Ughhh...

I wish I could keep up with this thing because I know I'm going to regret it later.

Ok, trying again.

Amelia just turned one year old three weeks ago. We took her to Disney World to celebrate, of course. It was decently cold out and the girls were adorable, as usual.

 

I'm the birthday girl!! 

 

A few days later, we had a cute little party for her. Of course, she loved the cake that she coated herself in.

 It's so hard to believe that she is one! She is growing so fast and is getting into everything. She's been walking for months so now she's already climbing on crap. She absolutely loves her big sister and gets such a kick out of it when Lily plays with her. The other day Lily led her around the house by her hand showing her things and it was one of the sweetest things ever. I'm phasing out all of her 12 month clothes for 18-24m stuff, and last weekend she crumpled on the ground screaming when I had her in size 5 shoes, so it's time for 6's I guess. She's sooo cute when she's happy but she definitely has a temper and her angry cry is so.not.cute.

Now, Lily's birthday is next and we are going to take her to Cinderella's Royal Table for breakfast. I'm so excited to see her little face. She is more into princesses that I ever hoped she would be but it is ridiculously cute seeing how happy she gets about them, so I'll take it. I'm going to get her a Rapunzel ("Princess Puzzle") dress for her present and give it to her before our princess breakfast. She is already talking about having a birthday party so I'll have to start really planning that soon.

Last night at Target we had a toddler leash incident and she fell into an end-cap display of wine bottles. Only 2 broke so it could have been worse, but we were embarrassed, and she ended up hysterical after the shock wore off.

We are in Phase 2 of ?? in our move to Oregon. We've moved out of our house and we're living with my parents as they try to sell their house now. I've applied for my OR nursing license, and Mark has applied for a job that would be so incredible for him/us if he gets it, so fingers & toes are crossed. We are having a hard time comprehending the best way to actually facilitate this move and get to the west coast though. Our current plan is now to ship our cars and fly nonstop from ATL to PDX. The actual cost of moving is substantial and that kind of sucks but it will totally be worth it in the end. We just have to get there ASAP so we can get started with our new lives!

Fun with my girls

Were hanging out at home the other day before I went to work. Lily randomly picked out a toy car at CVS and was playing with it. Amelia was just enthralled. She is so amazed with her big sister. She is so incredibly determined to grow up and keep up with Lily.  She won't stay a baby for long. :(

Then I came home from work the other day and I get greeted with this:

Scrunched face smiles are the best. 

Labor Day & Aquarium Day

Well, our little road trip went pretty well, though the night before it did not. I had intended to get up early so I could run to the store and then make a cake to take with us. However, Amelia was apparently not informed of this plan, because she woke up like 6 times and would.not.stay.asleep. So, I was up until about 7:30AM, blah. Finally, I had Mark get up and take care of her so I could finally get some rest. I think I dragged myself out of bed at 1 and then we got everything ready and peaced out, sans cake.

We got to Cape Coral around 4:30. We walked into the loud house and Amelia decided at that point to become shy and buried her face into me. Any time someone would try to talk to her she would turn away and I think she may have cried at one point. She got over it after awhile but there was a lot of action happening so she didn't get to do too much exploring. She got passed around quite a bit once she started warming up to people. She definitely preferred women over men at first.

Happy again. I love her smile!

Lily was seriously in seventh heaven having someone her age to play with. She ran around with her cousin nonstop, getting into things and being adorable. They played dolls and colored and played with purses and hair bows. Eventually they took a break to watch Bubble Guppies, and then followed up with a few dozen screaming laps around the house. It's really too bad they probably won't get to see each other for another year.

We thought that after the marathon she ran before we left that she would pass out in the car. Before we left we had her in her jammies so she could go straight from the car to her bed. Nope. She stayed awake and talking to us the whole 2 hour trip home. She can fall asleep in the 10 minutes it takes to get home from my parents house, but 2 hours on the interstate in pitch black? Wide freaking awake. Oh, and we realized we had a problem when she announced she needed to pee when we were in the middle of a stretch of BFE no where on 75. It was after 11pm so it's not like we could have stopped at McDonald's or anything really...my only idea was to find a Walmart, but we ended up missing the exit and she peed her in pull-up. That's what it's for kinda, but really, it was a mama fail. We have since put her little potty in the back of the car...if this happens again (which it probably won't because we're prepared now), we can at least pull over somewhere safe and let her do her thing.

We actually all got a decent amount of sleep that night! Again, I was ambitious with my mental planning and wanted us all to get up to go with Mark when he took Ellie to the airport and then go to the aquarium from there.

Yeah, that didn't happen.

After I roused the sleepyheads, it was time for the aquarium anyway! I had never been to the Florida Aquarium strangely enough, and it was on my list of things to do before moving away forever. And, I got cheap tickets on Living Social months ago.

It took almost as much work to pack up 2 kids for a trip to the aquarium that's less than 30 minutes away as it does to take them to Disney. We needed all the accoutrements involved with the water playground so they needed to be pre-sunblocked before leaving the house, and we needed towels and bathing suits, changes of clothes for them and for me, sun glasses, more sunblock, etc.

We got there by 2 and had plenty of time to look around, as it's not very big. Lily had a pretty short attention span at each tank: "Hi sish! Bye sish! I wush (love) you!".

I'm the boss of this tank.

Apparently this evil green eel was smiling. He's a very happy fish. 

After we were done inside it was time to see what Explore A Shore had in store for us. We went outside and got Lily changed and re-sunblocked quickly. She dug in the sand pit for a while and then went nuts on the pirate ship that Mark has since deemed a death trap. She seriously loved though. 

"I diggin!"

Eventually we got Amelia changed so she could play too. Babies in bathing suits are crazy cute. Unfortunately it was so.freaking.bright outside that I couldn't see the screen on my phone and ended up hitting the button that switches the main camera to the front facing camera...so while I thought I was taking cute baby pictures, I was actually taking (horrible) pictures of myself. Camera fail. 

We left the aquarium shortly before closing. Amelia was zonked in her stroller and her hair looked AMAZING. Lily fell asleep in the car before we were out of the parking lot - and it wasn't a big lot! It was a really great day. Love love love.

Labor Day Weekend

I worked Thurs and Friday nights, but I'm now in the middle of four glorious days off to spend with some awesome people.

Last night we went out to dinner with the fam and I drank a whole pitcher of beer. It was pretty great. Mark doesn't drink beer so we never get pitchers, but with my mom and dad a pitcher can become reality.

Yee haw!

The food was really terrible so it's probably a good thing we had a lot of beer. We had a wonderful time at the house afterwards - Lily fed Stephen the dog some yogurt, drew on herself with a Sharpie, danced on the table to "I'm Sexy and I Know It", and took a bath in the kitchen sink (and Amelia got one too).

Amelia woke up early so we got some special one-on-one time this morning.

Puffs are serious business. 

When she took a nap this afternoon, Lily and I ventured to Starbucks and then dropped some stuff at a Goodwill donation station since it had been taking up valuable space in the car for too long. We went to the playground even though it was *9 million degrees*, and had lots of fun swinging and sliding together.

Super cool. 

We went home and picked Amelia up and then went to Baby Target  to get a safe and beautiful Chicco Nextfit for Amelia. Here she is testing it out last month.

It was such a breeze to install! The SuperCinch made the LATCH straps amazingly easy to tighten. I got it in there rock-solid by myself with almost no effort, which was a huge relief considering the circus act that's require to install Lily's seat. At first I was a little weary that it has no rear-facing tether like our old Britax and Lily's current Radian RXT, but it's installed so solidly that there is almost no give when trying to move or lift the back of the seat. The recline feature is very handy and it has a bubble level and printed level lines in case you're not on flat ground when you're putting it in..they really tried to make installing this seat almost-foolproof. The Nextfit fits kids up to 40 pounds/50 inches rear-facing so the plan is for Amelia to ride backwards until she goes off to college, right? Lily is also all set with her Radian to rear-face til approximately the end of time, if mama has anything to say about it!

We'll be hitting the road tomorrow (um, today actually!) to head to Ft. Myers for time with Mark's side of the family so I'm happy she has a comfy, fantastic new seat to ride down there in.

I have almost all the ingredients here to make a key lime cake to take with us...maybe I can get up early to run to the store so it can become a reality!

Remember me?

Oh it's just me, back again.

I know, right?

I'd really like to keep up with this to document my girls' lives, as they are just growing so, so fast. What is that about? They change so constantly that sometimes it's hard to see the difference until you go back and look at pictures from just a few months prior, and you just get taken aback by how they grow. It's totally amazing. 

Check this out. A video, even!

I'm all cute and pathetic with my nasal canula, etc. 

 6 months later and I'm wearing a cowboy hat like it's nobody's business. 

Standing? What? Oh this isn't new, I've been doing this for weeks now, guys. 

Meanwhile, Lily is some how a little kid already. I thought she looked big when Amelia was born, but if you compare now to then, she was totally still a little baby. 

Look at her little baby bob! 

Probably going to college any day now. 

Anyway, we've just been working and living and growing. I about to start working full time again, unfortunately, but we really need to save a significant amount for moving expenses, and Mark's job isn't quite as stable as it once was. Hopefully his book sales will pick up soon once some more reviews come out. He got a really good one today, except they were seriously misguided about the cover. :/

We recently switched the girls to a normal schedule with some semblance of a routine and it definitely makes me feel like a better mom. I probably will see them a little less what with me working nights, but I know it is so much better for them to go to bed at a normal baby bedtime instead of staying up so late with us, and I seriously hope we can keep them on this path. They're sleeping so.much.better.  (knock on wood). Mark is doing well so far staying on a much earlier schedule too, but I do need to stay up a few hours later than everyone due to working nights. It gives me some free time to cook (tonight I made coq au vin and homemade chocolate syrup; last night I made mini broccoli omelets) and clean (haha year right) and finally, finally work on the photobooks that I've been needing to make for about forever! I did Lily's birth book in 2011, but I need to do her 1 and 2 year books still. I'm almost done with Amelia's birth book, and then I can start her 1 year book. I hate the idea of taking thousands and thousands of pictures and then having them fester in folders on my hard drives. I want them to tell help tell stories so they can show them to their friends and/or kids one day.

We really hate summers here with a passion, so we're happy that it's almost September and may even be under 90 degrees sometime soon...it will almost be tolerable enough for a quick Disney trip. I'm hoping among hopes that this was our last summer here. We have visions  of mountains and seasons and boots and sweaters dancing in our minds just about every day, and even though the babies keep growing, we almost feel like we're just in a holding pattern here and life is really going to start once we get out to Oregon. 

Well, it's been a while!

Hello again.

Sometimes when I come back to a blog, I'll delete my old posts so it doesn't look like I sucked at keeping up with it. This time, they're staying put. I don't want my thoughts and memories to be deleted. Yes, I kind of forgot to update for over a year. My bad! If I could go back in time I would probably do things differently, because I could have documented all the cool things we did during that time! 

Cool things like this:

Hi! I'm Amelia!

So, Lunch with Lily is now Lunch with Lily & Amelia! Guess I need to work on changing my graphic.   

Meanwhile, that cute little baby in front of the Kitchenaid box now looks like this:

 I'm a big sister now!

The focus of this blog will be changing a bit, to the more generalized "mommy blog" variety. I can only make so many kinds of muffins, and taking pictures of food gets old fast. We are undergoing a major lifestyle change in our home though, as I am determined to be a great role model for our girls and I want to be around for them for a very long time. 

One More Disney Day 2012

Last week, for the first time ever, the Magic Kingdom was open for 24 hours straight in celebration of Leap Day. Of course, this was something we couldn't miss out on! We got a later start than we had originally planned on as a certain baby was extra fussy the night before, and then we got stuck in traffic for 2 hours. We still had plenty of time for the park though because they were open until 6AM!

We weren't exactly prepared for how busy it was but we had a a great time. Since we're able to go to frequently we weren't really rushing around trying to do things. We mainly hung out and enjoyed the atmosphere and talked with our friends who also thought it would be a a great idea to hang out in the MK all night long!