Somebody Turned ONE!!!

Yes, our sweet girl turned ONE yesterday! It was a wonderful day of celebrating her life and the gift God blessed us with when she entered ours. Here are some pics of the festivities! Gotta love Costco's flower bouquets.And flower pom poms!Grant found this idea online to carve the "1" into the watermelon. :)The birthday chair.No one obeyed my "no gifts, please" request on the invitation. Ha.She even got her first basket of organic veggies from the farm garden! That zucchini was about as big as she is! Thanks, Jenny!We were so glad we were able to video chat with my parents so that they could watch her eat her cupcake!She was careful with it - didn't just go nuts, but certainly enjoyed the experience, as evidenced by the sweet bouncing in her seat as the frosting hit her mouth. A rare family pic!Her push buggy was a hit! She smiled and had wonderful form with the steering wheel. Her hands never left 10 & 2! Hopefully a foreshadowing of fifteen years from now...And there's a big happy smile in her new chair from Mimi and Grandaddy. She LOVES her chair, Mom and Dad! We took tons of pictures of her in it - you could tell she knew it was just for her!Naomi, you have been a blessing to us from the moment we found out that God had begun your life. As He knit you together in my womb, only He knew what a wonderful, peaceful, and content baby you would be. Only He knew how much we would need your joy this year. And only He knows the incredible plans that He has in store for your life. We are honored to be your parents and our hearts overflow with gratefulness to have had this amazing year with you. We love you so much!

I'm a Bad Mom.

It's July 25th. Today? Well, it's almost August and my daughter wore a swimsuit and got into a pool for the first time in her life. I believe this calls for serious self-reprimanding - if not just for the ABSOLUTE necessity of seeing this sweet girl in her strawberry suit! Love. It. I'll spare you the excuses and just put the pictures up. She looooved it. Fine, Naomi... heap the guilt upon me with a bucket. We should be, and will be, doing this on a daily basis! Oh, if it weren't so dang hot! We did get this cool little infant pool though that has a canopy which I discovered can easily be positioned to cover her if she moves into the sun.Nay is getting very good at drinking out of a cup and she loves her sippy too! She still has trouble knowing to tip them up, but it's fun to watch her learning.
Sidenote - one other bummer happened today. Naomi dropped our camera on her foot. It was so sad that it wasn't until hours later that I realized I forgot to check on the camera. It's more damaged than Naomi. :( The lens and focus thingamajig is stuck and won't zoom in and out. I'm so sad. Thankfully, it's still taking pictures, so maybe it's easily fixable. But until then, you might be getting lots of close-ups. Happy Monday!

Feeling Like Ourselves Again...

We're almost back to all of our daily activities, thanks to the antibiotics in full gear. And look who figured out how to crawl onto the shelf of the sofa table! What talent!Oh boy... yes, Mom. I'll keep a close eye on her.She had a nearly full appetite today - especially when I whipped out her first taste of a blueberry muffin. Yum!I also think she read every book in the house today that belongs to her! I noticed late in the morning that after she had been up a while, only the books were strewn over the floor. She had picked them all out of her toy baskets and left the toys! Fine by me!! Cousin Hanna, you may have met your match! :)As for sleeping, we're still working on it. Through the night is fine, but going down is really tough for some reason. She is STILL awake in her crib at almost 11pm! I think she might have gotten used to the late nights all week. Lord, help us!

Poor Baby... Poor Mommy...

Aaaaand, that picture rightly sums up the last 48 hours at our house. My crummy phone pic quality even adds to the accuracy of the message it speaks. Naomi has her first ear infection - left side. She slept terribly Monday night and everything went downhill from there. Let's just put it this way, make-up was NOT an option today if I wanted to appear even slightly alive. What's the recipe for this bout of sickness?
1/2 cup drool every hour.
Wake up crying in the night 12 times.
3 boxes of kleenex; use to wipe runny nose every 5min.
Rock in the rocker to squeeze in cat naps.
Refuse the bottle 4 times/day.
Only breathe through the mouth.
Rock some more.
Stir in a cry or two. Daughter and mother both may partake in this step.
Baby must not go to bed until 11pm.
Bake with a fever at 101.1 degrees into the wee hours of the morning.
Garnish with a call to the doctor and serve while rocking some more.
Enjoy 3/4 teaspoon of Omnicef for dessert!But hey, I can only say that my daughter's smart! She wanted to get this thing cleared up before her BIRTHDAY party next week! I was torn about how to handle celebrating our little one's first year of life. The trend anymore is to throw elaborate parties, even for a one-year old, when I could count the "friends" parties I had when I was young on one hand!! AND we had to walk to the party up hill both ways! Final decision = small get together (far away from family... :***( boo hoo hoo), handmade invites, and easy on the decorations (but enough for sweet pictures and memories). I would have gladly made up lots of extra invites to send out to our loved ones just for the heck of it, but... well, I'm just too lazy. So here you go. Consider this your copy. But PLEASE call me if you really get nuts and drive ten hours to be here so that I can order more party subs and Izzes. Lol.

Not Been Up To Much...

There's nothing to report here from the last few days. We had a nice weekend, running errands, planning for a little birthday party for Naomi, and doing projects at the house. Here is Naomi, gazing at Elmo in the morning... Funny sleeping position! She stayed like this for almost an hour!And somebody has discovered how to open up cabinet doors! We have officially entered the stage where all of the dvds can be found on the floor of the living room and the tupperware in the kitchen is strewn about... I love it.Picking out her favorites.She's not walking, but starting to think about it! She giggles any time we try and help her take a step - it's so cute. Hard to believe she'll be ONE in ten days!

Old MacDonald Had a Zoo...

We took our first trip to the Louisville Zoo today! I went with a good friend's mom and her mom - we had a blast. As I told Sheila how much fun I was having, she promptly said, "We gotta get you out more!" Lol. Agreed.But it truly was a fun day and so sweet to watch Naomi stare at the animals. It's such a fascinating thing to watch the gears turn in a little one's head as they take in the world around them. Here, she was watching the big ape swing on his ropes.A little store in the middle of the zoo had a statue of an ape - after warming up to it, Naomi decided he needed a little help cleaning up for the guests...We saw tigers... (and lions...)And bears... Oh my!!We watched a seal swim around,and Naomi even got to pet a wallaby! The poor zoo worker though... someone go give that woman a beach towel this instant! She was sweating quite disproportionately to the beautiful, breezy day.A really fun exhibit was the rainbow lorikeets. You can purchase little cups of nectar and they'll just fly right up to you! A couple of birds did drive-bys, causing the baby to jump, but she wasn't scared a bit. She would have grabbed one by the neck, had I not enforced the no-petting rules!After a couple hours, the zoo did Naomi in. I left with one tuckered out little girl! But it was fun to cross one more activity off of our Kentucky Bucket List. Thanks, Sheila and Peggy, for a great morning!

I Do...

So we went to a wedding last weekend. Grant was a groomsman for a good friend. But you wouldn't know it from OUR camera! Did we take ONE picture of the bridal party? Or the happy couple? Nope!!! So here are two I kiped from Facebook. Kind of creepy how easy it is to do that. I love being married to a redhead. They're so easy to find in pictures!Congratulations, newlyweds! We are so happy for the both of you and pray that you have a wonderful time on your cruise! Meanwhile, we'll all hibernate in the air conditioning so we don't melt away outside... Though we didn't get good wedding pics, of course we got some good shots of Naomi!And her thighs too! She looooves her doggie.We had a ball playing with Claire and Sophia, the friends Naomi used to be unsure about. Well, she's sure now!She loves them! They were such wonderful little mommies to her from the moment we arrived.Another friend we got to see was Olivia!! We were thrilled to see this baby, who is 6-weeks older than Nay. She was a buddy from our Bradley childbirth classes as you can see - they love being together once again! Sweet Olivia was walking all over the place and also showed off her FOUR teeth (of which Naomi has none), so now we have some developmental goals to catch up to! :) But they both have extremely content, relaxed personalities. Must have been the Bradley birth approach rubbing off for sure. Right, Kayla? Lol...We had a great car ride home, thanks to Elmo and vintage Sesame Street episodes.Now we're into the swing of another week. All unpacked. Diving into another term for graduate school. Cleaning the house. Making funny faces for the camera. Life is good.

Deleted

Love this pic of me and my incredible dad. I included it in the last post but it accidentally got deleted. It was such a long post, I sighed, but couldn't bring myself to randomly fit it in out of order. So here it is. In a post of its own. :)
Is anyone else having issues on blogger moving pictures around once they're uploaded?

Batter Up!

So while my parents were here, we decided to check out the Louisville Slugger museum. My dad was especially excited about this, as he has a rich baseball history playing Triple A ball years ago.He actually had a contract with Louisville Slugger when he played in the minor leagues, so he brought his bat because my on-top-of-it mom thought it would make a great picture at the museum! We thought we'd show up and do all the touristy things - read the sidewalk plaques... stare at the bat factory through panes of glass...The picture did turn out great - my dad with his bat in front of the biggest bat they've ever made! Seriously!Little did we know, we would walk into this museum and get to experience an incredibly special moment. In the lobby, there is a wall of all the signatures from the only 8,000 ball players in history who have ever had a contract with Louisville Slugger. We stood and scoured the wall for dad's name - all of us, I think, with a small doubt that it would actually be there (even him) - when Grant yells out, "OH, BUDDY!!!!!"You can see the surprise on my dad's face! Yep! Billy Severns. We had no clue that all of these years, his name is on the wall of a museum! It was the coolest moment! And it would only get better...Suddenly, we weren't just tourists anymore. We felt like members. :) Dad posed by "The Signature Wall" with his bat.I took about fifty pictures that all look like this, while Mom and Dad gasped and laughed at all of the names they recognized of their friends on the wall.Dad's my claim to fame. After all, I was conceived during Spring training! (only a student midwife would so boldly make such a claim, huh?) Grant was so excited too - it was such a fun thing for all of us to get to be there for the discovery. So then we enjoyed the museum. It's such a fun thing to do if you're ever in Louisville!Naomi met Babe Ruth... and we went on the 25-min tour through the bat factory. We had the greatest tour guide, who ended up talking with Dad and invited us to meet him at the "Bat Vault" later in the afternoon. When he found out about Dad's history, he wanted to give us the opportunity to see his original bat template and other bats from famous ball players.There were about six other people with us on the bat vault tour, an activity not open to the general public. It was such a cool room...Bill and Don. Don was asking all sorts of baseball history questions and yes, my father nailed 'em all. I was quite impressed!So then Don leans over and says, "Now, let's have some fun with this bat of yours, Bill..."And he pulls out Dad's original contract with Slugger! It was so cool to see! And for the record, Bill Severns was paid $200 when he signed with Louisville. Hank Aaron? $50. Just sayin'.What a fabulous day. We wrapped it up by spending a ridiculous amount of money in the gift shop. And talking about how my brothers will have to come to visit so they can see the factory as well... you're awesome, Dad!