Aaron’s first smile was on the day he was born, but I didn’t catch it on film until later. The picture was taken while he was lying on my hospital bed on the 11th, the day we were checking out. (I don’t care what the books say, it wasn’t gas.)The first two months of Aaron’s life were pretty typical – eat, sleep, poop, repeat; although, he did go outside the normal 2-hour feedings and bumped them up to 1-hour feedings.
His first Halloween costume was a ghost onesie, which he wore for all of half an hour before he pooped through it. (Yuck!) Luckily, I was able to get some pictures before it happened. While I’m pretty sure he didn’t have the first clue what was happening, he did get to help hand out candy to the trick-or-treaters.
His first night alone in his room and crib was on November 10th. I had been back to work for just over a week and he hadn’t been sleeping as soundly next to me as he used to, which was also keeping me up. That night, instead of laying him down next to me, I gently placed him in his crib and prepared myself for the worst….it never came. He settled in, took a deep breath, and slept soundly until it was time for his next feeding.
The next day, November 11th, was his first laugh. I don’t remember what happened to make him laugh, but I remember it was cute – quiet and short and sort of in the back of his throat. (He still laughs that way most of the time.)
He watched his first football game about a week before Thanksgiving and he thought it was the coolest thing EVER! He would lean toward the TV while the game was on and start crying as soon as the commercials started. At first I thought it was just timing, until he did the same thing repeatedly through the next 3 sets of commercials. My little man likes sports. Guess I need to start learning more about them.
On November 28th (during Thanksgiving weekend), he got sick for the first time. He woke up with a bit of a cough and a slight fever of 100.1 degrees. The fever never got any worse, but the cough did. He ended up with croup. By the time we could get into the doctor he was basically over it and there wasn’t much else to do but finish riding it out. He handled the whole thing like a champ, even grinning at me with tired, sick little eyes from time to time.
He fell asleep on his own for the first time on December 6th. Typically, he would fall asleep in my arms, but I wanted to start teaching him to go to sleep on his own. He whimpered a bit at first, but then he settled in and went to sleep. Looking back now, I should have kept up with that routine better than I did.
His first Christmas started out with the typical firsts – Christmas tree with lots of lights, presents galore (no, I didn’t go overboard at all!), cookies and milk for Santa, and many other traditions. On Christmas Day, he got sick for the second time. (I was starting to think he had something against holidays.) This time, it turned out to be an ear infection. I know this only because he was pulling on his left ear a lot by the next day, which was a Saturday, and pulling away any time I would touch him anywhere near that ear. With some help from my mom, I found out that a drop of Colloidal Silver in the infected ear will resolve the problem. 
By the time I knew what was wrong with him and how to help it, he was just plain sad and in a lot of pain. I got the silver and managed to get a drop in his ear despite his wiggling, screaming protests. Within a few minutes, he had calmed down and was noticeably better. By the time I got him to the doctor the following Monday, there was no infection left for the doctor to find. (I LOVE that I haven’t had to give him antibiotics yet!)
So, now we’re getting into the New Year. For Christmas, I had asked that my gift be to have Aaron roll over for the first time. (He’d been trying when he was only a couple of months old.) Since that didn’t happen, I decided that his new year’s resolutions would be to roll over and to start sleeping longer at night (he’d still been getting up about every 2 hours). Like the champ he is, he took on those goals with full force and rolled over for the first time on January 1st! I was on the phone with my mom and I got so excited all I could do was whoop and holler! She thought something was wrong until I finally calmed down enough to tell her that he had rolled over.
The rest of January came with several other “firsts”. He (finally) slept longer on the 2nd (again, what a stud for taking on his New Year’s Resolutions with such gusto!). He laughed when I tickled him on the 6th, sat up alone when propped up on the 10th and on the 18th he discovered his TONGUE! What a very cool thing this tongue is, too!
February came with some pretty exciting new things, too. He slept through the night for the first time on the 6th. If only that had stuck better (*sigh*). He got to watch his first Super Bowl on the 7th and also started trying to crawl that day. I guess he thought he had to play the game as well as watch it. By the 14th, he was able to scoot forward, and really well, too!
He had tried solids for the first time on December 5th, but he wasn’t quite ready so I decided to wait a little longer. We started again toward the end of January and he was doing well for about a week. Then he got bored with the plain cereal so I started trying veggies. 
I must have done something wrong through the transition, though, because he quickly started having tummy troubles that got bad enough we had to stop solids altogether on March 6th. After a couple of months of trying to get him back to normal, I started giving him a tiny bit of Miralax (against his doctor’s orders), which helped tremendously. We started the solids again on May 4th and he’s been doing great with them this time! I am looking forward to when his tummy will regulate on its own without any help from medicine, though.
Aaron took his first plane ride on March 27th and LOVED it! We got to go to Washington to see his Aunt Jeni and her family. He was completely enthralled watching the world outside get smaller and smaller as we took off and then get bigger and bigger again as we landed. He had very few and very short-lived moments of fussiness, which we resolved quickly by giving him a bottle or something to play with, or by singing to himquietly . Most of the ride, he just flirted with the women in nearby seats. He loves the ladies!
I’ll get into more detail about the trip to Washington in the next post, but I will say it was one adventure after another. Aaron couldn’t get enough. When we got back to Utah, I decided to
keep up the adventuring. So far, we’ve been to several nearby parks, attended a concert at the Springville Museum of Art, fed some ducks at a pond, and discovered and explored Thanksgiving Point (TGP). I’ll get into more detail about Thanksgiving Point in the next post, too. (This pic is in the "Secret Garden" at TGP.)
Aaron said “Mom” for the first time on April 30th. Well, actually, it was “Mom-mom”, but that’s even better!
May also came with some exciting new milestones for Aaron. He crawled for the first time on May 5th...I mean hand over hand, up on the knees, really crawled. (He’d been doing the Inch-Worm Crawl for awhile.)
Less than two weeks later, he was pulling himself up to a kneeling position and by the 31st, he had figured out how to pull himself up to a standing position. The standing part took a lot of work, but he quickly became a pro. The getting-back-down-without-falling-and-hitting-your-head part is still a work in progress.
Aaron tried his first “real” food on May 30th. He got a goldfish cracker from his Aunt Shera…very exciting stuff! On our next shopping trip, I bought some Cheerios for him. He had a hard time guiding them into his mouth at first. He found that if he could pinch it in the tips of his fingers and use both hands to pull it to his mouth he could get it in there with the first attempt about 7 times out of 10. 
Aaron has also figured out (sort of) how to drink from a straw. He started out trying it from my cup and then we got one of his own. Sure, most of the water ends up covering the front of his shirt, but he gets at least a little bit of it in his mouth. More importantly, he feels quite big and independent doing it and he has fun. 
Finally, the latest big milestone for my little man is that he crawled up stairs for the first time on June 6th! My house doesn’t have stairs, but Shera’s house does. We were visiting there on Sunday and he kept going toward the stairs so I thought we may as well let him try to get up them. Shera got her camera and took pictures while I stood right behind him as he pulled himself up from one stair to the next. (I still need to get the pics from her, so I will post those separately.)I am so proud of my little man!
We also had our photos taken by an incredibly talented photographer, Sarah Alston. These were Aaron's "unofficial" 6-month-old pictures. We had a studio photo set done within a couple of days from when he actually turned 6 months old and we were in Seattle when he was closer to 7 months than to 6...thus the "unofficial".
and Arwen, that I didn't have much time to feel sorry for myself.
He also got to do his very first art project of painted hand prints for Mommy. He was extremely sad when the project came to an end. (Doesn't he have a really good "sad" face?)
