Making Christmas Cookies

Last week at daycare, Madeline made Christmas cookies. She even brought some home for Mommy and Daddy to try. I'm sure you can guess how good they were, but they looked beautiful of course.

Christmas Trip

So after a nice Christmas morning at home, we headed out to see family. The first set of pictures are from Christmas evening with Andy's family. As you can tell by the fingers in Madeline's mouth, she was teething. We were worried this might ruin our trip, but surprisingly it didn't.

Of course, Madeline got to open all her presents first. She received lots of super cute clothes, some books and some toys.

After she was done, then the chaos began.

The next day, my family got together. Here are the kiddos opening their presents.

Great Grandma loved her gift! It's a calendar with pictures of all the grandkids.

We had a wonderful trip and it was great seeing everyone. I love that about the holidays.

I couldn't believe it, but we were able to fit all the Christmas gifts in the car except for one. We were LOADED. The one we couldn't fit was a tricycle and it's not like Madeline can ride it now anyway. Here is what our living room looked like when we got back. Obviously the tent will only be up on occasion. But how the heck we are going to fit all this stuff PLUS new baby stuff, I have no idea. We are going to be living like sardines.

Yes, that is Andy playing in Madeline's tent.

Christmas morning

Santa came to our house and left some pretty good toys for all of us. He even had Madeline's toys all opened and ready to play with.

She loved everything!

Santa brought Andy a Garmin. He was very happy and surprised with his new gadget.

He brought me a baby timer and a Spa gift certificate. You can't ever fail with that!

More Christmas pictures from our visit with family to come.....

Madeline is 18 months old!

Gosh, she is getting so big. Her well-baby appointment was last week and she is still in the 75%th percentile for height and weight at 32.75 inches and 26 pounds. Her personality is such a trip now too. She talks and talks and talks all the time. Most of it is babble but she sure knows what she is saying. She has upwards of 30 words or better and adds more and more every day. She loves to give us kisses and her favorite things to do are dance and read books. Her teachers comment all the time how she loves to listen to music and dance. She is most definitely Daddy’s little girl and asks for him from the moment she wakes up in the morning. She goes to him to read her books or to fix her boo-boos. Unless of course Daddy is the cause of the boo-boo, then Mommy gets to make it all better. She has Daddy’s funny sunlight tick where when she goes outside and is hit by the sun, she immediately sneezes. So strange, but they both do it.

She finally was able to climb up on the couch by herself for the first time this weekend. So all she did for an hour was go get a book, climb up on the couch and read to herself. It was the cutest darn thing and she thought she was so cool. Putting the remotes on the top of the couch to keep them from her isn’t going to work anymore. She likes to turn the TV on and off and make our DVR record random shows.

With her new age, she moved up to the Toddler Room at daycare finally. Oh my lord, she absolutely loves it! She throws tantrums now when I go to pick her up because she doesn’t want to leave. They have a sandbox, a computer and all kinds of arts and crafts in her new room. Plus she gets to go outside on the big kid playground. She sleeps in a cot there now too and she is doing great with it. I ask everyday and they say she lays right down and goes to sleep. Hopefully she does this well when we move her to her big girl bed at home in a few short months.

Speaking of tantrums, those are coming back. We got a small taste of it right after her 1st birthday but then they went away. She is doing it much more frequently now. Thankfully we haven’t had to deal with one in public yet (with the exception of daycare). I’m not looking forward to that.

It’s amazing to see how much she has changed and grown in such a short amount of time. It will be interesting to see how she does with her new sister. Less than 6 weeks away! She loves to help and is very loving so we think she will be a great big sister!

Christmas tree shopping gone awry

So we had quite an eventful weekend. We were Christmas tree shopping on Saturday and Madeline was running around all over the place. For the most part it was fine and we were all having fun. But then we were looking at a tree close to the street side of the lot. She took off again and when I looked for her, she was dangerously close to the street and running straight for it. I went into Super Mom mode and tried to run as fast I could for her. However, I ended up falling flat on my face and on my belly! At the time, I wasn't exactly sure what had happened since it happened so quickly. But after recounting it with Andy, I had fallen straight out of my shoes when I tried to run. Now that I can't touch my feet, I'm wearing slip-on, clog-type shoes so my feet had slipped right out them. Fortunately Andy ran and got Madeline and she was okay. Thank god! That girl gave me a heart-attack. However, now I was freakin' out about the baby. When I fell, it was full-frontal. I landed STRAIGHT on my belly and it was a hard fall. Both of my knees were scraped up and bruised, my nose was badly swollen and bruised and I busted my lip.


We went to the hospital immediately. I was a crying, hysterical mess when I was checking in but the nurse was very helpful and got me hooked up to the monitors right away. She knew I was worried about the baby (and I was also still shaken up about Madeline being so close to the busy street). But the baby's heartbeat was doing great and she was moving around just fine. They also checked her out on ultrasound in case, god forbid, things went bad and they had to deliver her. Her estimated weight was a little bit over 4 lbs. and she was measuring right on her due date. Everything looked okay, but the doctor wanted to keep me overnight for a 24-hour observation. It wasn't a comfortable or relaxing stay since I had to be hooked up to the monitors the whole time I was there. I was so glad to come home on Sunday. I was feeling awful all day though. But after a good night of rest at home last night, I'm feeling much better today. I'm still feeling a little beat up and tired, but I'm extremely thankful that both me and the baby are doing okay.


Andy went out by himself yesterday while Madeline and I were napping to go get our Christmas tree. I had no desire to attempt it again. I had enough Christmas tree shopping for one year. The doctor at the hospital suggested we try a tree farm next year where the streets aren't close to the trees. hahaha


Here are some pictures from before the accident.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was at my parent's house this year. There were 27 people there! We had relatives from Florida, Oklahoma and Maryland as well as all the local people. It was great to have everyone in one place and it wasn't that crowded at all. My parents set up a few tables in the living room for extra seating.

Look at this cutie pie and her Momma!

I love these pictures of Alexis and Madeline together. Madeline was very helpful with the "baby" and would give Alexis toys and whatever else she thought she needed. It was cute. I couldn't help but imagine how she'll be with her new sister. I think she'll be a great big sis!

Then she got ahold of Terry's god-awful hat. But of anyone there, Madeline definitely wears it the best.

Stealing some bites from Nonna.

It took Madeline awhile to warm up with all the strangers around. She was glued to my hip for at least the first hour. But once she did, she was all about hanging with the big kids.

Silly Girl

This past weekend we decided to do some finger painting. After awhile, Madeline turned the activity into face painting.

Then one morning this week, I went in to get her up and she was still sleeping. Usually she is wide awake and ready for the day. Look how I found her....butt in the air with the blanket all wrapped around her head.

28 Weeks

Another month already?! I guess so. I'm feeling pretty good for the most part, but I have the usual aches and pains for this far along.....back hurts, sometimes I have trouble sleeping, congestion. The worst though is I think I'm starting to waddle.

Where are we on names? I suppose we are a bit closer, but still haven't made a final decision yet. So I'll keep you all in suspense.

First two-word phrase!

This is so exciting! Madeline said her first two-word phrase tonight. Andy was taking her up to bed and I said goodnight to her. Typically Madeline will say bye-bye and wave but tonight she said, "night ma." Andy and I both screamed with excitement and Madeline looked at us like we were crazy. Ahh, these new developments are so much fun!

She is also starting to say No to things. When we ask her if she is ready to go to bed, she'll say, "No, no, no" and shake her head. It's hilarious and we crack up laughing. I'm sure we won't find this funny after awhile, but for now it's entertaining. I think it's because it's fun having the conversation reciprocated from her now. She is repeating everything we say, or at least attempting to say what we are saying. I wish I could get some of this on video, but once she sees the camera, she wants to be behind it looking in the view screen.

While I'm rambling, I'll tell you about our Toys R' Us trip today to shop around for Christmas gifts. We went to look at wagons first and found one that we liked. Right now we just have a small, toy one that Andy will take Madeline on rides in. But she is really too big for it. We need a real wagon. Anyway, right next to that section was the bikes and toy cars. We wanted to put her on a Barbie power wheel, but the batteries were dead. Then we saw this and put her on it.

Oh my gosh, she loved it. In fact, she wouldn't get out of it. So we finished up our "shopping" by pushing her around the store in it. Hopefully no one else wanted to try it out while we were there. hahaha

Here are some recent pictures. This one was taken at daycare doing what she does best, read books.

This is from one night when she was playing and decided to pull everything out of her toy box and climb in. She thought she was so funny.