Houston we have liftoff - Sydney's first steps

[mightymulhern]

Tonight, Sydney took her first unassisted steps. She walked 3-4 steps from the coffee table to Meghan and then 3-4 more from Meghan to me. After that the attempts degenerated into silliness with lots of grinning, hugging, and diving from parent to parent. Sydney was very proud of herself.

In other news, we also discovered this weekend that Sydney has a bottom molar sticking through her gum. This is in addition to the 4 lower front teeth she already has. ...now this little girl just needs some top teeth so that she can chew something.

This weekend we went down to U of I with a large group of friends for a football game. (Scott and Barb Coonrod; Aric, Michelle, and Austin Roush; David, Elizabeth, and Samuel Tuchmann; Faye and Clinton Chow; Chris, Lisa, and Claudia Eakin, Jennifer Yang and Jack, Tina Yang and Darren) Sydney wore a cute little orange cheerleader outfit and experienced her first game and tailgating. Sydney actually managed to sit through 3 quarters of football. Aside from being a drizzly day in the high 50s (and the Illini losing to Penn State), it was a great day.

Unfortunately Sydney missed a lot of napping on Saturday so Saturday night was interesting. She didn't want to go to bed in her pack & play so we ended up letting her play on our bed at the hotel until she crashed. ...and she literally crashed. Around 9:30 or so she just fell over and started snoring. Meghan gently put her in her pack & play and that was the last we heard from her until 4:30. For some reason we've been having 4:30 wakeup lately and at the hotel it was clear she wasn't going back to sleep so Meghan put her in bed with us. Previously that hasn't worked, but this time it seemed to do the trick. Sleeping with Sydney in the same room is hard because she whimpers and cries out in her sleep which had a tendency to jar us awake several times.

This morning on the way home, we met my parents for breakfast in Decatur. It was good to see them again, and they seemed to enjoy seeing Sydney (it's been since Father's day). Unfortunately we kept them waiting due to oversleeping and overestimating the speed in which we could get on the road this morning. Sorry guys! On the ride home, Sydney slept the whole way. That's a 3hr nap from roughly 10 - 1. For perspective, normally Sydney get's a morning nap and an afternoon nap and on a good day, they total 3hrs. We've exceeded that on a few occasions, but I can't remember a single nap ever being 3hrs. Today we plopped a nap right in the middle of the normal schedule which made the afternoon a little too long. She ended up taking another nap from about 5:30 - 6:30 and didn't get to bed until well after 8.

At one point this afternoon, we went back to the park. Sydney really enjoyed swinging. We swung her really high and she giggled when Meghan tickled her feet at the end of each swing. At one point we stopped and tried to leave, but Sydney motioned "no" (she has her own flailing hands sign for this). We initially weren't sure whether she meant that she didn't want to swing or she didn't want to get out of the swing. ...apparently we guessed right because she swung happily for quite awhile longer, but cried when we took her out later.

Also at the park, we tried going down the slide again. We put her down the big kids slide and she looked like a rag doll going down it. It's in that moment when you realize how little your child is. Then we tried the smaller ones, but she wasn't real interested. Later she climbed the steps to go back up the play equipment with the slide but changed her mind when she got to the top and didn't want to slide down. We also teeter-tottered for awhile too which is really hard to do when you have a 165lb person on one end and a 20lb person on the other.