Five Months

I'm a day late.  I blame it on the bathroom.  I can pretty much blame everything on the bathroom these days.  Anyway, on to the subject at hand.

Stella is five months old.  I can't believe how fast the time goes by.  Last time she went to the doctor, he said we could start giving her solids between 5 and 6 months.  She's gotten very curious about what we eat now and will even reach for food as we put it in our mouths, so I think she's ready.  I'm planning to start her on some solids next week.  We'll see how it goes.

So what is the little one up to now?  Well, last time I blogged, she had rolled over a few times and had then given it up.  I would venture to say she's an expert roller now.  At least from her back to her front. Just a couple days after my last Stella post, she started rolling over again and has never looked back.  She almost always rolls over to her tummy if I set her down on her back.  She can roll from her tummy to her back, but it's usually by accident.  I think she realizes she should be able to and she tries to all the time, but she hasn't figured out that she needs to get her arm out of the way.  So, if her arm happens to be out of the way, over she goes.  If not, she tries and tries and then gets frustrated that she doesn't get anywhere.  For awhile, she could only roll in one direction - to the right.  She was not an ambi-roller.  But, this last week she's started to roll in the other direction and has been working on that and doing well.

She still gets comments on her hair everywhere we go.  It is not falling out and, in fact, just keeps getting longer.  It's to the point that it's always in her eyes and I'm wondering if we should try to get it trimmed.  I know it seems ludicrous that I would even consider having it cut, but really, we're constantly brushing it out of her eyes.  She likes to play with it, though.  It's really cute.  While I'm feeding her or when she's going to sleep, she'll often reach up and play with her hair a little bit.  Mostly just rubbing it because it's soft.  Once, I put her down for a nap and when I went in to check on her, she had fallen asleep with her fingers in her hair.

She seems to like music.  I'm trying to start her early on the good stuff:  The Beatles, Johnny Cash, The Killers, etc, etc.  One of her current favorite songs is She's A Rainbow by the Rolling Stones.  She also likes to dance.  And by dance, I mean I hold her and dance around.  Because she doesn't have the motor control to be dancing around by herself yet.  But that will come.

Stella and Scout have quite the budding friendship.  They have a mutually beneficial relationship.  Scout is the source of endless entertainment for Stella and Stella is the source of endless spit up for Scout.  Yes, Scout still enjoys the spit up.  So much so that it's gotten to the point that if Stella spits up and I'm not in the room, Scout will come get me so I will move the baby and she can lick up the spit up.  It's still disgusting and still very convenient.

It just amazes me how quickly Stella develops from one day to the next.  Like how today, she all of a sudden seemed to realize that she should be able to get places.  So, she started pulling her legs up and moving as if she were going to crawl.  If only her arms weren't lagging behind in the process, she might actually do it.  One thing's for sure, this girl wants to go places.  She is ready to get moving!  She's also sitting now.  She's still pretty unsteady, but she can sit long enough for me to let go and take a picture.

She's definitely a mama's girl and when she's tired, no one else will do.  Although, she is getting better with her daddy.  She's usually pretty happy and very social, but when she's tired, she just wants me.  She is enthralled with any new environment and loves to go for walks where she can look around and take in her surroundings.

And, you might notice a few more smiles in these pictures.  She's a little more accepting of the camera now.  And she's very curious about my phone.  She usually reaches for it if I'm doing anything on it.  I fear the future when she will actually be able to get my phone and do things on it like play games or watch videos.

She pretty much has both of us wrapped around her little finger and we're excited to see what she does this coming month.

What We've Been Up To

We've been pretty busy around these parts.  And, this is apart from changing diapers, cleaning up spit up, and feeding a baby.  So, here's a little update on what we've been doing.

The bathroom.  There's always the bathroom.  Unfortunately, it's still not done.  But, we are making some serious headway and it's getting very exciting.  Mr. Frisby is taking next Thursday and Friday off work to devote to the bathroom remodel.  So, why is it taking so long?  Here are a couple pictures that will help explain.

This is our bathroom, completely gutted.  This remodel is serious business.  No walls, no ceiling, no floor, no nothing.  Fortunately, as I said, we're getting things done and this is no longer the case.  But, when you strip a room down to practically nothing, it takes time to put it all back together.

This is a picture of the bathroom sub-floor after Mr. Frisby leveled it out.  That was a fairly big setback.  He was ready to start tiling the floor and when he checked to see if it was level, it was not.  One of the floor joists was the culprit.  It was just a little high.  So, he spent an entire Saturday taking out the part of the sub-floor that was over the joist, planing down the joist, and then building a frame to attach to the joists on which the new chunk of sub-floor would sit.  It took a lot of time, but now the floor is level and tiling has commenced.

Scout has also kept us busy recently.  I took her to the groomer.  She came home with a sweet haircut and a problem with her eye.  Poor dog.  I knew something was wrong when we came home from the groomer and she was squinting one of her eyes.  I knew something was really wrong a few hours later when she would no longer open that eye and it was all watery and oozy.  I took her to the vet that afternoon and they said it was a scratched cornea.  Usually heals well, but it's super painful.  Two check-ups and 7 days of antibiotics later, she has a clean bill of health.  But, I learned something in the process.  Trying to put antibiotic ointment in a dog's eye when it's very sensitive is like trying to wrestle an alligator.  It took both Mr. Frisby and I to pin the dog down to get the stuff in and I ended up bruised and scratched.  Thank goodness that's over with.

Here she is fresh from the groomer.  You can tell she just got home because she still has the little neckerchief on that they put on her.  It looks really cute, but she HATES it.

As if Mr. Frisby wasn't busy enough with the bathroom, he also had to build a pinewood derby car.  The scouts did a pinewood derby fundraiser to earn money for a new track.  There were two categories: classic pinewood derby rules and no holds barred.  Mr. Frisby decided to enter a car in the no holds barred category.  His plan of attack was to make the car as light as possible, then attach his remote controlled helicopter to it to pull it down the track.  Here's the car:

Truth be told, I had my doubts.  But, when he tested it out, it actually worked pretty well.  His "helicar" ended up getting third place and a giant Butterfinger.

Little Stella has also been busy, but that is mostly for another post.  For now, we'll just mention that she met her birthday twin.

These little ones were born about an hour apart.  Stella looks way bigger, but it's just the camera angle.  They're actually about the same size.  Thanks for the good times, Double A.

And, finally, we got a new entertainment center.  Or media console.  Whatever they're calling them these days.  It's a huge improvement.  Here's the before of our living room set up:

Bookcase and TV stand from IKEA.  They're not necessarily bad pieces, but they're dark and chunky, so they're not ideal for our space.  But it was what we had.  Now the after.  Here's our new media center from Crate and Barrel:

I'm still working on filling up the shelves and putting everything away, but we like it much, much better.  It opens the space up a lot which is great for us because our living room is pretty small.  This was also a much bigger project than I thought it would be.  The new media center was delivered Friday afternoon.  I started unpacking it and doing some assembly after it came.  Then, when Mr. Frisby got home from work, we both got it all assembled and attached to the wall.  I knew that part would take some time and effort.  But, I didn't realize that unplugging the TV, components, and cables and then reattaching them all in the new media center would take as much time as it did.  Essentially it took us the entire evening.  Totally worth it, in my opinion.

And that's what's been keeping us busy lately.  Hopefully the bathroom will be done very soon so we can have some spare time.  We're starting to forget what that's like.

The Permit Story

We thought we had a pretty good timeline for doing our bathroom remodel.  Then, things got crazy and that timeline was blown out of the water.  Here's what happened.

Two Saturdays ago, demolition happily began on our bathroom.  Piece by piece, the bathroom came out and by the end of the day, we were down to the subfloor and sheetrock.  The next step was replacing all of the sheetrock with water-resistant sheetrock and getting it textured as well as adding new lights and a ventilation fan.  For all of that, we decided to hire a family friend.  Monday night we went to Home Depot and got everything we would need.  Tuesday morning, the said family friend showed up and got to work. Everything went well that morning.  He ripped out all the old sheetrock, installed the fan, and then got to work putting up the new sheetrock.  And that's when things got crazy.

While he was unloading sheetrock, our neighbor started talking to our family friend.  He informed him that he was a building inspector and told him to tell us that we needed a permit for what we were doing.  He said he wouldn't want to Red-Tag his neighbors, so we should get a permit.  Our family friend passed on the message and continued hanging sheetrock and backerboard.  We were completely floored.  We weren't moving walls or plumbing, so why on earth would we need a permit?  Well, as we started looking into it, it appears you need a permit to sneeze here in Morgan Hill, so obviously we would need a permit to remodel a bathroom (Okay, perhaps sneezing is a bit of an exaggeration, but really and truly you have to have a permit just to replace a water heater here).  Our friend finished for the day and we told him we would figure out the permit situation and let him know what was happening next.

That evening my sister stopped by to drop something off.  She is the YW Secretary in her ward and was on her way to YW.  We mentioned to her what had happened with the need for a permit and that the bathroom remodel had suddenly become much more stressful since we had no idea what we needed to do for the permit and what would need to be inspected.  She said, "oh, well our YW President works for the city issuing permits.  I'll see her in a few minutes and I'll ask her about it."  Ten minutes later, we got a phone call from my sister who put the lady on the phone.  She very nicely explained to Mr. Frisby exactly what we would need for the permit and told him that she would be working the desk the next day and I could come on down and she would give us a permit.  So great!  We were suddenly feeling better about everything.  So, Wednesday morning, I headed down to the city office and got us a permit. It helped that I took Stella and she charmed the pants off of everyone there.  With that done, we were set to go.  Except now we needed inspections.

And we have learned that these inspections are the really annoying part of getting permits.  They completely change the order in which you do things because of what has to be inspected and they make things very inefficient.  So, the next step in order to get our inspection was putting in the shower pan.  We hadn't planned on doing that until the sheetrock was up, taped, and textured and the backerboard was all ready to go.  But, it had to be put in for the inspection.  And we couldn't finish the sheetrock because the electrical that we were adding had to be inspected.  And the sheetrock nailing had to be inspected, so even after hanging it, we couldn't get the taping and texturing done until after the inspection.  So, our timeline was destroyed.  Mr. Frisby put in the shower pan last Saturday and after the mortar dried we scheduled the inspection.  The inspector came on Tuesday (not suprisingly, it was our neighbor who didn't want to Red-Tag us).  I was super nervous, but everything went okay.  In spite of getting the shower pan all ready, he couldn't test it.  We were misinformed about what the test would be and how much of the shower pan had to be ready, so we didn't have it totally done (because we were told not to).  But, he inspected the electrical, so we could at least finish hanging the sheetrock and have that inspected.  So, now the sheetrock is ready for inspection and as I type, Mr. Frisby is finishing the shower pan.  Once that's ready, we will have inspection number two.  Then we will really be able to get to work because we won't have any more inspections until the finals.

This has turned into quite a headache, so this bathroom had better be super fly to make it all worth it.  I'm so excited for it to be done!

Four Months

I'm pretty stoked that I'm actually doing this on the 23rd.  So, our little one is four months old today.  She's all grown up and wearing boots!

It's hard to believe how fast she's growing and it's fun to see her getting a little more mobile and interested in the world around her.  As you can see, she's quite the little chunk.  I have to be careful to clean in between her little rolls.  The double chin is particularly tricky because she gets spit up in there and then it's all I can do to get her to look up so I can clean it up.  But, look how cute she is!

We decided to try giving her a bottle.  She's going to have to take one eventually, so we figured it would be a good idea to get her used to it.  We give her one every once in a while and she does okay.  She sometimes has trouble getting started, but eventually she drinks it all.  And we're still figuring out which bottles she likes better.  So far the Phillips Avent is not a favorite.

As I mentioned, she's getting more mobile.  She rolled over for the first time the day after Christmas.  She went back to front and then she did it a few more times that week and decided that was enough.  She hasn't done it since.  She rolled over from her front to her back shortly after that, but only did it once and has given up rolling over for the time being.  She is excellent at spinning in circles, though.  I put her down to play and after several minutes of rocking back and forth and rolling onto her side and back again, her head is at the opposite end from where it started.  This is how I find her in the mornings most of the time now.

She's also gotten really good at grabbing things, especially her feet.  If there are no toys within her reach, she immediately goes for the feet.  As you can see, it's pretty adorable.

Everything she grabs, she immediately tries to put in her mouth.  Sometimes she misses and it makes me laugh.

You'll notice she's not really smiling in most of these pictures and in the ones where she is, she's not looking at the camera.  I've decided she has a healthy dislike of the camera.  She can be all smiles and as soon as you point the camera at her, the smile disappears.  In fact, sometimes she even cries a little.  We'll have to see if we can get her a little more used to it.

And here she is doing some tummy time with Scout's supervision.  Scout is always in the vicinity of baby because she's learned about spit up and has developed a taste for it.  Stella is most definitely a spitter, so Scout suffers no lack of little snacks throughout the day.  Yes, we realize it's disgusting that the dog laps up Stella's spit up.  But, it's super handy when she spits up and I can't immediately grab something to clean it up with.  I just yell for Scout.  And most of the time, I don't even have to yell for her.  She's learned what it sounds like when Stella spits up and she just comes running to help.  In fact, when I'm feeding Stella, Scout just sits expectantly at my feet because 99% of the time, Stella's going to spit up all over immediately after while I burp her and since she spits up so much, half of it will shoot right off the burp rag and onto the floor because the burp rag can't absorb that much spit up that quickly.  Did I mention Stella has a spit up problem?

And that's our little four month old.  She's pretty awesome.  I love waking up to her chattering in the morning.  She doesn't cry when she wakes up.  She just chatters away.  It gradually gets louder the longer she's awake - almost as if she's yelling to me that she's awake and ready to play.  And when I finally drag myself out of bed to go get her, she sees me, she stops wiggling and chattering for a second and gives me the biggest grin.  It makes all the spit up and dirty diapers worth it.  We love our little Stella!

A Project

Mr. Frisby and I have started a project.  This is a MAJOR project.  Bigger than our ceiling project.  We have begun a complete bathroom remodel of our master bathroom.  This is a project that I have been excited to tackle for awhile because the state of our bathroom when we moved in was, shall was say, pathetic.  Or maybe gross.  Dated.  Any number of adjectives along those lines would work.  It was in dire need of an update.  Well, an update is finally happening.  And this update has become even more exciting with the news of the massive tax return we will be getting (having a baby and paying a mortgage are great when it comes time to do taxes) that will allow us to do a little more than we had originally planned.  Now, don't get too excited.  When I call it a master bathroom, you must keep in mind that there's nothing "master" about it except the fact that it is off the master bedroom.  It's tiny.  Perhaps 5'x8'.  There's only so much you can do with that small of a space.  I would love to move some walls and make it bigger, but there's really nowhere to go, so the size of it will remain the same.  However, everything else that can be changed will be changed and we're super excited about it.  New sheetrock.  A new tile shower.  A new toilet.  A new vanity.  New lighting.  A vent fan.  A tile floor.  Pretty much, it's going to kick butt.  I'll save the pictures for a before and after when it's complete.  We gutted it yesterday, so it's all ready to go.  Our plan is to get sheetrock and backerboard up this week along with the ceiling lights and vent fan.  Next weekend we'll put in the new shower pan and get the floor ready for tiling (assuming they come in on time).  And the following week, Mr. Frisby is taking two days off work to give himself a long weekend to try to get the tiling and installations done.  It will probably be a stretch because we have a lot of tiling planned, but we'll see how it goes.  I plan to film the process so I can make a sweet video of the project.  Updates to follow...

A Holiday Post

I thought I was doing pretty good at keeping up with blog posts with my monthly Stella updates plus a couple others here and there.  Then I had a few minutes the other day to actually sit down and check up on other people's blogs.  Turns out I'm a little subpar on my blogging.  I saw everyone else's Christmas posts and realized I hadn't done one.  I saw everyone else's New Year's posts and realized I hadn't done one.  I saw all the fun things everyone has been doing for the holidays and realized that, not only did I not post anything, but we just really didn't do anything.  Indeed, it was a pretty low key holiday season for us.  Stella isn't old enough to understand anything of what was going on and not even really aware enough to be kept interested by festive lights and decorations.  And, she won't remember even a second of this holiday season.  So, it seemed a little pointless to bundle her up and head out on fun holiday adventures when we didn't even want to do it ourselves.  (And when I say ourselves, I really mean me.  Perhaps Mr. Frisby wanted to go out and do fun, festive things for the holiday season, but he was too busy with bishopric duties, so he was never available.  So, that pretty much just left me and I was more interested in relaxing this year.  Judge me if you want, but I thoroughly enjoyed a low-stress holiday season).

That said, this Christmas season was immensely more enjoyable with Stella around.  Funny, since she didn't have a clue what was going on, but it was still much more fun.  Even if she won't remember her first Christmas, I will, so although we didn't go out on fun holiday adventures, I thoroughly enjoyed shopping for her and making her as festive as I could.  So, without further ado, here is how The Frisbys celebrated this holiday season.

It started the day after Thanksgiving when we headed up to the Santa Cruz mountains to cut down our Christmas Tree.  We didn't take many photos because Mr. Frisby had his hands full with a saw and a Christmas Tree and I had my hands full with a baby and a dog.  But we snapped a couple photos and had a good time.

I think my sister may have taken a photo with all of us in it.  Maybe I'll get that from her someday.  But, for now, this is what I got.  Cutting down our Christmas Tree is a tradition that I've grown up with and it's really fun to be able to continue doing it with Stella.  And, just like last year, Scout was in dog heaven running around the tree farm.

Next was our ward Christmas party at which Stella got to meet Santa.

She charmed everyone at the party with her cute reindeer socks, rock star hair and pleasant, happy demeanor.

On Christmas Eve, Stella played Baby Jesus in the Nativity.  Aside from spitting up in the middle of the performance, I think she did pretty well.  No crying and she even tamed down her hair so it wasn't sticking up in the back.  I didn't get any pictures since I was playing Mary myself, but I think maybe someone in my family did, so we'll at least have some photo documentation.

Christmas morning was pretty exciting.  Mr. Frisby had no church meetings, so we got to sleep in until Stella woke up.  Then it was time to see what Santa brought.

Maybe she remembered a little from last year, but Scout caught on very quickly to what was happening.  But, like a good dog, she didn't touch any of her presents until we told her it was okay.

We helped Stella open all her presents, then we opened ours, and then it was off to church where everyone oohed and aahed over her general adorableness.

After church, we attempted a little photo shoot with the timer on our camera before we changed out of our church clothes.  Stella was hungry, so it didn't go well.

After that, it was off to my parents' house where we opened more presents and enjoyed a delectable Christmas dinner.

It was a lovely Christmas.  Stella loved all of her Christmas presents.  Here she is with one of her (and our) favorites:

And after Christmas, my sister and her husband came to town so we had lots more fun with them, though no photo documentation of any of it.

Okay, on to New Year's.  We enjoyed a small New Year's Eve celebration with family and some family friends.  We ate, we played games, we counted down to midnight, and we drank Martinelli's.  Well, Stella didn't.  This is how she rang in the new year:

And, admittedly, that's how I wanted to ring in the new year.  As a true mother, I thought about the planned festivities for Saturday night and I thought, "do I really have to stay up until midnight?"  But we had a good time.  And, on New Year's Day, we went to church where Stella again charmed the masses.  I must say she is adorable.

And that is how we Frisbys celebrated the holiday season.  Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone!

Three Months

 Merry Christmas blogosphere!  Once again, I'm a little late.  Stella was three months old on Friday.  Can you believe she just keeps growing?  She's been into her 3-6 month clothes for a few weeks now.  I was excited to make the change because she has some really cute outfits.  But, when she started wearing the bigger clothes, I was also a little sad to realize she would never wear those smaller clothes again.  It's not like me leaving my regular clothes behind for a few months when I moved on to maternity clothes during my pregnancy.  I knew I would be back in those clothes eventually (and it feels so great!).  No.  She will NEVER wear those clothes again.  It's a little sad.  But, life goes on and she keeps growing.  In fact, she's growing very well and getting quite chunky as you can see in these pictures.  Her doctor was very impressed with her weight gain at her last check up.

Here she is with her Aunt Tammy just after Thanksgiving.  Those cheeks are very kissable (Stella's, I mean).

And tolerating tummy time.  This has actually been getting a little more fun over the last month.  Not really for her, but for me.  I get to see her getting stronger and starting to push up on her little arms and it's fun to see her grow.  She likes it about the same as she always has.  For only a few minutes at a time.

Since we didn't get many pictures of Stella on her blessing day due to inclement weather outside and horrible lighting inside, I did a little photo shoot of her in her blessing dress a couple weeks later.  Here she is showing off her left hook.

I got out of the shower a few days ago and saw this.  Little Stella asleep in her bouncy seat with her bow slipped down over her eyes.  It made me laugh.  I don't know at what point the bow slipped down - before or after she fell asleep, but she didn't complain so I like to think it was after.

And that says a lot about Stella.  She doesn't complain in general.  She's a pretty easy-going, mellow baby and she's great.  This last month she's started to pay more attention to her toys and swats at them and reaches for them all the time now.  She can hold them in her hand if we put them in it, but she doesn't really realize she's holding it.  She recognizes us and our voices.  In fact, the first Sunday in December, we got to church and sat down just as the meeting was starting.  Stella was drowsy and her eyes were droopy, but she wasn't asleep yet.  She was starting to doze off in her car seat when Mr. Frisby got up to start the meeting as it was his turn to conduct.  As soon as she heard her daddy's voice through the microphone, she perked up and listened for a few minutes.  It was pretty cute.  She's also started laughing this month, though she's very stingy with them.  She's given me a couple little laughs here and there and she giggled quite a bit at her Aunt Gaylene, but that's about it.  She does have a favorite toy, though.  It's a little yellow lion that squeaks when you squeeze it.  Without fail, she smiles at that little lion whenever you give it a squeeze.  It's adorable.  She also rolls onto her side all the time now when I lay her down on her back to play.  And, she's also discovered how much fun it is to watch Scout playing.  She just sits there smiling while she watches the dog running around playing with her toys.  Again - it's adorable.  We just love watching this little girl grow and learn.  She's the best!

And, although, it's a couple days after her three month mark, here's a picture of our little cutie all ready for church on Chrismas Day!