December happenings....

In the spirit of trying to catch up to a Christmas post, here's some of what went on during the month of December....

This came in the mail. I really can't believe we are getting to this phase of life. She was showing interest in sitting on her cousin Emma's potty at Thanksgiving, so I decided to go ahead and get a potty so that she could get used to it. We haven't started training yet (and probably won't for a little while), but she does occasionally sit on it from time to time.  We talk about big girls going to the big girl potty and read books about using the potty, so I'm thinking that one day soon, she'll want to try....but I'm totally not pushing it!

I found her red-handed digging into some Christmas cookies before breakfast one morning....

 We celebrated Grandmommy's and Papi's birthdays the first weekend in December, after hearing them perform with their church's beautiful Christmas concert.

My sweet friend from college, Melissa, and her daughter Anne Charlotte came from Birmingham and stayed with us the first week of December while her husband, Joe, was at a conference in Dallas! It was so much fun to get to spend a week together, hanging out, letting our girls play together, getting to catch up! 

Lucy did such a great job playing with Anne Charlotte- gives me hope for little sister on the way!

Such a sweet girl with the most beautiful blue eyes you've ever seen! 

We took the girls on a walk in our neighborhood and saw horses, chickens and sheep. So fun!

The endocrine clinic Christmas dinner was at Buca de Beppo, and here is Dr. Oden, our obesity clinic's medical director, standing with quite the appropriate picture. :) I love my co-workers!

More to come, including Christmas pics!

Oh, Christmas Tree...

 In keeping with Christmas tradition, we went to Walls Family Farm with our friends, the Treadaways, to cut down Christmas trees a couple of weekends ago. 

Not gonna lie- it was about 85 degrees that day, and it wasn't quite the same with it not being freezing cold while chopping your tree down, but we made it work. It was great for the kiddos, though!

Our first stop was the donut store for a nutritious breakfast. Lucy quite enjoyed licking the icing off the donut and that was about it.....

Then we packed both families into the Treadaway's swagger-wagon- Lucy is still back-wards facing in our car, so it was a fun treat to be forward-facing. Parker and Callie did a fantastic job of keeping her entertained as well!

The newest Treadaway, cute little Tucker, even got to go and did a great job!

We arrived at the farm and piled on to the hay ride that took us out to the tree farm. Such a fun part of the day! 

We found the perfect tree and Lucy helped Daddy cut it down

Some prefer to carry their tree this way.... 

And others drag theirs...

Here she is, all lit up! FYI, the star on top is crooked on purpose- there was no other way around it. Kind of humorous, like a Charlie Brown tree or something!

22.5 weeks!

So, I'm 22.5 weeks along! Here's some sono pictures from our 20 week sono a couple of weeks ago. Little girl is looking great! She is measuring around the 40-50th percentiles, all of her body parts look perfectly formed (thank you, Jesus!). 

I'm hopeful that with her more-normal growth percentiles, that I won't have gestational diabetes this time (Lucy was measuring in the 90-95th percentiles at this point in my pregnancy before I knew I had gestational diabetes). Time will tell (at 28 weeks, actually!) when I get to take the oh-so-lovely glucose tolerance test. :)

Baby girl has become pretty active over the past week or so- she is giving me some really strong kicks through out the day, and just today, I could feel some body part sticking out a little bit when she moved. I LOVE the kicking and moving- such a sweet feeling! She was really active after I had Chipotle yesterday at work, so maybe she likes Mexican food! 

Not gonna lie, the past 6 weeks or so has been hard- we've been battling illness left and right it seems- Lucy got the flu right before Halloween, so we all got on Tamiflu, then Mike and I either got the flu (minus the fever and chills) or got some other viral illness that caused us to have terrible upper-respiratory tract infections, so I ended up on antibiotics. Then, I either got food poisoning or a stomach bug and was sick the week before Thanksgiving, which left me feeling really weak for about 5 days (finally got my appetite back after Thanksgiving), then we all got another round of colds. 'Tis the season, I suppose, especially with Lucy in school twice a week and church nursery. We are on the up-hill mend, I think, so I've been feeling more like myself the past couple of days. 

Ok, so, back to the pictures....

Soccer-playing foot!

arms raised up

profile of her face

the "money shot"- sonographer said she was 1000% sure she is a girl

one foot

both feet

22.5 weeks! I get comments all the time about how big I look to only be 22 weeks. I just think there's not a lot of room for my belly to grow taller, it just has to go out. I was like this with Lucy- just was really big most of the time!

Jesse Tree ornaments

I have always loved the Christmas season and wanted to make some sort of daily activity for our little family to remember the reason behind why we celebrate Christmas. I was inspired by this blog and thought that making a Jesse Tree would be a great way to share the message of God's promises to my sweet girls.

I fully understand that Lucy won't get it this year, but I wanted to get these done so that next year, when she is able to understand a little more, and my hands are full with two little girls, they would be ready to go.

I did some homework because there are many tutorials, Jesse Tree blogs, etc, out there. 

I finally found a blog that I loved that uses the Jesus Storybook Bible as the guide.

I then found another blog with a tutorial that matched about 2/3 of the ornaments listed with the Jesus Storybook Bible guide. For the rest of the ornaments that weren't on the blog tutorial, I either hand-sketched/designed them or found Google images that would work.

These took me about 5-6 solid nights to complete, from start to finish. 

It wasn't as hard as I thought it might be, just a little tedious with cutting out and gluing all the small pieces. I needed something that didn't require sewing, since I'm not a great seamstress, so this worked well.

What I used:

-felt of every color

- ribbon of every color

- felt glue

- sequins

- embroidery thread and needle

What I did:

- used the blog tutorial mentioned above and printed out all of the templates. I then placed a sheet of paper over each of the templates that I wanted to use, traced them, cut the pattern out and then took the pattern, placed it on felt, traced and cut out the design. 

- I learned the hard way- if one of your designs needs embroidery detail (like the sheaf of wheat or the tablets for the 10 commandments), embroider them BEFORE gluing the design to the backing. Otherwise, it's really hard to hand-sew through dried glue. (if you don't want to hand-embroider stuff, you can always use a fine-tipped Sharpie marker)

- I chose a colored felt for the backing, then glued the design onto the backing using felt glue.

- I then cut ribbon, glued it to the back of the ornament

- I cut out cream-colored felt a little bigger than the backing sizes and glued the cream felt backing to the ornament

- done!

Can't wait to start using these next week!

Being 19 months old...

Lucy-loo is 19 months old- hard to believe! 

This little girl is FULL of energy and quite fearless! 

Her current faves:

- bubbles!! She LOVES bubbles, has learned how to blow bubbles using the wands, loves to play with the bubble "juice"

- she loves to go see the horses down the alley and hit the garage door button on the way out

- she LOVES to go outside! 

- she is a pretty good eater, most days. Favorite foods: green beans, cheese, steamed carrots, broccoli, macaroni and cheese, hot dogs, spaghetti and meatballs, bread, blueberries, apples, any of the applesauce or pureed fruits/veggie blends in the squeezable pouches, cherry tomatoes, cantaloupe  Gerber meat sticks, most steamed veggies, grilled cheese, bean and cheese quesidillas 

- she does a pretty good job of drinking out of an open cup when seated at the table

- she has just shown interest in the potty- in fact, I felt kinda weird buying a training potty off Amazon this evening- like, I can't believe that we are entering this phase of life. 

- sleep schedule: wakes up between 7:00 am- 7:30 am (sometimes later if we're lucky!), then up until nap time around 1:00 pm, then bedtime around 7:30 pm. She dropped her second nap at 17 months (I actually had to drop her nap!).

- still uses her lovie and paci to go to sleep for naps and bedtime. At school, apparently, she doesn't use her paci, but I don't have the heart yet to get rid of it (and I don't want to fight the battle right now, honestly!)

- she is very talkative! Words include: mommy, daddy, sissy, apple, please, more, bye bye, see 'ya, cheese, eat, all done, poopy, Bebe (Bella), outside, horsey.

- she likes to sing in the car (or anywhere) and makes up songs with words that she knows. It's pretty cute!

- we are actively disciplining these days, especially for when she doesn't obey the first time (like sitting in her car seat to get buckled), and when she doesn't like something that another child does and she either grabs what the other child has or has this pterodactyl- like scream that she uses. 

- she loves to play in the kitchen sink and to help me wash dishes and cook- her shirt is often soaked by the end of the time

- we regularly talk about Sister, and she is able to point to her belly and then mine when we ask "where is sister?" She will sometimes lift up my shirt and poke my belly button and laugh, like she knows something's going on inside of there....too cute!

Ok, here's some recent pics...

Figuring out how to blow bubbles

crawling, jumping, climbing all over the play equipment at Willow Bend Mall

I looked over in the shopping cart and saw her chowing down on celery right from the bag. this girl LOVES veggies!

playing with Mommy's iphone camera

special ice cream treat with Mommy and Daddy at Braums- Daddy got most of the cone :) 

I know it's almost Thanksgiving, but here's our Halloween....

This year took some convincing and some tears to get into Lucy's Halloween costume. Now, granted, she had been two days post diagnosis of the flu, so she wasn't the happiest of campers that week anyway. (Yes, she got the flu after getting her flu shot 3 weeks prior...)

So, here's our Halloween night:

She was NOT happy about getting dressed up. At. All. 

Then she realized that you got candy and got to walk around the neighborhood, and suddenly, the world  was all good.

Sweet little bee!

Complete with wings...

"Ok, fine, Mom, I'll go trick-or-treating...at least I get to shove chocolate in my face..."

Post-trick-or-treating- see all the candy and snot....

The next day, we met our playgroup friends at the Arboretum and this was the best pic we could get of them all on the pumpkins. I decided not to fight the costume battle again, thus, no little Bumblebee...

Doing the Charleston...

Mike and I try to get away for a vacation every year around our anniversary and this year we headed to Charleston, SC, based on the recommendation from a couple in our Foundation Group. I think that this was probably one of the best, most relaxing trips we've taken together in awhile. 

Major THANKS to our parents who graciously watched Lucy while we were gone- we SO appreciate both of them being able and willing to take care of her so that we could get some much needed time alone!

So, here we go....lots of pics, by the way....

Oh, and a major criteria of this trip was that we ate good food. That's the one thing I can do these days- eat! So, we took lots of pics of our food because in my heart of hearts, I'm a huge foodie. 

Waiting in Houston for our flight to SC- we both had terrible colds and were awful to sit next to, I'm sure, because we were both constantly sniffling, sneezing, blowing our noses, coughing, sucking on cough drops, etc....so sorry to those around us!

When we arrived Saturday afternoon, we drove to downtown Charleston and enjoyed a late lunch at  Poogan's Porch

I had fried chicken, mashed potatoes and greens, as well as their delicious biscuits! Sad that they didn't have mac 'n cheese (as was recommended), but it was still quite tasty!

Mike had a BLT with fried green tomatoes- he was happy about his food

We then walked around downtown Charleston....

....saw the beautiful old houses...

...walked through the pretty archways and trees...

...saw the Pineapple Fountain by the bay.....

We then drove to our condo in Isle of Palms. And what an AMAZING view we had on our porch!! I mean, stunning! Our condo was awesome- it was so cute inside, had a super-comfy bed, full kitchen, and plenty of chairs to enjoy coffee in the morning while over-looking the ocean. One of our favorite things is to crack the windows or doors open and hear the ocean waves all night, which we were able to do. 

On Sunday, we slept in and then headed to a little neighboring island to eat at Poe's Tavern. It was lovely- we sat outside, enjoyed the nice weather and had these massive hamburgers...

my burger with goat cheese dressing and bacon and blue cheese slaw...yummy!!!

Mike's with swiss cheese and BBQ sauce

Mike trying to fit his boca around this massive burger

we then strolled along the beach for about an hour and daydreamed about owning a beach home like the ones we saw....

me and my preggo belly

That night, we wanted to go to a yummy seafood restaurant  one of the local's told us about. However, there was a massive storm that cut off the power to our building for about a minute, therefore, not allowing the gate to open, so we were stuck in our condo. Ever the resourceful husband, Mike found a beach umbrella in the storage unit and we walked to the next-door bar and had a quick meal there (probably the least-favorite meal of the trip). Once we got back to the condo, someone had manually opened the gate, so we actually went to the restaurant that we had originally intended to go to and had dessert. 

On Monday, we slept in, made breakfast, and went to Drayton Hall. The plantation had many, many old, beautiful trees with moss on them (although we found out later that it's not really Spanish Moss, it's called something else, but I can't remember what it was called!)

Drayton Hall

pond outside of the Hall

We took a tour of the inside of the home- here is the original plaster ceiling

....original painted wood siding...

one of my favorite pics of the house...

hand-carved wooden mantle 

trees around Drayton Hall

where the rice paddies were (I think!)

Our last night in Charleston, we took a walk on the beach around sun-set.....beautiful and cold!

Then went back to Water's Edge restaurant  (place we wanted to go when the gate wouldn't open) and had this amazing crab dip as an appetizer

I had the almond and chive crusted grouper with goat cheese mashed potatoes and asparagus

and Mike had the shellfish pasta- both were equally amazing! We took home pecan chocolate pie and ice cream and watched as Obama was re-elected

Our last day before flying out, we went back to downtown Charleston and took a horse and buggy tour, which was actually quite good! 

We saw lots of beautiful houses.....

One of my favorite pics of the houses

We had a really great trip and it was hard to come back, but we did miss our sweet Lucy!