Fun At The Beach!

This summer we've been able to go a couple times to a little local beach. Lauren always has so much fun, but at first wouldn't go into the water unless I was holding her hand.. Enter Bekah and Briella. The first time Lauren saw them charging out to deeper water, she took off after them! Since then I haven't been able to keep her out of the water and have to constantly stay with her to keep her from drowning, she'll walk out until she's up to her chin, crazy girl. I'm glad that she's having fun and being so brave, but I loved that first time of mostly getting to sit on the beach and chat with friends while she played in the sand! I'm so glad we've been able to go so much since a real beach trip, or any vacation, didn't happen this summer and I'm glad she loves the water so much. And, of course, I love fun times with fun friends.

Baking for Book Club

I don't host many things for friends because my house seems to be cursed! Whenever I try to have friends over for ANY reason, only 1 or 2 come. Not because they don't want to or are being rude, but something always comes up for everyone. So I've basically stopped having things at my house. 
I've been in book club for a couple years and I've never hosted, because of the curse, but this year I decided to give it a a try. I had a lot of fun planning what treats I'd make - some recipes on Pinterest I've been wanting to try. Chris was great with helping me clean and get chairs arranged in the living room. And what do you know - 14 people came! Now I don't know if that means that the curse is actually broken or if it just means that people really love and are committed to book club! Either way, I had a lot of fun and the recipes turned our pretty good, which is always nice.

Birthdays!

I do want to quickly catch up on the recent birthdays in our family. And then maybe I can stay current!

Chris turned 38 in February and Lauren had lots of fun helping him blow out his candles and eat his cake.

Then was Lauren's 2nd birthday! I've never felt like she's growing up too quickly, but it's hard for me to believe I have a toddler and not a baby! Her birthday was on a Tuesday and it had just snowed, so my mom had the day off of school so she and Ian were able to come out. Chris was working from home for his new job, so it was nice he got to be home. The night before, Chris and I snuck balloons into her room so she could wake up to them. She liked that a lot, but didn't like when we sang Happy Birthday as we walked into her room.

I invited two of her friends to come over for a little play date. They colored, played with bubbles, had lunch, and decorated cookies. It's always so cute to see her playing with friends, even if she still doesn't understand the concept of sharing very well.

The following Saturday we had my parents and brothers out for dinner and to give her presents. We also sang Happy Birthday to my mom and gave her presents, since her birthday was the day before. Lauren loved all of her presents and had fun playing with everyone. 

I couldn't get her in for her 2 year old checkup for a couple of weeks, which annoyed me because I'd always done her check ups within a couple days, if not on, her birthday. She weighs 23lbs (almost the 10th percentile!) and is 34 inches tall. This was her first time on the big kids scale and being measured on the wall, it was crazy how much that made her seem like a big girl to me!

She is definitely a two year old - she has opinions about everything and throws fits when she doesn't get what she wants. She also does amazingly cute things every day and is such a sweetheart! She loves music, dancing, reading, snuggling, sliding and watching videos of herself on my iphone. 

I'M BACK!

Obviously, blogging has not been my priority for a year now, despite my goal to get in 100 posts last year, ha! I've been thinking about getting back into it and couldn't decide if I wanted to try and catch up or just start "fresh". I post a lot of things on Facebook, but it lacks the details and stories behind the pictures. So, here I am, and who knows, maybe I'll make those 100 posts this year.

Here's a quick recap of what happened in the last year while I was busy not blogging.

Our baby girl turned 1

Grandma came to visit and we went to Amish Country

We went to Utah

to celebrate our 10th anniversary

 Lauren took her first trip to the beach - Chincoteague

We went to the DC zoo

We sent a balloon to Grandpa in heaven for his birthday

Lauren got a party for turning 18 months

Grandma came for another visit and we went to Gettysburg

Lauren got her first haircut

 Lauren went trick-or-treating for the first time

We went on a hayride

My brother got married (on my birthday!)

A couple days later we flew to Utah for Chris' nephew's wedding

 And, of course, Christmas was much more fun

11 Months!

I got a little sad this morning getting out her 11 month sticker - until I spent the next half hour trying to get her to sit still for a picture before giving up and letting her take a nap first. Then I got the absolute PERFECT picture! I'll have to think of a cute picture to take every year on her birthday.
I'm in the midst of trying to figure out how much I want to try and do for her first birthday. Obviously I know she won't care about any of it, it's all for me. I don't want to go so overboard that it's silly, but I do want to make it special, I've waited sooooooooo long to have a first birthday to celebrate!
This month she:
- has slept through the night twice, and for the most part only wakes up once
- is standing more and more on her own and for longer periods of time
- says "uh-oh" whenever she drops something
- waves hello and goodbye
- started eating turkey, apple slices, spaghetti, who bananas, rice out of Mommy's bowl, corn, butternut squash, pineapple

Clean Fridge!

Several months ago I found a link on Pinterest to a declutter calendar for the whole year. I'm ALWAYS trying to declutter the house, I don't understand why we have so much, so I was really excited to find this. I do as much as I can, but it's so overwhelming and sometimes I just don't know where to start or what to do. This calendar has it broken down so that it's totally doable during nap time and supposedly at the end of the year you'll have a clutter free home.
As the end of the year approached I found that a declutter calendar had been made for 2013. Originally I was going to make a cute dry erase calendar to have easy access to the declutter item for the day, but that turned out to be a little ambitious during December and all the festivities. Instead, I wrote each days' task on my regular kitchen calendar. I decided that Lauren's afternoon nap would be my declutter time. And off I went! Some of the days are just planning what or how to declutter or making resolutions about avoiding clutter, so it wasn't until the second week of January that a big project started. It was the fridge. We go through the fridge periodically, but sometimes I look in and realize we don't do a thorough enough job. So for three days I was suppose to clean out 2 shelves a day, the condiments, and then the outside. I went one step further because I'd found something else from Pinterest I'd wanted to do - put placemats on the shelves so that they're easier to clean and prettier. So I would completely clean off a shelf, take it out, rinse it off, put the placemat on and put much less food back (sadly, we had quite a lot of expired food). Then I cleaned off the outside, wiped it off, and put a lot less back. I felt a little like Superwoman getting that big of a project done AND taking care of a baby and coincidentally, that week was the first week since Lauren was born that I cooked dinner EVERY night.
I didn't take before pictures, one because nobody needs to see how dirty our fridge was, and two I didn't really think of it in time. But, here's the after. I don't think you can see the placemats too well, they're just black with white circles.

10 Months!

This is the first month I don't know her weight. We stopped going to the breast feeding support group a couple of months ago because she wouldn't sit still on the scale, she wouldn't nurse while we were there and it fell during her morning nap. I don't have a scale that works and I'm still debating whether I want to find a friend who has a scale we could use to at least estimate her weight.
This month she:
- got her first big head cold :(
- is still not sleeping through the night, but seems to be getting a little closer
- learned how to point
- starting shaking her head "no"
- learned how to play her favorite game on my iPhone by herself
- has stood by herself a few times
- managed to FaceTime Grandma by herself and call Nana by herself, all on the same day
- started saying "uh" when I say "uh-oh" on her birthday
- has tried blueberries, mango, apricot, pancakes, grilled cheese, eggs
- got to see and feel snow for the first time
- got WAY too spoiled at Christmas!

This Time Next Year..............

I will have lost weight
I will have an organized house
I will have finished at least one project that I've started
I will have sent all the birthday cards that I always mean to.

Those aren't resolutions, they're decisions.

Merry Christmas!

Like all of Lauren's other firsts, I had a picture in my head of what I wanted her first Christmas to be like. It didn't quite turn out that way, though. It took longer to get the contractor in to work on our living room, so I couldn't do any decorating and then I got a horrible cold two weeks before Christmas so I had to miss a party and since I'm nursing I was limited in what I could take, so I was just barely surviving for over a week and ended up doing most of my Christmas shopping on the Saturday before Christmas, something I did NOT want to do.
So there weren't any decorations besides the Christmas tree and I didn't finish the cute unwrap a Christmas book every night thing, but we managed to get all the gifts bought and wrapped and had a nice day. Lauren slept pretty well Christmas Eve, which helped!  After she went to bed we picked up all of her toys so she wouldn't have any distractions from the new ones. She almost got the hang of opening up presents, but not quite. And she got bored before she was even halfway through!
After her morning nap my family came over to exchange presents and she got fairly overwhelmed with that, but once we were done opening presents she settled down and enjoyed playing with everyone. One of my brothers then came with his new puppy, a Pomeranian/Jack Russell mix, one of the most adorable dogs I've ever seen and Lauren couldn't get enough of him, it was so cute!
We were able to recover quickly from having a house full of people and I'm already making lists of how to make next Christmas better!

A New Living Room!

When we went to Utah in July we asked my brother to house sit. He was more than happy to, until a couple days after we left when the shower started leaking into the living room below. There wasn't too much water, so he cleaned it up and the next day used a different shower. Same thing happened, only this time a lot worse. He sent us this picture of our living room ceiling:

We aplogized profusely that he had to deal with the problem and immediately got on the phone with our insurance agent to report the damage and find out the procedure for getting money to repair it. We ended up waiting until we got home to deal with all of that, instead of trying to do it all over the phone and making my brother deal with letting people into the house.

We had a couple of plumbers come give us estimates and chose one we liked. He found a small leak in the drain pipe, caused by the shower not being sealed properly when it was put in. At some point someone discovered this and just put a rag in to soak up the water. So he fixed it and we were excited to use our shower again. And then the next day after we showered water was leaking through the ceiling again. So the plumber came back and discovered that it wasn't that leak that had caused all the damage, but a nail that had penetrated intothe main drain pipe when the floor was put in. So the whole time we lived here, who knows how long before that, water had been pooling in the ceiling every time we showered! It was amazing that there wasn't any mold!
So here's what the ceiling looked like after looking for and fixing the two leaks:

It took us a lot longer to find a contractor who was reasonably priced and we felt comfortable with. Then it took awhile before we decided exactly what we were going to do. There was a TINY bit of damage to the floor and we couldn't decide what to do about that. We finally decided to do nothing. So then it took awhile for the contractor to have time to come do the work. Luckily that gave us plenty of time to pick a new wall color, because that was quite a process!
Here are the walls covered in samples:

We finally picked a color and got a start date scheduled. And of course it took longer than we anticipated. Lauren and I spent the first couple of day away from the house to avoid the dust and fumes, but that got old, so the last two days we spend holed up in the master bedroom.

Here's what our kitchen and dining area looked like for a week:

                                                        Lauren thought it was very weird.

The new ceiling is up!

 

And the painting is finally done!

 

 

We're still working on moving the furniture back in, we left most of it out to leave room for the Christmas tree. It was such a relief to have it done and we're so happy with the new look!

 

 

Just a funny side note, about a week after the plumber came to fix the drain pipe, our garbage disposal broke and we called him again to come fix it, we joked about just putting him on retainer. Then about a month after that we ran into him on my family's farm in Joppa, turns out he and his wife board their horse there!

9 months!

I think I've done a pretty good job enjoying each phase of Lauren's babyhood. There are definitely benefits and downfalls to each age and it's easy to hope to get to the next one quickly - "I can't wait til she can sit up", "I can't wait til she can feed herself", "I can't wait til she can sleep in her crib", "I can't wait til she can talk". But for every one of those I've said I've thought of something that I love about the phase she's in - "I love snuggling next to her at night", "I love when she reaches for me to hold her", "I love her sweet little baby babbles". So for the most part I don't feel like time is going too fast or too slow, I love watching her grow and learn and look forward to what she's going to learn next month. But it is pretty amazing that her first year is 2/3 of the way over! So much happens in the first year, they learn so much, and it's almost over. It's crazy! I'm happy that I've remembered to do all the "first" things and take all the "first" pictures that I've been dreaming about for years, even when it annoys Chris!
This month she:
- weighs 15lbs 8oz, which I thought was low, but I guess she's just a busy girl, burning a lot of calories!
- is 26.5 inches long
- FINALLY sleeps in her crib at night and for all of her naps
- still isn't sleeping through the night, but there are some nights she goes for longer stretches
- is pretty much out of all of her 6 month clothes and wearing mostly 9 month and some 6/9 month, which is amazing to me that she caught up in size with her age! I didn't think that would happen for years!
- wears 12 month size socks, she's going to be a tall girl!
- eats chicken with vegetables or apples or rice, although she's still not crazy about it
- crawls like crazy everywhere
- can pulls herself up on just about anything and sometimes tries to stand without holding on
- can crawl up the stairs
- went on her first road trip to upperstate New York and did great
- impressed the doctor at her 9 month checkup with all of her skills, she's right on track developmentally! Amazing for a girl who was born early and small and the OB's were so worried about!
We love her more and more every day, even the days she drives us crazy!

The downside to her being so mobile is it's almost impossible to get her to sit still for pictures! This is the only one where she's not screaming because I won't let her get up.