6 Months

6 months:

5 months:

4 months:

3 months:

2 months:

1 month:

Brand New:

Half a year

Yesterday was Maya’s six month birthday! We have officially reached the point that everyone kept warning me about: it goes SO fast. Her first 3 months seemed to go by at the proper pace, she was growing and changing so much everyday. Life was filled with lots of long lazy days. But these last 3 months have sped by! Maya thrives when she is out and about, so we keep really busy during the week. I love that we are making memories, but the days seem to speed by.

Loves: going outside (even in the cold), hearing the ABC’s, sitting in her high chair, saying good morning to everyone in the house, putting anything and everything in her mouth (especially books), swinging in the park, being around other babies, being naked.

Skills: she is the most talkative baby I have met and laughs all the time, she rolls both ways and is now loving being on her tummy, she has a roll-scoot thing that she is perfecting, she is getting so close to sitting and sat yesterday for about 5 seconds, she moves front and back in her walker, grabbing and grasping, touching faces, eating some solid purée’s.

We cannot even describe the insane amount of love we have for this little girl! And I love how she brings so much joy to others around her. At the airport on Wednesday she made so many people smile! Looking forward to: seeing her delight when she figures out crawling, Daddy taking her to swim lessons, discovering her favorite foods, Baby’s First Christmas, moving into our new house!

Maya – Doing her thing

This is why she is so slender:

Girl never stops moving!

Eating Solids!

Maya has been sleeping really poorly ever since we started packing in Long Beach. There have been a ton of changes and she is teething, but one of the other reasons she wakes up is that she is hungry. We decided to start solids a little earlier than planned (we had wanted to start when she was 6mos at Thanksgiving) so that she would have some extra calories in her belly in the evening.

Per our pediatricians advice, the starter foods we could choose from were avocado, sweet potato or rice cereal. All are pretty easy on the tummy and can be mixed with breastmilk to dilute. So a couple weeks ago Maya got her first taste of real food: avocado!

She definitely likes the idea of food. She loves grabbing the spoon and tries to grab the bowl. The next week we made our own rice cereal which she seemed to like better. I also tried mixing the avacado and rice cereal, she did not seem to like the combo. We had to take about a week off from solids because she got an awful diaper rash, but now we are back doing rice again. Next week we will try sweet potato at Thanksgiving!

Good Days

We went to Book Babies on Friday at the Gregory Heights Library, this will be our new library once we move to our new house! We liked this one even better than at Belmont Library. It is a smaller group and there were two other little girls born within 2 weeks of Maya. It seems like whenever I take Maya to other baby groups she is the most vocal and giggliest baby of the bunch!

So far all of our home inspections are going really well. We are waiting on some repair quotes and then our realtor can present those to the seller. Hopefully they take care of everything. There are no huge issues, just a few electrical items, the bathrooms need fans and some bricks on the chimney are loose. There are a few other items that we don’t expect the seller to fix like adding some insulation to one area, fixing a cracked walkway and repairing the trim around windows. The inspector said that he was happily surprised that the house was in such good shape based on the year it was built.

In other big news, I sold my car!

It was a tough decision to make, but I came to the conclusion that my car was part of my old lifestyle. In Southern California you have to have your own car, that’s the way it is. And the whole point of that car was for commuting. Now in Portland, Billy is riding the bus or carpooling every day so during the week we only need one car and on the weekend we tend to go places as a family. We are going to use the money for furniture, which makes sense since my new job is at home and I want to feel comfortable in my surroundings! While it would have cost practically nothing to keep it (since it was paid off), I got a bunch of money for NOT keeping it!

Yesterday we did some furniture browsing which was really fun. We need a lot of new stuff! Our current couch and living room furniture will go in the basement family room so we need all new living room stuff. We left behind our little dining table, patio table and dresser. And we plan to upgrade to a king size bed and put our current bed in the guest room, so we will need a whole new bedroom set too! So hopefully there are some good sales in January!

Diaper rash cured!

We have been dealing with a pretty bad diaper rash since we started solids. I decided to take a short break from feeding solids so that it would clear up. I had used Bordeaux’s Butt Paste and a cornstarch mixture, they appeared to be slowly working. I read in my baby care book to use an oil based cream to create a barrier between her skin and the diaper.

So thank you to my cousin Daniel who gifted us this Burt’s Bees Multi-Purpose Ointment! I can’t believe how fast it worked! Every butt is different, but this sure worked for us! I think now we will slow down with the solids, just feed her every 2-3 days until her system gets used to it.

The importance of being naked

Shortly after we arrived in Portland, Maya got her first diaper rash. I was pretty proud of her for making it 5 months rash free! Once it cleared up we started solids (blog post to come!) a few days later and now she has had a rash for the last week and a half. We have been using Bordeaux’s Butt Paste and the corn starch mixture that Dana gave me, it does appear to be clearing up but she is pooping A LOT so it’s kind of a one step forward, two steps back thing.

Today it dawned on me that we haven’t really done “nakie time” since we have been here! No wonder her rash won’t go away. We used to do nakie time at least once a day. I guess since it is colder here I just didn’t think of it. But right now it is warm in her room and she is happily playing with her toes as she airs out. And she has only pooped on the blanket twice so far 😉.

House Hunters with the Humes: Episode 2

Episode 1

Ding dong! Welcome to another episode of House Hunters with the Humes!

On Tuesday, we went to visit a house that had caught our eye online…

This house was occupied, unlike the other ones, so it took a bit of imagination to see past the homeowners stuff (and there was a lot of stuff!). As we went from room to room we kept liking it more and more. It was kind of like unwrapping presents at Christmas. We started on the main floor, and then we still got to look at the backyard and artist’s studio (!), then we still got to see the finished basement! The house is dated, but all of the updates that we could see it needing were totally doable. It is kind of a scary feeling liking a house this early in the process! I asked Kate, our realtor, if I could come back again the next day.

On Wednesday, Billy had to work, but I brought my dad along since he has been with me on most of my car buying experiences. After a second look, I still loved the house, my dad loved it and Billy had fallen in love with it at first sight. This might be our house! So we signed all the paperwork on Wednesday night, and on Thursday morning our (low) offer was accepted! We still are kind of in shock as to how fast this all went! Next week we have all the inspections scheduled and assuming all goes well, escrow closes 12/31 and we would move in later in January (the seller requested to rent from us for about 2 weeks, which I guess is common). We are totally happy with this timeline since it would be so hectic moving in during the holidays and would probably make Maya’s first Christmas kind of stressful!

So more about the house… It ticks almost every box on our checklist:
– 3 bedrooms, 1 bath minimum (4 bedrooms, 2.5 baths)
– 1000 square feet minimum (2878 square feet!)
– Quiet Street
– Front Porch
– Basement and/ or Garage
– Fireplace
– Dishwasher
– Entryway
– Sidewalks
– Walking distance to public transit (2 blocks to Billy’s bus to work), grocery store (.9 mile) and a park (one .7 miles and another .9 miles)

The main floor has a nice flow to it. It has a formal dining room and an eat-in kitchen. There are two bedrooms and two bathrooms on the main floor. Downstairs there is a large family room with a bar, 2 more bedrooms, a utility room with laundry and a half bath. There is a good sized backyard with a deck. Instead of a garage it has an artist’s studio, it is heated and has lots of windows – a great space to work on projects and to store the stroller and bikes.

I’m not going to put the address on here, but I’ll just say it is in northeast Portland, off of Prescott & 82nd (west of 82nd!). It is in the Roseway neighborhood, very close to the up and coming Cully neighborhood and convenient to all of the restaurants and shopping in Hollywood & Beaumont. Convenient to the airport and a quick bus ride down Sandy Blvd. for Billy to get to work downtown. Close to my parents on Mt. Tabor.

There are a few cons. The owners had a second lot with a huge shop/ RV storage that has been sold off separately. So there will be a house built there soon. The good news is that it is being built by a reputable builder that will want to get the house up fast (we heard 6 weeks) so that he can sell it. And it is planned to be listed about 100k more than ours so that will raise our value.

They listed the wrong elementary/ middle school, so we went from being excited about a 7/10 rated school to being disappointed by a 2/10 rated one. But this house hunt wasn’t about finding our forever home. We came to the conclusion that we could either buy a house we would outgrow in a few years or buy one in a neighborhood/ school district that we wouldn’t want come kindergarten time. We actually love the neighborhood besides the schools, the streets are long and walkable. There are several restaurants within one mile and it is super easy to get downtown and to other areas of the city. We actually kind of like that it isn’t a super hip neighborhood, we just want a quiet street. It’s close to 82nd, which isn’t a very nice street to be near. But it’s pretty far north so it is far away from all of the car dealerships and grossness that most envision on 82nd.

There was a bit of mold on the ceiling above the showers, the seller will be taking care of this, but we will also be paying to have a mold specialist examine the whole house to make sure there isn’t any more.

The other cons are just that it needs a lot of updating, but to us, these are also pros. We are so excited to get to put some work into our very own home and put our own personal touch on things. So maybe we will sell in 5 years and make a good profit after updating things… or maybe the schools will improve or the district lines will change and we will stay a bit longer. Who knows. But right now we are just very excited about how easy the whole process has been so far and for all the fun ideas we have for making updates! On the top of the list are: replacing sliding doors in bedroom with French doors, refinishing the floors, painting and either shampooing or replacing all of the carpet in the basement. And furniture shopping! Coming from 550 square feet to over 2800 means we need some new stuff! So fingers crossed the inspections go well and there aren’t any surprises! Oh, and if you are Christmas shopping for us we sure could use some Home Depot & IKEA gift cards 😉

And a big thank you to all of our friends and family that have been so supportive during this move and house hunt. It feels really good to have so many well wishes coming our way!

All-Weather Package

Fall? It’s unseasonably cold in Portland. From the 18th floor, the weather has resembled Long Beach; blue skies and sunshine. However, step out of the temperature controlled building and you’ll realize the resemblance ends at the threshold. So we’re putting on our layers and gloves and adjusting…excited to experience a real season again!

Ice Ice Baby

It’s cold out there! Today we have snow in the forecast! The wind has been blowing like crazy the last 2 days. Today we woke up to an icy ground cover. My parents house is at 380’elevation, compared to downtown at 20′, so we see a lot more ice and snow than most people closer in.

We had plans to go to the movies, but it’s not worth it to drive in these conditions, so we are housebound for the day!