Swimming

This morning was the first of our Parent-Toddler swim class.  Lucy absolutely loved it!  She had so much fun splashing (see photo below!) and playing in the water.  She wasn't afraid at all.  We think this will be good training for Hilton Head!

Happy Birthday Nuna!

Happy birthday to my amazing mother.

 

I hope to someday become as good as a friend to Lucy as you have become to me.

We love you so much!

 

 

Lucy's bad hair day

Lucy woke up Friday morning with a bad hair day. I thought I'd share some photos of our little "shaggy dog"



She paired the hair style with a smile :)

Dear Lucy - 10 months

Dear Lucy,

Today you are 10 months old!  You are an incredible little girl who amazes us everyday with your growth as a person.  You are such a sweetheart who likes giving hugs and kisses.

You have definitely been active lately.  You can easily pull yourself up alongside furniture, toys, and people's legs!  You can now walk along the ottoman in the living room too.  I think it is safe to say that you have mastered crawling and are ready for the next step(s).  You love to crawl around and explore.  You often go to the lower shelf by the kitchen (the brightly-colored Pepsi cans catch your eye) and the dog food bowls.  Most of all, you love making a dash for your Mama's or my feet whenever we enter the room.  You have even started following us when we leave the room.

You've had a fun last month.  A few weeks ago, you met your cousins, Jacob and Benjamin, for the first time.  You were very interested in them!  Before we know it, the three of you will be running around playing. Last week, your Mama had most of the week off of work.  You were able to spend a lot of time with her, and I know she cherished getting to see you even more!  I heard you were a good helper.  Plus you went to Nana and Papa's for a day last week, and of course, had fun playing over there.

We talk about how you come up with new faces or sounds that always make us smile.  (We usually like to blame Papa Ring for teaching them to you!)  Well, recently you have a new one.  While you look mad when you make this face, it usually is immediately followed by your great smile.  Sometimes we see this face after we ask you to please stop feeding all your food to the dogs!

Your Mom and I love you so, so much.  We are incredibly blessed to have you in our lives.  I absolutely love seeing your face light up when I come home from work.  You are so special to me.

Love always,

Dad

My Favorite Photo...

A few birthday's back we scanned all of Susan's old photos and organized them for her. When going through them, I found this gem:

That's Kyle, in the tube socks, neon graffiti shorts, with the bowl-cut hairstyle. He's lifting up his sister Kelly, so she can see. My guess is that she still couldn't see anything, but the photo really highlights the love between siblings. Looks like something my brother would've done for my sister or I... OK, maybe more like something he would've done for my sister :)

When you can only pick one...

Kyle, Lucy and I went to get Lucy's photos taken. One of the things I really want to do as a mother, is a get few professional photos from a child's first few years. Remember these? (and yes, that's the same white chair; CRAZY how fast the chairs shrink!)

We're on a super strict budget, so we could only pick one picture this time.

Luckily (or unluckily for the photographer), Lucy is going through a "stranger danger" phase, so it's not like there were hundreds of good ones to choose from this time. The photographer, Kyle, and I all picked a different "favorite" shot. I'm curious, which picture would you have chosen?

Photo #1

Photo #2



Photo #3


 

Photo #4

Photo #5

 

Photo #6

Meet Benjamin and Jacob!

I have the world’s cutest niece and nephews. This weekend Lucy and I met Benjamin and Jacob. They are the happiest little babies. They’re both pretty chill guys!

 

Here’s Lucy meeting them for the first time:

 

And here is Jacob: This guy is absolutely precious. Jacob and I enjoy our staring contests and he likes to hold my finger with his super long fingers!

 

And here is Benjamin: He’s a scrappy little guy. He melts your heart with his beautiful blue eyes. But be careful, because this guy likes to squirm! He definitely wanted me walking when being held too. I think he was interested in seeing everything going on!

 

Nana and Papa with their grandchildren:

 

It was so great to meet you Benjamin and Jacob! Your Auntie Chel loves you both so much!

Dear Lucy - 9 Months

Dear Lucy,

 

Tomorrow you turn nine months old! Another month older and again you have found a way to amaze me even more. You have started not only crawling, but climbing as well. You’ve managed to pull yourself up to standing. We’re pretty sure that your first word is “mama”, though you haven’t learned to associate the word with me. (But I’m counting it anyways).

 

Daddy and Nuna took you to your 9 month check up today. You weigh exactly 20 pounds and are 27” tall. You are in the 25^th percentile for height, 75^th percentile for weight and 96^th percentile for head size. We like to joke that we have a “short, fat baby with a big head”. Anyway they quantify it, you are 100% perfect to me.

 

You have managed to stay healthy and save the doctor appointments for regular checkups only (thank you for that). Anytime you’re under the weather and mama and daddy have to work, we drop you off at Nana’s and Papa’s. You still love to be cuddled and held.

I can’t believe how much you’ve grown in just 9 months. I love you so much!

I’ll always love you anyway,

Your mama

Sharing

Lucy has a lot of very fun toys.  They are colorful, interactive, educational, light up, play music, talk, make cool noises, etc.  She loves her toys and is getting so good at figuring them out.

Reggie also has a lot of toys.  Two baskets full of them.  Most have Santa hats (Christmas dog toys are very cheap the week after Christmas!) and some are missing limbs, but he loves all of his toys.  If he brings you a toy to play with and you don't want to play at that moment, then he'll simply drop that toy and go look through his basket for a toy he thinks you will want to play with.

Last night Lucy and Reggie shared a "toy".  As we are learning, many times it is more fun to play with things that aren't actually toys.  (This concept also applies to eating... see Michelle's previous post on the joys of eating paper.)  The two of them went back and forth stealing this precious empty water bottle from each other.  After laughing at this exchange for a while, I decided to take many pictures.  In hindsight, one simple video would have told the story.  Oh well.

Happy Birthday Michelle!

Happy Birthday to an absolutely amazing wife, mother, and blogger.

Life Through a Christmas Tree

Since my last post was “Life through a lens”, it's only fitting to title this post “Life through a Christmas tree”.

Everyone has their Christmas favorites.

I learned this year (thanks to Kelly) that my mother’s fondest memory of her mother was at Christmas. Her mother would take her to downtown Chicago, to State street, to see the Christmas decorations in all of the windows, and to see Santa.

My favorite part of Christmas has to be my Christmas tree. Kyle bought me our tree a few years ago, and it’s perfect. The only thing better than the tree is all of the memories that go on the tree.

The star that I have isn’t the prettiest star, but it was from my dad’s parent’s Christmas tree. I’m a sucker for family heirlooms (heirlooms = hand-me-downs) J

Every year since I was born, my maternal grandmother would buy me a Christmas ornament and write my name and the year on it. The thing is, my grandmother always paid a lot of attention to my latest fad or craze...  
*Little known secret about me: as a child I LOVED teddy bears (hey don’t laugh).

When I started playing piano, grandma found me an ornament of a teddy bear playing the piano; when I played basketball she found a teddy bear playing basketball. Get the picture??

This one must be when I decided to join band and played the drums. Drumming was a short-lived career (read:I sucked)

When grandma passed away, my mom would buy me an ornament every year (though not quite as creative as my grandmother’s). My aunt DJ started to get us annual ornaments as well; this year she gave us each one that my cousin made. Hopefully these artistic creations will become a future tradition). BTW, you should check out her etsy site: http://www.etsy.com/shop/yoshcreative

Ever since Kyle and I started dating, he would buy me ornaments with the year on them and put a photo of us in them. See sample below:

As I took down the Christmas tree tonight, I looked at the ornament that Kyle gave me each year, and it made me smile. Such wonderful memories. I married the best guy ever.

So there you have it, my past and present all on my Christmas tree.

As for the future, I choose this ornament:

I received it at my good friend, Hannah’s Christmas party. I hope that this Christmas gathering becomes a tradition, because Hannah and her bf Whitney, have become two of mine and Kyle’s closest friends. Definitely our favorite couple in the whole world to hangout with (sorry to all the other couples out there, but these two are really just that cool. Don't believe me? check out Hannah’s blog here: hannahshaner.com) Hopefully in 2032 I'm hanging 20 of these on our tree!

Well, the Christmas tree is all packed up. I’m excited to take out all of the ornaments & hang the star again next year; and reminisce about all the activities and obsessions of my childhood, remember my grandmothers, and remind myself how lucky I am to have such amazing people in my life.

Life Through a Lens... (The kind that you turn)

I’ve had a whole week off of work… A WHOLE WEEK! (Well minus the four hours that I went in today... There was a slight metallurgy issue and my metallurgist is in California, therefore I had to go in and you know, do as a metallurgist does).

Anyhow, back to my original point, I’ve already had a whole week off of work, and I don’t have to go back until Wednesday (unlessI have to do more metallurgist shenanigans on Monday. Hopefully, by switching from Silicon Carbide to Ferrosilicon, our sulfur in the holding furnace is less than 0.015% and I can just keep enjoying this time off).

Oh yeah, my point. I’ve had a week off, and my dad received a new camera for Christmas, therefore, by the laws of hand-me-downs, I’ve been using his old camera. So, here I give you, my week through the lens of a D90 (with a few iphoners mixed in).

Does taking photos of birds with a lens that you have to turn put me into the "photographer" category, or is it like saying I'm a "runner" because I ran 2 miles on a fancy treadmill?

The week started with Lucy staying home from daycare on Friday. “Staying home” = “Getting to spend the day at Nana and Papa’s”. I worry that if I keep sending Lucy to Nana and Papa’s whenever she’s sick, that she’s going to catch on and start faking a fever. Do babies know how to fake a fever? Can I fever be faked? Hmmm… Well, while playing hooky, Papa Ring taught Lucy how to make a motor boat type sound. I’ll have kyle post a video of it, but I’m sure you can probably hear it through this photo:

Now, when Lucy disagrees with something, or is bored, she busts out this new sound. Nice.



I recieved a nice Starbucks gift card, so we made a few trips to my favorite locale

We spent a few days with the Kelly and Ring families. Lucy has two "uncle David's". So we've been trying to come up with a new name for Kyle's brother. So far, nothing has stuck, so he's still "uncle David" for now.

Lucy with Uncle X

 We did get a chance to see my parents for a day.

Lucy loves her Papa

Lucy had to get the second half of her flu shot and has been running a fever ever since. All that she's wanted to do is snuggle and sleep. So here's Lucy and I the last two days:

 

The fever has made her a bit cranky, we've had a few of these moments:



This is Lucy's "Mom, I'm mad, please put down the camera and pick me up" face.

 Overall, she's still a fairly happy baby...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 Oh, and Kyle got Lasik. So he's been rocking these new shades all day: