We Wish you a Merry Christmas & A Happy New Year

Well we made it to 2013!

I feel like 2012 was a blur of craziness getting us here, but we had an amazing year. The high point obviously being adding Isabella to the family.

Christmas was good! We traveled to Cincinnati,  the girls (mainly Addiston) fully embraced the opening presents excitement! pictures:









Christmas eve was spent at my grandmother's house Christmas day at my parents. Jared's parents usually come down the week between Christmas and New Years but his Dad got sick so they opted to skip Christmas this year.




We got a picture of my whole family, I know we're huge!




We did all of the traditional holiday festivities. Cinnamon roll breakfast, lights at opry hotel, and Addiston even got to play with a little bit of snow-and when I say little-bit I mean about the size of her palm and then it melted! Oh and ya know, my oldest brother joined the next generation!






Sorry Tim-I was dared!

New Years was rung in at home with Chinese food and "It's a Wonderful Life" The girls stayed up and did surprisingly well. We pretended 11pm was midnight since we're both from Eastern time zone and watched the ball drop live.

We had the traditional Kielbasa and Saurkraut on New Years Day accompanied by black eyed peas since we live in the south now.

Life has finally settled down, we've put the luggage away till Easter and are in the process of getting the house back in order and catching up on laundry. Both of which were put on hiatus when I started a small fire in the kitchen last night and got to fulfill my lifelong dream of using a fire extinguisher. For those of you who haven't gotten the thrill, the ten seconds of blast aren't worth the 6+ hours of white powder clean up!!

In other news Isabella has started eating cereal and by eat I mean make a funny face when it enters her mouth and then spits it out.


And Yes! Her bib does say "my mom is hotter than your mom"

Fall softly

Day before yesterday the little girl and I were playing in the living room, reading board books, waving to each other across the coffee table when she took off towards her favorite toy (Mr. Giraffe) she was chewing on different parts of the brightly colored contraption when the trash can caught her eye.



As much as I hate to admit it she loves the trash can. It's tall and shiny, and I'm pretty sure she thinks it's a treasure chest. I mean the only things she ever notices that we put in it are things she wants, half melted puff's, random bits of paper she finds on the floor and puts in her mouth, empty food jars. She can barely reach the rim and Jared and I are always pulling her off of it scared that she'll pull it over and sure enough after weeks of attempting to get her to head our stern voices and avoid the "icky gross" it happened right before my eyes, at arms reach, she leaned back and the trash can came with her, or more, on top of her. Her head hit the transition between the ceramic tile of the kitchen and the warn carpet of the living room. Her right arm pinned under the now empty, stainless steel monstrosity.

She cried, refused a pacifier, knowing it would calm her down, and hey I can relate with just wanting to cry sometimes, so I let her cry a while. She has a little bump on the back of her head and welcomed the extra cuddle time she got this afternoon. I cursed the tile and the metal transition that dented my sweet little girl. We've joked about wrapping her in bubble wrap, putting her in a plastic bubble so that she wouldn't get hurt when she gets too close to the steps, or attempts to eat the coffee table.



But you can’t cushion your kids. You can’t send them into the world bubble-wrapped and helmeted even though you want to. You can’t carpet their universe, hoping their falls will always land softly. You love and let go and thank the modern world of advancements in safety for airbags and outlet covers, baby gates and bike helmets. And when our kids fall—and they will—you scoop them and hold them and tell them it’s okay.



There will be times when my patience is shot and I'm all hey-look-at-the-crazy-mom-who-can't-keep-it-together but there are moments when fessing up about the challenges of parenthood are good. Moments where I'll come here and write that there've been lots of whining, babies who won't sleep, a mama who's popping Oreo's and can't keep up with the laundry. And it feels good in that whole everyone relates kind of way. And it's kind of cool and in-with-the-times to be honest and lay some good self-deprecating parenthood admissions on the table because this generation is realizing it's good to be free and honest and, in doing so, we're going somewhere good with it.



Have a fabulous day! And if you fall this week, may you fall softly!

New Bird

So Addiston had her two month Doctor's appointment yesterday and like idiots we always dress her in cute little outfits just to strip her down to "a clean dry diaper" as soon as we're taken back to the exam room. They weighed and measured her then took us back to her room. I asked the nurse if I could re-dress her, (because in true doctor's office fashion the whole building was freezing) and she said that I would have to wait for the doctor to see her, just to wrap her in a blanket. I went over to the diaper bag to grab one and when I opened it there was nothing but a pair of size 1 shoes, a changing pad and my nursing cover.

Since we had gone out of town I emptied the diaper bag to wash all the stuff that had been used. The nursing cover had to suffice. It was rather small to wrap her up properly so Jared held her while we waited on the doc, who as soon as she entered the room commented, "oo what a pretty blanket," leading me to have to explain that it actually wasn't a blanket and I was hauling around a huge empty diaper bag. She had a nice chuckle, applauded our improvisation, and went abut her business.

Addy checks out fine, in the 75% for both height and weight.

To add to the excitement and anxiety of Addiston now sleeping in her nursery this morning around six she started to stir. I knew it was my turn to go get her but wasn't exactly conscious enough to and she wasn't being fussy more just playing and squirming around so I gave her a few minutes. Well come 6:30 she still wasn't fussy but sounded a bit less content so I got up, took a second to adjust to being vertical and walked across the hall to find...

A naked baby. No we did not put her to bed that way. She managed to squirm her way out of her night gown leaving it nicely swaddled at the foot of her bed!

There's never a dull moment with a newborn! But if this houdini like undressing in her sleep becomes habit we're going to have to swap out all her nightgowns for footie pj's!
Oh and one more thing,

Great grandma Byler, her daddy's mom's mom! A wonderful woman who has 14 great-grandchildren now! And, "bakes the best bread in the whole wide world" ;)

Here we go...

Wow so it seems like time has flown by since our little miracle arrived! She will be six weeks old tomorrow and I can't beleive how much she has grown and changed already.



She's in a pretty consistent routine now, waking up between seven and eight and staying awake and playful till eleven and noon. she usually naps off and on throughout the afternoon till daddy gets home and she wakes up again to play with him! She gets her bath at nine then eats and goes to bed. (evening routine is a must and a miracle) It only took 3 days of routine for her to get it and now our evening are much more predictable! She knows that right after her bath she gets fed and if we take to long putting lotion and her nightgown on she starts to fuss till she gets food, it's almost comical! But the bedtime routine has been a wonderful addition to her schedule and makes putting her to sleep much easier!

The newest introduction to her routine came in the middle of the night tuesday, when Jared fed her, her first bottle.



I appreciate my longer than three hour stretch of sleep but to be honest I felt a little heartbroken that she didn't need me for something, while at the same time liberated because woah is it stressful being tethered to her 24/7!

In other news: a tip to other parents out there, don't place the diaper genie next to the hamper... your husband will mistake one for the other in the middle of the night and you will be cleaning diaper gel out of your washer and dryer for weeks to come!


She started making all sorts of new noises this week, ooo and ahh are now in her vocabulary and I swear she said yeah the other day, it was accompanied by a head-nod!