Major Catch-Up / Life Lately

Hey guys, remember me? I used to blog consistently over here, but now that my baby is over a whole year old, she is into literally everything, and it's tough to get enough time to shower and eat, let alone blog.

I soooo miss this space and the fellowship with my blog friends, though. I want to try to be better. No promises. No guarantees. But I'm going to try. Even if it's just one post a week... that's still better than none, right?

I am thankful that I am friends with so many blog friends on Facebook (or at least follow on Instagram) - it makes it a bit easier to stay caught up with everyone!

Waaaaay back in September, Annabelle turned one. For her birthday, Dan and I decided that we weren't going to buy her a gift since she doesn't need anything... so we decided to start the gifting of experiences tradition with her. We decided that her first trip to the zoo was in order, so that's what we did! Living two hours to the closest zoo makes it tough to go all the time like some of my friends and their kiddos do, but we had a fun little weekend trip to Dallas, and she LOVED the zoo. (She has since been to the St. Louis Zoo and the Tulsa Zoo as well! She's a zoo-hopper, I guess! We created a monster... she is hooked on them!)

Annabelle and I drove up to Kansas City at the end of September because I was a bridesmaid in one of my best friend's wedding. Little Annie got to spend a couple nights with her Grammy and Great Meme while I was busy with wedding festivities. They fed her lots of ice cream, and she had a blast. She's now looking forward to seeing them again TODAY!!! (for the first time in seven weeks! Woo!) 

We did find out that she's a chips and salsa junkie just like her mama... see below. :) 

While I was in already in Kansas City, Annabelle and I drove across the stat to St. Louis to see another one of my best friends, Michelle! We had to meet little Huxley, who was born in July. We had a blast catching up in person rather than via Skype, and we took the kids to the zoo (and to eat food... lots of food!) It was so great seeing so many friends during my trip to Missouri... but I was SO glad when we made it back to Texas. There's just nothing like your own bed, right?! 

Phew! That was a lot all at once... sorry! It feels great to be sharing again, though! :)

(Since I'm still WAY behind, I have a few more catch-up posts coming before I'm back to normal... sorry in advance!)

Life Lately (A Long Overdue Update)

Guys, I have been absent from this blog a lot lately. Life is just busy right now for some reason (not complaining), so this little space of mine hasn't been in the front of my mind. I'm hoping to change that now, though, because I miss it! And I apologize now if I commented on every post you have written over the past few weeks... oops. But hey, at least I got all caught up, right?

Anyway, like I said, we've been pretty busy around here, so today I'm going to share some recent happenings around the house... and later this week, I'll be sharing other things that have been going on!

Sorry in advance if this life lately post seems more like an All About Annabelle post... I didn't mean for it to turn out that way, but she's the only person I'm with most days, so....


This girl is luckily LOVING bath time lately. She could spend forever playing in the water, and she especially loves all of her rubber duckies. You'll see why it's a good thing in a few pictures...

We go for a walk every day, and since it's so hot outside, we immediately have an indoor picnic on a blanket in her room with ice water and a snack. One day, she decided yoga would come in handy as well. #DownwardFacingBaby

I don't really have a caption for this one... but isn't she just the sweetest?

Remember when I said it was a good thing she likes baths a few pictures up? Well, this is why. One of her favorite meals is peanut butter and jelly waffles, and this is what happens. It's inescapable. Every. Single. Time. What a cute little mess.

She loves watching her daddy mow the yard! 

On my birthday (oh yeah, I turned 29 on July 22nd... and didn't even write a blog post about it! Ha! Oops!) we got dressed up (okay, so I wore a t-shirt, but hey, I put on make-up, so that's a win!) and had a little selfie fun after lunch. 

My best friend FINALLY had her baby boy, and Annabelle is already in love with sweet Huxley! 

Well, we made is almost 11 months without any kind of sickness in this little girl... but she finally succumbed to a cold / double ear infection. We had a really rough day Friday and ended up in the ER in the middle of the night into Saturday morning... a couple more rough days and nights later (and some antibiotics), she is MUCH, much better... but the bath tub was the only place we could get her to smile while sick. The cool water helped her fever, and of course, her ducks are her favorite! 

I made another round of baby food for Annabelle... I received a lot of comments on my Instagram and Facebook page about this, so I'm planning on sharing my how-to and recipes later this week! Stay tuned! :) 

And lastly... who doesn't enjoy all the Snapchat filters? They're so much fun! 

In other news, we celebrated my birthday by going to Drop Night on base to see a pilot training class receive their aircraft assignments and then went out to dinner. We even had a babysitter for the evening (our first one in Texas!), so that was fun! 

Dan and I both got sick from Annabelle, so we've been battling awful colds ourselves.

Dan has started flying, but I will share more about that soon!

We have a couple road trips coming up this month, and I am hoping and praying Annabelle does well. She used to, but our last trip was not ideal.

I have started to wean from all the pumping - not completely for sure - but since I want to take it slow to avoid mastitis, I started early (but have enough milk for Annabelle anyway!) - and I plan on writing a wrap-up post about my journey once I'm completely finished. 

What have YOU been up to lately? 

Life Lately {Since We Got to Texas}

It's been a long time since I've shared our day-to-day life here on the blog, and I kind of miss that aspect... so here's a month-long catch up post!

It's been a pretty hectic month getting to Texas, unpacking, and diving right in to having people over. (Seriously, guys - that's the only thing that gets us unpacked at a new base. We invite people over for a cookout the second weekend we're there, and it forced us to have the boxes GONE! Works like a charm! I will add that we've been lucky to know more than a small handful of people at both bases we've moved to before we got there, so we did have people to invite over. Try it!)

Annabelle has really been enjoying trying new foods. They're still hit or miss with her, and she is still drinking a ton of breastmilk, but she LOVES puréed squash, refried beans, and chomping on raw veggies, like cucumber, carrots, and fresh green beans.

There is a park a quarter mile from our house, and I just know it's going to be so much fun while we live here. Annabelle got to swing outside for the first time, and she enjoyed it after getting used to it. I can't wait until she can go down the slides too!

A comparison photo - 2 months on the left, 7 months on the right... exact same outfit (it's a 0-3 month onesie, but it is HUGE! She hasn't fit into that size in anything else for a long time). She wore it as the Royals won the World Series last fall, and she wore it again for Opening Day 2016! 

Long story short: Dan bought me this mug way back in 2009 when we hadn't been dating long. He was at tech school at Sheppard AFB, and I was back in Missouri going to school. It was our first taste at long distance, and I loved the mug! Well, that mug made the move from Missouri to Colorado, then the move from Colorado to Ohio, and now from Ohio to Texas... back to the very same base it was purchased at seven years ago. Crazy! 

Dan celebrated his 27th birthday earlier in April. We didn't do much, as he had a stomach bug the day before that really wore him down, but we hung out and luckily were able to go to dinner at a local steakhouse since he was feeling better. I made this collage of him being a dad for his birthday social media post. ;-)

Little Miss needs to SLOW DOWN. All last week, she started crawling (pretty fast, too!), pulling herself up to standing, said her first word (dad, of course - three times in a row while looking straight at Dan), and cut her first tooth through - finally! She is officially MOBILE, and she's loving it!

I eventually caught the stomach bug Dan had earlier in the week and was pretty much out of commission. Annabelle was such a patient trooper with us this week - a happy one at that! 

Girlfriend has so much teething pain. I feel so bad for her poor little gums... she's working hard, but so far, just one teeny tooth is there. 

And last but not least, our fur-babies for National Pet Day last week. Ironically, only the picture of Gilligan in the sink was taken in Texas. Stormy and Smudge's photos are both from Ohio. Oops. I need to capture some new shots of them soon!

Well, I guess that pretty much sums up our life lately! We are finally falling into a new normal here and making a routine for ourselves. I can't wait to share more of our Texas adventures! 

Life Lately

Life lately has been hectic... we've been traveling so much, and I am just flat out exhausted.

Some may consider this post a photo dump... but I'll add commentary as well so I can remember all these events. I sure hope life decides to calm down a bit before Baby Cookie arrives... I could use some quiet days.

I sure did miss these fur-babies while we were out of town! More on that out of town part in another post or two...

I love when I'm able to get them both in the same photo. 

Hospital stay #? Who knows anymore. I was admitted for pyelonephritis, which is a kidney infection. No good. They kept me overnight and pumped lots of fluids and antibiotics into me. 

While I was stuck in the hospital, it was National Hug Your Cat Day. I was super bummed, so I told Dan to hug the kitties for me when he got home. This is the photo I got... nice try, babe. It's the thought that counts, right? :)

One night, we went out for custard... and I thought, "let's bring Smudge along"... so glad we did because they had a dogwich on their menu! It was frozen custard between two dog biscuits. He loved it. 

We went to the Strawberry Festival in Troy, OH... but the best part was taking a photo with Babe Lincoln!

Stormy climbs Mt. Janelle every day. She loves her baby.

My handsome husband ran his first half marathon! And the lucky guy wasn't even sore afterward - he even mowed our yard that day!

These two... staring at an airplane. She's such a daddy's girl.

On the 4th of July, we made patriotic French toast. It was SO delicious. 

And then we spent the rest of the holiday weekend sanding and painting furniture for Baby Cookie's room.

I wore my respirator (Walter White style, yo) because of my asthma... and so Baby Cookie didn't have to get all the fumes either.

No caption needed. :)

We celebrated Tyler's second birthday with him, and we had so much fun! He is such a little character, and we love seeing him so often. 

After flying, I was super sick... again. I had an ear and sinus infection, so I loaded up on juice since I can't take many meds right now. 

Dan and I have started (and almost finished now) a six week Lamaze class through our Air Force Base hospital... it's 2.5 hours each Wednesday night, but we're learning a lot. This is after the first class when we deserved 1/2 price shakes for having to watch a live birth on TV without any warning.

The MLB All Star Game was in Cincinnati this year, which happens to be only an hour away from us! Groupon was so nice and offered a big discount for the Fan Fest... so we went! It was a lot of fun, and we got to pose with the world's biggest baseball.

And I got to hold one of Cal Ripken Jr.'s old bats, which was pretty sweet.

Gilligan likes exactly TWO human foods: ice cream and peaches. When I had peach ice cream, the guy went nuts. I can't blame him, though. 

Stormy is always laying on her baby. She's going to be so confused when Baby Cookie doesn't have whiskers or a tail...

Smudge is the goofiest dog in the world. This is his "I'm so happy after a walk" face. 

Due to my sinus infection, I was actually admitted during a routine appointment with the pulmonologist. I was wheezing too much for their liking, so they hooked me up to an IV with some meds to open up my lungs. It worked, but I had a slight allergic reaction, so what should have taken 30 minutes actually ended up taking 2.5 hours because they had to dilute the medicine with saline and drip it super slowly into me. I'm all better now, though!

We keep catching Stormy sleeping on the changing pad. In her defense, it does look like a cat bed... and here's a tiny sneak peek at Baby Cookie's room! 

I made these cherry lemonade cupcakes for our Ohio baby shower that a couple good friends threw for us... more on that later!

Has your life been crazy lately too?

Have you done anything fun?