Lucas antics and 9 month pictures

Yesterday, Luke was playing with my phone. My cell phone is an old school, ancient, flip phone that I bought from some guy on Craigslist after my phone broke less than a year into my contract. Texting is a huge pain, it has no data or internet, it's mostly just good for calls. There is no way to lock it besides shutting it. Luke likes to open it and press buttons and sometimes manages to call people, I caught him calling Joe a couple weeks ago, he was crawling away from me as fast as he could with my phone in hand as I could hear it ringing. I grabbed it (cue tantrum) and closed it. Anyway, yesterday Luke kept hitting numbers and I joked to Joe that hopefully he wouldn't end up calling someone in China or Japan. (I grab it and close it to clear it every once in awhile to hopefully prevent him from calling anyone.) Well he maneuvered himself into the corner of the room and kept saying hi over and over. By the time I got to him and got to the phone, there was no indication of a call (he had closed it though which hangs up and clears it), I didn't think to check "dialed calls".

A couple hours later, my mom called and asked if I was okay. Uh, yeah. Then she asked if I knew that Luke had called her and kept saying hi to her over and over again, and she even put my brother on the phone and he said hi to him, too. Then he hung up.  And my mom thought it was funny and figured I didn't know it since she knows he likes playing with my phone and I let him. Then she started getting all crazy and thought what if I was passed out or otherwise incapacitated and Luke was calling her in distress. Uh, no. I know my kid is smart (he has this car thing that you have to shift the gear thing 3 times and then it starts playing a song he likes to dance and clap too, he shifts the gear twice and will start clapping and dancing before the song even starts. I noticed it today and told Joe and he was like "oh yeah, he's been doing that..."), anyway, he's smart, but I would not want to be unconscious and reliant on him and my cell phone in an emergency...he's as likely to call China as he is my mom.

Joe has taught him to respond to "how old are you?" by pointing a finger, so it looks like he's showing "1". He also has figured out "so big" and clapping and itsy bitsy spider and waving, although sometimes he gets it all mixed up and might clap instead of wave, or something like that.  He is walking all of the time, too. And busy, busy, busy. Sleeping? Eh, not so great.

Our photographer has been really busy because one of her friends lost their house and belongings in a fire and she was letting the family stay with them (they have 3 kids.) So she just got our disc for the 9 month pictures to us late this week, but I've got to say, the pictures are so so so worth the wait!  The disc she sent has 364 pictures and most of them are pretty fantastic, so I'm just going to post a few of my personal favorites.

6 month pictures sneak peek

So he turned 24 weeks old a week after these were taken (last weekend), but he's technically not 6 months till Oct.27th so we are pretty impressed with his sitting. (He did wobble but Joe was behind him with hand out to catch him every few minutes.)

Have I told the story of the lamb? Things went crazy so quickly the day Olivia was born...I called my parents from the hospital that morning just to let them know I was there but "everything is fine" because we still insanely naively thought it was. Then it wasn't fine and I was in an ambulance to level III NICU hospital and my parents were on the way. When it became clear we were delivering, when they prepped me for c-section my mom ran down to the gift shop and bought a little lamb. She gave it to us right before we went in to the OR. Joe put it in his pocket, and when they gave her to us, got the lamb out and held it next to her. We bought 2 more lambs, 1 is buried with her, 1 we gave to my mom, and the original lamb from the delivery room is in our memory box. So when I was pregnant over a year later, a month or so before Lucas was due, it occurred to me to try the gift shop to get a lamb for him. The gift shop inventory changes a lot- we walk by it every month to get to the support group and they ALWAYS have different stuff in the windows, so I wasn't very optimistic about finding another lamb, but sure enough, almost 2 years later, they were still there. So Lucas has one and we include it in some of our pictures as a symbol for Olivia.

Anyway, here are the pictures that we have back as our sneak peek, we are very excited to see the rest!

To anyone in our area, we can't recommend our photographer highly enough. She is the sister of another baby loss mama and also volunteers with NILMDTS (Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep- an organization that sends professional photographers out to take pictures for families for free in the hospital with their child.) So I liked her a lot just knowing that (which she does not mention but her sister told me).

Anyway, we are in love with all of the pictures we have so far and I think we did a good job of remembering Olivia with the main focus being on Lucas since it was *his* photo shoot after all.