Miss Independent

Eating a Mum Mum

As Olivia is going on 10 months, she is becoming more and more independent by the day. About two weeks ago, she decided she would no longer let us feed her pureed baby food. She would scream, cry, and generally make our meal time a very stressful experience. I decided to start letting her eat all finger foods and she is now a very messy, but happy camper. She really does a pretty good job of picking up her food and putting it in her mouth, although judging by the picture below, it doesn't look like it. :)

Speaking of eating, she has been eating like a horse lately. I thought maybe she was going through a growth spurt and that being a bottomless pit would only last a few days, but this new found shoving-food-in-her-face business shows no signs of slowing down. She's so busy crawling around (on all fours), pulling herself up on everything and now, climbing stairs, that she must be burning a lot of calories and working up an appetite.

She seems to love fruit, especially nectarines. She's been eating bananas, cantaloupe, peaches, sweet potatoes, cheese, turkey and ham lunchmeat, puffs, mum mums (see picture at the top), and some homemade turkey meatballs packed with all those veggie purees that I have stored in the freezer. So far, she's not a picky eater for which I am grateful.

In other news, Olivia is a genius! ;) She "read" the word yum-yum in one of her little lift-the-flap books. On this page it says, "This little baby is hungry." When you lift the flap, it shows the little girl eating and the words say "yum-yum." When I turned to the page and lifted the flap,she said yum-yum all on her own. I was so surprised and excited. I ran to the office to tell Yusaku and when we got to that page, she performed her little trick again. So, it wasn't just a fluke! She did it again the next day for my mom!  Granted, she doesn't do it every time, but that's okay. I still know she's a smartypants!

Great Minds Think Alike

As I mentioned in the last post, we had decided not to get each other any gifts for our anniversary. We decided instead that we would just give each other cards and go out for a nice dinner.  Well, as it turns out, we both thought we'd try to be creative and a little sneaky and buy each other a little something. This little something? A small version of our wedding cake...same flavor, from the same place our wedding cake was from.

The funniest part was when we discovered that, without knowing it, we had both gotten each other the same thing. I had ordered my cake for him (an 8 in. single white cake with lemon cream filling and buttercream frosting and the words "Happy 5th Anniversary" with 6-24-06 written below it) earlier in the week over the phone. Then, Thursday night he finished up work a little early and told me that he and Olivia were going to run a little errand. Since he wouldn't tell me where he was going, I was guessing that maybe he was getting me a little something.

When he came home and we were talking over dinner, I asked him if he had anything (read: present) he needed to bring in from the car. He said no. I was surprised and asked why not. He told me he had ordered something. This set off my suspicions that just maybe he had had the same idea as me. After a lot more dancing around the subject and asking each other some questions, we finally discovered what we had done and swapped details about what kinds of cakes we had gotten. The one he ordered for me was just very slightly different than the one I had ordered for him - a 6 in. single white cake with lemon cream filling and buttercream frosting with the words "Happy Anniversary" and some pink flowers on top.

Since we had figured out the surprise before we were actually supposed to pick up the cakes, Yusaku asked if I thought we should cancel one of them (because, come on, who really needs two cakes?), but I said no, it made for a funny story and good memory and we could always share some of the extra.  So, here are pictures of the two cakes.  I'll definitely never forget this anniversary! :)