10 months!

Double digit months! Our darling Miss Summer still continues to entertain us on a daily basis. Her new trick is to yell short outbursts as loud as she can, usually in quiet settings, like church. She has discovered her voice for sure. Sometimes, it drives me absolutely crazy.

She can roll from her back to her tummy, which she will do in her crib and I always find her sleeping on her tummy. I think she sleeps better that way, except when she gets her arms or legs stuck between the slats. Too bad it took her so long to figure that out. Thing is, when she first started doing that she would wake up soaking wet from pee. The diaper soaked through and her jammies and sheets would be wet. Not a fun thing to change at 5 am. I tried plastic pants—no dice. Finally I just put on two diapers and it works like a champ.

She eats like a horse. Half her day is spent in her high chair eating, as you can see from most of these pictures . Breakfast is usually a container of yogurt, a slice of bread, a banana, and maybe a bowl of Cheerios. And she would keep eating I’m sure if I let her. Needless to say, she has developed quite the gut on herself. She also starting to feel really heavy and solid. I don’t have an official weight for her, but I’d say she’s well over 15 pounds.

She has 3 teeth, two on the bottom and one on her upper left. Tonight she started grinding them together while I was feeding her applesauce and it sent shivers through my whole body. I had to give up and have Derrick finish feeding her. SO NASTY. But her little teeth are pretty cute.

She’s a pretty spunky little kid, and is always giving us crazy faces. We went to Holy Hill to check out the fall colors a few weeks back and I got these two faces from her.

It was pretty chilly that day. Starting out she was doing pretty well.

By the end she wasn’t really having it anymore.  She’s not crawling yet, but she’s definitely getting much more mobile. She scoots on her bum a little and will bend waaaaay over to try and get something just out of her reach.

It’s hard to believe she’s 10 months old already. She is looking more and more like a little girl and less like a baby. It’s amazing how fast they change.

We sure do love this girl though, and even if she drives me crazy by the end of some days, she has a great dad who loves to play with her when he gets home and gives me a break. She’s always thrilled to see him, and by 5:30, so am I!

Love you, Summer Love!

Halloweenie!

I can’t believe Halloween has already come and gone! It’s all downhill from here as far as holidays go. 2010 will be here before we know it. Yikesabee! (Movie anyone?)

We dressed our little chickadee up as, well, a chickadee! She was happy as a clam wearing it and I think she looked hysterical and awesome.

  We took her trick-or-treating up and down our street and took our new neighbors treats and introduced ourselves. So far everyone seems really nice. So far.

We had an impromptu Halloween dinner party and managed to have quite the menagerie of animals. A butterfly, chicken, and two monkeys. I loved seeing these kiddos all dressed up.

Speaking of kids dressed up, what the H is up with kids’ Halloween “costumes” these days? Half the kids that came wore absolutely NO COSTUME or the barest minimum of what could be considered a costume. I straight up called them out and asked them what they were supposed to be. They had no answer. No free candy if you don’t do the work! Put on a freaking costume! Beads and a ball cap do NOT a costume make. Neither does a Farve jersey. I also had quite a few kids with 2 bags “for their sick brother/sister”. Why didn’t I think of that scam when I was little? Pish posh. Oh well. There were some cute costumes though,and either way I LOVED having tick-or-treaters come to our house!! So fun! We totally ran out of candy though…next year we will have to really stock up!

Hope everyone had a great Halloween and scored some sweet candy!

Dining Room Makeover

Friday Derrick took the day off and we tackled our first home improvement project together: painting. Neither one of us has any real painting experience, but I watch so much freaking HGTV I’m essentially a pro in my mind. We got the paint and primer all in one and two coats and 8 hours later we were done! It’s far from perfect, but for our first real painting job, I think it looks fantastic. Plus, we didn’t fight and we still liked each other at the end of the day! Bonus.

Before: A sea of orange

After: Cool, calming gray

What do you think??

We did it!

Well, after what seemed like a gazillion appraisals and countless delays, we FINALLY closed on our house! We were able to move in as scheduled this past Saturday and rent from the sellers until we closed. I was so blown away by how much help we had Saturday morning. Good thing I had so much to do because if I stopped to think about it even for a second I would get all choked up. Driving the U-Haul MYSELF to our house pretty much took my mind off it! I’ve never really been on the receiving end of such service and I can’t even describe how it feels. To know that we have such great friends here just really touches me. So I have to say thank you to each and every person who showed up to help us: Joel, Mike C., Mike & Jessica, Jonathan, Joe Miller, Ray Miller, Brandon Miller, (none of whom are related, coincidentally), Drew & Megan, Spencer M., Marty M., Casey, Devin, Nick, Jason G., Matt B., Jim, Steve, and Ryan. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU! We seriously could not have done it without you. And a HUGE thank you to all who called or emailed offering to help watch Summer, help clean, help pack, etc. You know who you are, and even if I didn’t take you up on your offer, please know it meant the world to me that you even took the time and offered.

Derrick’s mom also decided to come the day before we moved and help get things ready. I pretty much just passed her Summer and said, “See me at bedtime!” It was so nice of her to come and it was a huge help.

So, we are all moved in and almost completely unpacked. Almost. We love it so far, even though it’s taking some time to get used to living in a new space. As a “Welcome Home” present to us, our kitchen sink clogged. Ok, well, I put a bunch of rice in the disposal apparently is a huge no-no. Who knew? Luckily, we are blessed to know a super awesome handy guy who came to our rescue and <strike>made a huge mess</strike> fixed it for us. I have a feeling that won’t be the last house call Greg makes for us.

Now comes the fun part: painting! I have lots of projects already on my list and can’t wait to get started!

Food storage

The past couple months I've started to get more interested in obtaining a year's supply of food, as our church encourages. One of the biggest struggles we've had is lack of space. Now that we'll be in a home (hopefully....we were supposed to close today but the appraisal didn't go through and now we're just waiting to see if the 3rd one gets passed) we will have plenty of space to store it. It's daunting at first just getting started, but like all things, you just have to start.

Luckily, Emergency Essentials has a blog, and both make it easy to start! They are even giving away two $10 gift cards! Go here for one(or click the button below) and and here for the other.

I used their analyzer to see how many days I could feed my family with our current "storage" and it said only 6.66 days. Yikes! Better start adding to our storage so we won't starve!!

Rock on

We're seriously debating scrapping the costume we bought for Summer this year in lieu of making her a rocker chick.


I mean, she already blasts her music 24/7 and has begged for black nail polish.

Me no likey packing

Packing is in full force here. I hate it. I hate the scratchiness of the cardboard boxes. I hate how loud the tape is. I hate all of it with the passion of a thousand fiery suns. The only good part is that I went through everything a couple months ago and purged like crazy so now I don’t have to sort, I can just pack. Oh, and the thought that once it’s all over we’ll be in our very own home!!

I used to be somewhat of a packrat. I kept everything. I held sentimental value to the little things. Then I got overwhelmed with all the crap I was accumulating. So I got rid of a lot of it. Now I’m torn. There are things I know I should keep for posterity’s sake but just don’t feel like keeping. Like diplomas, tassels, pictures, etc. Shouldn’t I want to keep these things?? I spent years earning them! Maybe I was so sick of packing last night it seemed easier to just to pitch it. And then there’s things I’ve had for 10+ years that I honestly don’t need, but then I think, heck, I’ve had it this long, why get rid of it now?? Then I have flashes of being on A&E’s Hoarders and snap out of it. I’ve resolved that it’s okay to hold on to some things from the past. One box of mementos is not going to take up too much space in our basement, and it is fun to look through it every once in awhile and reminisce.

This blog is all over the place. Sorry.

In the meantime, I’m trying to pick paint colors, which is really hard. It’s just paint! Why is it tormenting my soul like this?

Oh, and then I got a speeding ticket coming home from work the other night. Crying didn’t work. 48 in a 25. Construction zone. Honestly, it didn’t even occur to me that it was a construction zone because it’s been a construction zone for like EVER. And even though Mr. Police Officer was kind enough to reduce the citation for me, I still cried the whole way home. I hate getting in trouble.

Apple-y sweet and fun to eat!

Today was our inaugural apple picking outing. Even though it was cold, and I was tired (I worked a 7am shift this morning), we had a grand old time. We all bundled up and headed to the local apple orchard and picked ourselves some Honeycrisps and a few other varieties. But mostly Honeycrisps because let’s be real, they are really the only true apple variety this time of year. And we got a bag full of them for ten bones. And we ate one while we picked.

 

Summer happily hung on Dad while we meandered though the orchards trying to avoid the icy drafts. I’m super excited to make apple crisp and apple pie and apple dumplings (a la Our Best Bites….they call for Mountain Dew…this could quite possibly be the world’s most perfect food!)