Update

Can I please have that camera?

Mommy's little helper

Well, I figured I would try to squeeze in one more post before the end of the month.  Let's just say I am glad this month is about over.  My dad had his open-heart surgery on the 25th and is still recovering in the hospital.  Thankfully, everything seems to be looking good and now he just has the long road to recovery in front of him.  He was in surgery for about 5 1/2 hours - even though they told us it would take 4-6 hours I wasn't really expecting it to take that long since my mom's only took a little under 3.  They had told us it would take 4-6 hrs with my mom and I will never forget that feeling of terror when they called us back so soon to talk to the surgeon.  I figured it had to be bad news if they were already done.  So when my dad's took so long I started really worrying that something had gone wrong.  Right now he may be coming home as early as Mon or Tues of next week.  It will be interesting taking care of both a parent and a child at the same time :)

Grace is so close to crawling on her hands and knees.  Right now she gets up on her knees and rocks back and forth - it looks pretty funny.  We call her our "Humpty Dumpty" :)  It's really funny when we put her in her crib to sleep and we can watch her doing it on the monitor.  Cracks us up every time!!  The other day Jeff was sitting on the floor of the living room trying to read the paper and, of course, Grace wanted the paper SO BAD!  He put it up one step on the hardwood and she actually almost crawled completely up the step to try to get it.  She couldn't quite figure out how to get her knees above the step.  We have learned that if we want her to do something new, all we have to do is let her think she can get something forbidden!

Going for it....

What?  I'm not doing anything!!

 My sister is still here from NC so I have been watching Eliana sometimes while she goes to the hospital to see my dad.  Watching the girls play together is so much fun!  Eliana has a little snuggle toy that she is really attached to, and Grace tried to play with it one day, and Eliana whipped it out of her hand and gave her THE LOOK.  It was hilarious!  It's so funny how even though they are still so young they already want the toy that the other one is playing with.  I wonder when the true fighting will actually start? 

Milestones and Memories

Both my babies had milestones this week - Toby turned 8 years old on Tuesday and Grace turned 8 months old on Thursday.  Every year for Toby's birthday we have spaghetti for dinner and he gets to enjoy the noodles as a special treat.  I think the noodles are eaten faster every year, too! When I think of how fast the last 8 years have gone by with Toby I realize that one day I'm going to wake up and Grace is going to be turning 8 too.  If you want to feel old really fast, have a baby :)

Grace continues to change all the time.  She is getting really good at army crawling and actually crawled across the living room the other day (our living room was the original garage so it's a pretty big room).  And, of course, she's finding all the things she shouldn't get into.  So far she's played with the curtains in the living room, the cable cord for the satellite, and the cord to her monitor in her room.  She's teaching us very quickly what we still need to baby-proof!  She babbles all the time, and has also added an "Incredible Hulk" routine to her noises.  Randomly she will have this really deep-voiced grunt/squeal thing and stiffen her arms and her face will get all red.  It's pretty hilarious!  We think she does it to intimidate other babies! 

Grace also can clap her hands and sort of wave bye-bye, imitate kissing noises, and loves to play with her blocks and bang them together.  She LOVES solids - we still haven't found a food she doesn't like!  At the beginning of the year we started her on wheat and just yesterday we started her on yogurt.  So far, no reactions to anything - I pray that she never has any allergies.  We also started giving her the little puffs and I'm really impressed with how well she does with them.  She's getting really good at picking them up and actually getting them into her mouth now.  At first she would pick them up and then not know where they went.  She is definitely quite a character and her personality develops more every day.  I'm still not worried about anyone messing with her as she gets older!

In other news, we found out last week that my dad will have to have open-heart surgery sometime this month.  This was completely unexpected - my dad has never had any major health issues, has never been overweight, and eats relatively well.  He hadn't been to the doctor in a few years so he went to a new doctor just to get a physical earlier this month.  He knew he had been born with a heart murmur, but no one ever seemed concerned about it, but this doctor suggested he go to have an ultrasound done.  When they did the ultrasound they had some concerns about what they saw so they referred him to a cardiologist.  When he went to U of M to see the cardiologist they admitted him right away and did a catheterization and found that one of the valves in his heart is bad and on of the main arteries to his heart is 80% blocked.  So he will have to have the valve replaced and a bypass done on the blocked artery.  He also has a blood clot inside his heart so the surgeon wants to wait a little while before doing the surgery to see if the blood thinners will help take care of it before they go in.  It's been a pretty rough week dealing with this, especially since it wasn't even a year ago that my mom had open-heart surgery (she has a whole different set of problems) and my dad had no symptoms at all that anything was wrong with his heart.  It's just scary that both my parents have always been relatively healthy people and both have had major issues with their hearts before they even turned 60.  Please keep my dad in your prayers as we go through this scary and difficult time.

January hasn't held good memories for me the last few years.  My first miscarriage was on January 27, 2008 when I was almost 9 weeks pregnant and then I had my second ectopic pregnancy and surgery on January 19, 2009 when they removed both the baby and my left fallopian tube.  When I was pregnant with Grace I couldn't wait to get through the month of January because I was so afraid something would happen.  Even though Grace can drive me crazy sometimes and there are days when I don't feel like being a mommy I will never forget what a true miracle she is and how blessed we are that God gave us such a wonderful gift. 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone!  This is the first year that we have started with a child (on the outside that is!) and it sure is great to be so blessed.  Although I will admit that I am sad that it's no longer the year Grace was born (I'm know, I'm weird!).  Everytime I sit down to write in this blog it hits me at how fast time is really going.  Next week Grace is already going to be 8 months old. 

We had a great Christmas and New Year.  Jeff and Eliana's (my niece) birthday is on Christmas Eve so that makes it even more fun, and this was Eliana's first birthday; which is also hard to believe.  I was able to be in the room when she was born and I can't believe that it was already a year ago.  My sister, her husband, and Eliana came back up to MI on the 16th and we had a first birthday party for Ellie at our house on the 18th.  She was so cute - I made a smash cake for her and when we gave it to her she wanted nothing to do with it.  My sister put frosting on her fingers to try and encourage her to dig in, and she got the most disgusted look on her face and tried to wipe the frosting off!  Of course, if we hadn't wanted her to get into the cake she probably would have smashed it all over :)  The party turned out great, and even though I was SO nervous about my sister asking me to make and decorate the cake, I think it turned out even better than I exepected - what do you think?

On the 22nd I threw a surprise dinner for Jeff at The Blue Tractor in Ann Arbor.  There were 18 adults, 2 kids, and 3 babies there, so it turned out great.  I even think he was surprised!!  If anyone hasn't been to The Blue Tractor, I highly recommend it - the food is great and it's not your average bbq place.  Unfortunately I didn't think to bring my camera, so I don't have any pictures :( 

We celebrated Christmas with my dad on the 23rd at our house and Grace got the cutest little airplane toy from him (my dad is an aircraft mechanic for Delta).  We then had Christmas Eve with my mom and sister at our house (it was crazy how many gifts Grace received!) and then we had a Christmas Day celebration with my grandparents and then we headed to Jeff's brother's house in Blissfield.  They have three kids so it was great for the cousins to have a chance to hang out.  On the 26th we had a party for Jeff's mom's side of the family and then another party in the evening for Jeff's dad's side of the family.  We have one final Christmas party here on Sunday and then we will finally be done.  Whew!!  Thankfully, Grace weathered all the celebrating relatively well.  I felt really guilty about how screwed up her schedule got but she handled it well for the most part.  There were definitely some cranky days!!

On the 27th I got together with two of my best friends from high school - one of them had a little boy last September and the other had a little girl in February.  One lives in CA and the other over by Detroit so we don't get to see each other very often.  It was so great to see all our babies play together, and so weird to think back on all our times together in high school and now we are all moms!! 

The big news in our house is that Grace has started crawling!  The first time we saw her do it was on the 18th - and I got her to do it by holding my cell phone out :)  It's not an official crawl - at first she would kind of roll up on her side and then propel herself forward by pushing her feet on the carpet and then rock to the other side and do the same thing, but now it is more like an army crawl and I have a feeling we will see the "normal" crawl within the next week or so.  Thankfully she doesn't crawl too far yet so we have some time to get used to having a mobile baby!  We did start doing some baby-proofing in the kitchen and still need to do more in the rest of the house.  It's hard to know where to stop in the baby-proofing - on one hand you want to make sure she's safe but on the other you don't want to lock up the entire house. 

I also think that Grace has truly started teething.  The last few nights have been pretty miserable - we went from having a baby who slept for 10 hours straight to having one that woke up every 45 minutes to hour and a half.  UGH!  Hopefully we can get through this soon and go back to the old schedule!!