Our Little Elf

Just a few days before Christmas and we are so excited!

Little guy exploring the tree...

Ho, Ho, Ho!!!

My friend Jessica came over with this awesome Santa suit. I couldn't resist putting Dom in it and taking some pics!

Little Gym Friends

Dominic absolutely loves going to his Little Gym class. It's amazing to see how much he has developed since his first class. He went from crying during most of the first class doing tummy time and rolling around to crawling, hanging from bars, forward/backward rolls, making friends, and overall LOVING the class. His favorite part of the class is when they bring out the balls and bubbles.

Here are some shots with his buddies from the class.

Dom and Billy on the parallel bars...

Prince Charming standing at the bar...

All of the kids LOVE eating the jump ropes...

Playing with the hoops with Billy and Tate...

Dominic's friend Aspen gives him kisses now at all of the classes...

Hanging with Bella and Eli...

I love the Little Gym!!

Dominic loves to swing!

Since it was such a beautiful day, I decided to take Dom to the park. He had so much fun crawling on the grass and in the swing.

9 Months Old!!!

We can't believe that Dominic has been with us for 9 months already! We were talking today about how fast time has flown by. We have been having so much fun with him, each day he shows us more of his awesome personality and makes us smile and laugh. He is such a sweet loving little guy who likes to cuddle and give us kisses. It has been so fun watching him explore the world and go through so many first experiences. He is crawling like a champion, pulling himself up on anything he can, babbling up a storm, and is just starting to clap.

Today we had Dom's 9 month checkup. Unfortunately he now recognizes the doctor's office and immediately started crying when we went into the exam room; he knows this is where the shots take place. He is now 28 inches long (45 percentile), 19 pounds (25 percentile) and has a head circumference of 47.5 centimeters (95 percentile). We have proof that he's a smart little guy with his big brain :). At this visit, we learned we need to up his food intake and can be more adventurous in what we're giving him. So far he has been easy to please with food, hopefully this trend will continue.

After the appointment we went to Whole Foods to get more food for Dominic to try. This was the first time he got to ride in a shopping cart, which he loved. He had so much fun grabbing everything I was putting into the cart.

Happy Turkey Day!

This was Dominic's first Thanksgiving. Grandma Lela and JB came up to celebrate with us this year. We all went over to Grandpa Ron and Gram Gram Joan's house. It was a full house this year, in addition to all of us, there were Joan's two daughters Lizzie and Sara, Sara's husband Kerouac and their two children Miles and Radley. As always the food was really good and so was the company. Dominic tried turkey for the first time and really seemed to like it. Now that we know he likes meat, he'll be having a lot more of it :)!

He had some special treats waiting for him at his highchair. This highchair has been used by me, my dad and my uncle, so it has a lot of history behind it.

A Visit from GG

Dominic's Great Granny (GG) came down to visit over the Thanksgiving holiday and got to meet him for the first time. Dominic is the youngest of over 15 great grandchildren. He has been really lucky to have gotten to meet four of his great grandparents!

A Tooff!

Dom has been teething for the past few weeks; he's been drooling a lot and gnawing on everything. We noticed this morning that he cut his first tooth on the bottom right side! I'm sure his other bottom one will be here within a few days. It looks like he will get all six of his teeth around the same time; his gums are really swollen and you can see his four "ghost teeth" on the top and the second one on the bottom.

Unfortunately Dominic isn't letting us see his tooth very often so we haven't been able to take a picture of it yet.

Another Fun Visit

This week we had a visit from El Grandre Bo, Noni Star and Aunt Danielle. This was the first time Dominic got to meet his Noni, they had a good time bonding together. It had been many months since Danielle and Bo had seen Dominic and he has changed A LOT. He showed off all his newly acquired skills like crawling, pulling himself up on things, climbing the stairs and many more.
The visit was short but we had fun, hopefully we'll see them again soon.


Grandre feeding Dominic his dinner...

Snuggling with Danielle...

Dom vs. the cow

It's funny, about a week ago I pulled out this toy cow that vibrates and moves across the floor and Dominic was terrified of it. He would hide in our arms and start to cry, poor little guy. Now has become more brave and LOVES his cow. He's played with it so much that we've already had to replace the batteries!

8 Months Old Today!

Today Dom and I went to Half Moon Bay to visit Grammy. It was an absolutely beautiful day in the 80's; such a treat in November! Dom had a great time getting into EVERYTHING in Grammy's house; it's amazing how busy he is now. He is such a little explorer.

Here he is sitting in our childhood rocking chair that was originally Kier's and then mine...it's just his size.

Happy Halloween

This year we celebrated Halloween the day before at a small party. Dominic was a little lobster, Gabe was an 80's hair band member and I was a devil. Dom did really well in his costume (surprisingly) and he also liked to try on parts of our costumes.

The costume didn't even stop Dom from practicing his crawling...

Cute little devil...

Baby rocker...

We've got a crawler!!!

Dom has been doing his "commando crawl" for a while now, but today he officially became a legitimate crawler! We've been using our cell phones as motivation...uhoh he already loves phones :).

A new gymnast, a yogi or ???

When he gets bigger we'll be putting him in gymnastics for sure :).

Oh how things change...

Before Dominic was born I told Gabe I didn't want our house to be taken over by baby stuff, I still wanted it to be an adult home. Seven months later our house has completely transformed to Baby Land. Now we have a Jumperoo, high chair, play pen, gymnastics mat (with another one on the way) and toys galore. This week I took away his gym because he is over it and would rather roll out of it and try to play with the lamp or speakers instead. To add to our colorful kid friendly house will be three gates as well as something to keep him away from the tv. Our house will never be the same, in a VERY good way :).

More food!

As always the days are busy with new adventures and developments in Dom's life. He has tried a variety of vegetables and fruit along with his rice cereal. He seems to really like sweet potatoes, butternut squash, green beans and pears; he's not a fan of avocado. To my surprise just to prove once again he is my son, he doesn't like bananas! I was surprised by this one since pretty much every kid loves bananas; we'll try it again at a later time. He's now on apple sauce which he seems to like.

Pumpkins

We took Dominic to Half Moon Bay for his first pumpkin. We met up with Grammy and our friends Brooke, Itay and their son Aiden.

Dominic was the cutest little skeleton at the pumpkin patch. Here Daddy was trying to blend in with the pumpkins.

Mommy was a little too creative with the pumpkin.

We had fun at the pumpkin patch, not only did they have pumpkins, there was a petting zoo, pony rides and a train ride. Unfortunately Dom was too little for most of the activities but he did get to ride the train with Daddy, Itay and Aiden.

Since Aiden is older than Dominic he was able to do some of the other fun stuff like ride a pony and play in the pumpkins; he seemed like he had a good time.

Grammy was very happy that we came to the beach to get the pumpkins.

Next year will be even more fun since Dominic will be old enough to do all of the fun stuff at the pumpkin patch!

Mover and shaker

Dominic has become VERY mobile in the past few weeks. He is still on the early stages of crawling but he gets around all over our living room and anywhere else we let him roam. Gabe and I are in the process of figuring out what gates to get for the house; it has become a bigger project than we imagined.

Dom is definitely all boy, he gravitates toward anything technology related - iPhones, computers, remotes and tv components. The way he started his "crawling" was by putting our iPhone out of reach on the floor, this was enough motivation for him to cruise over to the phone.

He has been working on his baby yoga skills; for an added challenge he tried to drink from his sippy cup.

More Fun at the Little Gym

Today was Dominic's fourth session at the Little Gym! For a special treat Daddy was able to join us for most of the class.

There has been much progress since his first experience there; he actually likes it and doesn't cry (for the most part) during the class! The key I've discovered is as long as he's had his naps and eaten before the class we're golden...go figure :). So far his favorite activities are playing with the bubbles, balls and getting to explore the different fun things to climb on.