Zach Makes Me Picture Happy

It seems like within this last month Zach has grown up so much. For one thing, Zach has started pulling himself up using whatever he finds. This ends up being a problem when that something is too light to hold him up and he just pulls it on top of himself or when that something has wheels. Also, Zach has now discovered the fun times that come with pots and pans:



Now that Zach can pull himself up I always find him in a standing position when I get him up from naps and when he's fighting us in our attempts to put him to bed. Here's a picture after a nap (sorry it's so blurry):


The reason for more blurry pictures is Zach's reaction to the flash. He can be doing something really cute and then when the flash goes off his facial expression turns into something like the drugged-out look below. My best chances for a good picture are to turn off the flash and hope that Zach stops moving for a second which doesn't happen too often :).



After a bath the other night, Zach's hair randomly dried in this curl:



A new favorite toy. Zach figured out how to open up our dominoes. We often hear a crashing sound as they're pulled off the shelf and dumped all over the floor. Zach has also been known to carry them into other rooms.



We hung out with our friends Lukas and Casey the other night, and Zach had his first shot at playing Guitar Hero. He loved playing with the drumsticks. Now he just needs to be able to reach the drums...


Along with getting introduced to Guitar Hero Zach got to have fun with DDR. He loved it when I held him and moved his feet up, down, and side to side in time with the arrows.


Zach loves Cheerios and the Gerber Graduates puffs. At first he'd choke them down when we gave them to him. Then we found that he'd chew them when he was the one to put them in his mouth. It's been fun watching Zach learn how to handle the small cereal pieces. He will pick up a piece with one hand and then switch it to the other so it is easier to shove in his mouth.



On a final note for this post, we've been working on helping Zach sleep through the night. This has not been a fun process. Until early February he was waking up every 4 hours to eat. We decided that before getting Zach to sleep through the night we needed to help him learn to go through the night without eating. I started feeding Zach more often during the day so he wouldn't be so hungry at night.

Habits are hard to break and I've lost a lot of sleep from being kept up for sometimes an hour at a time. We've now got him to the point where he can last 8-10 hours during the night without food. Now we need to help him learn to sleep through this whole time period or calm himself down when he does wake up.

Here's a picture Derrick took one evening while he was working on homework. Losing hours of sleep in the middle of the night wears you out!


For the last picture on this picture-happy post, I really like this picture I took while Zach was sleeping. He uses the pacifier while falling asleep but we can tell he's really asleep once he spits it (or in this case pulls it) out of his mouth.