Happy first birthday Zachary

Our crazy boy has this thing with blinking his eyes anytime the camera comes out.

Check out Zachary's new skill. This gift from Santa has been great. It really encourages him to get up on his knees. He has been pulling up to his knees all the time since Christmas, and has pulled up (in his own way) to "standing" several other times.

Our sweet baby boy is one!!

Singing Happy Birthday, he ate up the attention. We sang the day after his actual bday b/c we had all of Skip's family here that day. He had all his cousins, aunts, uncle (Jeff just missed it), and one set of grandparents. Not bad for one little guy!

Not so thrilled with tasting the frosting. Like I've said before, he's not really ready for actual cake yet.

Zachary turned one 2 days after Christmas! We didn't do too much (we already had the party), but did make a cake and sang with the family. I think Zach just enjoyed getting to play with his cousins and siblings. Simon was sweet and shared a shiner with him :) Really they were playing with the same toy and it bumped against his eye just enough to make it a little black/blue-ish. Boys will be boys!

We took Zach the next day for his well child check. He got 5 shots! Yuck! Our little man is up to 17 lb 13 oz!!! Huge in comparison to last year, but still not quite on the growth charts. He was 28 3/4" long, which keeps him on the charts somewhere between 10 & 25th %. He tall and thin like his daddy!

We talked a lot about PT and Mike wants us to continue that. We also talked about my concerns with his eating. Mike referred us to OT (occupational therapy) to be evaluated. We will do that on Jan. 19th. We got the go ahead to switch to milk, work on getting off the bottle, and to try to increase his fluid intake, especially with his lower weight. But with his other feeding issues, I'm going to try to just keep things more or less the same until our appointment. I hope they can give us some suggestions.

Zach has done many crawling "steps" but his preferred method is still the army crawl. He is an expert at getting up our step now and is getting into more trouble now :) Like I mentioned, he is pulling up to his knees all the time now, which we love to see. The PT says that he may just be too busy at this age to worry about sitting up and will accomplish this later on. When they are younger, sitting seems like so much fun. Now that he realizes he can move, he'd rather be on the move than worry about sitting still. As he works on pulling up and keeping his balance on his knees and feet, the core muscles will be getting stronger. I still think the hardest thing about not sitting up yet is bath time. It really takes 2 people, one to hold him up and the other to scrub him clean. This while he is so busy kicking like a frog.

Isn't it funny how much difference a year can make? Reading back thru posts of a year ago--well, let's just say I wouldn't want to re-live that time for anything. So happy my baby boy came through it all with flying colors! So glad Em & Cal survived the chaos of life. So glad Skip and I have a strong marriage and he was able to put up with me thru that time. I love my life!!!! Right now it is looking pretty good!