Hand eating

Rachel has discovered her hands and she is so very excited about it. She's not quite sure how to separate out the fingers yet, so she just sucks on the whole hand. She'll also spend a few minutes at a time just looking at her hand and watching it move. Here's yet another cute video--she's talking and eating her hand and smiling more and more every day. Today she actually smiled at the elephant on her bouncy seat--her first time smiling that is not in response to another smile. And since Stephanie mentioned she liked watching me act like a fool in that last video, here's one with Jacob to balance things out. :)

In other news, last Wednesday she accidentally rolled over from her tummy onto her back all on her own. I don't think she realized that she actually controlled the rolling over, and she hasn't done it since, although today she was getting pretty darn close. A friend of mine said her son rolled over twice in one day, then didn't do it again for at least 2 weeks. I guess it looks like Rachel will follow suit.

Talking baby

Rachel has started cooing and gurgling along with her smiling on occasion and it is so cute. She seems to like to hear her own voice. Here's a clip of the video we got of her being happy and talkative.

Waking up

This is what Rachel looks like when she wakes up most mornings:She's usually pretty happy (as long as I get in there before she realizes she's hungry), and she is turned sideways in her crib. She's started doing this this week, and does it mostly just during the night when she sleeps longer stretches, but does it almost every night. It's pretty funny. And she always rotates to the right, which I guess is not too surprising. We're glad to be raising a girl that leans to the right--we won't have any Hilary followers in our house. :)

Family resemblance

Here are our baby pictures. We've tried to figure out who Rachel looks like and I think the one she most looks like is a picture of my mom when she was a baby--it was a picture of three babies and I could pick her out because she looked like Rachel.
Anyway, here they are--you can decide who you think she looks most like.

Here's me.
Here's Rachel...And here's Jacob.

As a side note, we finally got some pictures of Rachel smiling. She's so cute and fun when she smiles. The last couple of days she's been really smiley and gets really excited when you smile at her.

Buttered Popcorn

Jelly Bellys (or should that be Bellies?) are pretty tasty little treats. I was eating a little bag tonight enjoying myself, then came upon a buttered popcorn flavored one. Yuck! That is the one really nasty flavor of Jelly Bellys. I said something to Jacob about how gross the flavor is and how I don't know anyone who actually likes it, and of course he says he likes it. So I did a google search to see what came up and there was one blog where this guy was ranting about how gross it is, and was pretty funny, and every other web page was trying to sell buttered popcorn Jelly Bellys in bulk. Apparently it held the top selling jelly belly spot for a while. (I think this is because people like to buy bags of them in bulk as gag gifts.)
Anyway, so Jacob thinks I'm the weirdo who doesn't like them, and I think he's the weirdo. So we decided on a well designed convenience poll (yes, those are oxymorons in the statistical world) to see who is in the mainstream of buttered popcorn likingness. So, go ahead and make your vote in the comments section.... Show Jake I'm not the only one who thinks that flavor is disgusting.
:)

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all!
Here's a cute picture of Rachel in a Christmas dress someone in our ward gave us. (She had planned to send it to her niece, but didn't get it sent off in time, and since it's not really the type of dress that can be a late Christmas gift, we got it.)
Of course there was a hat that came with it, but don't worry, we didn't actually make her wear it for more than a minute or so for the camera.
As you can see, she loved the hat.

One month

Well, it's Rachel's one month birthday today. We gave her a cupcake to celebrate... well, I ate the cupcake my visiting teacher gave me, figuring she'd get some in milk form. Time flies. She's sleeping a lot better now than a month ago--5 hours in a row most nights. And this week she's started smiling back at you when you smile at her... but only if she's fed and changed and there's no one else around and the camera isn't within arms reach, of course. It's really cute, though. She opens her mouth and scrunches her nose and it looks like she's laughing silently. One of these days we'll catch a picture of her smile.
Here's her sleeping in her car seat on Sunday.