Saturday mornings

Saturday mornings are wonderful at our house.  The last two weeks I've taken the early morning (about 6 AM) feeding since I needed to pump shortly after anyway.  Poor Kyle is always so sleepy in the mornings, and since I'm usually pooped on Friday nights and he lets me take a nap around dinnertime, I'm really big on letting him sleep a little on Saturday mornings.

After pumping and washing some bottles, this is how I found my two sleepyheads.  They slept until about 10 AM!  It was nice to get some laundry going and get showered when it was still pretty quiet.

After waking up, Daddy and Audrey eat eggs and milk respectively then settle in for their cartoons either in the bedroom or on the living room couch.  Audrey LOVES watching Batman cartoons.  She's mesmerized by the colors on the screen and attentively watches from across the room.  I've tried to get her hooked on Arthur, too, but she's only kinda likes it.  

 Here's a picture from last Saturday of Audrey falling asleep in the afternoon after watching several episodes of Batman.  

Audrey's a lot more chatty and smiley lately, which we both think is wonderful.  I practice saying mama and dada with her, but Kyle wants her first word to be either Batman or nanananananana...so he's working on those with her as well :)

Embarrassing Audrey

I noticed this weekend that in addition to doing the sweet things like reading with Audrey and watching cartoons, Kyle seems to have a fatherly ambition to make Audrey look ridiculous by "playing" dress-up.  He also likes to squeeze her cheeks while she's napping at church (I had to reprimand him several times to leave her alone today!), make weird faces at her (sometimes when she's sleeping and can't see them anyway), and mimic her attempts to talk to us (so of course she'll NEVER want to talk to us when she gets older!).  I guess that's what dads are for, right?  Embarrassing their children?  Kyle takes it to heart sometimes...particularly lately!

Kyle dressed Audrey up as Superbaby with a receiving blanket for a cape and "flew" her out to me on the couch

Kyle found these headbands in the dollar section at Target on Friday.  Of course, she had to try on both while Kyle snapped the picture!

Poor girl.  I guess although she'll be spoiled, we'll even it out by embarrassing her terribly.  Hope insurance covers counseling!

Christmas in November

Since Kyle's grandparents were heading to Florida for the winter, we decided to go to Indy a day early last weekend to make sure that we were able to spend some time with them and that they got to see Audrey.  They brought Christmas presents for her (they won't come back north until about May)!  It was weird doing Christmas presents and Halloween outfits in November, but hey...we do what we can!

Audrey got this, too...but I forgot to take a picture!

Poor Charlie wanted to help open presents, too...but he got in the way of pictures!

Grandma and Grandpa also bought a stroller and an activity mat for their house, and Audrey loved playing and looking at all the dangly toys on her mat:

What a spoiled little girl!

Halloween 2013

For her first Halloween, Audrey was a banana.  I got the costume at a garage sale for $2.00...what a steal!  Audrey wore her costume on three separate occasions...once for Great-grandma Brenda and Grandma Michele, once for my entire family, and once for Grandpa Gary and her great-grandma Dot and great-grandpa Gerry.  She hated her suit, really.  She'd be happy in it for about two minutes then cry the entire time.  I think it was the hat!  We snapped the pictures as quickly as we could!

Hulking out!  I tried to get a picture of her hat, which said "top banana"

She was the cutest banana I'd ever seen!  I was really sad to pack the costume away in a box, but I keep telling myself that it'll probably come back out for another kid, so I'll see it again!

Also, Audrey loved the candy.  Her bucket (Kyle's old one) was half-full of candy when we left my mom and dad's house.  Audrey had all of it gone by the next evening.  What a piggie! ;)

The Last Days of Maternity Leave

The last nine days of my maternity leave, Kyle was in Guatemala on an adult service mission trip with his dad for his parents' church.  Kyle's dad invited him to go a long time ago, and we'd planned for Kyle to go to Guatemala this year even before we knew we were pregnant with Audrey.  When we discovered that we were having a baby, Kyle originally decided not to go.  However, when we looked at her due date and the date of the trip, we discovered that I'd still be on maternity leave, so I encouraged him to go and said that if I needed any help, I'd just call up either his mom, my parents, my sister, or my grandparents.  Because I ended up needing a lot of adult contact just to stay sane, I ended up only spending two complete days in Muncie of the nine he was gone.  I was also trying really hard to focus on getting ready to go back to school the next week, and although it was hard to do without Kyle there, I'm glad he got the opportunity to help build a health clinic in Guatemala. 

These pictures are from one of the times I visited my mom and dad early in the week he was gone.  I drove past work and saw this outside!  Good thing I took a picture, because the next time I came up (only a few days later), it was gone!

Also my mom had a baby blessing dress made for Audrey out of her wedding dress, which she gave to us the week Kyle was gone.  My sister and I each used a lace sleeve from the dress to wrap our own wedding bouquets in, and with the extra material, my mom decided to have baby blessing/baby baptism clothes made.  I have two siblings, and each of us will get a little girl and little boy outfit.

Audrey with the wrapped dress.

Looking a little small in the gown.

The dress is extra-long, like a christening gown, and in the picture it's a little big in the shoulders still.  Kyle and I decided to have Audrey blessed sometime in January, though, so she'll fit right into it then!  

Going back to work was interesting.  It was hard to leave Audrey and I think about her all day long, but in the end, I'm glad (a) that I went back to work when I did instead of waiting longer for SO many reasons, mostly personal, and (b) that I decided to go back to work at all, also for personal reasons.  I sure do miss her throughout the day, and pumping breastmilk at work is so much worse than pumping at home, but it's for the best.  I refuse to bring any work home, so that helps!  We have found a wonderful baby-sitter for Audrey in Portland, and I was nervous that Audrey would cry all day, not take naps, want to be held all the time, etc.  However, Audrey has been nothing but wonderful for our sitter, thankfully!  Every time we go to pick her up, Audrey is either sleeping or smiley!  She loves to watch the other kids run around, and our sitter says watching them must poop her out, because she falls asleep while watching them! 

It stinks that we just can't all hang out all day at home.  But since we can't, we can't ask for a better situation!

Batman and The Hobbit

Audrey has a special bond with her daddy.  They frequently watch superhero cartoons together and Kyle has taken to reading to her before bedtime.  We have two different types of bedtime reading, I guess you could say...storytime (which right now is The Hobbit) and scripture time (we're reading from the Old Testament).  Kyle reads aloud in both instances.  Usually when he's reading The Hobbit, Kyle's holding Audrey and enjoying the one-on-one time with her, but for scripture study, we all sit together on the couch just before Audrey goes to bed and read and look at the pictures (we have a special edition distributed from the church that has included pictures with the scripture story summaries).  It's great for a little kid, especially when you have such a short amount of time before they start to get fussy!  We'll be using this version of scriptures with Audrey for a long time, I think.

Some pictures of Audrey and her daddy hanging out:

Meeting Audrey (part 2)

Wow...it's been almost a month since I've updated!  I've got tons of pictures to share (mostly of Audrey, of course) as well as plenty to share about our life over the last month or so.  I want to keep the posts short, though, since it IS Sunday night, which is when we like to get a lot of our snuggling with Audrey in before the work week begins!

Audrey met a few more close relatives over the last month!  Aunt Kelsey made it home from Marquette, Michigan for a weekend in mid-October and got to see and hold Audrey for the first time!  Audrey loved hanging out with (and farting on) her aunt :)

"She's so small!" (10/18/13)

Uncle Jacob also got to hold Audrey for the first time the same weekend (all the other times he'd met her to that point, he'd just gotten home from work and was pretty dirty):

"Chill out, bro!" (10/18/13)

Lastly, Audrey met Great-Grandma Evans (my mother-in-law Michele's mom).  Audrey enjoyed napping on Grandma Brenda!

(10/26/13)

Kyle and I discussed this weekend how lucky we are that we live near both sets of Audrey's grandparents.  He never got to see his grandparents too often when he was growing up because they lived so far away, and that's not something we want for Audrey if we can help it.  Everyone loves seeing her!  We did a short count...of the nine weekends Audrey has been alive, there's only been ONE weekend where she's not seen a set of her grandparents!  That one weekend we were supposed to host a set of grandparents at our house, but we had to cancel!  We feel so blessed to be able to say this (although we're probably going to be staying home a little more often on the weekends to come since I'm no longer on maternity leave!).