Updates To My Last Post and Remembering Her

Haha. Who am I kidding! I thought of like a thousand more things that I need to update on than just the two mentioned in my blog post title!

• This morning Bobby went upstairs for me to retrieve Griffin out of his crib to eat and he found him laying on his tummy for the first time. He rolls over on regular carpet sometimes but this is a first for his crib! I was wondering when this might happen. He still sleeps in his Halo Sleep Sack and its a tad bulky. I knew it would be harder for him to fight his way over to his tummy, but he did it!

• Griffin has also gotten in a horrid habit of getting his little arms and legs stuck in between the bars of his crib. This is what is waking him up a little too early from naps (and most likely at night too). I need to go out this weekend I suppose and get those breathable bumpers for his bed. I think they are super ugly, but hey, if they help him sleep longer, bring on the ugliness. 

• No teeth yet this morning. I just checked again :).

• Ya'll are probably sick to death of hearing about my plants (but thank ya'll all so much for the sweet sweet comments anyway the other day!!) but we've gotten such great rain lately that so many beautiful trees, plants, and shrubs are blooming so wonderfully!

These Texas Blue Bonnets are blooming at the entrance of our neighborhood. For ya'll non-natives these are the state flower of Texas! Aren't they just gorgeous!

This rose bush of mine only had a couple of pretty blooms on it last week (which is usually all we get all.year.long) but this morning I discovered that it had gone crazy almost overnight and is now covered with blooms!

Our other rose bush is doing the same thing. In a few more days I'll take another picture to post because it will quite literally be riotous with blooms! It has a lot now (my picture is just not doing it justice) but check out the picture below...

Once again, it's hard to tell (HEY BOBBY I NEED A NEW CAMERA :) but all of those scraggly bits that you see are tiny little blooms just waiting. This bush will have hundreds of blooming flowers on it very soon!!

I don't have a picture of our fruit trees out front but they are also covered in blooms which means that we will have lemons and tangerines coming out our wazoos!

• I went to the mall last weekend to use up some gift cards that I had gotten for my birthday last month. I snagged the cutest aviator sunglasses! A portion of the sides is covered in the prettiest coral enamel!  

• Back to my littlest Griffin, he got a sippy cup!

For right now, he mostly just likes to play with it when I have him cooped up in his highchair. If I hold it to his mouth for him, he will drink the water out of it. He pretty much gives me the stink eye because he's not crazy about the water... Maybe I should put just a tad bit of formula in it for him and see if that goes over better :).

• Griffin went to the grocery store with me the other day and what usually happens to him did happen and I managed to remember to take a picture. :)

His car seat doesn't fit at the top of the cart where it should go so he has to ride in the basket area. I just keep piling food around him (with the exception of the frozen) until he's nearly covered. Poor baby. Can you tell just how much he minds ;). Does this ever happen (or did it ever happen) to you?

• Caroline has been on my mind a ton lately. I keep seeing this little red bird outside my window and I think of her every time. Usually we just get lots of little brown and boring birds here...

Can you see it in the trees ? 

I added this little Easter decoration next to Caroline's urn the other day. The pink bunny just seemed perfect for her!

• Maybe I'm thinking more about Caroline these days because I just got done watching the episode on TLC about Michelle Duggar and the baby that she and her husband lost. We don't have cable but I sure did buy this episode on Amazon and watch it. Did you watch it and what did you think about it? I have heard tid bits online here and there from other BLM's and I'd like to add my two cents worth. So many people out there are wondering why would she and her husband share such a personal experience with so many people and why hold such a large church service for someone so little. I think that there are a lot of people (family's who have lost little ones and not lost little ones) that place so much judgement on what is or is not "gestationally appropriate". I firmly believe that things such as this can ONLY be left up to what the parents feel that they need to do to heal and feel better. It's not really about anyone else.  Also, kudos to Michelle and Jim Bob for sharing one of the worst moments of their life on national television. So many of us go through such a similar experience as them and yet the taboo of a child's death is still lingering! Many grieving parents are expected to hush up about what happened because it makes other uncomfortable. I say so what about others.  Maybe by sharing something so intensely personal others watching will be better able to help friends or family that experience the same. 

• On a much lighter note gals, we had lunch at the cutest little antique store last weekend. You will NEVER guess what we discovered in there...

Did you ever play in one of these at a McDonald's play-yard when you were little? Both Bobby and myself did and we had the best memories of it!! We could not get over seeing one again! :)

• Also while we were out we went to a cute little train museum. The boys had a wonderful time there! 

Love all my sweet boys!!

Wow, if you are still reading this you are awesome! Thanks for hanging in there for all my random mish-mash of whats been going on around here. It just gets harder and harder to find time to blog these days. I know that soon it will get better. Hang in there with me and hope that ya'll all have a great weekend!

Griffin Is 6 Months Old!

My sweet sweet baby is a whole six months old! How are we already half-way to one year old??

I think that this baby stage is one of the best :). He is so smiley, cheery, leaning new things every day, playing with toys, and interacting with brothers.

Griffin is :

• around 20-21 pounds. I'm just guessing. We will find out on Monday when we go in for his 6 month checkup.
• wearing size 3 diapers and size 9-12 month clothes. Some 9 month sizes fit great and other ones are too small and he needs a 12 month (particularly for the length).
• getting 2 teeth on bottom! They are not through the skin yet but it is seriously a matter of just a couple more days. His little gums on the bottom are swollen and I've been checking a couple of times a day just waiting to feel that little tale-tell feel of something sharp :).
• still nursing on demand during the day and eating breakfast, lunch and dinner in his high chair. During the late afternoon hours my milk seems to start to give out and I have to supplement with formula. I figure that I'll nurse for as long as it still works for both of us and supplement as needed. I made it to my 6 month goal so we'll just see what happens from here on out.
• eating all sorts of things! His loves so far are avocado and bananas. He has eaten sweet potatoes, squash, apples, pears, and green beans. He hasn't found one yet that he doesn't like. He might take after his mother :).
• napping a couple of times a day... on a good day. We sometimes have weeks where he goes on terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad napping strikes. This make him (and by default, me) very grumpy. 
• going to sleep most nights by 6:30. He is almost always awake by 5:30 the next morning. Some nights he is an awesome sleeper and goes the whole night with out waking. Most nights he's up 473 times. I might be slightly stir crazy from all the lack of sleep accumulated over the last  6 months.
• starting to get thick hair! It's coming in pretty light  blond with maybe the tiniest hint of red.

My littlest boy is becoming the funniest guy ever! We recently went to a family function and Griffin nearly about went crazy trying to get to a plate of brownies :).

He kept throwing himself to one side of the infant carrier to get closer to them and then licked the carrier until we finally put the plate away. My boy already know what tastes good and he's never even tasted them yet! :)

Griffin can almost sit up. We just need a tad bit more upper body strength and balance and then he'll be golden. He also can roll front to back and then back to front. He doesn't like to show these skills off very much though. He likes to wait until I'm out of the room then do his rolling trick. :) I will walk back in and find him rolled over a different way than I left him!

I can hardly wait to see how Griffin grows and develops over the next six months. There are just so many fun things to come! 

Oh! And I didn't forget to take the cute, fun pictures of Griffin with the little stickies on his shirt. I'll add those later to this post when I get around to taking them. :)

In Bloom

All of this wonderful summer-y, rainy weather here in South Texas has really brought our yard to life recently. My poor hubby is back to mowing once a week, bless his poor heart.

Griffin got his first "tractor" ride not long ago. He was thrilled! :)

My sweet father-in-law came by to help us out with our lawn before Graham's birthday party and Griffin got his first ride! He loved it! He rode around with his Opi for about 10 minutes in hog heaven. :)

I'm really excited because all the flowering bushes and plants have really started to come alive this week! I really wish I had more time to spend outside tending more of it. It really would be lush and beautiful with more tlc (and less dog and boys tearing it up :).

He is just a litte taste of what we have right now!

If Bobby and I can manage to get our act together and really get our yard (oh how I wish I could call it a garden) looking nice I'll show it all to you! 

I hope that everyone had a wonderful weekend!

When One Thing Leads To Another

This concept happens a lot around my house :).


Bobby says one thing and I end up just running loose. My poor, but very understanding husband loves me so much (thank goodness).


Two weeks ago, I had to crawl up under the table one day to fetch a lost toy of Grady's and just happened to look up and saw what appeared to be a hidden leaf. Later that night I mentioned it to Bobby and sure enough I was right!! Mind you, we have had this dining room table now for about 8 years and never noticed. Sad. Our cute little table now stretches out to the most glamorous proportions!


Spurred on by the recent development of our gorgeous new table, Bobby re-centered the table under the chandelier. I just happened to comment to Bobby just how much I hated it. (Think gold and very '80s.) Bobby's response to me was "You can have a new chandelier once you paint the dining room." I said, "I'm going to the hardware store now then."


I began taping off the walls that night and even started a little of the painting too. It's not a huge room so it only took me a couple of days. The worst of it was the 10 foot ceilings required to to climb up Bobby's big ladder like 4000 times. I swear I lost weight while I was painting :).


Before : 
(sorry this is just a random old picture so you can see the crazy white/green combo walls)

After :

 This is the view from the door to the kitchen

 This is the view from the hallway by our front door. 

The horrid chandelier that has to go.

I'm super excited about how it all turned out! It is so much more "me". Cozy but a tad elegant and lots of rich warmth. It has spurred me on to wanting to start other room painting projects! Then next thing on my list is our downstairs hallway. I just know that Bobby can't wait. :)

So you see, had Grady never lost his toy, had the leaf never been discovered, the table never re-centered, the ugly chandelier discussed, I never would have painted. Funny how one thing leads to another! 

WordPress Is Looking Mighty Nice Right Now...

I can NOT begin to tell you how irritated I am right now with Blogger. I am going on Day 2 on having a glitch involving my dashboard with no end in sight. The error I keep getting looks like this...(oh wait see the bottom of the post for the error message because POS Blogger will not let me type anything below the copied "error message". I'm shocked.)

When I first received this message I though, "no biggie, I'll just report my problem". It truly was no biggie until I started searching and couldn't find a way to contact blogger to let them know of my error message. The note, if you will notice later specifically states "When reporting this error to BLOGGER SUPPORT or on the BLOGGER HELP GROUP..." but, guess what! No such places exist! I searched and searched and then had my tech-savvy hubby search and search but nothing! I then googled the two different terms. They took me a very general area in which you can select from about 4 different frequently asked questions. None of those 4 suited my problem. When I tried to go to the "Blogger Help Group" that google sent me to it was a private, invite only site. WHAT?? But the error message had just told me to go there?! {In case you have not noticed I'm whining like one of my kids right now...}

I am beyond irritated  right now. What the heck am I supposed to do?

Right now, it seems that I can publish all the blog posts that I want to but from now until probably forever I can not access any of my reading list. My hubby's awesome suggestion was that I just look at the list of blogs on my right sidebar of my own blog and check them from there except that that is only 1/100th of the people that I follow. This is my apology now if I cease commenting on your blog.  

The only thing that I was able to find was some sort of Blogger "product forum" what ever that is supposed to mean. I filled out some kind of form and now I am on some kind of random list with about a million other pissed off Bloggers that list their complaints against Blogger. I seriously doubt that anyone in the Blogger Tech  Department really even checks it. They have, however, managed to email me said list multiple times a day with all the new people listing their complaints and unresolved issues. It's like some sick promotion to leave Blogger in the dust and go elsewhere to blog.

Am I some kind of idiot and totally missed some bright shiny button that I can click that will take me to the right place? If you don't blog on Blogger where do you and do you like it??

If you are still reading my rant, below is the error message I see 1000 times a day that I log into my blogger dashboard to see if it's working yet...

We're sorry, but we were unable to complete your request.

When reporting this error to Blogger Support or on the Blogger Help Group, please:

• Describe what you were doing when you got this error.
• Provide the following error code.

bX-bz8xzf

This information will help us to track down your specific problem and fix it! We apologize for the inconvenience.

Close

Grady's New Big Boy Room!

I can't believe how long it's been since I've posted! Horrible, I know. We've been so crazy busy lately that I just haven't had the time. Sometimes it's either blog or sleep. I promise you I will choose sleep every.single.time. :)


So we finally have Grady's room done! 


My big kid is so excited! 

I pretty much took pictures from every conceivable angle possible :). 

The above picture is the view of his room as you walk in. I moved his dresser to a different wall and now have zero regrets as to how big it is. It holds all of his things with room to spare!! I love how sturdy it is (My big 'ole self stood on top of it to paint part of the ceiling and it didn't even so much as creak...)

Speaking of painting, I did his whole room all by myself! It was a horrible flat white color. Yuck. It was soo dirty and gross. I painted his room in a semi-gloss so when I have to clean his walls I can just hose them down. It looked so good that I've now got plans to paint the whole rest of the house in this neutral semi-gloss as well!

And here is his new bed! Also super sturdy seeing as how he almost demolished his crib and destroyed 3 crib mattresses. Please ignore the potty next to the bed, he uses it at nap time when he has to go. We still have to gate him in his room due to ongoing nighttime wandering problems and so he's usually not able to get out to the regular restroom in time before a potty accident happens. 

**Update-the potty have been removed from the room and tossed into the trash (nasty thing). Grady has since proved reliable about making it to the restroom in time! Yay!

I really felt the need to post a picture of the corner of his room. I'm not quite sure why, it is just a corner after all. :) This is where we read at night though. Grady will pile up on his bean bag chair while we sit on the floor and read to him. I love this part of the day!

And here is another random picture of his room. The empty wall will soon have a small book case there. I just need to get it painted a pretty red first! If you could please ignore the junk in the hall way... it was a major spring cleaning day at our house and tons of stuff got sent packing!

On a funny side note, Grady witnessed me all day cleaning and then taking pictures (these were taken several weeks ago). Just yesterday I was in his room making his bed and he asked me if I was taking pictures again. Apparently that is the only reason I clean. Maybe I should do it more often. You know, for the sake of having a clean house and not for blogging.

And here is Grady's closet. Not super exciting or anything. I also need to get a little something to hold toys in here. Surprise surprise, Grady broke the last one. 

On either side of his closet he has great little shelves for book or toys. They look only about half filled here, but last week I grabbed all the kid books that were hanging out in our living room and put them up here. The shelves are now filled and almost sagging with books. 

Lest everyone tries to rush out at the same time to buy me the "MOTHER OF THE YEAR" award, this is what the floor of Graham's room looks like. Like all of it. His room is next!

Griffin's Prize

If Griffin can manage to take just ONE decent nap this week then he will win a prize..

That's right friends, Griffin will win the opportunity to wear a boob on his head. (Now I can't wait to see how many weirdo's find their way to my family blog by googling "boob on head".)

Now if Griffin is ever a rotten teenager then I will pull out pictures of me feeding him while he's wearing this hat and show them to all of his friends. :)

Is this not the funniest hat that you have EVER seen! My friend Candance makes them. She has a hilarious sense of humor no? :) Roll over to her etsy shop and check her out!

I'm pretty sure that she makes these in drink koozies too ( you know, if your hubby needs a prize or something...) :)

Caroline Elizabeth and Ashley Elizabeth

I received a great Facebook message yesterday :). It was from one of my dearest friend's Momma.

I just wanted to share something special with you. I had a dream about Ashley. Maybe I should say Ashley came to me in a dream, which she often does. In my dream she was playing with Caroline Elizabeth and taking care of her. Caroline was laughing and smiling. I woke up with the greatest sense of peace and happiness. In my heart I felt like Ashley was telling me to tell you that Caroline is happy and she is taking care of her for you. I hope this doesn't upset you. I prayed about it before telling you so I hope I made the right decision. I think of you so often and I'm so proud of all the things you've done to honor your daughter as I have tried to honor mine. We have that in common. I will never let Ashley's memory die and you'll never let sweet Caroline's memory fade. It makes some people uncomfortable but that's their problem not ours. Some people don't understand how important it is to remember our loved ones who have gone to Heaven and it's very hurtful. I had a bad experience last week that hurt me deeply. I also had a wonderful experience helping some parents who lost their son, which we have done often since we lost Ashley. It helps us to help others who have gone through the same thing. I sense that you've reached out to help others too and I'm so proud of you. Sending my love and hugs to you. I hope this doesn't upset you, but gives you peace. I know Ashley has come to you too or I wouldn't have mentioned it. Love you Hillary! Linda

When I was in college (many many years ago :) I met the most amazing girl who quickly became my very best friend. We were roommates for years! We went through thick and thin together! She was one of the maids of honor in my wedding. In 2001, 3 weeks after my wedding she was shot and killed while driving down the road. Her nightmare is here.

To say that I was devastated is an understatement. I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, and was beyond depressed.  My very best friend was gone overnight. 

I still remember the morning that I got the news. Bobby and I were happy newlyweds that had just moved. We were living in a rural area with almost no cell phone service and a home phone line that had not yet been set up. A sheriff cruiser pulled up to our home to tell me. I wanted to vomit on the spot. 

Its been 11 years now and I still think about her almost everyday. I saved every picture of her and every funny note or letter she ever sent me. I miss her so badly. Every big event in my life I want and need to share with her and can't. I hate it. 

When we had our little Caroline, Bobby and I quickly decided that our little girl should have the same middle name as my bestie. I thought that there could be nothing better for the two to share (other than Heaven :) as names!

Ashley's birthday is coming up this next Saturday (St. Patty's Day!) and I've been thinking about her a lot. I was beyond excited to hear from her mother and to learn of her dream. It's always been my wish that they were together. :)

College days! :)

Happy 10th Birthday Graham!

Dear Graham,

Happy 10th Birthday! Your brother, Daddy and I had such a fun time surprising you this morning by yelling "Happy Birthday" as loud as we could to wake you up :). We loved singing you the Happy Birthday song while you were still in bed and I know you enjoyed it too. The smile on your face said it all :). We wanted you to feel how loved you are from the moment you woke up this morning. 

From the moment you were born, you forever changed our lives. We became Momma and Daddy for the first time! You have blessed our lives with so much joy and sunshine that sometimes our hearts can not contain all the emotion.

My Daddy, Papa Ralph. He has since passed on but still watches over you.

You were such a fun happy baby! You made us smile every.single.day. I sometimes can not get over how much your little brother Griffin looks just like you! He will grow up to be as handsome as you are. :)

Your smile is always contagious and we love to hear your hilarious jokes and stories that you bring home from school!

We are so thankful that you have such a loving and giving spirit. Momma does not know someday's what I would do with out you! When your little brothers are just too much you always lend a helping hand by either holding a cranky Griffin for me or playing a fun game with Grady.

You love to learn and have so many grown up interest! I love to hang out with you because we like to so many of the same things. We love to go to the movies, museums, and book stores together. You are a mini-me :). You struggle in school some but you just try soo hard to over-come you difficulties that you inspire me to try harder myself!

Graham, we love you more than words can describe! We are so blessed and so thankful that we get to be your parents!

Happy 10th birthday big kid!!

Love, 

Momma and Daddy