“Tummy time” and a new job

Allison has continued to grow and experience new things.  She loves tummy time, and he r neck is getting stronger.  She is able to hold it up by herself for at least a few seconds.

On Monday, I started a new assignment with IBM and have missed seeing my little girl during the day.  I love coming home and spending a few minutes with her.

As Katie pointed out, “Growing like a weed” sounds like something a boy would do — she says “Growing like a flower” sounds much cuter for a little girl.  So we’ll say that Allison is indeed growing like a flower.   We suspect she is over 9 lbs now (she was 8 lb 9 oz last Monday) and continues to grow right before our eyes.

Here are some of the latest pictures:

Nana and Papa (Katie’s Parents) have been visiting this week, and of course we have taken lots of pictures.

Yesterday we took Allison to the park for the first time (Duke Gardens).  She slept through most of it, but it was fun for the rest of us!

I also gave her a bottle for the first time today.  It was a really neat experience for me, and Allie didn’t seem to mind.  She took to it immediately and drank the entire thing in about 10 minutes.

We have continued to enjoy taking pictures of Allison and couldn’t resist adding some new ones to our blog.  We are in love with all of the faces that she makes (unknowingly at this point of course).

It’s hard to believe that Allie will be 3 weeks old on Saturday!  We went to her 2 week check-up on Tuesday and were glad to hear that she is gaining weight and is doing well.

It is hard to believe that it has already been a full week since we saw little Allison enter the world.  She is just the cutest thing ever, and has been so good about sleeping for several hours at the time.  (Hopefully that continues!)

We haven’t been able to resist snapping hundreds of pictures this first week.  Here is a slideshow of our first week.

This week has been full of “Firsts” for Allison — first time meeting her grandparents, first time outside, first car ride, first bath, and first walk around the neighborhood.

Here are some pictures we took after strapping her in for her first walk outside with Grandma and Granddad.

Here is a video that I made last night covering the last few days.

What a weekend this has been.  While at a friends house on Friday night (somewhere between dinner and dessert) Katie let me know that she thought her water was breaking (just a little at a time).  After a phone chat with Dr. Welch, we decided to come to the hospital and see what was happening.  We timed it perfectly, as Katie’s water “officially” broke as we were walking into the hospital.

By the time we got here, Katie was 3cm and they told us this was definitely for real.  (We weren’t really expecting that!)  After a fairly short 7 hours, little Allison Lynn Griffin came out crying.  They cleaned her up in the room and she was in mommy’s arms in just a matter of minutes.

Both sets of Grandparents got here by mid-day and enjoyed holding their new granddaughter (the first grandbaby for both sets of grandparents).

Dan and I took a painting class tonight at Wine & Design in Raleigh.  This was such a fun date night.  Neither of us has any painting experience, but they said that wasn’t necessary, so we tried it out.  They do a different painting each night and you follow along as an instructor shows you step by step what to do in the painting.  Everyone’s painting was slightly different, but they all turned out great.  We highly recommend trying it out if you live in the area!

We continue to love making pizza.  This past weekend we made 2 kinds and both were delicious.  We were trying to use up some leftovers from the fridge as well as veer from our norm and the results were lip smacking.  Our first pizza had BBQ sauce, cheese, onions, and sliced chicken fingers (we forgot to take a picture before we’d already eaten most of it).  The second pizza had honey mustard sauce, cheese, tomatoes, spinach, and bacon.  Yummy!