Houston has a lot of great parks, but Atlanta parks have one thing Houston park’s are missing – friends and family!
We spent one morning at a local park with Libbie
Swings are so much fun!
Old school metal slides are a little scarier!
And tire swings are entirely out of the question!
But she still had fun!
Then we had an absolute blast meeting up with my friend Jen, her husband T.J. and baby Joseph. Last year when we saw Joseph, he was still in Jen’s tummy, so it was great to meet him on the outside!
Joseph’s checking Marion out already!
My odd child carried around a dinner roll the whole time we were there.
Taking the occasional nibble
Sweet baby girl
And Joseph thought it was way too cold to be swinging!
So we packed up and headed to Knitch where the daddies babysat and the mams were too busy oogling yarn to take pictures!
We’re trying to settle back into the post-holiday routine here so I’m going to use this downtime to recap our holidays. Sorry for being boring, but really, does much interesting happen in January?
First up, a Mississippi Christmas!
Another (failed) visit to Santa!
Santa also looks less than thrilled.
My brother and Santa have an in-depth conversation about beards
You know if that whole history thing doesn’t work out for you…
Sweet Rosemary looks like she could be doing something better with her time
Marme’s gorgeous tree
Presents!
Mar and Papaw share some reading time
Hey Belle, you stole my Pap!
I can assure you the chaos was controlled
I have no idea what she’s doing in this picture
Now it becomes clear. The baby bottle goes in your ear!
All the cousins!
And in case you can’t read their super cute shirts
From left to right, Isabella (3), Andrew (almost 4), Rosemary (7 months), Lauren (almost 19 months old), Marion (15 months)
We had such a lovely Christmas this year, all things considered. The biggest consideration being travel! This year was an L. Christmas, so we knew we were going to Jackson. However, Josh had some extra vacation days and with it being Marion’s first Christmas, we decided to tack on a trip to Atlanta. That meant roughly 26 hours in the car in 13 days. Marion was an absolute champ however and handled the whole thing way better than we expected. We left Houston the night of the 19th around 7:30, about an hour before she normally goes down for the night. We did our normal mid-point stop and she slept through it. She did wake up around Brookhaven, MS, so we stopped, did a quick feed and change and we were at Dad’s house by 3 a.m. The other three segments of the trip, we drove at more reasonable hours, two afternoon drives and one early morning one. No matter what time we left, she spent most of the time in the car sleeping. Which is exactly what we hoped would happen! We did all the drives with no more than two stops and I don’t think it added much more than thirty minutes to our normal travel time.
Just before we left, Marion had started to get into what we call a flexible schedule. Which we promptly threw out the window while we were gone! We just followed her lead when it came to feeding and sleeping, and again, we were so pleasantly surprised by how easy she was. We joked a hundred times that we should travel more, as it apparently brings out the best in our baby! She actually slept through the night (by our standards, not the silly medical ones!) twice and most nights just had her usual one wake-up. She only had a few meltdowns and those were mostly due to her refusal to just go.to.sleep. She seemed to like all the extra stimulation and she was so flirty and charming! It was a lot of fun for me to see her interact with other people and she didn’t seem to mind being passed around. Thankfully separation anxiety hasn’t set in yet. She did have to make sure one of us was nearby though, and just doing a visual check with us made her secure enough to be a little social butterfly.
Co-sleeping made things so easy, as we didn’t have to fool with bringing a pack-n-play or any other gear. Sleeping gear that is, we had enough baby related stuff to outfit a set of quads I believe. I do have to say that I really missed the ability to breast feed, as we had to deal with always making sure we had enough formula, bringing and cleaning bottles and lots of extra things like that. Nursing would have really simplified that. I am pretty proud though, that even with so much stuff that we brought, we used almost all of it. Next trip, we’ll skip the baby monitor (we only used that one night) and take less blankets (we took four and only used two regularly.) Other than that, we used almost everything, even the Tylenol and thermometer. Thanks to not having to take the PnP, we were able to take the stroller which we put to really good use.
Now that you’ve made it through all the prose, here are the pictures!
Getting ready on Christmas Eve
She’s very excited!
With her favorite present, the stuffed puppy!
We had said that we were just doing a book and a teething toy at each stop (we had three) and we stuck to that, with the exception of the puppy. But we had a good reason for getting it!
We were at Bass Pro Shops on our way to get her picture taken with Santa, when all of a sudden, her face lit up in a way that we haven’t seen before. I thought it was the big blue background in SantaLand, but she was looking down, not up. That’s when we saw the big bin of stuffed puppies.
When we walked up to it, she just reached right out for this one particular yellow dog. She grabbed a hold of it’s ear and just did not let go. We offered her a black dog and a bear, and she had no interest in those.
After her picture with Santa, we walked past the bin again just to test her reaction and she got so excited for that same dog. So it came home with us
And yeah, that’s all the pictures we took Christmas day. We’re so lame. Apparently, I’m pretty good at getting the day to day down in photos, but I suck at documenting the big events. But here are two super cute videos of her and her puppy. Again, ignore the idiot behind the camera.
This weekend was, among other things, Marion’s christening. It was also my parents’ 20th wedding anniversary, but I was too busy having fun and visiting to take pictures. Luckily, everyone who was at the party was also at her christening.
I have to start out by thanking my mother-in-law for the absolutely gorgeous christening dress Marion wore. It is just beautiful and it was so special to have that for her.
My dad did her christening, which made it even more of a meaningful occasion.
Our whole family, well, most of us anyway.
We were just missing Brent and Bregitte and their little one on the way
This makes me laugh because we’ve all got our mouths open and Marion is crying.
The three girls, Isabella who just turned two and Lauren, who is almost seven months and Miss M.
This is as close as we got to all four of the grandkids (sorry for the way off coloring.)
The pretty little miss
She was so tired, but she was so well behaved.
We also got to spend some time with Mamaw. It’s our first Christmas without Pap, but it was really healing to see Marion and Mamaw together.
Look at those big old monkey feet!
Well hello there!
Daddy got in some good play time as well – it’s so nice having him off of work!
I’m not very good at learning my lessons, and this weekend was proof of that, in case anyone needed additional examples.
I love Martha Stewart. I think she’s brilliant and talented and who I want to be when I grow up. Minus the whole jail time thing.
However, she has the most evil trick of throwing a totally unnecessarily complicated cooking step into a recipe or calling for some strange esoteric ingredient. You would think I would know this by now, and I kind of do.
So Saturday afternoon, we had a trip to the store planned, and I was pretty sure I had everything I needed for the cookies. But I tripled checked the recipe and made sure that I did, in fact, have everything. I opted not to start cooking Saturday night and spend the time with Josh and Marion. Good decision, right?
Until I woke up Sunday morning at 8:00 a.m., ready to make eight dozen cookies and be at the party by 2:00 p.m. I started to measure and prepare and read through the recipe, only to discover, the stupid cookies have to be refrigerated for TWO HOURS before cooking!!!!
I should know better – I really, really, really should know better at this point! But I didn’t. So they only got cooled for like thirty minutes, and I put them in the freezer instead of the fridge, but whatever, they turned out delish anyway.
Stupid, stupid Martha Stewart. Oh I love to hate you. And perhaps next time I’ll read the whole recipe, not just the ingredients.
While I was busy cooking, Miss M and her Daddy were busy reading.
In the past week, Marion has really started to enjoy looking at books. And catalogs. I think we have an early shopper on our hands.
Please notice that her hands are still not still.
She also likes to help turn the pages. Thank heavens it’s heavy catalog season, this is how we’ve been able to eat dinner in peace lately!
And in other big news – look what we did!
It’s our first trip to see Santa! With her brother and sister of course. They’re old pros at the Santa picture thing, so she wasn’t scared at all. By the way, it’s insanely hard to get two dogs and a baby to all pose for a picture!
Oh yeah, and this little thing happened this weekend too.
And she did it again, to prove it wasn’t just a fluke the first time.
We tried to take Christmas card pictures this weekend and I think we have a winner. But we haven’t fully decided yet, so in the meantime, here are some that definitely won’t be it!
This one didn’t make the cut because guess what, she’s moving her foot – go figure!
But I don’t want to be a reindeer!
I really, really don’t want to be a reindeer!
Apparently something outside the windows was way more interesting than looking at the camera.
Seriously, puppy licks are the best thing for keeping bows on.
Again with the movement!
That’s how she gives kisses.
Nanuq is the most fascinating thing in the world to her
