Easter Sunday: Round 2

We celebrated Easter with my side of the family last weekend and even though it was much colder and terribly wet, we still had a blast.

This is about how our morning went, her face looked like this
until we started some activities. I think someone is teething.

My parents have an awesome older farm house with so many
unique traits, with one being this upstairs vent that looks down to the
fireplace so the heat can rise up. Lily loves to look through said
vent and yell for whoever is downstairs. I even found her doing it to
a normal floor vent the other day, it was incredibly cute. 

It seems like it should be easier to get a decent picture of the three of them, but alas, this was the best we could do...

She finally started to perk up once we began coloring eggs. For some reason she loves eggs even though she doesn't eat them (she's allergic). As soon as she saw them she started shouting "egg! egg!" and each time we gave her a new color she told us what it was. Apparently to Lily all colors are blue, so that was informative. She really enjoyed doing this and was surprisingly gentle.

She is always very timid of men when she first meets them but seemed to be especially so with my Grandpa. This is the face she would make at him for minutes at a time, and anyone who knows Lily know she doesn't do any one thing for more than a few seconds. 

I think this picture, however, may explain her hesitation to warm up to him...

Being the only grandchild on both sides means you get double the egg hunts where you find all of the eggs yourself, double the presents and double the Peeps.

After the Easter Egg hunt we did some Easter carols. One of my favorite parts of Easter are the hymns, they have been a part of this holiday since I was a child and represent all the happiness and glory that comes from this season. Unfortunately our church doesn't do the traditional hymns so my sister and I decided we could just do it ourselves because my family is super awesome like that. This is how that turned out...

It's moments like these that make my heart sing.

Afterwards Lily helped Boppee play some tunes on the piano.

All-in-all it was an awesome Easter with an even more awesome family. I love these people more than they will ever know!

Silly Lily

Another silly Lily moment! She has this infatuation right now with clipping buckles together and Sophies collar seems to be the perfect thing to practice on. She takes it a step further, however, and proceeds to wear it as a crown. So silly! Then when I went to take a picture she insisted on wearing the camera bag as a purse and quickly ran away so this was the only picture I got. I love my silly baby.

Easter Sunday: Round 1

We had a really great Eater that consisted of hanging with Mamaw, Uncle Shawn, Sandra, and Uncle Chiz, eating a LOT, easter egg hunts and eating some more. Shawn came over Saturday afternoon to get some food prepped for the next day and Lily loved being the kitchen helper. She was especially good and helping "Unka Kan" snapping the fresh green beans. Now I may be slightly biased, but it really was one of the cutest things I've ever seen. Go on, see for yourself...

We also stopped by to see our Godson and Lily's cousin, Peter Aaron. Seeing them together is so adorable, Peter Aaron watches Lily with the most loving eyes and Lily loves to help him with his binky. They really are so sweet together, they definitely remind me of a young Holly and Brynt. 

Easter morning was much more interactive than last year. It's so crazy to think of how different things were just one short year ago: 

We spent the morning at church listening to a great service and Lily had fun in the nursery. 

When we got home Shawn and Sandra were slaving away in the kitchen preparing us a delicious Easter breakfast. It was truly amazing, my mouth is watering just thinking about it. While everyone was busy cooking, Lily was busy covering her arm in her Easter stickers. 

After that everyone needed a nap, then Lily opened her Easter baskets from Mamaw and had a lot of fun doing it. 

 One of her favorite presents were the peeps, or as Lily calls them, cookies. 

 I wasn't planning on doing our Easter egg hunt outside because it was cold and raining when we left for church, but only in Michigan does it become warm and sunny in a few short hours. She did a great job and loved looking for more eggs. After she had found them all I started sneaking them out of her basket so she could keep looking for them because she had so much fun doing it. 

This video shows what it's like when there is only one small child in the family. She definitely had her fair share of attention that day!

 After the hunt we came in and relaxed for a bit then started on dinner! Everyone worked together to make another really awesome meal. Needless to say we were all stuffed and tired.

That didn't stop us from enjoying dessert, however. It's Easter, come on! I actually ventured into baking because Brynt really wanted to try a mango carrot cake recipe we had seen in Better Homes and Gardens.  Obviously it didn't come out like the one in the magazine but it was edible so I consider that an accomplishment for myself :)

All-in-all it was a really awesome Easter with great family. We can't wait to do it again in a few weeks with the Schroeder/Zeunen clan.

10 years and 18 months

Wow, so I started writing this blog entry about a month ago... shows how reliable my brain has been lately. Yikes. Nonetheless, it's still worth sharing :)

We celebrated two big milestones at the beginning of March: the 2nd of the month was Lily's 18 month birthday (I know, she was born on August 30th but February only has 28 days so I declared it to be March 2nd) and the 3rd was Brynt and I's 10 year dating anniversary.

We had been trying to plan a night, just the two of us since Lily was about a year old but it never worked out until now so we took that to mean we should go all out and spend our first night away from Lily celebrating our anniversary. We've been through the typical up's and down's of a relationship, but have also been thrown a few extra curve balls that have brought us closer together and made us stronger than ever. We thought that deserved to be celebrated. We got a hotel suite at Weber's in Ann Arbor and enjoyed a bottle of champagne, the poolside room, hot tub, and their incredibly nice restaurant and bar. It was the perfect night away, especially because Lily exceeded all of my expectations and eased all of my worries about being away from her.

 After our weekend away we spent a nice quiet day together on the third (the actual day of our anniversary) treating ourselves to Panera for dinner and a special cookie cake to celebrate our milestones. Lily particularly enjoyed the icing. After we put the babe down to bed we enjoyed our cookie cake with a glass of wine and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, which was the movie we saw on our first date. It was the perfect way to wrap up such a momentous occasion and I'm so looking forward the the next one!

A day in the life of a 19 month old

Lily is almost 19 months old and I got some decent footage of what a low-key day is like in her life. She is still babbling away, learning new words every day and continues to be a silly little girl. Enjoy!

Silly Lily Moment

I have decided to start posting the random things Lily does because they are always so silly! I haven't hung out with a ton of babies, so I'm not sure if they all do stuff like this, but I figured it's best to document it just in case.

Yesterday she found a few cough drops by my bedside and I let her hold them because she didn't try to put them on her mouth. She went over to play with an old small chest of mine with lots of drawers and one of the knobs comes off so she thought it was fun to put the knob and her cough drops in the drawers. It didn't get really interesting, however, until she found the dryer sheet in the closet and proceeded to wrap up her "prizes" inside of said dryer sheet repeatedly. I had asked her in a soft and slightly amazed voice, "Wow, Lily, what's in there?" so she kept using soft surprised voice gibber gabber every time she reopened the dryer sheet full of cough drops and a knob. She's pretty cute, what can I say?!

Look what I can do!

I haven't updated Lily's progress in a while, so I thought I had better document some of the super cute things she is doing now or I will soon forget.

I'm deciding her first real sentence was, "All better!" (or as Lily would say "Ahh bebba"). Her vocabulary has expanded so much since I wrote about things like this, I could fill this blog with the new words and phrases she says. Some of my favorites have to be please (pea) and thank you (ank yew) because they make me so proud when she uses them! By far her favorite words to say are the names of her immediate family members, which is so sweet because she loves them all so much.  

She knows hot and cold and will say "tahhh" with her hand out in front of her when something is hot and "brrrr" when she feel something cold.
She can say "I don't know" (aye nuh nuh with hand out to the side), "where are you" (ah yew), "another one" (ah nuh nuh nuh), "all done" (ah duh) and the list goes on.
She can say a multitude of words that I won't bother listing here but for some reason she can not say "milk." She calls it "gna" which is slowly progressing into a "no" sound which I can't figure out for the life of me.
She loves loves loves to make animal noises. I can show her almost any animal and she doesn't usually say what the animal is but will make the noise it makes. The exception now being that all elephants are apparently Dumbo, but the elephant was the first animal noise she learned and she's been doing it for so long now that I let that one go. She also says puppy for dog and pippo for hippo.

 Her favorite movies are Dumbo and Aristocats because she loves elephants and cats (and those were the movies I didn't mind watching repeatedly).  You can tell we had watched this movie pretty much continuously the whole time she was sick because she started memorizing parts of it. In this video she is watching her favorite part of Aristocats where Berleous slides the keys and pinches Marie's tail so she says, "Mama he did it again!" in which Lily simultaneously says, "Mama!" Burleous then sulks saying, "tattletale" and Lily says the same. They then go on to sing their scales and arpeggios. She usually says the parts before they do, but she was distracted by the camera. 

She has become increasingly interested in potty related things and is always changing her stuffed animal's diapers. Here you can see her thoroughly wipe and then diaper the bear. We attempted potty training for about a week but she seemed uninterested. She also has terribly dry skin and ended up scratching herself until she bled so we are keeping her fully clothed until we can get that under control.

This is just a snippet of some of the random things she does throughout the day. I had her help me with potatoes the other day at dinner and she loved it. So the next day I gave her the leftovers to put in a bowl and stir while I cooked. I noticed at one point that she was no longer at my feet, which was strange, so I peeked around the corner to find her burying the potatoes under a pile of pillows, play with something else for a few minutes, then throw the pillows off to rearrange them slightly. 

The list of things she can do truly feels endless, everything she does makes me laugh (well almost everything...) and everything she says is adorable. I'm sure I will think of a million things more and will hopefully remember to write them here!