Birthday Photo Dump

First post in a while......not much to say but pictures to share!

      ^^^^^^^^^^She woke up on her birthday to a cozy coupe from Uncle Dane waiting for her ^^^^^
   

 ^^^^^^We didn't have her cake on her birthday...so she got half a donut after lunch and loved it^^^^

By far her favorite present was the balloon from the grocery store, she walked around holding it for days afterward.

Reading her new books with Daddy

We got her a giant Rosary for her birthday.  She still stole daddy's, one can never wear too many Rosaries while praying.

When everyone started singing Happy Birthday she was very suspicious about the whole thing....I don't know what she thought was going to happen, but she just glared at all of us, it took her awhile to warm up to the cake....but she got into it.

The next day we let her have 1 more go at her cake.....there was no hesitation this time ;-)

Sometimes being the birthday princess is really hard work.

Firsts

One of the most fun things for Matt and I being parents is watching our Little Bug experience things for the first time.  To see her little brain churn over a new experience is so exciting.  We've had quite a few firsts this summer, but I think 2 from the last couple of weeks deserve to be highlighted.

1. Barbecue.
Matthew and I love barbecue.  Love. It.  Often we are trying to plan dinner and both are simply craving barbecue making whatever we had on the meal plan for that night seem like nothing we want to eat.  We push through though and when we do get to go to our favorite barbecue place it is even more of a treat.  When we want good barbecue we head to Carolina Brothers.  Carolina Brothers is no frills at its finest.  You walk into a very small house/shack looking building to the sight of about a dozen kitchen tables (plain old kitchen tables) with chairs at them.  You walk up to the counter and order, your food is already ready to go as it's been smoking and cooking for the last 48 hours in the smokers out back.  Find empty chairs, sit down, enjoy.  We usually get a rack of ribs to share and 2 sides worth of baked beans, because, well, they're that good.  Maggie was munching on Cheerios and baked beans when she noticed the pile of discarded bones on my plate in her reach.  Before I knew what was happening she had snagged one and was sucking every little bit of fat/meat/sauce she could get off the already pretty clean bones.  She cleaned one and promptly asked for another.  It was so funny and she was so excited to have the bones!  I started giving her little pieces of meat and girlfriends was in Heaven!

                                This is her haha! face after she grabbed the
                                          first bone.  We moved all the plates away from
                                          her at this point.

2. Donuts
Maggie was a good girl in Church on Sunday, so she got a donut (read: Mom decided she really wanted a donut after Mass so told Dad that Maggie had been good and she probably wanted a donut).  We stopped and got donuts and came home.  As Matt put Maggie in her highchair and handed her a donut he said, "Well Maggie, you are about to experience a little bit of Heaven."  And I believe she agreed.  She was very hesitant at first, but it didn't take long for her to figure out that this was good stuff.  After we had all enjoyed a donut (which is waaaay more sugar intake than anyone is this family is used to getting) we all took a glorious 2 hour Sunday afternoon nap and woke up starving for an early dinner.

                                                                    Sugar Crash

A Post!

So I know it has been quite some time since my last post......it's summertime!  Maggie and I have been trying to get out of the house and enjoy the weather as much as we can, luckily it seems the crazy heat spell we were having is over and the next couple of weeks should be glorious!  We are missing daddy a lot these days, summer is his crazy, crazy time at work and with a deadline this week it is going to be a long one!

I have lots of pictures on my cell phone that I need to transfer for various posts so today I'll post the wonderful family pictures that my sister-in-law took.  She has done numerous photo sessions for Matt and I over the years at different stages in our relationship and these are among the best I think!  It was really hot and buggy the evening we took these, but Maggie was a trooper and we got some great ones!

Here are a couple that I took of Maggie in our backyard a couple of weeks ago:

                            This girl is as sassy as they come......we are in for it when she is bigger!

             This is her cheesy smile, a relatively new development when she sees the camera

                                                 "Mom, this photo shoot is over......."

Bugs

Maggie and I are getting ready to go into hermit mode for a couple of weeks.  The cicadas are coming.

I grew up in New England.  House Flies, Mosquitoes, Black flies....that's your bugs folks.  Granted, black flies are nasty, but nothing like what we have where we are now.  Any day now we are going to be struck with cicadas of plague proportions.  They will come out of the ground after 17 years, shed their nasty skin, make baby cicadas and die, leaving me plenty of patio sweeping to do.  They are huge and clumsy and fly into anything and they make an incredibly loud noise, and when thousands upon thousands make a really loud noise, it's out of control.  They don't bite or sting, but they are huge and gross.  So there is those.

A couple of weeks ago we did something I never thought we would do, we had the Pest Control guy come and spray our house.  It started when I was running down our basement stairs one day and it was dark and I had no shoes on and almost stepped on this guy:

I did what any self respecting woman would do when seeing thing thing (which was the size of the palm of my hand) very close to her foot, I screamed, ran back up the stairs from the family room, shut the door and googled: "A spider and a locust made a baby....what is it??"  Remarkably I got an answer.  This is a camel, spider, or mole cricket, all 3 names acceptable.  Why God made them I have yet to discover.  But He did.  And they come down into the unfinished portion of our basement and try to creep into the family room down there.  The darn thing was big enough that Matt finally got it a couple of weeks later (during which time I went nowhere near the lower level of our town house) and had to kill it with a big wrench from his tool bucket....yes folks, a wrench.

But I had decided I would suck it up and live with the bugs and we wouldn't call the bug treatment guy to come and I would tough it out and blah blah blah.  Until one evening when Matt and I were both sitting on the couch half asleep talking about how we really should be in bed already and we really needed to get up etc.  As we were finally preparing to get off our butts this scuttled across the living room floor:

Like a champ I yelled and tucked my feet up thinking that I most certainly never, ever, ever was leaving the couch again.  Matt jumped up and grabbed the nearest thing he could get his hands on (a tissue box) and managed to beat the thing to death after it scuttled across Maggie's jungle mat.  We stood over it both hoping we could convince ourselves it was something other than what it was....but it indeed was a cockroach.  And at that point I was done.  We were paying for treatment, paying for the ugly chemicals, paying to keep these out. 

Luckily when the exterminator came he said because we live near woods and everything we were seeing were wet woods bugs he thought they were coming inside to get out of the cold at night.  So we had him treat.  He seemed hesitant to treat our windows, and then informed us that the cockroaches were likely flying at our windows to get inside.  After which Matt insisted he treat the windows knowing if I returned home and found out they hadn't been I'd be calling them back.

I grew up thinking I wasn't really a baby when it came to bugs, I realize now that is because we didn't really have bugs where I grew up.  Here's to hoping that Maggie gets her father's non-squeamishness when it comes to critters.

Quirky Kid

So maybe all kids are like this....or maybe not, I don't really know.  I do know that our sweet Little Miss is quite a quirky little character.  She makes us laugh so much.  Currently her favorite things are:

1) Sitting in her office
2) Our couch pillows
3) Screaming
4) Grunting

1) Not really an office, but we call it an office.  Through a small patch of woods behind our house you can see the highway.  Especially before all the leaves started coming in you could see the cars going by.  Maggie at least for 5 minutes everyday, usually longer, assisted by her father or I, hangs out at the window ledge watching traffic.  She takes her job very seriously and doesn't like to be disturbed.  She doesn't smile, giggle, or talk during this time, just very seriously watches traffic go by.  When the lights are against her for 30 seconds and there are no cars she starts to get a bit stressed out.  It is hard to do ones job of watching cars when there are no cars to watch.  She puts her hands up on the ledge, usually holding the window lock and watches cars.  As the trees fill out they are getting less and less visible and I fear she may be filing for unemployment soon as again, hard to do the job when you can't see the cars.

2) Our couch pillows.  Maybe its the polka dots?  I don't really know, but she looks and talks to them like they look and talk back at her.  If she's having a bad day I park her on the couch with the two couch pillows and she tells them all about it and calms right down.  We are working on finding her some friends.

3) Screaming.  Y'all, I believe my sweet girl is the most beautiful, perfect little darling.  But she makes the most ungodly noise I have ever heard.  It's a screech, scream, loud noise.  It sounds like it should give her a sore throat after about .02 seconds, but she can go for hours.  I am amazed the neighbors haven't called animal control to stop us from torturing cats...it's that bad.  And let me tell you with a goal of seeing just how loud her little lungs can actually go and endurance like a marathon runner there are days when Matt walks in the door and I want to pull my hair/have already pulled most of it out.

4) Grunting.  Our sweet little lady.  When she isn't screaming she is grunting.  I don't know what this sweet baby babbling is that other people talk about here.  We have screeching cats and grunting pigs at our house, it's how we roll.  I have had people act very surprised and very alarmed when they walk up at the store and say how cute she is and rather than smile and babble she smiles and loudly and emphatically makes a guttural grunt at them.  I just smile and say "Yes we think she is adorable," while they walk away thinking I'm a crazy lady.

We are so excited to see where this sweet little girl's independent and very, very wonderful personality is going to go!

And I leave you with my absolute favorite picture of all time: