Happy 7-month birthday to Lyla today!

(by the way, how cute is this picture of Lyla and her cousin Jackson? OMG)

When you have a baby, sometimes things take forever to change. But other times, it can take just a few days or a week and suddenly everything is different.

In the last seven days, Lyla has slept through the night about 4-5 times and has done it a few days in a row now. In fact, it’s already starting to become the norm.

She even had two nights where she slept for 12 hours!

Now, these nights seem to come with a few wake up/cry moments, but they only last a few minutes.

We attribute this of course to the fact that she’s probably getting the right amount of food now. We’d been a bit behind the 8-ball for some reason and didn’t realize how much baby food she was supposed to be getting. We weren’t starving her (calm down everyone), but it just wasn’t enough.

Now that she’s full and starting to plump up, the sleeping has become easy. She’s on a nice schedule now…sleep all night, take a morning nap from around 8:30-10:30 and then an afternoon one from 2-3 or something like that.

She’s just as happy as a clam too. From the books I’ve read, I’m a firm believer in sleep = a happy baby. The less sleep they get, the more chance of A.D.D. and fussiness. She’s never been that fussy, but now she’s just as giggly as ever.

Of course, she’s also getting older and more interested in “things”, meaning she gets bored more easily, especially if we’re out eating. She doesn’t just sit there anymore, she wants to know what’s going on and play with stuff. If she’s not having fun, then she’s starting to whineeeeeeee….which gets annoying.

But we love her anyways.

With her going to bed now between 6:30 and 7:30, our time for evening dinners is ending, so Jina and I are planning on try to do a few more date nights when we can. Going out on Friday night for our anniversary was a lot of fun. We ate dinner at Kona Grill and just hung out at Starbucks for a few hours, soaking up the beautiful weather we were having.

Really enjoyed Father’s Day. Jina and Lyla got me cards, which were very funny, and then they both got me a $25 gift certificate to Atomic Comics and a little USB reading lamp.

I have to say, the reading lamp is pretty awesome. You can power it with the USB connection which will light up your keyboard in dark rooms, or connect it to a clip that I put on the headboard last night to read. Soft LED lights…very nice.

Oh yeah, another reminder…I started a weather blog called Haboobing, so go check it out and subscribe/bookmark it!

Now I leave you with a little video of Lyla laughing at me throwing the ball for the doggies. You never know what the kid will find funny, but when she starts laughing, we grab the video camera.

Okay, I’m kidding. You know that. Jina knows that. I know that. But that’s one of the main reasons we’ve made it to 11 years.

We love to laugh, but we really love to do it together. We’re a constant source of entertainment for each other. If we have some boring dinner event to attend (like for work, etc), we always have a good time because we can make each other laugh.

There is much debate on who is actually funnier, but that’s a blog for another day.

We’ve been married 11 years. It’s actually still amazing to me that we’re in double-digits. Not that there was doubt that we’d get here, but that it’s been that long already. Truly, these years have flown by. Sometimes it was harder, sometimes easier, but never boring or slow.

And now things are even more exciting. We have a little girl in our lives that makes things very, very interesting.

Or tiring, whatever you want to call it.

We’re parents now, so things are different. We look at the clock around 8pm and are scared to say the phrase that’s become the elephant in the room.

“You ready for bed?”

I know for sure the years we’ve been together prepared us for what it would take to have a baby in the house, but it’s still been a challenge.

But I couldn’t imagine raising Lyla with anyone else but Jina. I’m so glad that our journey has brought us to where we are today. Even thought our lives have changed dramatically by adding this little bundle of joy, we’ve still maintained our sense of humor, our love for each other and our marriage.

We’re much more sleepy than at our last anniversary, but the past year has been one of the most exciting and eventful of our lives. I wouldn’t change a thing about it.

I look forward to year 12, which will come when we’re both 35 years old and officially make us married to each other for over a third of our lives.

Crazy.

But this week, our little Elyla is the side of an avacado and…well…I just keep praying next Tuesday gets here to we get put this week behind us and hopefully move on to a better fruit/vegatable.

Jina of course loves the stuff, so I’m sure she’s happy about it, but I’m looking forward to maybe a mango next week! Who knows?!!?

There is also another development in the Elyla’s changing body: She’s growing little bones in her ears, and should now be able to hear VOICES and stuff!

This poses some problems for me, especially since Jina gets to spend more time with her than I do, for obvious reasons. And to top it off, I’m out of town right now, so I have a lot of DE-PROGRAMMING to do when I get home.

Stuff like “Hey Elyla, just so you know, House Hunters isn’t the only show on TV“, or “You ignore what mommy says about us never needing a bigger TV” and “Let me tell you about the time many YEARS ago when your mommy used to stay up past 9pm” and other important details.

But the big thing I may tell the baby tomorrow night is how awesome it’s been being married to her mommy for the last 10 years, because June 19th is our big milestone anniversary!

We celebrated it last year, so we’re keeping it low-key this weekend – just a dinner, maybe a movie and some good, quality time spent together – but it doesn’t diminish the fact that 10 years is a HUGE deal to us and we’re so very proud that we’ve grown only closer the entire time.

It’s strange how you feel you know someone (including yourself), and then 10 years later, you look back and realize how childish you both were, and how the decisions you made at the time seemed to be done by another person.

I’ve now been in a relationship with Jina for over a third of my life, which is amazing when you think about it.

Well, here’s to 10 more years, this time with an added person thrown into the mix!