Happy New Year!!

It's 2014!

Normally I am so ready to get a near year going and under our belt. But I can honestly say with out a question in my head that 2013 was the BEST year of my life so far.

We spent the first few months of 2013 getting ready for our bundle of joy and just enjoying being super pregnant! I loved it!

I finished up my last day at The Dessert Tray in February and said goodbye to my very favorite women on the planet (and Mark!)! I loved working there even while 9 months pregnant!

March 19th, we welcomed our baby girl into the world! She was born at 5:02 am and we have been obsessed ever since!

 

She was born at 39 weeks and 3 days and weighed 7 pounds 4 oz. She was entirely perfect and gorgeous! We are both so smitten and can't get enough of her little self! 

Most of our year consisted of taking a million pictures of Em, flying with Em for the first time (and 2nd, 3rd, and 4th) , going home several times, and having so many snuggles!

In October, grandpa Max passed away. That basically sucked. He was amazing and I still think about him every day. I get reminders of him all of the time. In Costco, while cooking dinner, while playing the piano, while snuggling our baby.

His funeral was beautiful and heart wrenching and funny. We still miss him.

 

All gorgeous pictures are credited to JLD Photography.

 

That was definitely the hardest part of 2013. But from hard things came many beautiful things. Just like grandpa would have wanted. How funny.

 

We celebrated Emilia's first Christmas in Idaho with our family, but that will be a whole other post!

 

2013 was really just the best year I can ever remember. There were definitely some challenging moments: colic,  more than a few sleepless nights, and missing family. But there were so many amazing moments this year! I know that every year is just going to get more and more amazing with my little family by my side!

 

 

 

I hope that everyone had an amazing Christmas and New Year and that your 2014 is just as amazing!

9 months... holy crap

Emilia Grace is 9 months old tomorrow morning, just after 5 am. That is really hard for me to believe! Here are some tid bits about our little love:

-Her top two teeth are coming in right now! The one on her right has already broken through the gum and is currently a sharp little white nugget! The second is shortly behind it!
- She is a speed demon and loves to explore independently! She will explore around the house and then look for me to make sure I am close!
-After she explores, she likes to poke her head around the couch and catch your eye. She bursts into a HUGE smile and starts crawling towards me super fast! 
- She loves to play the piano pedals! If I am playing the piano, no matter what, she is right there under me playing all three pedals! She also will randomly play them during the day when she is exploring!
-She is still madly in love with her daddy! She gets so excited when he calls us at lunch, or when he walks in the door at night. He gets huge smiles and big old hugs! He loves it!
- She is still nursing every 3-4 hours during the day and on a good night every 5-6 hours. She sometimes likes to talk with her mouth full. It is kind of naughty behavior, but pretty darn cute!
-She is pretty adventurous when it comes to food! She likes just about anything! Sliced avocado, sweet potatoes, toast, simple pasta, you name it!
- She has been doing this thing lately where she acts like she wants a big kiss. She will come at you with her mouth wide open and at the last second she will stick your nose in her mouth! It's pretty slobbery and pretty hilarious!
- When it's time for her to go to bed, after I have nursed her, we rock in the rocking chair for a few minutes to get the air out. She wraps one hand around my neck and the other holds one of my hands. We sit like this and just rock. One of my favorite things about our day.
-She experienced her first snow fall about a week and a half ago! She was a little suspicious of it and VERY curious!
-We put up our Christmas lights a few weeks ago and she loves looking at all of the twinkly lights!
-Her eyes are currently a mix of hazel and grey. Unless you go outside. Or she wears blue. Or looks at anything green.

I  fall more and more in love with this sweet and spicy little girl every single day. She is my side kick and pushing force!

On Friday ( December 20th) she will be 39 weeks and 3 days old. Which is exactly when she came out. I can't believe it. It's hard to believe that time has really passed that quickly! The day that I gave birth to her was the most magical and spiritual day I have ever experienced.

And NEXT WEEK is her very first CHRISTMAS!! I am so excited to celebrate her first Christmas, especially in Idaho with my husband and my parents! Going to be an amazing time!

First Thanksgiving!

This is late (of course) but we celebrated Em's first Thanksgiving! We didn't make nearly as much food as we normally do (it's only the three of us!) but we ate a feast!

We pulled out and washed all of Grandma Zola's black china and made lots of food. I didn't really take any good pictures of the food, but just know that it was SOOO good.

Big bird. Amazing stuffing. Home made rolls. Mashed potatoes with half and half and BACON FAT. Yes. Green beans and bacon. And more bacon fat! Pumpkin pie. Tons of gravy that even had a little bit of... YES bacon fat!

( The weird thing is that I lost weight over Thanksgiving! Think maybe there is a connection between bacon fat and weight loss?! A girl can dream right. )

 

Our little family. Well it would have been if Em had looked in the Camera and not at my face! All 8 times we tried to take this picture around her high chair! Haha

 

My plate!

 

Up until Thanksgiving, Em had been on a vegetarian only diet. I wanted to get the go ahead from her pediatrician to give her a little bit of meat. She loved it! We still don't give her red meat or anything too out there, but she did love the turkey!

 

 



And this is our little family once we (all three of us!) stuffed ourselves full of food! We called this look Turkey stoned!

Eight months!

*I first wrote this post like two weeks ago, but just have been super busy! So I am FINALLY finishing this and putting it up!

Our little baby is eight months old now! I can't hardly believe it! I feel like I need to pinch myself because it seems pretty unreal that she is that old already. Although, on the other hand, it's hard to remember a time when she wasn't a part of our lives!

Here are some things about our girl...

- She is ALL over the place! She loves crawling all over the house and is getting pretty fast! She loves peaking around the couch and catching your eye, then smiling a huge old grin!
-Her 2 bottom teeth are all of the way in and pretty much the cutest thing I have ever seen in my entire life! When she smiles and I see those little teeth, I just die!!


*Look closely and you can see the adorable two little teeth in her smile! She is so cute it kills me! She is also using my baby blanket!

-She pulled herself up the other day, right in front of Hy and I! I have a little wooden box that my dad made me in high school, and she just grabbed it and stood right up! We are in trouble now!
-She chatterboxes a bunch now! We call our dogs the "DogDogs" to Em and you will see her searching for them at different times during the day. She loves it when they pop their heads around the corner and it makes her burst into smiles and giggles. She even says something that sounds a lot like dogdog or rue rue.
-I put her in the shower with me for the very first time the other day and SHE HATED IT! She cried the entire time and acted like it was total torture! Definitely haven't tried that again!
- She is getting pretty close to being able to say "dada" ! When she says it, her daddy just melts. It's pretty sweet.
*Since I first wrote this, she says "dada" all of the time now!
- She just had an appointment with her new pediatrician and we really liked her! She was very sweet and our opinions pretty much mirrored each other, which to me is pretty important. She congratulated me on having such a successful breast feeding relationship and said that she hoped that we were able to continue on. I loved hearing that. Our breastfeeding relationship is so incredibly important to me. Her latest stats are:

Head: 17 inches- 75th %

Weight: 16 lbs and 13 oz - 25th %

Height: 27 inches- 50th %

Our pediatrician said that she looked gorgeous and perfectly healthy. She said that her cognitive function was fantastic and that she looked like she was ready to take off running!

-Hy and I take Em out every where. Any place that either of us go, she is always right with us. We love to eat out at as a family. From the beginning we felt like it was very important to us to have Emilia exposed to social settings, and we feel like she does really well at restaurants because of this.

*This is at one of our favorite breakfast places Biscuits.

-We have new play date friends and she chews on toys and mostly stares at the people in the room! I hear all of the time that she is such an old soul and has to check everyone out before she decides if she likes you or not! That makes me feel pretty special that she likes me so much!
-We are still breastfeeding like champs and only have 3 and 1/2 months left until we hit the 12 month mark! So proud of that! I know I've mentioned it before, but our breastfeeding relationship is so incredibly important to me (and her) and I will do my best to carry on with that until we decide we are done!

Sad Times...

I haven't blogged in a while and this time it is for a very legitimate reason. We lost my grandpa. He had been pretty sick for quite a while, and he passed away peacefully on October 15th at 5 am. Thursday night Hy, myself, and the baby girl, flew into Las Vegas airport and then proceeded to drive to Hurricane. We stayed at my parent's house along with my siblings and their spouses. The viewing was Sunday night at 5 pm in Cedar City and it was really great. The photograph montage with music was totally gorgeous and they had the candy displays that I had suggested.

He looked exactly like himself and at the same time nothing like himself. I struggled through out the week, but didn't really lose my stuff until I saw him at the mortuary. Something pretty hard and sweet happened there as well.

The month before he passed, Em and I had gone to visit my family and spent a few hours with my grandparents. Miss Em is kind of shy at first and takes a little time to warm up to new people. BUt with my grandpa it was INSTANT SMILES and she reached for him INSTANTLY.  It was pretty adorable.

The first thing she did as Hy held her and walked up to his casket, was bend herself right in half and reach hard for him. That was hard for us.

It was really wonderful getting to see a lot of family that we hardly ever see, and it was wonderful introducing them to Miss Emilia for the first time. That was pretty special. And she especially loved my cousin Jenny.

The service was the next day, Monday, at 11 am and it was really beautiful and pretty funny. Some parts were pretty much agony and some parts just so him: straight to the point and funny.

The graveyard service was gorgeous. It was a bright and sunny fall day and the colors couldn't have been more beautiful. They did a full military service with a gun salute, flag folding and presentation, and playing of Taps.

After that, we headed back to the church for a luncheon. The night before I had made German chocolate cupcakes which was his absolute favorite cake that my mom made him every single year for his birthday (probably since before I was alive). That cake is so him to me, and I felt like we couldn't have a celebration of his life with out getting all sugared up on German chocolate.

I just want to put a few of the last pictures that I have of him. They are so very special to me because it was the last time I saw him alive. And it was the last time Emilia did as well.

I could write about what he meant to me, but the truth is that he meant the world... and how do you write about that? One of the things that hit me hardest was the fact that he wouldn't get to know the children we don't have yet. But I have to think that he already does and I have to believe that he is up in Heaven some where getting ready to shoot us down some more babies at a moments notice. The thought of him tending our future children makes me pretty darn happy.