As I start out this Thanksgiving morning, I am flooded with all the wonderful things in my life. Like waking up to a happy girl sitting up in her crib in our warm house, with family to visit today. Every morning, I'm thankful I get to wake up next to my wonderful husband. We're both thankful for our jobs, me especially because they let me work part-time with three days of working from home. It's a wonderful balance of being a working mom and a stay-at-home-mom and I do think I'd get bored at home everyday. I'm thankful for our church and the support that it gives us, as well as a place to serve and help others when they're in need. We're both thankful for our families being close (all within 10 miles away), which also means there's never a shortage of babysitters for ski days or date nights (another blessing). Most of all, I'm thankful for my faith and relationship with our loving Savior, Jesus Christ. In a confusing world where many things are clamoring for our attention, I have the Lord and an eternity-focus in this world which definitely puts things in perspective when I stop for a quiet moment and seek him. I really appreciate Thanksgiving and that it's really about getting together with and enjoying the company of family. If you stress out about cooking a big meal and getting everything perfect, you miss the whole point. Hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving and stop and spend some time in quiet reflection of the blessings in your life too!
I love this picture! It definitely blow-up worthy and was from our camping trip to the Sand Dunes in August with my sister and her husband. We're blessed to live near such beauty and to be able to take our little girl tent camping. We both love it, and I bet she will too - we took her camping four times last summer and even when it was cold, she was having fun!
Have you ever had one of those days where everything seems to be going wrong and you wondered why you even got out of bed? I guess it isn’t quite that bad, but this morning, Ashleigh took my cup of coffee and spilled it all over the carpet. After cleaning that up, I decided to try to get some work done upstairs. We have these little puzzle pieces of foam that make a cube and she decided to try to eat one and ended up gagging herself on it and throwing up all over her new sweater. Guess I should be thankful that she didn’t choke on it and is alright. Needless to say, the puzzle pieces have been put away until a much later age, like 6. I know she doesn’t do these things on purpose, but it was almost enough for me to wake up Rob (he works until 3 am), give him the baby, and leave for a while to take some time to myself. She’s napping now, so it is a good time to get some work done. My work lets me work from home three days a week for half days on my lap top and it really is ideal to be home with her these days, even if I do spend most of my time trying to work and picking up after our little girl, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
I'm late getting these out, but here are some pictures from the festivities. She had three different mini-parties with family and friends and it was just wonderful. Makes my own birthday seem rather uneventful, but then I've also had 28 birthdays in my life. It was fun to see her play more with the packaging than the actual gifts, but I guess that's what 1-year olds do!
A big thanks to all our friends and family who made her birthday special! We are so blessed with so many wonderful friends and family close-by. Thank you for your generosity and it was great getting together with all of you! She just loves all the new books and toys. For those of you who couldn't be here, we're glad to see you when you are in town and miss you!
These cake pictures are shown chronologically, so you can see once she understood what cake was, the stuffing of the cake by the handful began. Her first two times with the white cake were so dainty, we wondered if she was a normal kid, then she had the chocolate cake... she LOVES chocolate!
We had our first Halloween with our daughter (well, it was actually the second if you count that Ashleigh was a week old on the first Halloween). We dressed her up as a dinosaur and went to a few of the neighbors houses. It's different experiencing Halloween as a parent, but fun to experience it again through the eyes of our little one. It was a pretty uneventful evening until later that night when she had a reaction to her flu shot earlier that day and got sick in her crib at four in the morning. Both my husband and I caught it later in the week as did Grandpa who watches her two days a week while I work. I've never done a web page or anything like that, so I thought I'd start a Blog and have a universal place to talk about what's going on in our lives, post some pictures, and just have some creative fun. She really did have fun, even if she was sick, you couldn't tell from these picts.
I'm late getting these out, but here are some pictures from the festivities. She had three different mini-parties with family and friends and it was just wonderful. Makes my own birthday seem rather uneventful, but then I've also had 28 birthdays in my life. It was fun to see her play more with the packaging than the actual gifts, but I guess that's what 1-year olds do!
A big thanks to all our friends and family who made her birthday special! We are so blessed with so many wonderful friends and family close-by. Thank you for your generosity and it was great getting together with all of you! She just loves all the new books and toys. For those of you who couldn't be here, we're glad to see you when you are in town and miss you!
