Stayin' Alive . . . Sort Of

We're still alive. Sort of. Henry makes a heck of a lot of noise all the time (it doesn't matter if he's sleepy, happy, sleeping, awake, what-have-you). So, even when he's asleep at night, we can't sleep through all of his crazy chinchilla-like noises (he only nurses about three to four times at night, but we're waking up a lot more than that right now due to those noises). Nora was so quiet compared to this kid. What's more: he never cries unless he's hungry, and at night, he never gets to that point because I'm always right there to grab him immediately (during the day, I'm always tending to Nora, it seems, when he gets to that point—and it's zero to 60 when he does, man. What a wailer!). He just grunts and squeaks a lot. It's quite funny in retrospect, but when we're trying to sleep, it's not so funny. It's a good thing he's such a cute, cuddly, sweet little bugger. It makes it a lot easier to handle. We know that it won't be terribly long before he starts sleeping longer stretches, though. (That's when we tend to move our little loveys into their own rooms. Nora moved out of our room when she was about four months old and sleeping about six hours at night.) That's the beauty of already having done this before. We know there's light at the end of the tunnel.

Nora's getting better with her tantrums. She's not perfect by any means, but she's adjusting to Henry pretty well. In fact, she's started being really sweet to him. She asks about him all the time (I need to record her saying his name), and she pets him. She lets him hold her penguin when he's upset, etc. She's really sweet with him (and more careful about making sure she doesn't step on him or put her weight on him when she's climbing around him while he's laying on one of us). So, we're getting there! She'll be a wonderful big sister yet. We're working really hard to make sure she's getting lots of good, positive attention. I think it's really helping.

Plus, Nora's vocabulary and understanding is just completely exploding all of the time. It's so awesome to see. Every day, she says something new, and she seems to understand so much more than she did the day before. It's so cool to watch her grow up into such a neat, little person (with her own quirks and personality).

I got a chance to upload some photos and videos today. I managed to fill up the memory card this time, but the bulk of that memory was used up on Henry's video (see below).

I swear she's not smooshing his belly here like it would appear. She's actually quite careful about now squishing him now.


Darn that shadow in the lower-left corner!

And now for some videos:

Nora Knows How to Use the Remote

Li'l Henry

The end!