Ruby's First Birthday Party!

My girl is one year old. I know I blogged earlier about how I was wrestling with what I wanted to do for her party. We decided to do it as low key as possible and it was perfect. I used all leftover decorations from other people's baby showers or birthdays. Since our house isn't big enough to accommodate our friends (frustrating but definitely a good problem to have) we normally have to split up but I really wanted to just all be together and enjoy each other and so we decided to make the most of our ginormous deck outside.

Ruby + Rylee = baby best friends forever

all the babies loved her new truck she got from her grandma and pawpaw

first bites of cake

warming up to it slowly

definitely didn't like the sticky on her hands

asher is ruby's newest friend. he is only two months old and apparently the object of ruby's affection..

ruby's friends, minus a sleeping rylee

The party was exactly what we wanted, just to sit down and be with our friends and truly celebrate Miss Ruby Ann. Thank you to all that came. We are blessed to call you friends and cannot wait for years and years of celebrations together!

I want to ride my bi-cy-cllleee. I want to ride my bike!

Queen anyone? No? Okay. Well I love that song....


If I have made it abundantly clear, let me clear something up. Andy is awesome. He is the most doing, hard working, always trying to improve, make the world better kinda person you will ever know. So when he came up with this idea I was down b/c I knew he could handle it. We sold both our cars, downgraded and bought an old and super not fancy yet reliable/awesome gas mileage car for me to drive and he would bike everywhere-to work everyday, to get groceries sometimes, to a happy hours after work, to friend's house, even once to church and back once which was 22 miles. Yeah, I told you- he's awesome.


Now here we are three months later and I can honestly say it has been so so so much easier than I thought it would be (says the girl that still has a car, the guy that bikes 17 miles a day may have a different story ;) ). The only adjustment for me has been learning to drive a manual (a 450 mile drive was my crash course) and if I'm really being honest, learning to be humble enough to drive 2001 Chevrolet Prizm. Andy really likes riding and the few days he doesn't he says he misses it. A couple weeks ago we even started taking Ruby on rides and have been going to family bike rides many times a week.

little girl's first time on the bike

didn't take her long to loooove it

she loves waving at people, trees, really anything....

So we are definitely a biking family now. We've bike to go get a ice cream cone a few times, grocery store, the pharmacy, garage sale-ing, to a friend's house, and just cruising of course. Biking is so awesome in so many ways but even better than the crazy money we are saving and awesome exercise is just good old fashion family time together.

Pinterest Fail

Have ya'll seen this website?
http://www.pinterestfail.com/

It cracks me up and makes me feel better that a good chunk of my projects don't turn out how I imagined them. Here's my most recent one....

Inspiration:
(http://theembellishednest.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/pinterest-challenge-diy-wall-art/)

(http://theembellishednest.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/pinterest-challenge-diy-wall-art/)



Easy right? Tape up a blank canvas and just paint your heart out. Take the tape off and boom you've got yourself a masterpiece!

I will say this, we had some serious fun making it. Thankfully our friends Chez and Eliza came over do it with us. 

Two happy, messy girls

then she crawled out to the yard and started playing in the dirt, i figured what's a little dirt with some paint?

Add caption

our masterpieces! i use the term masterpiece loosely...



So then I peeled the tape off and it wasn't the big reveal I was hoping for. It was u-g-l-y and it didn't have no alibi.

So, a week or so I decided to re-do it. I taped it up again and had a little better idea of what I wanted this time.

better!

her happy home on the mantle

I'm currently working on another pinterest project gone wrong. It's funny how bad this guy has turned out. Can't wait to share another failure with you soon. I've got to go waste another 12 hours on it first though....

the bad stuff

One of my biggest beefs with the blog world is that everyone's life looks kinda fabulous because you only see the good stuff and then you looks around and wonder what you are doing wrong. I didn't know if I should blog about this or not but decided to because well, it's a part of our life and that's what this blog is. Our life. Even the bad stuff.

Two weeks ago today I found out I  miscarried. I had known I was pregnant since I was four weeks, and I was ten weeks at that point. It was heart breaking. I wouldn't wish that kind of sadness on anyone. It was surreal. I have typed and deleted about 10 different things here because, well, what do you say. It was awful in every way. I cried for about three days.

Then it got better. This is the part that I want to remember. We let a few close friends and family members know what had happened and just asked for prayers of healing and peace in our hearts. They did. I know they did, not because we happen to have the most awesome support group ever, but because I felt it. I felt peace washing over me. I thought more about how our baby was in heaven than how he or she wasn't here on earth with us. I started seeing blessings in how we had to find out this horrible news. I was suppose to go in for an ultrasound at 8 weeks but we ended up scheduling it closer to 10 weeks because of scheduling conflicts. If I would of gone in at 8 weeks then we would of been completely blindsided when they told us the baby had no heart beat (stopped growing at 6 weeks). I started bleeding over the holiday weekend, and when I called the doctor she told me I had a 50/50 chance of miscarrying and I could go to the ER if I wanted but there wasn't anything they could do for me so I could just wait for an apt Tuesday morning. At the time I thought this was cruel and agonizing to make a pregnant woman wait 2 days to know what was happening to her baby. But now I can see that I was given some time to prepare my heart for what I was afraid was happening. I can see God's timing in all of this know and am so thankful for how we found out such awful news.

So, there it is. We lost our baby. We are, of course, still very sad we won't meet our baby in this lifetime, but more peace every day about it. Luckily we have a feisty redhead that has been integral in our healing process and of course a very cute distraction when we need it.

11 Months

We haven't taken our monthly pictures since 9 months. Total fail on my part. Life just seems to be in fast forward these days. It's strange because we aren't particulary busy but yet days just slip away. Now, a few weeks before her big birthday I thought I'd slip in a 11 month update....

ruby is starting to babble finally. At her 9 month apt the pediatrician was a little worried she didn't babble at all, but she does a little now. It is still mostly grunts and squeals, but just in the last few days there is a definite "dada" in there which is just so amazing to hear.

We are definitely on a pretty consistent schedule. Wakes up around 6:30am, nap at 9am and 2pm, then bed at 7pm. We listen to her bedtime song and then put her in her crib and after tossing around for usually 10-15 minutes she goes to sleep. It still blows my mind that she goes to sleep on her own and sleeps nearly 12 hours a night. I thank God every single day for this huge blessing.

She is awesome at independent play. It's no big deal for her to sit and play by herself for 45 minutes. Favorite things to do include pulling things out of boxes, playing with my old empty wallet, playing with an old keyboard, flipping through books, and messing with Molly's crate.

There is no doubt she is an extrovert. She loves being around people. She is a lot like me in that she likes being around people and just watching but can still be a little shy. If a new person comes up to her she is a little more hesitant to be held by them and avoids eye contact.

 She is getting more cuddly these days which I looooooooove. For the past few months she's been so active with her crawling you couldn't get her to sit still long enough. The past week she hasn't been feeling well, so that may be part of it, but she reaches up a lot to be held a lot. And after naps and when she wakes up she likes to just be held and rocked for while or she gets really cranky and cries.

She has 8 teeth!

Starting to walk, mostly it is 1-2 steps here and there. The other day she took five steps in a row though. It takes quite a bit of coaxing though, her preferred mode of transportation is definitely still crawling.

Eating well, she is starting to protest certain foods though. If she doesn't like something she picks it up and drops it on the floor. It's making me kind of nuts but I'm trying not to give her much of a reaction because that just makes her laugh and do it more.

Little stinkers loves to grab her hair when her hands are good and gross. Clean ups are fun.

My big girl

Down in fraggle rock.....

After a painting project

MISC.

 Nearly a month of no blogging and I think this is like my 5th post today! Figured I was on a roll and I better take advantage of it (and Ruby is asleep now). So here's bits and pieces from our life the last couple of months or so.....

Rachel and I made this quilt for our friend Elana her baby girl Rylee

we started line drying. it works especially good on our cloth diapers as the sun actually bleaches the stains out- who knew?

jimmy johns is amazing. that is all.

andy's gotten a little bit of time to work on the nova, he built this entire front end/transmision/i don't know what it's called

i am obsessed with dump cake/easy peasy cobbler- this one was peaches and blueberries.

Very proud of our newly signed 10 year mortgage!!!

slowly working on xeriscaping our yard- believe it or not this is a huge improvement from what it was before!

Andy built this machine that bends metal tubing. Seriously, he's just too awesome times I can barely even handle it.

Playin' Around

Ruby is a handful. Like I look away and she is playing in Molly's dog bowl/eating a cotton ball/stuck under the desk/hiding behind a chair (all of these things happened just this morning). I also feel really strongly that my job is no longer to just keep her alive (our only goal the first few months, I'm glad we succeeded) but to start getting those brain cells a poppin' and help her to explore this world as much as I can. So, we've been trying to do some fun activities lately....

We "fished" for bananas. She was good. But she also really likes bananas. I kept making it harder by cutting the pieces smaller and smaller and she got every last one.

Then we attempted some finger painting. Literally everything she touches goes in her mouth, so I just added a little bit of food coloring to some yogurt for her to "paint" with....

I would say she ate at least half of her "paint" and this activity lasted all of about 10 minutes with a whole lotta clean up but worth it nonetheless!

We had bought this tube for Molly to run through and jump over years ago and brought it out for Ruby to play with and she wasn't too interested, even with dad showing her how to do it!

It's been so much fun the past few months being able to play with her and see her happy and watch her learn. I know this is just the beginning too! I cannot wait to do arts and crafts with her, we are just going to have so much fun!