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.