We've been working hard for the (very limited amounts of) money

Sorry, friends! I know it's been forever since we posted. It's just been a combination, as always, of some sleeplessness, some boringness, lots of hard work around the house and in other areas of our lives. But! The other reason I have been holding off on posting is that Graham rolled over all by himself for the first time this weekend, and I have been trying to get video of it ever since. He is not a command performer, apparently. He did it twice for me when Joe wasn't there, once for Joe when I wasn't there, and has refused to do it at least four times when the video camera was running. Apparently he has not inherited my flair for drama and attention. Perhaps that's not the worst thing in the world...

Anyway, Graham just continues to change and grow every day. He's solidly sucking his thumb now (hooray!) and grabbing and holding onto things and laughing this very bizarre deep-throated "heh huh heh" whenever he grabs my hair. He's sitting up better than ever (propped in my lap, but not all slouchy like he has been until this point), and is even turning his head when he hears my voice. His grandparents (dad's side) are coming this weekend (also hooray!) and I think Grandma Lorraine is going to flip out when she sees how big and smart he is. I was looking at old pictures the other day and I just couldn't believe how much he has grown already. I can't imagine him crawling and walking and running, but I know it's right around the corner.

So, since it's been forever (a whole week!) without new pictures, here you go:

Graham concentrating really hard on his new toy:

Looking very dapper in the new Tybee Island onesie Grandma Big K and Grandpa JSpen sent:

And being a bit of a mess after we tried to do handprints and footprints last night. Maybe we should have done that when he was a little less mobile?

But then...

Guess who slept the whole night through for the first time? Wooo-hoooo! He finally went to sleep at about 8:30 pm. Then we got him up at 11 to feed him, and he went back to sleep pretty quietly. I heard him wake up around 3:30, and he made little noises until 4 am, but he soothed himself back to sleep until about 7:15. What the! So exciting. Now we are currently working on napping, since he was yawning a blue streak, but has been chatting to himself for about 20 minutes and definitely cried when I put him down.

My name is Graham, and I hate to sleep.

Graham is currently on a sleep strike, and it is breaking our hearts and wills. We have been so so lucky up to this point - he has always been so calm and collected, with hardly any crying. And when we put him down to sleep, either he is already zonked out or within a few minutes he has talked himself to sleep. Not so much for the past few days. He is really refusing to nap in the morning (at best, it's 45 minutes) and then it's a major struggle to get him to nap in the afternoon so that by the time he falls asleep, he is sleeping for 3+ hours and it starts getting towards evening. Then it gets later and later until when he will fall asleep for the night. The past few nights, it has just been that he was awake until late. Tonight, he was yawning and yawning and even fell asleep the last time I fed him, but the minute his head hit the mattress, he screamed. With real, big tears and gulping air and honest-to-goodness screaming, which he has never done before. It took about an hour of being up and down, trying to get him to soothe himself but not abandoning him, before he settled to sleep. It was so hard to see him so miserable. So, I don't know if he's still in his little growth spurt and his bones are aching, I don't know if he's transitioning to giving up his morning nap and just having a big long one in the afternoon and is just thrown off by that, I don't know if he's just getting a first little separation anxiety, I don't know if maybe he's even starting to teethe a little bit (he's recently started drooling and bubbling as well). But I do know that no one in our household was happy from 7:30-8:30 pm this evening.

I suppose I shouldn't complain

So this morning I was playing with Graham and I finally cracked. He is a lot less interested in lying on his back anymore - he is much happier when we are holding him to stand or sit on our knees when he can look around at the whole world and practice his grabbing skills. So I called Joe and got financial dispensation to go out and buy the bebepod. Hooray! Except we went out to buy it and this is what happened:So now his little chair is just waiting for him to wake up:He's been asleep in his carseat for three hours. Look at your cool chair, dude! Don't you want to sit in it?? And besides, we were supposed to meet up with Kelly to go to the Lilac Festival! I had me an appointment with some fried dough and a slushie! Instead, I did work. Ugh.

Graham is learning stuff

It's amazing how you can really see babies learning, isn't it? He tries out all sorts of sounds and ways to move his mouth, he flexes his fingers back and forth and tries really hard to figure out how to hold something, he pulls his knees up underneath him and pushes and pushes to try to roll over. None of that has anything to do with him taking a bath, but that picture is just too cute to pass up.

Right now he's lying next to me kicking away and mouthing all over his rattle tube-y thing. See?

A belated happy Mother's Day!

To all the rockingest moms I know....

Grandma Big K
Grandma Lorraine
My grandmas! Janet and Helen
Liz Humph
Candice
Christine
Somerville Christine
Jan
Muffet
Peggy TFR2K
Makaela
Brand brand spankin' new mom Erin (with twins! twin boys!)
Kelly
Emily
Linda
Kris-Ann
Jenny
Gretchen
Gigi
Allison
Carrie S.
And the second Carrie S.!
Claudia
Kris
Deanne
Mags
Amy
Lynn
Ingrid
Jennifer
Joan
Mary
Roberta
Rebecca
Mom-to-be Rachael
Alena! (duh! with a smack to my head)

And I know there are so many more that I overlooked when trying really hard to think of everyone. You all are my role models - each of you have taught me something about being a mom. Thank you thank you thank you!

It's like someone created the perfect drug for me

Tonight I found this site: LibraryThing. Which is amazing because it combines my love of books, and my freakish need for organization. So, I've decided to make an online catalog of Graham's children's lit collection. I've actually had a fair number of people ask me what books we had already, so that if they very very kindly decided to gift Graham with a book, it wouldn't be a duplicate. This is not me begging for more books, I promise. (Not that begging for books is beneath me, this just isn't an example of this.) I also thought that there are at least a few people out there reading this that also love children's literature and/or have children of their own, and maybe we can talk back and forth about great books, new books, books that don't live up to the hype, etc. So down there on the right there's links to the catalog (which is in process) that can be searched. Fun!