Cameron's Adventures

As Emma becomes more and more aware of the dog Teika, the dog tries very hard to ignore her. Soon, as Emma will start crawling it will mean trouble for Teika. Already, she is pulling at everything she can get her hands on and she’s got quite a bit of strength. So poor Teika, soon will be the days when her ears and her tail will be pulled… Until then, Teika is choosing to ignore Emma…

If I don’t look at her, she’s not there…

In the picture below, Teika is definitely asking me what have I done, bringing this little baby home… Ah, but I know she’s secretly in love with Emma. I can see the carrying motherly instinct in her every time Emma cries.

And of course, Emma is ever the curious…

Over the past few weeks, Emma has been grabbing things more and more. And her hold is quite strong. In fact, if my hair is down and I’m close to her, she’ll find it and hold on to it. I quite like it but I can see how later on it can be an issue. Still, I’m thoroughly enjoying her grabbing on to things. She’s such a curious little girl.

Of course the instant she grabs on to something, she wants to put it in her mouth!

Everything, absolutely everything is fascinating to her. It is so refreshing to watch her get so excited and curious about everything. I’m sure all parents can tell me this, but it is so different when one actually experiences it first hand. Parenthood is amazing indeed!

I love her cute little chubby feet. They curl up in ways only babies feet can. It’s as if there are no bones in there!

Seattle is finally seeing some nice weather. Well it seems that we go from one extreme to another. July 4th was a cold and rainy day and people had to wear sweaters. But just a few days after including today, the weather is really hot. Today it’s in the upper 90’s.

As the weather wasn’t so hot on Monday, I took the blanket outside and Emma and I spent a few minutes laying in the shade. It’s tough when no one else is home, so I trusted my handy dandy tripod to take some pictures of the two of us. Emma really loves to stand. I think she’ll be very, very excited to walk as soon as she can do it.

But before walking, she just learned to fully flip over today. So for your enjoyment, I’ve captured her rolling.

A week ago, Emma and I went to visit my mom in the morning. We’ve been able to do this a couple of times. I know mom enjoys seeing and holding Emma very much. Here are a few pictures and a little video from our visit.

“Where is Emma” song that mom and I are singing in the video below is one that I learned at my PEPS meetings. It is a song that I sing to Emma very often when she is fussy and getting ready to cry. Amazingly, it stops her from crying. She loves to hear it and watches me with intense focus when I sing it.

Bye, bye, mommy… until next time!

A few days ago, I finally found Sophie the Giraffe at the Village Maternity at University Village. You see, I have been looking for it for a few days for Emma. I think she is starting to teeth because every chance she gets she goes after eating her own hands, my hands, Rory’s hands or pretty much anyone she can grab. Here’s a perfect capture as she goes for Rory’s arm.

So in addition to eating anything she can get her mouth to, she now has Sophie the Giraffe.

She just can’t get enough of Sophie…

And as a sneak preview of what’s to come, she is now standing up, her legs strong and straight. She wants to walk really bad…

As Emma is nearing four months everyday is an adventure. Recently, we had a few pictures taken of all of us. It has been since the hospital that we’ve had a family picture. It seems so long ago, yet at the same time like only yesterday.

And because I can’t help it, I played around with some effects, for a more “glamorous” shot of us. I just love Emma’s face expression and hair in the image below!

Rory took some fun photo of me. These were while we were in a park having a picnic. Emma slept peacefully and we had a great time except for the many flies that flew by around us. They kept trying to go either into our eyes or our ears. Why, why, why?

And a few more fun color change effects. This one bring out the cold tones in the photos.

Rory tried to keep it cool while the flies surrounded him…

While I decided to cover my ears with plastic cups to prevent them from getting in…

In the evening, Emma slept peacefully in Rory’s arms. A perfect ending to a perfect time.

It’s all about Emma nowadays. She is growing and changing so quickly that I’ve got to keep posting even if that means writing several blog posts a day.

My PEPS group leader said that dads will be very critical to kids, especially girls when they are around 5 years old. So Rory has 4.75 years left before he’ll be the center of attention for Emma. He he he… Well, I think he’s doing quite a fine job right now as well and just wanted to share some of my favorite pictures of him and Emma. She’s daddy’s little girl…

Emma is definitely having a blast in her daddy’s arms.

I was reminiscing over pictures of Emma this afternoon trying to see if her hair is indeed growing and changing colors. When she was born she had a lot of hair, but as the picture below shows, it is indeed getting thicker.

My little girl is growing so fast!!! I’ve been so lucky to be with her 24 hours a day these past three months. I’ve seen and enjoyed every little change that she’s gone through. And am thoroughly looking forward to new changes day by day.

Over the past few days, a few major events happened. First, on Sunday it was Father’s Day and Rory’s first celebration as a father. For his day, he wanted chocolate chip cookies with cranberries. I haven’t baked cookies in ages and ages but since we had chocolate chip, I baked some from scratch.

And they were delicious! Yum, yum, yum!!!

At the same time, Emma has achieved two big milestones. First, she raises her head when on the belly a lot. This is something that I did not see but just all of a sudden on Father’s day, she held it high. Ever since then, she’s been enjoying belly time a bit more.

Second, she’s been holding her head a lot while in the orange chair that I’ve blogged about before. In my previous blog just a few days ago, I took the photos very quickly as her head was all over the place. But in the photos below, she must have been in the chair for 10 or 15 minutes.

This weekend, we went camping. Emma is now three months old and we thought it would be a perfect experience for her. The weather should hopefully not be too hot or too cold. Of course as any mother would be, I was worried that I would either not dress her up warm enough during the night, or dress her too warm. In the end, she was perfectly bundled up!

The camping trip was great. We went with two other families that both had infants. Sarah is one month older than Emma and Henry is one day. Here’s a picture of the three of them enjoying some afternoon awake time.

The camping trip started on Friday afternoon. Emma, Teika and I picked up Rory from work and drove for four plus hours to Keller Ferry Marina where we camped. The place was gorgeous as these pictures show. And our camp area was in a perfect location, right at the end with a spectacular view.

As we arrived around 8:00pm, Friday night was mainly spent setting up camp, putting Emma to sleep and chilling around the camp fire. Saturday morning came early as the day became bright by 4:00am and with an infant, that’s around the time for a feeding. Still, we got a few more hours of sleep and finally woke up for good around 8:00am.

The weather for Saturday was spectacular. It was very warm but we had water and plenty of shade to make it a perfect day.

As the day went by, we ate, swam and just had a lot of fun.

Baby Sarah

Baby Henry

Baby Emma

But as any awesome things go, we had to have a story. And ours started around 1:00am on Sunday morning… Both Rory and I woke up at exactly the same time, looking around our tent and seeing it move in all directions. Teika too was awake. The only one still sleeping was Emma. And that’s exactly how we wanted to keep it. Outside, the wind was blowing, blowing like it’s never blown before. Still I felt that it was really kind of romantic. Inside the tent was comfortable and really felt safe. However, we were in a somewhat lower area of the camping ground. Our friends were higher up and had a tougher time with the wind. Within minutes, Jeff came by and said they were packing up and leaving. We followed suite as the tent was not staked to the ground. By 2:30am, we were packed and on our way home.

In less than an hour we had packed our gear. Pretty good considering it was dark. But the drive home wasn’t peachy. The rain started pouring and it felt like buckets and buckets of water falling quickly from the sky. On top of that, we were tired. But Rory was an amazing trooper and drove pretty much all the way home. I got to take a quick nap and was able to drive the last hour home.

All in all, the weekend was great. And Emma did wonderful on the drive home. She just slept and slept. We will definitely go camping again.