Stella is 6 months old!

Our little Stella is 6 months old now. Time goes by so fast. SHE SLEEPS THROUGH THE NIGHT! Bedtime is 8:00 pm and she gets us up at 5:00 am to eat. It is HEAVEN! She scoots along on the ground and seems to be making progress towards sitting by herself and crawling. She is playing with her toys more and more and loves to hear herself scream. It used to be a high pitched, ear bleeding, trill, but is now an "Incredible Hulk" like wail that makes her face turn crimson. Strange little thing isn't she? She loves to laugh...and I mean laugh. Full belly grabbing, rolling on the floor, cackling laughter. Mom will say something as benign as "Yummy" and she will burst out with gale force laughter that makes us all laugh in response.

Stella had been venturing into solid foods, and I have been making my own baby food for her. She has tried squash, peaches, sweet potatoes, pears, banana, rice and oatmeal cereals and green beans.

At her 6 month check-up she weighed 15 lbs and measured 27 1/2 inches. She is in the 40th percentile for weight and off the charts at over 97% for height. That means that less than 3% of babies her age are as tall as she is. We hope that this trend continues and that she gets her mom's height.

We recently made the small trip to see Great-grandpa Ross along with Grandma Ross, Aunt Charity and kids. He seems to be doing really well at 96 years of age and wisdom. It was so great to see him and show him our cute babies.

A few weeks ago Uncle Mike (John's brother)and Aunt Julie visited us from South Carolina and brought all of their kids. It was so great to see them. We miss them very much and were so glad to catch up and see how the kids have grown.

Aunt Holly (John's sister) and family came down from Olympia, Washington last week to visit recently. We got to finally meet Peter who just turned 1. It was a lot of fun to visit with all of them and catch up.

Uncle Andy moved to Burbank, CA recently and we miss seeing him all the time. The good news is that he will be up to visit every 6 weeks or so.

We are doing well all in all. My pain medicine delivery system (aka pain pump) surgery has been pushed back again to 3/28/2009. We are a little frustrated, but are very excited as the trial went so well. For the trial they injected 0.2 mg of morphine directly into my spinal canal. The 12 hours that followed was the most painless that I have experienced in over 7 years. It was blissful and I was giddy! Too bad I had to stay in the hospital for observation...if I had my way I would have taken a long walk with John, Stella, and Frankey.