Before I get into our recent spring break trip I want to discuss Molly for a bit. When she turned 8 months old it was like a switch flipped and she was a new baby. She had colic when she was young but once she out grew that she was still a fussy baby. Fussed a lot, very needy, over all not the easy going third child everyone kept promising me. She also spit up A LOT! At 8 months that basically stopped too. The last month has been amazing! She has been so happy, she has been developing rapidly, growing well and it has just been so fun to be around her. She had her 9 month check up a few days ago and weighed 18 pounds 13 ozs and was 29 inches tall. I forgot to ask about percentiles. While we were in Florida, just a few days shy of turning 9 months old, she crawled for the first time. It was an exhausting, jerky looking thing but she made forward progress. She has gotten much more efficient over the last week but it is still not smooth. She loves pulling up on things now too. She is quite strong and sturdy on her feet. A few times in the past few days she has let go and stood alone for a few seconds before falling onto her bottom. She started clapping in the past couple days too. The first day she was waving one of her hands around and then figured out how to get the second one in on the act. It is cute. She loves watching her sisters, she laughs and gets excited watching them dance and play around. She flaps her arms and legs in excitement. She has started tubbing with them without her baby seat in the tub so she is just 'one of the girls now'. They have to be a little more careful of her but it works well and she also gets a huge kick out of splashing around with them.
Molly has gotten more talkative, and babbles quite a lot. She can say Mama and Dada now but not necessarily for us. She seems to understand a bunch of things, if she is in her excersaucer and I say jump she jumps up and down, when she hears music she dances, when we ask for a kiss she will open her mouth and kiss us. It is so cute! She loves eating turkey, bread, some american cheese and cheerios. She still eats baby food too for fruit and veggies.
So now onto our Florida trip.
This year we decided to drive down. We knew it was a crazy proposition with three young kids but it went as well as we could have hoped for. On the way down we left Greenwich at 12:30pm and arrived in Florida at 6:45am. It took 18 hours and 15 minutes exactly. We hit two traffic jams, we let the kids run around for about 30 mins once and stopped three times for gas. The kids slept all thru the night, waking only when we stopped for gas but they went back to sleep each time. We had 14 full days there and the weather was perfect. We swam so much this time, went to the beach, went sea kayaking to see sea turtles, saw manatees, hit the play grounds, rode bikes, went to a carnival, saw lots of sunrises.
It was a great trip. The kids were healthy, slept well, and had a great time. Casey continued to improve her swimming. She can dive to the bottom of the deep end to retrieve pool toys. Julia made some good strides as well. She would put her face down in the water and swim using her arms and legs for one breath of distance.
That is how Casey started out. If we can get some pool time in this summer she will be swimming. Molly was such a happy baby that we were able to put her in the excersaucer under the umbrella next to the pool and we could all swim. She did not like the beach, the touch of the sand seemed to freak her out. All around it was a great trip. On the way home we left at 6pm and arrived in Milford, DE to visit James's grandmother at 8am. The kids were perfect again. We would do the drive again as long as we had enough time down there to make it worth it.
