Happy Spring!

I hope it's as warm and nice where you are as it has been here. We've been enjoying the opportunities we've had to get Cade outside. Just tonight we walked down to the park and spent some time swinging while the wind blew the little bit of hair Cade has around until it stood straight up. The daylight savings time has helped too.

This last weekend he ran a bit of a low grade fever so we took him into the doctor's office on Monday. Turns out he had a small ear infection. He was determined to prove to us that winter wasn't over yet. He's been teething for a few weeks now (getting his fifth, sixth, and seventh teeth, no word yet on the eighth, so he's remains a little lopsided), and that's kept him a slightly clogged up in the nose. The doctor guessed that all the congestion helped plug up the tubes going from the ear to the throat, causing the infection. Either way, he was impressed that Cade made it this long without any other kind of sick baby visit. We've really been blessed with good health and a very smiley, happy baby. He continues to become more and more fun.

He's getting the hang of feeding himself. He takes after his Grandpa Gronseth and will eat Cheerios at every chance he gets. Tonight we went to a Turkish restaurant owned by a friend of Susie's here in Bloomington and he got a chance to try the Turkish chicken, bread, lentil soup, and white bean soup. Yum! There really isn't anything that he's repeatedly turned down yet.

I'm wondering if Cade will become a world famous singer someday (or at least famous to himself like his daddy). :) Most of the time we put any kind of music on he's hollering at the top of his lungs and changing pitch every once in a while. It probaby sounds like crap, but it's beautiful in Mommy's and Daddy's ears. He'll make that Wookie-like noise you get when you talk with a little spit or phlegm in the back of your throat. I kind of think guys can make that sound better than girls for the most part. Mommy can't make it but Daddy can, and Cade and I go back and forth with that one. It's hilarious. And we've just started making Indian Chief noises with his mouth like Mallory in our friend's blog. He'll get this big smile on his face and keep yelling as a way to encourage me to keep popping his mouth. Lots of fun. That one got quite a few smile tonight at the grocery store. I'll try to get a video of it soon.

He's also getting a lot more independent physically. He's not crawling yet, but he loves to wiggle and bounce, and it's for longer periods of time now. Remember the balancing baby pose from one of the last pictures in this post? Well, now when I hold him up like that he'll get this huge grin and just lean back so I have to catch him while he falls backwards. We've decided he might be a stunt double someday with that lack of fear. He'll just laugh and laugh and wiggle until I hold him up again for another round. I think that move makes the ladies at church cringe in fear. I need to get a video of that too.

Another thing I've noticed just in the last week is that Cade is becoming more spatially aware of his surroundings and more able to focus on things and recognize them at a distance. He'll watch someone walk away until they leave the room. Or he'll be sitting in the kitchen and hear someone coming down the stairs and look to the door that comes into the kitchen from the stairs.

He also loves bouncing in his exersaucer (if that's even a word). Our kitchen has a couple different doors and I'll go back and forth between doors and pop my head out and say "Hey!" He'll crack up and start bouncing and then I'll go to a different door. I'll pop out again and say "Hey!" again and he'll crack up and bounce again. Here are a couple picture of that exchange.

Here's the cracking up when I jump out from one side.

Here's the initial look of surprise when Daddy shows up in a different doorway.....

.....and then the action shot of a bouncing kiddo.

He's started getting smart about it too to where he'll anticipate me switching doorways so I have to mix it up on him and pop out of the same side every once in a while just to keep him honest. Brilliant kid, I tell you. He's already in the gifted program: he makes gifts for us in his pants every day. :)

Speaking of talented, I have to brag on Cade just a bit and let you know that we've already trained...uh, taught Cade to fold laundry. Tiny, nimble, baby fingers can fold clothes much faster and more efficiently than adult hands. So if you need laundry help we'll rent him to you for a low rate.....uh, let you watch him while we go to the movies or something. Just kidding, but I did catch him when he was just hanging out at laundry time the other day. He kind of looks like a prisoner in his stripey onesie. He may not know how to fold laundry but he sure is cute (spoken like a totally biased parent, I know, but I'm allowed to say that every once in a while, right?). Thanks for checking in!

Chow Down!

I've not blogged for a while, and I'll write more soon, but I wanted to get a video up. I bought some fresh salmon in Seattle last weekend; Cade got to taste a little last night. I think he liked it! He's getting a lot better at feeding himself, but the food definitely doesn't all make it to the mouth yet.

Ice storm/Our son speaks dolphin

Despite not having to bear the brunt of it, we are glad the ice storm of 2009 is over. We are so thankful for Susie's apartment in Bloomington so we didn't have to endure a week without power. There are still people who probably won't have power for another couple weeks. Since we were up in Bloomington we don't have any pictures of the storm, but our neighbor said he took some and he'll send them to us. I'm interested to see them but glad we weren't here to experience them.

We were feeling rather cramped in the studio apartment, but we felt fortunate to have a place to stay that had power and heat. The power to our house was out for about a week, and as far as we can tell, there isn't any major damage. The pictures below show how many tree branches came down, but thankfully none of them damaged our house. I have a few small repairs to make to the gutters on the garage, part of a fence is damaged, and the branches crushed a couple of the path lights on our front sidewalk, but other than that we're sound. We had to throw out a lot of food, but our insurance is covering that. Thank God for the protection of our house. To see all the limbs down and know how many big trees we have around our house and know that we don't have to deal with broken windows or a damaged roof is great.

Big thanks to John Mark and Kaleb as well as Mark for helping clear a place for us to park our car and carry our stuff in when we got home Thursday night. And also big thanks to Mark for looking after our place while we were gone. It was a huge peace of mind knowing we didn't have to rush home because our house was in good hands. Susie and I could have come back and toughed it out, but there was no way we were bringing an infant back to a cold house. So thanks again for all the help!

Today I cleaned up all the large branches and put them out front. The sun was out which made the yard a little precarious. I was either walking on the remaining ice or sliding through mud from the melting water. The city will be sending around chipper trucks to clean up all the dead branches that I can drag out to the street. Even though I got all the large branches our yard is still covered with a layer of small sticks and twigs. I think it looks like the 2nd little pig's yard after the big bad wolf blew his house down.

Hey Mom and Dad, I finally got to put the "saw on a stick" (said with a country accent) to good use. I'd used the saw part, but not yet bolted it to the stick until today. It proved invaluable to reach some of the branches that were broken but hadn't yet fallen off.

Here are a couple pictures of the backyard before I started this morning. You can see a couple lines in the picture. One is our cable, but we still have service. Weird. The other is our land line, which is still out. (I know we're the only people on earth that still have a land line.)

And here are a few pictures of the pile of branches I made today.

And in Cade-related news (since this IS a Cade-themed blog), he's started making these smacking and clicking noises with his mouth. I got a video at dinner last night of him working on his dolphin a little, but again he was very distracted by the camera. He wanted to grab it and put it in his mouth. Also, here are a couple pictures to show how much he's grown. The first one was taken in July and the second was taken a couple weeks ago. What a difference six months makes!

Tooth Number Three

Hello from Bloomington. We are just emerging from being snowed in (more on that later). Here are a few pictures of Cade and what we've been up to. If you hadn't already learned from my Twitterfeed, you'll be pleased to find out that Cade has his third tooth! It's his upper left front tooth. And if you don't use Twitter, you need to get on the bandwagon. :)

I think he's getting tougher and is developing his mom's pain tolerance, because he really hadn't been too fussy for this tooth. But....there might be a reason for that. The night before we noticed his tooth, I was holding him while sitting sideways in one of our kitchen chairs. He's become a very wiggly baby, and I wasn't watching his wiggles closely enough. He kind of jerked his head forward and smacked his upper gum into the back of the chair. Those seconds between impact and pain recognition happen to be longest seconds in all of time. I was just sitting there horrified and waiting........., waiting..........., waiting............, and he finally realized he'd hit his mouth and let out a scream. He had a little drop of blood on his gum. It was the first time we'd seen him bleed besides after a shot at the doctor, and it was no fun for me. I felt so bad; it is not fun seeing your little guy cry, especially when you feel partially responsible. I wished I could've taken the hit for him. But then the next day his gum seemed to be just fine and we noticed his tooth, which was right where he hit his mouth. We hadn't noticed it the night before, and believe me, we were inspecting. So maybe that's the trick to getting them through the gums expediently. Any dentists in the audience want to weigh in on that one? (Don't worry Mom, we're not planning on hitting him in the mouth every time we think he might be close to a new tooth.)

Back in October I posted a picture of Cade in his Rockies hat. Well, he's been growing. As I mentioned in my last post, he went from 20th to 95th percentile in height in just two months! His head has been growing too, and we tried the Rockies hat on him again. It's pretty close to fitting. I took a couple self portraits. Self portraits are tougher than you'd imagine, especially now that everything near Cade is a target for grabbing and inserting into his mouth. This was the best shot I could get.

He's getting more and more accustomed to spending time on his tummy. It's just a matter of time before he motors right on out of the room. The way he moves seems like he's super close to crawling. He just needs to get strong enough to lift his chest and head up. I got Cade a weight rack and we've been doing our baby bench presses, so any day now....... (And yes, this shirt says peanut, and yes, we think it's hilarious and think this outfit is about is as cute as they come. Props to Life is Good; this peanut ISN'T getting recalled.)


He's been eating great, too great in fact. The doctor recommended upping his solid food intake to allow Susie to keep up with the milk production. Doesn't matter. The kid scarfs down any and everything and still drinks Susie out of house and home (lame idiom, I know, but I couldn't think of any kid-friendly ones related to breastfeeding). Susie has been eating more than I have lately, and she's still shrunk to well below her pre-pregnancy weight. It's still hard to keep up with him. Anyways, his solid food repertoire now includes squash, sweet potatoes, green bean, peas, carrots, pears, and applesauce. We got this big jar of applesauce before we came up to B-town this week and he's eaten over half of it in a couple days. Maybe he's in another growth spurt. Someone needs to tell him there are only 5 more percentile points so he eases off. We tried a new food today and I never get tired of the "new food face." This time it was a spinach/carrot mix. He makes this face EVERY time he tries a new food and eventually likes it by the second or third time we feed it to him. Like I said, this face never gets old, and I thought I'd capture it one more time for posterity. The picture's a little blurry because he was making a yakking head thrust, but he still gets his point across.

It has snowed over a foot in Bloomington over the last day or so. IU actually canceled school today. I guess the beauty of working from home is that I never have a snow day (which can be good or bad, depending on how you look at it). I'm not complaining. I love the fact that I can travel with Susie occasionally and still get everything done I need to. It's actually good that I came with Susie because this morning our neighbor in Owensboro called and told me the tree in our backyard fell and ripped the power line out of our house last night. Owensboro got hit with a doozy of an ice storm and there are well over 20,000 people without power there right now. We're glad to be in an apartment in B-town that has power and heat but we're kind of wondering what we'll find when we get home on Friday evening. Apparently we have tree branches down all around the house but no apparent damage to the house, which is great. We're thankful to have great neighbors like the Hedges who keep an eye out on our house while we're gone. Mark went over and shut our water off so we wouldn't have to worry about pipes bursting with the power out. I talked with the utility company today and with so many people without power it could be quite a while before we get it restored at our house. If it's not back up when we get home this weekend we'll have a chance to light up the fireplace for the first time! Adventures never cease! Cleaning up the branches in the yard will keep us warm.


So because the snow looked so inviting today we bundled up Cade and took Chili for a walk down to the park at lunchtime. Cade really seems to like the cold, and who doesn't love to play in the snow?

Chili is an expert at making doggie snow angels. Here he displays perfect form, though he might receive a tenth of a point deduction for not pointing his toes.

Back at the apartment we just HAD to jump in the big snow bank the plows so graciously left us. You might not be able to tell in this small picture, but Chili's front lip is up and his teeth are showing and it looks like he's got a huge grin. Chili cheese dog!

Cade keeps learning new syllables and how to make new sounds. As a self proclaimed sound effect artist (what guy isn't?), I love repeating the sounds back and forth with him. He talks and talks and you can tell he's trying to say stuff to us, it just hasn't come out in English yet.....for the most part. Last weekend I woke up one morning to find that Susie had brought Cade into the bed with us and he was laying in between us awake already. I looked at him and smiled and told him good morning and clear as a bell he looked at me and said, "Hey Dada!" I'm pretty sure it was unintentional because he hasn't repeated it since, but Susie and I both cracked up. It was amazing. His random syllables came together beautifully in that moment. He's also been learning to make a "lalala" sound with his tongue. The other night I was saying "I love you" to him and it sure sounded like a rough "Ah love loo" coming back. We're not sure how much he's comprehending speech, but it's fun to imagine he's saying stuff to us. I can't wait to hear him say "I love you Daddy" for the first time.

The other thing he's just learned to do is to scrunch up his nose and eyebrows and breathe in and out through his nose really fast. It's hilarious. I caught it on video a number of times, and none of them do the real life version justice. Enjoy these two short clips. Thanks for keeping up with us!

Happy January!

So I've not been good at posting lately. I promised more pictures of Cade from December and I've let school and work and busyness take up my time. I've got those pictures as well as some new Cade information for you today! We took Cade to the doctor yesterday and he's definitely grown. It's safe to say that he has caught up (and in some respects passed) other kids his age. He weighs 17 pounds, 12 ounces, which puts him slightly above the 50th percentile. His head is 17.5 inches around, which puts him in the 75th percentile and right on track to have his dad's large melon. And he is now 28 inches tall, which puts him in the 95th percentile! Tall and lean (and strikingly handsome, if you ask me). I told Susie he's a mere 4 inches away from being half her height. We're very proud of him and how well he's eating and growing.

We've decided that six months is definitely a very fun age. He's becoming more interactive every day. Just this morning I was saying "dadadadada," "mamamamama," "dogdogdogdogdog," and other things to him like we frequently do and he looked at me and said "doydoydoydoy." I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but it made me smile. He's always trying to communicate and speaks his mind quite frequently. Maybe it will be with real words soon? And he's not crawling yet but he can kind of inch around. He can't lift his head and upper body off the ground with his arms, but he'll push his rear end up in the air with his legs and then kind of slide forward like an inchworm. It's just a matter of time before we're chasing him around.

We would appreciate your prayers for our health in the coming week or so. Yesterday Cade had his latest round of immunizations. One of them was his last round of the Rotateq immunization. When Cade received the last round of the Rotateq he was sick and threw up for a couple days and then passed the rotavirus to Susie and then on to me. It was like death had fallen on our household. We couldn't keep anything down and had fevers. We wondered if it was a coincidence but when relaying our stories found that other families had experienced the same thing with their kids. I grudgingly allowed Cade to have his last round yesterday, but I honestly couldn't recommend this immunization to other families. The doctor told us not every insurance covers this immunization (our does), so not every kid gets it. If not every kid gets it, then it must not be a life or death thing. If I had it to do all over again I'd turn it down. So we're kind of bracing ourselves a little, washing our hands like maniacs, keeping the bottle of Lysol handy, and praying for good health.

Another thing the doctor told us was that we could start mixing solid foods into Cade's diet along with milk, cereal, and baby foods (sweet potatoes and carrots are his favorite) we've been feeding him. So when we went out to eat last night we gave him a couple little soft pieces of bread for him to work on. Susie was holding him and took her eyes of him for a second and he grabbed a piece of prime rib from her french dip sandwich and had plans for that as well. I grabbed it out of his hand; we were laughing pretty hard. Here's a picture of him eyeing Susie's sandwich.

He's also recently taken an interest in his feet. He loves hanging onto them and rocking around. It makes changing his diaper a little more challenging because his hands roam around south of the border while we're trying to clean him up. He spends half the day with his hands in his mouth and we don't want him recycling anything, so it takes a little more vigilance to watch his hands while changing him. That and the fact that he's so wiggly have moved us up the diaper changing/baby dressing difficulty scale a few notches.Last weekend was Susie's birthday, so her parents and her Aunt Fran came in. We had a great time with them. We went to Shogun, a hibachi-style Japanese restaurant, on Susie's birthday and Cade really seemed to enjoy the show (that shirt is definitely going in the too-small pile; it seems like he's growing out of everything!). Cade's been sleeping a lot better when he's at home. It's still a little bit of a challenge up in the apartment in Bloomington since Susie tries to be mindful of her neighbors. We think he's picked up on that and uses her courtesy as a way to get more snuggle time in bed at night. That makes for some very tired mornings at school. But he has been doing better at home and has even slept through the night a four or five times since the new year. Last night we tried a suggestion from the doctor. He told us that he's definitely big enough that nutritionally he doesn't need to get up and eat in the middle of the night, but it's probably just a habit for him now. He suggested putting him down when he's ready and then waking him up to feed him right before we go to bed. So Susie fed him around 11 and he slept until 7! Hopefully that isn't a one-night deal and he can start making it more routine. Sleep is good. :)

Well, here are some pictures of Cade and Susie's photo shoot in Colorado. There are too many good ones to put up here, but here are some of the best (and thanks Amy and Mom!). (The first picture is of him in a sleepsack. He sleeps a lot better in these and we're not sure why. Every night he's slept through the night he's been in one of these, so they are standard procedure now. It also makes it easy to do a midnight diaper change. He doesn't mind diaper changes during the day but he HATES getting changed at night. The sleepsacks just have one zipper up the front so it's easy to get it off him and quickly change him which is another big advantage. Inventor of the sleep sack, thank you.)

Merry Christmas from Colorado!

Well, I'm finally getting around to posting about our trip to Colorado for Cade's first Christmas. We hope your Christmas and New Year were as great as ours. Here are some pictures from our trip.

Cade's an old veteran when it comes to flying now. He's wearing red corduroy overalls that I wore when I was a baby. Unfortunately we had two flights on the way out with a layover in Kansas City. He really did well, but you could tell he was tired of flying by the end of the day. It probably didn't help that he dropped a HUGE bomb in his pants about 45 minutes from the Denver airport. If it's possible, I'd like to meet the person who can change a poopy diaper in an airplane bathroom. We elected to wait and try to keep his mind off his backside as we descended into the Rockies. The lady next to us graciously suggested a change on the traytable, but we just as graciously declined. So we held our noses and bounced him around, which I think just spread the turd between his diaper and his innermost layer of clothes. This is why we always pack at least one extra change of clothes in his diaper bag.

Since we flew in on Christmas Eve, the first order of business was the traditional Gronseth Christmas Eve spaghetti dinner. After dinner we let Cade try out another new food: bananas. This turned out to be a not so great decision. More on that later.
After dinner Cade fell asleep and was awakened by a slimmed down Santa Claus. He really wasn't sure what to make of the situation. It was either because he wasn't quite awake or because Santa had an eerie resemblance to his Grandpa.
Christmas morning was fun. Cade really got into unwrapping the presents.

We eventually realized he wasn't enjoying the unwrapping for the actual presents. It was for the paper. Yum!

Unwrapping presents is tiring, especially when you're not very experienced at it yet.

All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.....and I got 'em. We think Cade got his teeth from his mommy because they are anything but straight. They look like an inverted snowplow. Here's hoping for a reduction in the price of braces!

Christmas Day dinner was a big prime rib. Cade's lobbying for a piece due to his new teeth. He was making the case that he needed to try them out and creamy bananas and carrots weren't much of a challenge for teeth. We told him he'd end up having some processed prime rib the next day and he was ok with that.

Our big present for the year was snowshoes! So we took Cade out a couple days after Christmas. He was also showing off his new hat and gloves. He really seemed to like it. He's shown that he's comfortable in the cold (taking more after the parent that didn't grow up in Florida). :) That's a good thing, since my mom's backpack thermometer read 7 degrees when we got to our destination. It was a beautiful day and a lot of fun.

I got a backpack frame carrier for my last birthday, and this was my first chance to try it out. Cade really seemed to enjoy it. For the first part of the hike he looked all around and just watched the trees and the snow. He eventually fell asleep.

Here we are at the "falls," which ended up being a frozen creek. As we made our way down he really started crying very hard. At first we thought it was the cold, but it turned out to be the bananas he'd been eating for the past couple days. Grandpa played the hero by taking Cade and running back down the trail to the car with him. He wasn't the least bit cold, and it was hard to console him. He really had some bad stomach pains for a couple days, and when we quit feeding him bananas it went away. I guess it's good we feed him one new food at a time because then it's easy to isolate the ones that give him problems. We've since started on sweet potatoes and he's scarfed those like it's going out of style.

One really cute thing he's started doing is reaching for dogs. Here he is reaching for my sister's dog, Bella. He's also reached for my parents' dog, Maggie, our friend Alicia's dog, Gracie, and Chili. I think Cade and Chili are going to be great buddies when Cade gets mobile. Today Susie found Chili sleeping in front of Cade in his "guarding" position. I know Chili feels a little left out now that Cade is around, but it's great to see him embracing Cade as part of the family.

Cade loves to play "balancing baby." He just gets into this zen-like frame of mind and sits very still and smiles at me. Hilarious.

Smiley Cade with Nana.

My sister Amy and my mom spent some time doing a couple "photo shoots" with Cade and Susie. There are too may good pictures from that to include in this post so I'll get those up in a future post soon so stay tuned. Cade's first Christmas was a great one. We hope yours was great too.