Week 15 in the Life of Riley

Yeah...I still haven't come up with a creative name! Feel free to make some suggestions if you can think of something!

The big thing that happened this week was Riley getting his tongue clipped, but I already did an entire post about that. He also met a few new people this week. On Tuesday, my friend Bobby from work came over to have lunch with us. Then Saturday night we had dinner with our friends Rusty & Paula Hale.


Bobby & Riley


Rusty, Riley & Paula

I also learned it's FUN to dress up boys too!!! I was worried there wouldn't be as many cute clothes for boys because there is definitely a much smaller selection to chose from! I guess that never really changes, BUT have no fear! There are still plenty of cute boy clothes!! Kelly doesn't approve of some of them by saying "My son isn't wearing that!", but I can still play the baby card and sneak some of them in! ;)

Here are just a few of his outfit changes this week! The other problem is that since he still spends most of his life horizontal - it's hard to get him into a cute pose, and if you do it's even more difficult to keep him there AND capture it in a picture while trying to get him to stop eating his hands and look at the camera! So sometimes you just gotta take what you can get!


In his soccer outfit, lying on a Steelers blanket watching the Steelers game with Dad! (Even though he's not supposed to be watching tv!)


In his baby blue cargo pants and adorable sweater vest from Children's Place - see it's hard to get him propped up and posed!


You can't see it, but he has on a cool thermal shirt that says My Mom Rocks - because he knows I rock while playing Rock Band! Check out the shoes! They are like mini diesels! And these are his FAVORITE 2 toys!


In his cool Gap cargo pants and polo shirt with thermal sleeves with his favorite Ducky!! Once again wondering WHY Mommy keeps putting this silver thing that makes him BLIND in front of his face! I should probably google whether you can harm your child with flash burn this early on! I think all 1st children suffer from that though!

He's still enjoying rolling his RRRRRRRs with Dad and he started shrieking this week too! But he still looks surprised like he can't believe that high pitched noise just came from him! He and Dad still sit on the sofa and "chat" back and forth in their own special language for hours! It's like Riley has an entire new repertoire of sounds now that his tongue has been clipped!


Riley & Dad "chatting" on the sofa. You can tell by the smile on Riley's face this is one of his FAVORITE things to do!

Oh yeah...he's been laughing out loud for a while now, but starting this week - he literally starts cracking up at HIMSELF! And he'll just laugh and laugh and gasp for air and laugh and laugh some more at nothing at all! At first Kelly thought he was laughing at him, then he was like I'm not even doing anything! He's just cracking himself up!

He also tries to sit up and stand EVERY time you hold him! And now that he's seen the world from a vertical perspective, he'll cry when you try to lie him back down! It's like he's saying "No! Now that I've seen the world this way, I can't go back to lying down all the time!" We joke that he's going to have a 6 pack like Kelly with all this trying to sit up he's doing! He's constantly working those abs!

And as you saw in the pictures above, his favorite toys are his links (see keep it simple once again!) and a little Ducky his Great Aunt Shireen got him before he was even born! Oh yeah....and his hands! He's still trying to eat them every chance he gets!

I think that's about it for week 15! Oh yeah, I keep thinking how am I EVER going to walk out the door to go back to work! Kelly may have to take me and pick me up the 1st few days so I can see Riley as long as possible! I can see how 12 weeks is the magic time to return to work! That's just before they start interacting with you all the time, smiling at you, laughing and showing their little personalities! Now that he's doing all that, I find myself not wanting to even walk out of the room for a minute for fear I'm going to miss something so cute it's picture or video worthy! Maybe I need to get a web cam set up for my Mom and Kelly to have while I'm at work so they can run him over to the web cam when he does something new or cute! But that means they would just have to sit there in front of the web cam all day because he's always doing something cute! :) And I'm guessing that wouldn't be the best thing for my productivity level at work either!

Week 14 in The Life of Riley

I'm struggling to come up with a 'creative' name for the posts where I just do a brain dump of Riley's week! Sometimes there are just too many cute things to ever be able to create a separate post for each one!

Luckily, we didn't have much of a Halloween hang over! I was worried he might be a little overwhelmed with so much action 2 days in a row! But it was all just another day for Riley! Probably because he didn't have to stay up until 1am putting the final touches on his props!

Last Saturday, my godson's Mom and her other son - Mona & Nikhil - came to visit us from Washington State. Nikhil is ADORABLE! He fell in love with Riley's Halloween book that had a loud vampire laugh and lights on the last page so we decided he would get more use out of it than Riley right now! Mona said when they went to see other friends for a couple of days that Nikhil would tell his friends "The baby had my book." And when I say he loved it, I mean he LOVED it! He carried it with him everywhere we went! To every store, etc! He even loved my magazines with pumpkins on the front of them, and all he wanted to talk about was Halloween! He was a skeleton and his brother was a cop! I think he might actually fit into our household! I told Mona she can send him to spend Halloween with us next year, and he'd probably come home totally over Halloween! :)


Mona, Riley & Nikhil


Mona & Riley - Kelly and I LOVED this pic because he's looking right at the camera! That's hard to get with a kid! And look at those cheeks!! Makes me want to kiss them!!


Riley sporting the Puma track jacket Mona bought him. Her 2 boys are the most GQ youngsters I have EVER seen! Sporting their Joe Jeans and Ed Hardy t-shirts!

They spent the night with us on Tuesday too. Then on Friday, Riley and I took a trip out to Heath on Lake Ray Hubbard to see my friends Nigel & Kim. They have 2 girls Jessica & Emma that are just adorable! Riley LOVED them! He would just stare and smile at them! Emma would say "He smiled at me 5 times! He smiled at me 6 times!" Then Jessica said "He's staring at me!" Which lead to a conversation about how boys staring at girls turns into boys chasing girls at recess (Jess is 7, so she knows all about this!). We finally had a good car trip where Riley slept all the way there and most of the way back! So he didn't WAIL the entire drive! Thank God! Because I'm not sure I could handle that for 45 minutes each way!

It was cool to see Kim. She, Nigel and I worked together 10...OMG! Yes 10 years ago!..as consultants on the AT&T project that brought them into offering local phone service instead of just long distance! So she and I are both 'tech chicks', but we also learned that we share many of the same philosophies on parenting! She actually had her 1st daughter in Australia (where Nigel is from), and it was amazing to hear what support they have available to EVERY new Mom there! And they are definitely advocates of breastfeeding and all it's benefits! Her peditrician there wrote the book Baby on Board, which seems to very much have the same concepts as Baby Wise here. And Baby Wise is the book I had recommended and sworn by to me the most when I was pregnant. Every Mom that told me about it (Emily, Nancy & Molly) all said - just do it! It works! It's all about doing a feed, wake then sleep cycle instead of a feed, sleep wake cycle. It sounds simple, but it makes such a HUGE difference! Riley was sleeping through the night by 6 weeks, and I can put him to bed after our night time routine now and he soothes himself to sleep. He can also soothe himself back to sleep if he wakes up during the night. So now I'm one of those mother's that swears by it! It was cool to compare notes on swaddling, over stimulation, the importance of a routine and doing the feed, wake, sleep cycle with Kim now that I've actually lived it! Reading it in a book is one thing...living it - something entirely different!


Riley & Emma - Riley LOVED her little lamb! And Emma went and put on her dance recital outfit that matched her lamb for the picture! So CUTE!


Riley, Jess & Emma - Both of the girls put on their dance recital outfits for the pictures!

Other than that Riley and I hung out all week doing our normal routine including our daily walks because the weather is SO nice right now! The highs were in the 70's most of the week I think. We're experiencing our 2 weeks of fall before it's too cold to take Riley for walks! Our walks are becoming more fun and interactive - not just me walking while he takes a nap! He's so much more aware of his surroundings now - he wants to look around and take it all in.

For those of you like me that don't know - newborns sort of panic when they are in the wind because they only know how to breath out of their nose. My pediatrician said if you hold a newborn's nose, they'll turn blue because they don't know how to breath out of their mouths! Anyway, Riley overcame that hurdle this week and he LOVES the wind now! And he was cracking me up this week on one of our walks on a windy day! Every time the wind would blow what is left of his hair and faux hawk...he would scrunch his shoulders up and giggle out loud! It was SO funny! Then he would look around to try to figure out who was tickling him! He's definitely more ticklish now too - so Kelly and I are always kissing his neck and tummy and he just laughs! Anyway...again it's the little things! But it was so funny! He's laughing out loud all the time about almost everything now! There's not many things cuter than a baby's laugh for sure!

And now his smiles are mostly deliberate! He had a tummy ache a couple of nights this week, and I walked in his room TIRED because I had only gotten a couple of hours a sleep before he woke up. And when I got over to where he could see me, he would flash the BIGGEST smile! He does it EVERY morning when you go in to get him too! OMG! Talk about a smile that can melt away all your tiredness!

Kelly and Riley started a few new things too! They literally have their own special Ewok language! Riley will 'talk' back and forth with Kelly forEVER if you let them! And he just loves it! Kicking and smiling the entire time! He also LOVES to swing or fly in Daddy's arms! The flying of course started with the Superman costume last week, but he smiles like crazy just loving it! It's so sweet! I find myself imagining all the things these 2 will enjoy together over the years, and it brings a smile to my face!

I think that's most of what we did this week! I'm on my countdown to my return to work on Dec 1st! Only 3 more weeks left! :( I have NO idea how I'm going to go to work!! Kelly says I'll do it like almost every other Mom has to, but I'm sure it'll be a Kleenex day for sure! I'm thinking about working from home the 1st couple of days to ease the transition back! It's going to be harder for me than Riley, but at least he'll be staying with GiGi (my Mom) and Kelly for the 1st month or so. We are waiting for a little boy in the class above Riley's to walk, and he hasn't even taken a step yet!! Thank goodness I was an anal retentive Mom that got on the day care list in MARCH!!

Oh yeah, today we went shopping with Nancy & Ethan at Grapevine Mills! To be honest, I haven't bought Riley very many clothes up to this point because he already had so many, but OMG! today I found the greatness of The Children's Place for cute clothes! I was thinking there weren't as many cute things for boys like there are for girls! Oh was I wrong! Wait until you see his adorable Thanksgiving outfit! Let's just hope Riley likes it as much as I do! Hopefully it will still fit in a few weeks! He's already in 6 month old clothes and socks, and he just turned 3 months last week! He's LONG and LEAN like his Daddy though! He outgrows them in length WAY before he outgrows them in width!

Well I think that about covers it for this week....til I find the time again!