My Eight Month Old (an old post)

I really want to be a better blogger. I don't know why I can't seem to get anything down on this blog. My hope was that this would be like a scrapbook (since I'll never scrapbook), but I seem to have missed out some of Spencer's most important months. Hopefully, I will turn this around into a scrapbook blog one day.

Spencer is eight months old, and she is already so much more fun than Wes and I had ever thought possible at this age. She is still really long, and she is mostly wearing 12-18 month clothes. She sometimes looks like a redneck baby in these because she is too skinny for them, but 6-12 month clothes would never fit her long torso. She loves to eat, and doesn't reject any certain type of baby food. She is working through stage two foods now. We are finally about to move out of our size two diapers, which is good, since we have boxes and boxes of size three diapers.


Spencer has slept through the night from about 6:30 to 6:30/7:00 since November. What an amazing sleeper! Wes and I are so grateful for this. It makes all three of us such wakeful, happy people. She is a dream when she wakes up in the morning, as well. She stretches right away, even before she opens her eyes, and it is the most adorable thing. She enjoys lying on her changing table, babbling, giggling, and getting tickled by her parents. She wiggles around, but when you take her clothes off, she really lets loose and starts to kick like a wild woman. She laughs the most when you tickle her tummy or her neck. She also thinks that any kind of funny noise is hilarious. She gives good belly laughs if you make a crazy noise for her.

We spend our afternoons playing with Spencer on the floor, watching her work toys like her bubble gum machine and her piano, and listening to her squeal and giggle. She really is just always happy. We are so blessed to have such a content baby who is always smiling at us. She is great medicine for lifting your mood. As soon as you're around her, bad days are just forgotten. She is so good that we hardly even notice when she's sick, which is kind of tricky. I always feel like the worst mom when I finally realize that she's been sick for several days. We've had such a problem with ear infections, fluid in the ears, and a little bit of hearing loss that we're getting ear tubes in two weeks.

One of my favorite Spencer laughs happened at Costco last week. Wes was holding her, and I walked ahead of them and turned around to look at them. He held her tightly and ran toward me, stopping right as he got to me. She laughed so hard that it didn't even sound like her voice. So of course I got Wes to do it again. This time she squealed so loudly that people probably though she was being kidnapped. Hilarious! Wes has decided that she's going to be a singer. I think so, too, especially if the amount of singing that goes on at our house is any indication.

Spencer is SO not into the idea of crawling, or of even being on her stomach at all. She absolutely hates it! We will let her ease herself onto her stomach and lay out several toys for her to grab for, but she just cries and cries and turns in circles. She can do a 360 degree turn in about one minute flat, but she refuses to attempt any other movement. The reverse army crawl doesn't seem to get her anywhere, so she just gets frustrated. We do think that she will love walking. She loves to stand and hold onto our fingers; she's brave enough to continue letting go and falling. I love to pull her up from sitting. Her little fit look just like she's in first position in ballet. I'll be interested to see if this child ever crawls, or if she just goes straight into walking.

Our Little Schroder

The Best Weekend

It may be months later, but I'm still remembering my best weekend of the winter. I want to document it so that I can recall how great it was when I'm fifty years old.

Valentine's weekend was better than I could have planned. I love those weekends where everything falls perfectly into place. On Friday afternoon, I was able to pick Spencer up at my parents' house because they were so kind to pick her up from school. We played around at their house for a little bit until I realized that it was snowing pretty hard and starting to stick! We quickly left for home but didn't get there for an hour due to the snow traffic. Usually, I would have been steaming, but it was really peaceful to watch the snow accumulate. Wes had already gone to the store to stock up on food, so I knew that we'd be snuggled in all cozy for the night.


The snow kept splattering down in big, chunky flakes, and we spent hours just staring out of the window. This kind of snow hasn't been around Greenville in at least a decade. It was beyond gorgeous as the snow started piling up all around our house. We took Spencer outside for the obligatory photos, but it was a bit cold to keep her outside for very long. We embarked on a cycle of eating, staring out of the window, finding another snack, and standing by the window again. In our house, when it snows, calories don't count. You are required to buy lots of fattening foods on the pre-snow grocery trip. I know that I gained at least three pounds because of the snow. We stayed up a little later than usual, and finally went to bed after looking out at the snow one more time (I fear disappearing snow, so I have to constantly check on it).


I loved waking up to a white yard, and we took Spencer outside to see if she would play in it. She was really hating on the snow. We tried to sit her up in her Randy from Christmas story jacket, but she just slowly drifted back, back, and back until she was lying back completely in the snow. Then she started crying, so we gave up on this idea.

"What are you doing to me?"

"Enough of this!"

We were able to relax for the rest of the day until it was time to get ready to go to Wicked! I have been wanting tickets for Wicked since I found out it was coming to Greenville a year and a half ago. We went to Liberty for dinner and began with Mai Tais at the bar. Liberty is my absolute favorite bar, and Wes and I love to sit there drinking Mai Tais even if we are getting a table to eat. We left just in time to get to Wicked. We had much better seats than when we saw it at The Fox, so we were thrilled to really be able to see what was going on.

Wes and I have never been out to a nice dinner on Valentine's Day. We've usually gone to Clemson basketball games for Valentine's Day, but we just didn't get that together this year. Since I didn't have to work the next day, we felt like giving the Valentine's Day date a try. We had crazy thoughts that we could make it to an early dinner on Valentine's Day since it was on a Sunday. We drove around town and stopped at about four restaurants before realizing that we would wait forever at a decent place. We finally broke down and headed to Red Robin for our romantic meal. It actually turned out better than if we had gone to a fancy Italian place. We so enjoyed it, and it was hilarious to go on a date without our daughter and be surrounded by families.