Whirlwind of a trip

OKLAHOMA. The land of my childhood, the land of some of the people I love most in the world, and my most favorite place to visit. A couple weeks back I was brave/dumb/naive and thought driving our $1800 car that I just learned how to drive (it is a manual) up to Oklahoma without Andy and with a dog and baby that hates the car would be okay. Well, it was. We survived. It wasn't pretty at times. There was hysterical screaming (nearly from more than one of us), there was dog puking incident that made things extra fun, but gosh darn it- we made it!

 Since Ruby is such a stinker in the car we had to break up the trip but it worked out really well. So first leg of the trip we just drove to Waxahachie and spend the night with Andy's mom and then she drove with us to OKC and sat in the back and played with Ruby which was so helpful.

Then I spend the weekend with my BFF Sara, Drew, and their sweet baby I was crazy excited to meet- Mackenzie.

How can she not just melt your heart? Uh, that face!

I love George (Sara's dad) and boy did Ruby love George, they played together for a long time.

My favorite OKC girls

Ruby had a rough night and so the next morning I was a little tired but Sara spoiled me with a souffle and mimosa! What a wonderful way to start the day.

the.best.picture.that.ever.was.

It was a relaxing and fun weekend and Sara and Drew were wonderful host to me and my little rambunctious girl that was all over the place. Hopefully I didn't scare them too much about having a 10 month old. Love you guys!

Alright, then Sunday evening we headed up to Tulsa.......

Permission

I gave myself permission today to give Ruby a crappy birthday party.

Okay, not a crappy one. In fact, I know it will be lovely. Double in fact, I think it will be better than the first birthday party I have imagined in my head since, well, she was born. I'm still rectifying in my head how I feel about the whole thing, let me attempt to explain...

Pinterest.

Those of you on pinterest probably already know where I'm going with this. Those of you not on pinterest, well, let me attempt to put what's been swirling around in my brain for months.

Pinterest is a website that you can saved images and see other people's images. What it sometimes is for me though is a place to see how average and not organized, creative, or fabulous your life is. You will see pantries with so many labels that it makes Martha Stewart weep with joy, you will see tutorials on how to make your mascara with things from your pantry, or make perfume from your toots you capture in a jar (lol@myself there), but most of all you will see parties. Oh these parties, they will challenge your beliefs. They will turn your world upside down. Okay, they don't? Well when you have your child's first birthday coming up then, at least for me, it's messing with me.

So for months now I've been pouring over 1st birthday parties. Should she have a Hawaiian theme part where everyone whears grass skirts and we build a pit and roast an entire pig in the backyard? OR should we have Zoo theme part where we have real animals come to our house so our kid (that will have zero recollection of any of this and has an attention span of approximately 25 seconds) can pet a goat? Heck, let's just have a swim party, now we will need to have a pool built sometime in the next 30 days but how hard could that really be? Pinterest makes these all seem like rational first birthday ideas.

So the last month or so I've been going back and forth between big blow out with everyone we know or the three of us eating cake together and just having a low key family day. They both had their appeal but I felt like I was leaning more towards the big blow out because that's what your are suppose to do for your kid's first birthday (as Pinterest would have me believe). But then I would look at her and realized she was having a great time playing with a plastic cup the past 45 minutes and her birthday plans have zero impact on her. She is going to be happy no matter what and I really wanted to spend the day celebrating, not cleaning/cooking/stressing out.

There is also a very real possibilty that maybe I am making all this up because I'm lazy and just don't want to throw a big party. My menu changes would prove this to be the case.

Menu:
Hamburger sliders (w/ homemade buns)
Corndog bites
Potatoe Salad
Pasta Salad
Fruit Sald
Hummus and veggies
PB doggie chow
Assortment of cookies
Big multi-layered cake
Cupcakes
Pizza


So, that's the plan. No figuring out where out of town guest are going to stay, no worrying about the ice sculpture melting, no anything that requires stress. Just hanging out with friends for an hour or two and then the rest of the weekend for us to just be with our one year old. One year old. Crazytown.

sick baby girl

when your baby is sick you do....well....whatever it takes to get them better and I tried to get a few smiles out of her as well

My job is hard

She looooved this scarf, got some good laughs out of it

You want to chew on a tube of toothpaste? Go for it my sickly baby...

An adventure under the bathroom sink? Go explore!

Pull out all my kitchen towels? Of course you can!

After three days of high fever (we got up to 104!), then a couple days of rash covered body, then a day or two of just plain fussiness, I think we may be in the clear. She is still acting pretty fussy but I honestly think she is just learning to vocalize and is a very strong willed baby (have no idea where that came from ;) ). The important thing is that we survived!

Visitors!

A couple of weeks ago Andy's family came to visit! We hadn't seen them in a while and it was nice to catch up. We even did some fun things while they were here. Our nieces were just so awesome with Ruby. I can honestly say in the four days they were here I didn't need to entertain Ruby once. Between her two cousins, aunt, and memaw, Ruby was one very popular little girl!

a very much loved present from memaw!

how lucky is ruby to have such awesome cousins that take care of her

visited the capital

then did a little window shopping down south congress and they got a see a glimpse of why austin is awesomely weird

memaw gave ruby her first pigtails

It was a special visit to get to see Ruby interact with Andy's side of the family since we don't get to see them very often. It was just so sweet how everyone was just about arguing over who got to hold her/play with her/do anything with her. She is so loved and I'm glad we got to have family time together.

He let you do what now?

In a continual effort to be cheap live frugally and have some fun we decided one night that I could cut Andy's hair. He's not much of a hair person anyways and figured if I messed it up too bad he would just shave it. Easy Peasy.

Scruffy before

I went to town- look at all that hair!

Andy wondering why he thought this was a good idea

Taking matters into his own hands

We forgot to take an after picture, so here's the only pic I could find of Andy since the hair cut.

It doesn't look too bad right? Well, that's because it's far away! In certain light I will still see random like 3 inch long hairs sticking up that I missed. Luckily Andy doesn't care and so I think we will probably keep doing it and hopefully I will get a little better. Any one else need a trim?

Nine Months

Oops, I forgot 8 months. That means you get two month's for the price of one. Bargain. Here we go.

 Ruby fun facts:

Champion crawler, I mean this girl is FAST! Look away and boom she's gone. It's scary. We have to be really careful to always keep bathroom doors closed because she loves to eat toilet paper. Not that she has...much...

Loves music! This makes me so happy. Unfortunately her favorite is Elmo singing. When we get tired of that (approx 1 1/2 songs for me) then we listen to lots of oldies and Glee. She will bounce up and down and clap her hands. Adorb.

She is definitely an extrovert. She gets fussy if we stay home for more than a day or two. She can stay up late w/o being fussy, skip naps, teething, it doesn't matter what, if there are people around her she is happy as a clam.

She is starting to babble more. At her 9 month apt the pediatrician was a little worried that she was barely babbling at all but in the last couple of weeks she has started. She will even say dada which makes Andy really happy.

She is finally taking consistent naps. She wakes up around 6:30am. Then takes a nap around 9am and 2pm, then goes to bed around 7:30pm. It's been nice to be on a schedule and be able to plan things a little better (also the whole not sitting outside her door while she screams her head off and I cry thing was pretty awful and we are past that! yea!)

Amazing eater. She will eat anything you put in front of her.  We are done with purees and doing finger foods now which is fun and she definitely prefers. When I try to feed her yogurt or applesauce now she looks at me like "Um, we are past that crazy lady" and tries to grab the spoon. I'm starting to let her do a little self feeding with the spoon, which means our normally huge mess after every meal is even bigger now but she has fun and that's what matters.

Stats:
Weight: 17lb 4 oz (23rd percentile)
Height: 27.25 inches (40th percentile)
Head Circ: 44 (52nd percentile)

4th of July 2012

We had a fabulous 4th. A few friends came over for dinner and then we went to the Cedar Park fireworks. I was really excited for Ruby to see the fireworks. She definitely noticed and watched them but didn't get too excited about them, but it was also waaay past her bedtime and she only had one nap that day. She was a trooper though!

Boys doing what boys do, acting cool and grilling meat

Catch phrase!

Yea America!