Baby Lukas Milestones, Entry No. 5: Attitude, Playing, Eating, and yes, Walking

I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before, but time seems to be progressing much faster with Baby Lukas than it did with Baby Fifi. For instance, it's already been four months since the last Baby Lukas Milestones post! But alas, all is well, because the time has allowed a lot of milestones to accumulate!

Attitude
The first milestone we want to cover today is Baby Lukas' little 'tude. For such a sweet looking and rather small boy (at 11 months old today, he can still fit in clothes his sister wore at about 3 months old...), he has quite a temper and a lot of expectations on how he should be treated. A memorable case in point: over Christmas break at my parents, house, we had a clever idea to take a "flipbook" style photos set that shows the growth of our family. The series came out quite nicely, and Auto Awesome made it typically awesome, as you can see below:

The Growth of the Family

Naturally, Baby Lukas was the last individual to be added into the series, which meant that he had to spend about 30 seconds sitting by himself behind the camera. He was not amused by this brief abandonment and let us know it by screaming and rocking! I have to admit it was funnier in person than I could ever describe in words. But in any case, Baby Lukas will readily let you know the status of his happiness if you don't let him eat something or play with something he's interested in. Interestingly, he is usually pretty good about following directions: if we tell him to stop playing with the electrical socket, he'll draw his hands back and shake his head, acknowledging our "No" commands...

Playing
Baby Lukas is very good at playing with toys as well. Seemingly better than his sister was at the same age. He can stack blocks and both build and dissemble Legos, and he can even blow a whistle, something that Baby Fifididn't figure out until she was well into her toddler stage!

Baby Lukas Building Legos

Like his sister, however, Baby Lukas is also very fond of dancing to music. Interestingly, the children developed their own methods of dancing - whereas Fifi tended to dance more by twisting, Baby Lukas' dance of choice is swaying side to side:

Baby Lukas' swaying dance. On a side note, I don't know why babies naturally love playing with phones.

Eating
Another interesting case of forked development between Baby Lukas and Baby Fifi is in their eating. Baby Fifi ate a lot. She tended to drink around 40 ounces of milk a day (and still drinks about 3 cups of milk a day today), while also being able to down our home-blended baby food by the quart happily. However, she didn't have a chance to eat much in the way of regular people food, mostly because she didn't seem to like it as much as baby food.

On the contrary, Baby Lukas has never really liked drinking milk. He only drinks about 20 ounces a day, and it's usually a huge pain in the butt to get him to finish a bottle. Even to this day he is not very good about holding his own bottle - instead, he must play with a toy or an object while you hold the bottle for him. And... he can only play with a toy for a limited amount of time - he'll typically cycle through five or six toys before finishing a 5 ounce bottle of breast milk!

Similarly, Baby Lukas is not very fond of mushy baby food. He far prefers eating regular food, and his typical daily lunch these days is a whole smoked turkey leg. I don't know how he eats so much but stays so small!

Last, but not least, Walking!
Finally, the event that triggered this post! Less than one day before his 11-month birthday, Baby Lukas took his first steps! He's been standing all by himself for several months now, but didn't have the confidence to take steps until yesterday, which is yet another case of forked development. Baby Fifi didn't stand on her own until she was about ten and a half months old, but she essentially decided that once she could stand, she could walk. So big sister won this round! But even so, it was a close contest!

I couldn't possibly close this post without a video of the First Steps!

Winter Holiday 2013

Most of our winter holidays feature a trip away from home. However, this year, we couldn't get everyone together for a long enough period of time, so we did not do any extensive traveling. That doesn't mean that the holidays weren't eventful - not by a long shot!

I started our winter holiday early, so we went back to my parents house on the Saturday before Christmas. Ed and his wife also showed up early because Ed had to go back to Orlando to work on Christmas day.

As such, we did our Christmas dinner and present opening a little early, so that everyone could be involved. I made this awesome "Auto-Awesome" video using my new Moto X (Merry Christmas to me!) to commemorate the event as it was the first one where Fifi really kind of understood what was going on:

Auto Awesome really is Awesome

A few days later, we took a trip to the World Famous Lion Country Safari. I'm told I've actually been here before, but I guess it was long enough ago that I don't remember a lick of it. I expected that it was basically just a drive through zoo, which is kind of neat but somewhat of a short-lived experience. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that there is actually a walk-around zoo as well, which happens to be chock-full of fun activities for kids!

Auto Awesome did a great job of putting together this video completely automatically, without any intervention or prompting from me! Kind of creepy, but I am really impressed with the results!

Christmas Day 2013 proved to be really memorable, but not in a good way. We learned, the hard way, that Lukas is allergic to eggs. After having eggs for breakfast, he had the hardest time taking his nap. Eventually, we found out that it was because he was uncomfortable from the rashes that were breaking out all over his body. We spent most of the rest of the day in the emergency room, where he took some antihistamines and steroids to get back to normal...

Getting medicated

Recovered at last

On our last day in South Florida, we went back to Sugar Sand Park, a very nice little park with an awesome playground. That much we already knew from a previous visit there. What we didn't know was that there is an equally awesome Children's Science Exploratorium on the premises, all for the excellent admission price of Free! Even Lukas had a great time!

Chasing Fifi

Lukas getting in on the action

Lukas loved the floating balls!

With that, we headed back home to Melbourne. But the events would not be over yet, not so fast! Not content with spending all Christmas Day in the emergency room for allergies, Lukas contracted some sort of virus that took his temperature all the way up to over 104 degrees on New Year's Eve!

Mommy crafted this cold compress to keep Baby Lukas' temperature down

In the meanwhile, I took Fifi for a walk around the block to see the fireworks when we ran into some neighbors who invited us over to roast marshmallows!

After putting the kids to bed that night, Cherry and I discovered that fireworks viewing from our back porch on New Year's Eve was actually quite nice! The weather was not too cold, and there were rather large fireworks displays occurring from three directions that reflected on our pond! I knew that waterfront view was worth it!

With that, Holiday Season 2013 came to an end and we kicked of 2014!