Catching up!!!

Well...since my last update, Avaree has mastered even more things. She now sticks her tongue out for no apparent reason, sits up all by herself, drinks water from a sippy cup, eats pureed carrots like they are candy, and continues to be the sweetest baby EVER! :)

It was pretty hard going back to school after spring break, but I finally stopped crying after a couple of days, and we are soooo blessed to have Mrs. Donna! She's amazing and Avaree loves her!!! (So does Mama!!)

This weekend, I got to be a part of a very special day for a very special person. My sweet friend Jamie (who was the most beautiful bride ever) got married to the Mr. Daniel Dekat and it was soooo nice to spend some time with the girls and just enjoy Jamie's special weekend! She was the most CALM bride you have ever seen! :) Mama got to put on a pretty dress, get her hair done, put on some makeup, visite with sweet friends, dance with her husband and feel like a real human again! Then I got to come home, kiss my sweet baby girl (who was perfectly happy and content) and crawl into bed. It was refreshingly wonderfull. One of my new goals is to try to balance my life better. I think it would be easier for me if I didn't have to leave her during the day, but alas, I still have to make time for myself, my husband and my sweet friends!!!

There was even more good news floating around this weekend and I can't WAIT to share... :)

Coming up this week: Brandon's 29th birthday and Avaree's first Easter!!! Stay tuned for pics!

Left: Ave now thinks she is too big to lay down like a baby during her bath! ha! :) Right: Love that smile!

Our morning ritual... :)

Trying squash for the first time!! She really likes it now!

DRINKING OUT OF A SIPPY CUP AT SIX MONTHS...wow!

In her high chair for the first time! (Thank you, G-Pops and Gigi!)

I love carrots!!! Mmm...

A classic Avaree face... :)

Green Beans and GROWING up...

Yesterday was Avaree's 6-month well-baby visit and here are her stats:
--Weight: 17 lbs, 7 oz (75-90%)
--Height: 27 inches (95-97%)
--Head 17 inches (75-90%)
She received an A+ on her physical exam and development too! Poor baby had to get 4 shots, but after a little TLC and Tylenol she was good as new! :)

This was a milestone appointment for several reasons. First, Ave is almost a half a year old and the doctor told me that next time she sees her (and here's hoping that she doesn't have to see her again until her next well-baby visit) she will have tried all of the foods available to her now (fruits, veggies, multi-grain cereal, and starting on meats) and will be crawling with the possibility of walking! OH MY GOODNESS...my baby will do all of these things in the next three months? Maybe it is because I have been home this week, but it seems like Avaree has grown and changed soooo much in just a few short days! She has started SCOOTING and is a busy little bee!!!

Yesterday, she had her first taste of (pureed) solids...green beans! We started with a veggie first (and an unsweet one at that). Her Daddy was soooo pleased. (hehe...) If you know Brandon very well, you know that he despises green beans (their smell, their taste, their texture, etc.) I can just open a can in the kitchen and he'll know it. Anyway...Avaree dove right in with moments of pleased and displeased facial expressions, but she ate about a 1/4 of a jar. The funniest part was Brandon's face. He wouldn't even pick Avaree up from her bumbo...he said he still smelled them!! TOOO FUNNY! I was able to get pictures of Avaree, but not Brandon. You just have to take my word on how funny it was! :) So...we're going to stay with cereal and green beans for a few more days and then introduce something else new!! (Probably squash!!) The new adventures have begun! The doctor told me that right now Avaree should start getting about 70% of her caloric intake from me, and the rest from her solid foods; however, by 9 months, that should be the opposite. This is very bittersweet for Mama!!! She's just grown up sooooo fast!

Enjoy the pictures and thank you for keeping up with our little family. Avaree is so blessed to be loved by so many.

In bed with Mama this morning. Her jammies say: "Mommy WHALEY loves me!" :) I must say that she slept ELEVEN hours last night and never made a peep! I was so proud of her!

Yummy Green Beans...hehe :)

" I want you ball...but you are a little out of my reach. Hmm...I know, I'll scoot over and get you."

"I got you, ball!" :)

We heart spring break!!!

All dressed up and ready to go see Daddy at work!!!

We had visitors!!! Ave got to visit with Karrington, Kennedee, shea shea and Uncle Scott! We also had a wonderful visit with G-Pops!!!

This is what we did every morning of the break! Since the time change, Avaree has been sleeping 10-11 hours every night with just one wake up in between!! (YAYYYY!) So around 7:30 every morning, I would go get her and put her in bed with me!!! I fed her and then we would talk and play for at least an hour before we did anything else. It was pure joy, especially on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings when Daddy got to be with us too!!! :)

Avaree got to play with all of her toys at home!!! She loved being home (and so did I!). :)

We got to walk outside in the sunshine every now and then! It was really windy this week, but ever so often, it would die down and we enjoyed the vitamin D!!! :)

Why do we love spring break? We got to relax with DADDY! :) This is the cutest picture!

Monday was Brandon and I's anniversary, but he had to work. So...on Tuesday, Bran, Ave and I went to Olive Garden for lunch! Mema and Paw Paw had given us a gift card for Christmas and we were saving it for a special occasion!! :) (Thank you!!) So...this is what our anniversary lunch looked like: Brandon and Ave on one side (part of the time)....and Mama and the elephant on the other! :) hehe... We wouldn't change our lives for anything in the world, but we did laugh about how things had changed! :) It seems like we have lived a lifetime in just two short years! :)

We looooooove Spring Break!!!!

Mama has looooooved being home with Avaree this week. It has been just a little taste of heaven and it will be soooo hard (on both of us, I think) to get back into our school routine. It will be a long haul until summer! (But, I am very thankful that I will get to be off this summer with my baby girl! This will be my first summer off since my sophomore year of high school; AND I will get to spend it with my favorite!)

A lot happened in Avaree's little world this week:

--She started wearing size THREE diapers! (tear!!)

--She started taking a PACIFIER! (She was gnawing so hard on her little hand that she made her tongue bleed and bruised her hand; so I (yet again) put the paci in her mouth and this time she took it!)

--She can sit up (pretty well) without support!!! She does lean toward her feet a little though! :)

--She went on her first real shopping trip (to somewhere other than Target, ha!). We went to the Banana Republic outlet to spend Mama's birthday gift certificates (Yes, I know that was six months ago, ha!)! She was sooooo good and clearly has good taste in clothing stores, hehe! We might have also stopped at Baby Gap and Carter's Outlets too. :) We found Avaree the sweetest Easter dress...can't wait!

Spring Break has gone by sooo fast and I still have many, many things to check off of my to-do list, but my most important item on the to-do list is sleeping soundly, so I am off to grade more research papers! Thank you, Lord, for my sweet, healthy, precious baby girl.

We go this afternoon for Avaree's 6-month well-baby visit, so stay tuned for her latest stats! Love to all!

Two years and counting...

Two years ago today....Mama married Daddy. :)

Now... a couple years of seminary, three colonoscopies, a funeral, several weddings, two apartments and a house, a few trips to the emergency room, a few different jobs, two cats, a baby, a million prayers, and a lot of love later... I love him even more than the day I said "I do."

A few more favorites... :)

love mama.

my favorite. :)

Ave's thinkin' face!

Beautiful.

I was singing one of our little songs to her. :)

Can you believe that Kerri does not do this for a living? She's amazing. I am so thrilled with these pictures.

In one week from today, my baby will be six months old. That is half a year. It feels like she was born yesterday. wow. Looking forward to spending the whole week with her and getting to spend time with Daddy too.... yay for Spring Break! :)

beautiful baby girl... :)

My sweet and talented friend, Kerri (otherwise known as Dex's mama), came over the other day to take some pictures of Avaree for me! It was our first day of sunshine in a while and it was a perfect afternoon for a trip to the park! :) I am in awe of these pictures because I think each one capture's something different about Avaree's blossoming little personality! She is so beautiful. Here is a sneak peak of some of the pictures! Captions are not even needed...enjoy! :)

(Thank you, Kerri!!!!)

Rolling over in my bed!!!

This video will make it clear (as if it wasn't clear before) that Avaree is half mine. :) Every time she sees the camera, she clams up! (This is clearly not a trait that she gets from her Daddy!) Alas, she eventually does roll over in this video. Just wait for it: it's worth it! :)

adventures and antibiotics...

Avaree can now roll over from front to back and from back to front! This is how I found her after a nap this morning! :)
I'm the happiest sick baby in the whole wide world! :)

"Mama...."

"I love to play in my crib while Mommy gets the bath ready!!"

We put Ave back in her cradle and put it in our room so that we could listen to her breathe when she was really sick. Well, she's a little smarter (and a little bigger) now and she just decided that she would try to crawl her way out! ha! She didn't, obviously, but b/c it was elevated, she was just so cute trying! :) (P.S. No...she didn't stay there.)

"I love my Daddy!!!"

Cooking with Daddy! I told Brandon that this is the closest he will get to understanding what it feels like to be pregant, except he still needed to add a few pounds to that load! :) Ave loved it!

Now that Ave can roll and move around in her crib, she is just all smiles when I come in and perfectly content to play. But, as soon as she sees me, (my heart melts) and she beams a beautiful smile! :)

"Bounce, bounce, bounce!"

Ave's new "jumping jenny." She loves it b/c she can bounce and turn herself around!! :)

Woh--what a week we have had! Poor Avaree has been congested for 2.5 weeks now and last Sunday she started running a fever. So, Brandon stayed home with her on Monday and I went to work. When I walked in the door, Brandon handed the baby to me and he went to work. I quickly decided that I was taking her back to the doctor (for the third time). I couldn't get an appointment until Tuesday morning, so I just loved on her and decided that I would stay home the next day to take her to the doctor. Well...to make things more complicated, I woke up that mroning with an even more extremely sore throat (I had had this for a few days). So, Daddy stayed with Avaree and I went to the doctor at 8am . The doctor told me that I had pharangytis and just needed more meds and to go to bed! (right.) A couple of hours later, we finally get to Avaree's appointment and learn that she has an earache. Poor baby! I had been suctioning and using saline in her nose for a week trying to keep it out of her ears, but alas, it was there. She got more antibiotic. Meanwhile, that night we both get up with Avaree when her fever spikes and get her back to sleep with a lower temp around 4am. At this point, Brandon has moved to the guest room and I'm in our room (trying to keep us from giving the sore throat back and forth to each other like we have been) and I wake up at 6am vomitting bright green. I continued this until I decided to wake brandon up and this went on until about 10:30 am. Poor thing, he was trying to keep himself and Ave away from me and I was screaming for him every time I threw up. He eventually looked some of my symptoms up on the internet and decided that we needed to go to the emergency room. (P.S. I did call my doctor and did not get a return call from the nurse until we were already at the hospital, 5 hours later.) Aunt LaLa met us at Plano Presby and picked up Avaree and took her back home. (Thank you, Lauren and Alise for taking care of her!!!) It turned out that I had been vomitting bile and that my throat infection had leaked into my intestine and caused inflammation and an infection. After x-rays, a few blood tests, some morphine (did I mention that it hurt?) and nausea medicine, they sent me home. I went straight to bed, the girls went back to work and my Mom got here (Thanks, Mom, for all of your help!) just in time for Brandon to leave for work! It was a bit of a nightmare and we thought that we were on the mend until Saturday when Brandon called me from work with similar syptoms. He came home and I put him to bed with some of my nausea medicine and even though he had a fever, chills and some of the other symptoms, he never got worse. Thank you, Lord!!! So...it's Sunday afternoon and Ave is asleep, Brandon is watching sports, I am writing a blog...and it seems that our world is getting back to normal. Of course, I was concerned yesterday when Brandon told me that he didn't want the television on! So....please pray that our little girl will continue to heal, that her ear infection will go away, and that the snot that is seemingly endless will soon dry up so that she can breathe better.