Jumping baby!

Dallin got this jumperoo toy for Christmas and he's really started enjoying it recently. He'll just bounce and jump for minutes straight. Well, you can see for yourself. Have fun turning your head to see the movie, I can't rotate it. And notice the phone book he's standing on. He's just barely to short to reach all the way to the ground.

New Favorite Toy

Dallin has a new love: a toy. This little table is the perfect height for him to stand at by himself. He really likes being a big boy and standing up, but he can't stand without support from someone or something. Enter table toy.

He likes to practice standing/walking a lot, but he's not as excited to practice crawling. This is what usually happens when he's on his tummy:

He really has the pathetic "help me!" face down.

Success! Finally!

As anyone who has been keeping up with my blog would know, Dallin has had a little trouble gaining weight since he was about 4 months old. For whatever reason, he just hasn't been able to gain enough weight to keep up with his growth curve, or any growth curve for that matter. He has moments when he'll be doing well and then he'll drop off again. In every other respect, he seems like a perfectly healthy baby. He looks healthy (he's small, but he's not skin and bones, he's got fat on him), he's a very happy baby, he can stand up by himself while holding onto a chair, couch, toy, etc., and is working on crawling. I just haven't been able to get him to gain much weight. Even when I gave him some super calorie formula for 2 weeks on the pediatrician's recommendation, his weight did go up, but not really any substantial amount, just an average amount.

At the beginning of this month, he hit rock bottom. In one month, he did not gain any weight. Not a single ounce. I'm not exactly sure how that happened (I promise I was feeding him!). I knew that I needed to do something different to help him gain weight. I'm willing to give Dallin formula if that is what is necessary to keep him healthy, but I wanted to try every other possibility before going to that. So I started working with a breastfeeding specialist. She gave me some tips and I tried them for a week. Then I took him back to the specialist yesterday to be weighed again. I'm always nervous when I take Dallin to be weighed. We weighed him, and in one week he had gained 4 ounces. The specialist was expecting him to gain about 1-3 ounces. He finally gained more than expected instead of less!!! I'm so happy that something has finally worked. Seriously, this was like the 3rd best moment of Dallin's life; #1 being when he was born and #2 when the cardiologist told us his heart was fine.

I'm going to keep doing what I've been doing and hopefully it will continue to work and he'll keep growing well. I would love to be able to be past all these weight problems. I know it's only been a week and that we need to keep him gaining like this a lot longer than that, but we finally have a good start.

And I'm happy to report that he has gotten his first tooth!

Tooth #2 will follow shortly.

Yummy burritos!

This is what happens when Dallin is around bowls of food and you get distracted for one second:

Mmmmm... sour cream.

Happy Birthday to me!

My 23rd birthday was last week. To celebrate I invited my siblings that live in Provo to come over for dinner a few days before my birthday. I made an Apple Stuffed Pork Loin Roast.

Very tasty.

Along with it we had Fettuccine, broccoli and salad.

And for dessert: Boston Cream Pie, one of my favorites and my usual birthday cake.

The birthday girl in all her glory.

We somehow didn't have birthday candles, so we stuck a match in the cake. Very resourceful.

My actual birthday was pretty low key since we had other celebrations before. Mckay and I went to Red Robin for dinner. You can't go wrong with a Banzai burger and bottomless steak fries. And later on in the week we took advantage of Coldstone's birthday club and got free ice cream.

Delicious.

Does anyone know what day it is?

Happy Friday!

(Thanks for the bibs aunt Julie!)

Downtown Denver

While we were in Colorado for Christmas, we went to Downtown Denver. I had never seen it before and I've heard about the how amazing it is and the attractions they have. So we took the light rail downtown.

Mckay's mom, Graham and Annie came too.

While there we walked through the 16th street mall. 16th street has a large portion blocked off from cars and it just has pedestrian traffic and a free bus going up and down the street all day. There are tons and tons of shops, restaurants and a mall all along the street.

We ate lunch at Illegal Pete's. It's a burrito place much like Qdoba or Chipotle's (which is Mckay's favorite).

It was muy bueno.

We also went to the capital building

and we learned some things about Denver history and the building itself.

We took turns getting into the old school phone booths

and we stared up at the amazing dome. Unfortunately, we were just barely too late to make the last tour of the day up to the dome. Next time...

And since Denver is known for being "the mile high city," we had to find proof that this was actually true. There it was, engraved right into the steps of the capitol building, "one mile above sea level."

If you notice, a few steps up from the writing is a circular gold plaque marking exactly 5280 ft elevation. Or so they thought. Not too long ago (maybe 2002 ish?) they measured again and found that their previous marker was too high and that exactly 5280 feet was down 5 more steps, marked by the plaque at the bottom of the picture.

The view from the capitol.

And here is Dallin sporting a Colorado Avalanche hat. If you spend too much time in Denver, you automatically become a fan. They are that awesome.

More Christmas fun

Dallin likes watching other babies and children. He seems fascinated by them. So he really enjoyed spending two weeks with kids around him all the time. When Dallin would get fussy, one of his cousins would come smile at him and Dallin would stop crying and smile back. Dallin really liked his cousin Porter. Porter is only 2 weeks older than Dallin so they're good buddies.

They stayed like this talking to each other for a good 10 minutes.

On Christmas Eve, we listened to rolls of Christmas music on the Player Piano and sang along. Here are 2 other cousins singing with grandpa.

Last year around Christmas, the Easton's did a Ginger Ale taste test to see which brand was the best. (I think Seagrams Ginger Ale won that one.)

This year we did a Root Beer taste test. I was interested in what my choices would be because A&W is by far my favorite root beer, but I wanted to see if I would still choose that as the best in a blind taste test.

We got 7 different kinds of root beer and the cups were prepared by Mom and Dad Easton so we didn't know which brand was in which cup.

We tasted each one and chose our top 3.

The outcome: 1st place - A&W

2nd place - IBC

3rd place - Mug

Now we have proof that A&W truly is the best root beer. My votes surprised me. After choosing my top 3 numbers, I learned that my root beer choices were, in order: A&W, DIET A&W, and Barqs. I can always taste an undesirable difference when a soda is diet, so I don't know how I chose a diet soda. My only explanation is that this drink was in cup #7 so by the time I got to that one my taste buds were getting confused and couldn't distinguish the aspartame flavor. At least my top 2 choices were A&W. I'm a true fan! 2 of the choices were clear losers. There was always a resounding groan or "eeww" from anyone drinking one of these. The brands: Hansen's and Big K. The store brand may work for some things, but when it comes to root beer, don't settle.

Our Christmas Celebrations

We went to Colorado to spend the holiday with our Easton family. Before we left, we opened the presents we had from our Crapo family. Here are some pictures from our Christmas celebrations. Be warned, there are a lot of pictures of Dallin opening presents. Since this was his first Christmas, we wanted to make sure it was well documented.

Dallin liked ripping open the presents. He really likes paper, and he really enjoys putting it in his mouth.

He's still a little too young to understand what Christmas is, so he generally got more excited about the paper than the present inside the wrapping.

But he did like this book (thanks to Neil and Ashley!).

And he liked how this hat made his head warm.

And since things are always cuter in action, here is Dallin opening a present.

We made it to Denver on a pretty uneventful drive. The roads were nice and clear and the weather was good. We left early in the morning and made good time, so we got there in time for lunch.

Our Christmas morning was relaxed. We ate a huge breakfast of waffles, omelets, bacon, hash browns, and cinnamon rolls. Then we opened our presents!

Mckay got me some delicious smelling hand soap and a season of Monk. It seemed like an appropriate pairing.

I got Mckay this workout bar so he can do pull-ups at home and get ripped like the guy on the box.

Dallin ate more wrapping and decorating paraphernalia.

And he got a six pack!!!

of socks.

In all, we got a bunch of movies, books, clothes and games. We also celebrated my birthday (which is coming up in a few days...) while we were there and I got more movies and 8 Dr. Seuss books. We had a lot of fun with family. Dallin loved being held by his grandparents and watching his cousins run around. We had a peaceful and relaxing 2 weeks. I'll post more later about the fun things we did.