We Have a Crawler!

Maddie started crawling this past Wednesday. As you can see from the picture, she uses her left hand but her right forearm...silly girl :) She mostly uses her knees but sometimes I think maybe her knees get a little tired and she switches momentarily to her toes. It's so cool to see her moving toward something she wants. Mostly, that's the dog or whatever the dog happens to be chewing on. But, hey, whatever gets her moving, right? She's such a big girl and mommy and daddy are so proud of her!

Also on Wednesday she started waving at us. I don't have any pictures of that just yet, but hopefully I'll have a little video to post of her waving soon. It's so amazing watching our little girl learn so many new things. Sometimes I feel like I'm about to send her off to college already :) It just doesn't seem possible in the short amount of time that she's been with us that she could know how to do so much! I'm so in love with this little girl! I swear I could just sit and watch her all day long, just to watch the expressions on her face when she sees the dog or cat come into the room, to see how excited she gets to see daddy come in to get her up in the morning, to see her snuggle up with her "snuggly" and suck her thumb when she gets sleepy. I just want to soak in every little bit because I know it's not going to last nearly as long as I want it to!

She's starting to crawl!!! I'm so glad I got to capture this moment on video :) I just got the camera out to show her progress (mostly getting up on her knees and pushing herself backwards) when she surprised me by actually moving a knee and a hand forward! Oh my goodness...I'm just the proudest momma :)

Happy Valentine's Day

Yeah, it's a few days early, but Happy Valentine's Day from Maddie!! What a good sport she is when I want to take pictures of her. I made her a little onsie with iron-ons that says "My Valentine" for the pictures, but I guess I could've done without that since you can't actually see the whole thing anyway. Oh well...I tried.
She had so much fun with the boa :) It kept tickling her face which helped me to get some smiles out of her for the pictures! But I think toward the end it just started to annoy her (and me by getting feathers EVERYWHERE).

Way to go Steelers!

As you can see, we were rooting for the Steelers to win the Super Bowl! Of course, as usual, they didn't let us down...

We had a small Super Bowl party at our house and Maddie and I were the only two rooting for the Steelers (well, Eric was kind of on our side, I guess). All of our other guests were mostly southerners and were going for the Cardinals. One of Maddie's little friends from her playgroup, Saylor, stopped by to have some pictures taken and she was even all decked out in a Cardinals cheerleading outfit. Crazy what we do to our kids, huh? :)

So, here are a few pictures we got from the Super Bowl party!

I LOVE the Park!

Yeah! I got to go back to the park today! It was such a nice, sunny day so Mommy and Daddy decided it was time to go visit the park again. Lucky me :) Look at all the pictures below to see how much fun I had...

Me and Daddy got to climb up and look at Mommy through this big window. I thought it was pretty cool :) We also got to climb all over the jungle gym at the park...Mommy took a TON of pictures, but there were too many to share on here.

Daddy helped me go down the slide! I was a little unsure of what to do so Daddy gave me a little pep talk and then DOOOOWWWWWNNNNN we went! It sure was fun :) I got to do it over and over again.

Of course my favorite is still the swing. This park only has two swings that I can ride in so we had to wait our turn. But it was SO worth the wait :) I just smiled and laughed the whole time Mommy and Daddy were pushing me.

Unfortunately the fun had to come to an end. It was getting close to time for me to eat (again) and I was getting really sleepy. All this fun sure is tiring! Mommy held me tight and we got just a couple more pictures before we left the park for the day. I can't wait to go back!

A Day in the Park

What a gorgeous day we had today! It was a beautiful 76 degrees and mostly sunny. We did have a bit of wind to deal with, but, hey, we can't ask for everything, right? Well, the little girl I babysit turned 5 today so I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to take them to the park. We had a nice little picnic lunch and then played on the equipment for about an hour. Maddie went down the slide for the first time today and seemed to enjoy that. The faster I let her slide down, the happier she was! What a little daredevil I have :) She also rode in a swing for the first time today. I was just going to sit her in it to take a picture but I thought I'd give it a push and see what she thought. Well, as you can see from the picture, she LOVED it! (Also...can you see her two little teeth in the picture?) I can't wait to take her back to the park tomorrow to show Daddy how much fun she had and to get some more pictures of her on the slide. Hopefully we'll be able to post more pictures this weekend!

Weekend Update

Maddie had a very busy weekend! Friday night we went to our neighbor's house for an incredible lasagne dinner (Thank you Barb!). Maddie stayed up WAY past her bedtime, which is really getting to be a bad habit for us lately. The unfortunate thing for me was that she didn't really sleep in all that much Saturday morning! She was up and ready to play by 7:30am. I guess I shouldn't complain, I still got at least 8 hours of sleep, but I'm just used to a minimum of 9 hours! We spent Saturday playing and napping (Maddie, not me) and then we went out for dinner Saturday night with Maddie's playgroup. We had a really nice BBQ dinner at a local restaurant which was really fun! It was kind of crazy having a group of 12 adults and 6 babies! We only stayed there for about an hour then we invited one couple to our house and their daughter and Maddie played for a while until Maddie was BEYOND tired (around 9:30). It is nice that she'll actually stay awake later than 6:30pm now so she can be a little more social :) We had a Christmas party for the playgroup and Maddie was heading to bed just as our guests were arriving...definitely not a night owl! Sunday morning started bright and early to get up and try out a new church. We've lived here for almost 16 months now and we've FINALLY found a church Eric and I agree on :) Maddie behaved herself through church and then fell asleep in the carseat on the way home...it was past her usual nap time by then. The rest of Sunday was spent watching football and relaxing. Maddie watched the kickoff of the Steelers game but then was off for a really late nap. She really seems to enjoy watching football on tv when it's not time for sleeping! Hopefully she'll get to watch some of the Super Bowl at least :) Monday I didn't have to babysit since there was no school (the mom is a teacher so when school's out I don't work!) so Maddie and I had a chance to meet Daddy for lunch. We did that a couple of times during winter break and we really missed it! So we met at an awesome Mexican restaurant (Chuy's) and enjoyed some steak burritos-YUMMY! Afterwards Daddy headed back to work and Maddie and I enjoyed some shopping at Baby's R Us :) That about exhausted Maddie (she was awake for over 4 hours at that point) so she slept A LOT the rest of the day! Whew...it's nice that today we'll be back on our usual schedule and will only leave the house to pick up the babysittees from preschool! I'm sure Maddie will enjoy a relaxing staying home all day to sleep whenever she wants :)