Updates

Well Hayden is one, and big things are happening! He took his first steps for Jay on November 9, but is far from actually "walking". He will get into a groove, taking a few steps back and forth between Jay and I. It's a lot of fun to watch, and he is definitely more interested in walking when dad is around. Crawling is just so fast, so he seems to prefer that. He has also turned into our little climber and therefore our little daredevil. He can now get up and down the couch in no time, and has a blast climbing over anything in his way. Sometimes that happens to be Oscar, which does not please Oscar but he deals with it.


We started giving Hayden milk in his sippy cup about two weeks ago to mixed results. After a few tries, he definitely prefers whole milk once it's been warmed. He's still not in love with it, but he is making excellent progress. As a result, we're washing and packing up the bottles this week because he is no longer interested in them! This was a huge relief, as the bottle seemed to be a great source of comfort to him for a long time. I guess he's ready to move on to bigger and better things!

Food is a ton of fun for little Mr. Hayden. He loves to eat whatever we eat, which can include Thai food, avocadoes, whole wheat banana bread, pasta salad, anything on our plates he seems to think is fair game. He is such a good eater and is surprisingly on the "skinny" side for his size, but he burns a ton of calories with all that playing! He is having a blast with all his new birthday toys, and we're going to have to clean out some of the old ones to make room. I still owe you a blog about Austria; I got a little behind there for awhile but we're working on getting caught up!

Happy Halloween!

We love Halloween in this house, and were very excited for Hayden's first celebration of the holiday. But first, we had an adults only party! On Friday night we dropped Hayden off with our good friends, the Bakers, who were all too excited to watch him for our night out. We headed to a pub on post that we'd decorated earlier in the day and set up with lots of yummy food and treats. Several other couples and some single soldiers attended as well, and we had a blast! Good food, pictures, music and costumes made for a really fun night. Hayden had a great time with the Bakers, and has a new best friend in their dog Harley.

Our late Friday night meant we got to sleep in a little on Saturday. We headed to post to take Hayden's Halloween picture and grab some lunch. I love his Hulk costume and it's so easy to get on him so we didn't mind putting it on a few times. Halloween night we met our friends to go trick or treating on post at 6 and walked around for about an hour and a half. Hayden always gets confused when he's all bundled up but he was a champ in his stroller. He's too little for candy but we trick or treated at a few places and put candy in his fun Halloween bag for us to later enjoy. We tried to get a few pics of the kids inside but Hayden wanted nothing to do with it. It's a rough life for a baby!

After trick or treating we headed to the bowling alley where games were free if you were in costume. It's so much fun feeding Hayden now that he can eat real food and really enjoys feeding himself. He has grown very anti-bottle lately, only wanting to drink a few ounces of formula here and there so we decided he was close enough to his first birthday to try some milk. Boy is this going to be fun! He doesn't care for it at all, since it's not nearly as sweet as formula. We're trying some things to get him to like it (mixing it with formula, warming it) but so far he just spits it out. It's pretty funny to watch. But he didn't like juice or water in the beginning either, so eventually we'll prevail and hopefully he'll be a milk drinker like his parents!