10 on Tuesday

1. In less than 12 hours lil love and I will be boarding an airplane for beautiful Portland, Oregon.

2. I am thrilled about the trip and extremely excited to see my family and Alicia, I'm just sad about leaving J behind. I get nervous when my family is apart.

3. I have been spoiled the last two days. I didn't take off the last two days from work, but the week worked out perfect in that I only had a few kiddos and only for a couple of hours. I liked it, but was quickly reminded this afternoon of how ridiculously lonely I get not being around poeple. There is a reason I work!! Even if it's with children from whom I get zero adult interaction, it's interaction nonetheless!

4. I thought I would share my story of numero diez (that's 10) from last week. Okay, so I was about 13 years old. Back when it was so cool to paint your nails absolutely hideous colors like, say, yellow! And it was so popular that the stores didn't even sell yellow nail polish ::eyeroll:: So that left me with the only logical thing I could think of, and that was to make my own.
Yup. I took my starkling white polish and added a dab of yellow food coloring, shook it up, and what do you know - it turned yellow. Perfect. I'm a genius.
But now it's too thick (which doesn't have anything to do with adding the food coloring, the polish was just thick). And I needed it thinner. I was thirteen, young and witty, and knew that the microwave liquifies solids, like butter, surely zapping the bottle for a few seconds wouldn't hurt anything and would thin out the polish enough to do the trick. Let's just say that within 8 seconds the bottle had blown up, I had YELLOW finger nail polish all over the microwave and it smelled like burnt plastic. What was I too do? Oh yeah, go grab the nail polish remover.
True story.

5. Macy is obsessed with shoes. If she sees one of my shoes on the floor, she crawls at top speed over to the shoe, grabs it, turns over and with much gusto says, "Eeeeeeee!!!!!" and thus begins her 5 minute love affair. And sometimes when she's desperate for the one on one with her fascination, she'll pull my flip flop right off my foot. It keeps her entertained for at least 5 minutes every time.

6. On Saturday, a good friend of my family's got married. It was a nice and beautiful wedding. Congrats Joel and Elizabeth!

7. I'm really struggling with whole 10 thing because I have no pictures to show. They are on my laptop and I'm here on the desktop.

8. Scratch that. I have one on flickr that I don't think I've shown you, if I have forgive me. This is my bro and his wife.



9. Have I shown these?







10. Well, folks, I made it. Here's for 10 things bubbling in my life right now. Not sure if I'll be able to post for about week. Take care. I love you all.
xoxoxo

kiddos

I took these Saturday morning of one of my friends kiddos. Aren't they fun? Let me know what you think!

8 months

My sweet baby girl,
The one thing that stands out in my mind about this month is the army crawl. Gosh, I love that army crawl. It is so adorable. And you are so quick. My heart just melts when you scoot to me and pull on my feet and I look down and you are staring up at me with those big, brown eyes. And your eyelashes. I love those eyelashes. That is what most people comment on when they look at you are those big, brown eyes and long, thick eyelashes. They gorgeous. And you didn't get it from me! Your daddy has long eyelashes. And I suppose the brown eyes are a mixture of my hazel eyes and daddy's blue eyes.

Macy Grace, you have filled our life with so much love and joy. We just enjoy watching you play with your toys. Especially your carrot bat. It's a long, orange, plastic carrot that is shaped like a bat. It is as long as you are but you love it. You enjoy most of the big plastic toys. Like your sword, bowling pin, and golf club. It's hilarious. You talk to your toys and kick your legs. And smile. The smile. It's huge and lights up your entire face.

On the 4th of July you watched some fireworks in the dark sky sitting on my lap at great grandma Betty's and you loved them. You really didn't make much sound but you would look at me then just look back at the display. It was cute. You took your first long car ride (6 hours!) to your great grandma Betty's and were a very good girl.

You love animals but don't like the grass. It's nice that way. I can put you on a blanket and you hardly never crawl off it outside because of the grass.

You change more and more everyday, it's just amazing. You also sit up all by yourself. And you look very grown up when you do. You still love baths and have been swimming several times. You enjoy most all of your food except ham and gravy. I don't blame you. It stunk!! I think you especially love your plain veggies and bananas. You will suck on a sippy cup and are VERY clingy to your mama. But you love daddy too. And Jake. You love to pet on Jake.

You take two naps a day, one in the morning for about an hour and one in the afternoon for about two hours. You sleep really great all night. We still don't have any teeth, but the bottom two look really really close. And you don't like it. At all.

Lil love bug, I pray for you everyday. You mean the world to me and daddy and we couldn't love you more. It is amazing how much you have changed my outlook on life, so much that words can't describe. You are sunshine. I love you.

With all my love forever,
Momma
xoxoxo

Your stats:
18 lbs 27 1/2 inches

10 on Tuesday

1. I've been crazy busy shooting pics and practicing. My day goes like this. Up at 6am with the lil love bug. Daycare from 7am-6pm. 6pm head out and try to get some pics of ANY willing subject! haha, and sometimes NOT so willing! Home by 7pm. Feed Macy. Play with Macy. Bath, book, boob, bed for Macy by 9pm. Study, read, edit, reread, re-edit. My eyes are burning and watering by 11pm. Go to bed. Start all over. It's great!

2. Here is one of my willing (i think ;) )subjects, she's gorgeous. Both of them. They are sisters. The blond is my sister in law. PS: I didn't ask you, is it okay if I share these on the world wide web? Thnks!






3. I won't comment on the willingness of this one.



4. Or this one.



5. I realized I have yet to publish lil love's 8 month letter. Will do that. Soon.

6. I leave next Wednesday with Macy Grace on her very first ever plane ride. I did myself a huge favor though. We are flying out of here, which is way more expensive, but I just couldn't travel 3-4 hours in a car to a major airport, load up an 8 month old and fly across the country by myself. Just couldn't do it. Any tips for air travel with a baby?

7. I mentioned it briefly. But lil love is taking the bottle. It has been a struggle for 4 months. She hasn't let that thing even touch her lips. It was ridiculous. She just likes skin. I thought for a long time it was the formula. Nope. She wouldn't take breastmilk pumped either. I'm not sure what the break through was, but I'm not complaining. I basically just didn't give up. I kept offering it over and over again. Finally she accepted it. Maybe it was the $20 bribe ;) But I didn't say that....

8. This lil man was okay with my big, black box



9. I think that for supper tonight we are going to have barbeque pork sandwiches and potato salad.

10. Did I ever tell you that one time I blew up a bottle of yellow finger nail polish in the microwave!?! I'll have to share that sometime.

break through

I think we finally have a break through with Macy Grace. She is finally taking the bottle. Mostly only 2-3 ounces at a time, but it's the bottle nonetheless and I'll take it. I'm so thankful.

house thoughts

I think we have made a tenative decision to go ahead and stay here in our house awhile longer. Moving into this house back when I was 40 weeks 3 days pregnant (it's true!), our plan was stay here a few months, a year max, and finish our previous abode. Besides we went from roughly 2,000 sq feet, with 2 bath, 4 bedrooms, a kitchen, dining room, living room, and office, with a separate laundry space and workshop for storage to a 1,100 sq feet, with 1 bath, 2 bedrooms, a kitchen/dining room/living room combo, office/playroom combo, laundry room/storage room combo. Our previous house is loaded with cabinets and closets, our living house is not. As a matter of fact, our previous home is still loaded with most of our things. Needless to say, in the last 8 months we have completed all but nothing on our previous home. Quite discouraging when you think of the fact that we loose ALOT of money every month partially occupying 2 homes. So, we needed to make a decision. A unfortunately we start discussing the topic, get frustrated because their is so much to do and we don't want to do it, and quit talking about it until the craziness of what we are doing again slaps us between the eyeballs. Thus the cycle starts all over. Not to mention we have our 'forever' home sitting in a beautiful neighborhood occupied by paying tenants and I drive by nearly everyday pining for the day that we get to move in. It's just not pracitical right now. Or at least that's what I tell myself everyday (my heart has yet to agree!).

So, we are at a crossroads. Do we move back to the loaded house (with the problems it has and halfway started renovation!?) and use living house as daycare only, opening space up and allowing more income? Do we reevaluate our living house situation and make it more practical allowing for more space? (Have I ever mentioned how I love pracitical living, thinking outside the box, and NON-CLUTTER??) Or do we take a plunge - asking our tentants to move out, then move into our 'forever' home in the outdated version it is (with absolutely ZERO cosmetic redo's for a LONG time) and call it good? Decisions, decisions.

It's not as easy as yes or no. Because I know what I want to do. But we're not sure that is the right move for our family right now. So, I sit and wait. However, time is running out. We need to make a decision - soon. So, we hit our heads against the wall, ran in opposite directions, and talked about it. I think for now, as of today, we are staying here. Our loaded house just simply isn't ready for us. We will be frustrated trying to live amoung the dirt and renovation. Plus, it's not healthy, especially for lil love.

Moving into our forever home is the option that is the hardest for me to walk away from, considering my love affair with the 1914 bungalow. It's hard for me to logically talk myself out of it, but nonetheless, I know us, and without all of our ducks in a row before moving in it just isn't good. So, the countdown is down. We will renew their lease for one more year. Next June, I'm moving in!

So that brings up to option 3, continue living in our living house and start living practically and make more room. So, that is precisely what we are doing. I'm moving out the dining room table.

10 on Tuesday

1. I'm so behind.
Really.

Last weekend we took a mini road trip and headed over to Junction City to visit Jeremy's grandma. We left of Saturday and planned to stop as many times as we needed and swore to not make this a stressful trip. Macy has never rode in a car for that long so we expected it to take longer than usual. And actually she did very well. We went about 3 hours without stopping, and she slept most of that. When we did stop, we ditched the restaurants and found a roadside park. We threw down a blanket and unloaded the cooler. Macy loved being free and was everywhere on the blanket we hardly wanted to eat! I knew with us traveling to his grandma's house, she wouldn't have a highchair so I packed her bumbo - it was perfect!



Jeremy looks like he's having a great time huh?



I love it when she pulls her little lip in like this!

Next it was on the road again, stopping at my favorite shake place - Spangles. I'm serious, their cherry shakes are the best EVER! They are so creamy and flavor full.
I contemplated buying 10 on the way back home and piling them in the ice chest. Seriously. Ha!

Our goal was to arrive at said destination by 6pm, we made it around 4:30. It had been nearly 4 years since Jeremy had seen his grandma and it was SO special to see her again. And I loved going to the farm. Every family vacation he went on as a child included his grandma's estate on the farm. He has alot of memories there and I loved seeing it all.

We ordered pizza for dinner and had a great time enjoying the firecracker show out on their property. Macy Grace LOVED them. They did not scare her one little bit. At all. She sat on my lap and just watched them, then would look at me, then back at the show. It was great. Something else. Great Grandma Betty has kitty's. Cats actually, but I call them kittys. And I don't have a fond place in my heart for the fur covered friends but Macy loves all animals and everytime she saw the kitty she was squeal with delight!



That was close as the kitty could get before great-grandma would make the kitty run off! She didn't want lil love to get hurt as they are not used to babies.



Sunday we went to the lake so Jeremy could fish. He didn't catch anything :( But it was still fun. I actually put Macy Grace in her floaty in the lake, she did really good.







Then it was to the petting zoo.









The weekend turned out to be pretty nice, we enjoyed it!

2. Macy Grace is teething, and I might just poke my eyes out. It.is.horrible. Horrible. Teething gods, please bring back my sweet, loving, sleep-through-the-night, playful, cute, happy baby. I'm so over this. Teeth are definitely overrated ;)

3.

4. I'm still trying to work things out for my vacation. Lil love and I are suppossed to fly to Portland for my great grandma's 95th birthday celebration, and my tickets got canceled :( Boo. I have zero motivation to start researching for a ticket again.

5. I'm in the middle of a huge transition in my life. Hopefully I can expound more on that later.

6. Saturday was my bro Dalton's (I call him deena) birthday. He's 14. We had a party and he got Mario cart and a wii fit, so my family hung out playing the wii. All except for lil Lindsey. She was in Mexico City ministering to orphans.

7. Summer is almost over and I just don't know how I feel about it. I love summer. With all my being I love summer. And it just hasn't felt like summer this year.

8. Jeremy just walked in with this. One of my favorite drinks. Diet Crush. A whole tray. 24 of them. Yumm-o.



9. Twitter. Are you on? I am. Feel free to follow me, and I'll follow you! mindyupham

10. Today is one of my best friend's birthday. Happy 25 Tyler. I know you don't read my blog, but whatev. At least I told you =)

Have a great day folks! Seez the sunshine!!

just one

Miranda helped me with a minishoot of lil love - it's hard working getting pics of this wiggly little girl!
Thanks Rana

Liberty 09

We had our annual July 4th musical and this year I was one of the narrators in the 110 cast of the production. Actually Lindsey, my sister, was also one of the 4 narrators.



And Jeremy and I and lil love



I would give credit to the photographer, as it isn't me, obviously, but I can't remember who took it. Excuse the quality, white floresent lights and stage lights combined aren't pretty for portraits!

fallen heros

I was catching up on the blogs I read everyday and Karen had a great post this up on honoring our fallen heros. I won't try to reword what she has said, just head over there and check it out.

storyboard

I made this storyboard of Macy Grace playing with her toys! She sure has plenty =)

so what have we been doing?

making memories...



sidenote: These aren't the best but just put on your mommy goggles and ignore!
PS: I'm really really self conscious of myself, especially my side profile, I hate it, but I know that's not what these pics are about, they are the memory of lil love and I - side profile and all!