The Finke Family

Last Friday we went to Target and got our Christmas pictures done. I wanted to get some done of Gabriel anyway so I figured we might as well get a picture for the Christmas card too. It’s always a little stressful taking the Christmas picture ourselves so I think this worked out a lot better. I won’t post our family Christmas picture until after we’ve sent out our cards, but I will share a couple of my favorites of Gabriel. I’ll post the rest of them after we get our cd with all the high res images sometime next week. He did really well but it was more difficult to get him to stay put long enough to take a picture.

Gabriel has gotten 2 more teeth recently. First he got another bottom one and today we found one of the top middle ones poking through.

Gabriel has been going from crawling to sitting all the time now. He used to never like to sit and would always prefer to be on his stomach. It always kind of catches me off guard now when I look over and see him just sitting there playing with something like such a little boy. He really likes this wire maze thing that has little wooden cars on it (you know, the toy you always see in doctors and dentist offices). I always wondered if kids really liked those things and I guess now I know that they are riveting.

Another thing he has learned is how to give “fives”. Sometimes it’s more like a little tap, but he knows what he’s supposed to do when we say “give me five”. This is the first thing that I feel that we’ve really “taught” him to do. (We obviously have our priorities in order.)

Sleeping through the night has been hit or miss lately. I’ll usually hear him cry once or twice during the night. Sometimes he’ll just go back to sleep on his own and sleep until morning. Other times he just yells off and on for an hour until I finally go and get him and feed him. He always goes right back to sleep after I feed him, but I’d really like to not have to wake up at all during the night.

My favorite thing to watch him do now is get excited over something that he sees. He’ll be crawling around on the floor and he’ll see something that grabs his attention (usually something we don’t want him to go near like the dog bowl or an open gate or door). He starts breathing really heavily through his nose, his eyes light up and he makes a beeline for it. I almost always know when he’s going to get into something he shouldn’t just by listening for his heavy breathing. Speaking of the dog dishes, we created a temporary solution by putting the water bowl on a kitchen chair and only putting the food bowl down when we are actually going to feed Pedro. Pedro is tall enough to drink directly from the bowl on the chair and the cats can sit on the chair next to the bowl and drink. So, problem solved until Gabriel starts standing up on his own.