Festivities

A few pictures of Mommy and Emma trying to finish up some decorating in between sick days. She was cracking me up bc all or a sudden she started acting like she was chomping down on the berries! She is so crazy; I don't know where she gets it! ; )It was fun to have my little girl decorating with me even if she did put all the pics bunched up at the bottom. A phrase we often hear these days, "No! I do it! I do it!"...or, "Do it myself, Mommy!"...still little miss independent! I don't know if I'll get more pictures up, but the other day, she left me and went to the kitchen...heard her in the pantry assuming she was helping herself to a snack as she likes to try to do but didn't find her there. I found her in room by her cradle with babies with a can of meat sticks and a spoon, trying her hardest to get the jar open. She said, "feed baby, Mommy." It was so cute; what a little helper I'll have when Bryson comes! At least it was a spoon instead of a fork! The bottom pictures are from Rock Hill's Christmas parade. Ben and I took her last Friday night, and she loved it! The boat and tiger were two of her favorite things. She also loved every mascot, train/trolley looking car, and any animated and/or lighted thing. She definitely lost attention a few times and had to do some running, but she was not ready to go when we left. It was too cold for Mommy and Daddy, and it was our first time; we didn't know to bring the thermos of hot chocolate and tailgating chairs! : ) We couldn't believe how people were camped out and settled when we got there. We should be more prepared in the future. The next night, we went out to dinner and then to Journey to Bethlehem, a live walk-through experience of the story of Jesus. A local church, St.John's UMC, puts it on and does a wonderful job. There are a few scenes at the beginning that narrate the birth being foretold to Mary, then Joseph, and then the visit with Elizabeth and a look at the inn...you then "pay taxes" as you enter the city gates where the city is alive and busy with prophets, animals, travelers, markets, etc. As you walk out, you make your way to the nativity scene. We have enjoyed it every year we've gone, and Emma loved it this year. They had lots of live animals that she got to pet and get a close up look at, definitely her favorite part. Rock Hill has Christmasville every year now which has lots more great events that we hope to do more of as Emma gets older. We headed to my sister's for a Christmas party last week-end, then I helped put on our annual youth Christmas party for a local projects community, and this week-end, we have our Christmas party and then Christmas with Ben's parents. I LOVE this time of year and the joy it brings to be with people and share with others! It's hard to balance activity and being still enough to prepare our hearts as we celebrate Jesus' birthday, and it's been a little harder this year with all of our sickness. I am trying to really slow down these days, especially with Emma. I so badly want our children to be able to "be still and know" better than Ben and I do! We get caught up in the busyness of life way too often, and I am hopeful we can continuously re-evaluate the activities we do to be sure we are not subtly teaching our family that we always need to be on the go and that activity is more important than just being with each other and growing as individuals and family.

Christmas Tree

As is our tradition, we got our Christmas tree and decorated the day after Thanksgiving. We had hoped to go to the mountains and pick one, but the weather was not going to be so great, and we had plans to go to Clemson Saturday so we didn't want to be in the car so much in two days...so off to our usual lot down the road. Emma still had a great time playing in the trees and collecting rocks and dirt. Really there probably wouldn't have been much difference to her. : ) A sweet little boy gave her two candy canes, and she is definitely a fan of those now! She loved putting the tree in the house and as you can see was all about helping Daddy. We had fun decorating the tree, and she actually did pretty well putting the ornaments on the tree. We haven't had many issues with her messing with them since either. We didn't end up making it to the wonderful defeat of Carolina Saturday because we had colds, and they were calling for colder temperatures with rain. I was so sad to miss being at the game with my family, and it was the first Clemson v. USC home game I've missed since we started getting season tickets. We went to Ben's parents' so he could watch Georgia suffer an ACC defeat as well. I watched the Clemson game in another room by myself. Occasionally Ben, Emma, or Mikayla would come watch a few minutes with me. As it turned out, I woke up throwing up with an awful stomach bug around 4 Sunday morning...not sure a little cold rain could have made me sicker! I'm not a virus fan (not that anyone is), but I now know it is way more awful to be pregnant and get sick. UGH! As if throwing up from hormones and an already sensitive gag reflex hasn't been enough for the year! It wiped me out for a whole week; I just couldn't regain energy, and it was really hard to eat for a few days too. Ben got it Monday morning and was awfully sick as well. Unfortunately, that was one of his busier work weeks and he "had" to go in Tuesday. I did convince him to at least go in late and give his body a little extra rest. Thankfully, Emma was spared...until this week. I'm still grateful though because I just didn't know where I would get energy to care for a sick child. At least I was able to recover first! I had a doctor's appointment a week later and found out my iron was really low too, which I'm sure contributed to my struggle to regain energy and strength. It was pitiful to have my little girl sick! She had quite the will power holding back vomit. I kept telling her to let it out, and she would just hang over the toilet crying, "No Mommy, I don't want to!" Oh, it broke my heart! She now knows what "I sick" means and almost immediately got to where she would go straight to the toilet to get sick. Much less mess for Mommy at least! She did manage to get sick in her bed about midnight Thursday, and it was awful! I was gagging walking into her room; thankfully, Ben finally heard us in her bathroom trying to get her and her linens rinsed enough to try for more sleep. He came and rescued me as I was gagging over the sink rinsing her pajamas. To sum things up, the virus hit us all over a span of 2 weeks or so, and, between our sick nights, I spent way more time on the hard floor than I ever care for, much less when I'm already so uncomfortable from pregnancy at night. The Lord was gracious, as always, though, and we will hopefully now be healthy for Christmas this year (last Christmas we were passing around a virus!). It has taken me longer to finish decorating and to get the few last minute gifts on our list, which I have not enjoyed, but life could be worse.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is always so much fun, and we surely have more than enough blessings for which we are thankful! One of the most important being family, and we were blessed with a day filled with time with both of our families. We met most of my family at Pa's that morning to enjoy the outdoors and let Emma and Will play in the leaves. They both LOVE the leaves as you can tell in the pictures. We ended up taking a walk in the woods as well. It was so nice to be out in the fresh air and able to take a leisurely walk and catch up with family. We headed on over to my grandparents for lunch from there. My grandfather has been having trouble with his health on and off, and that was not a great week for him, so we were all pitching in cooking and getting the food out to try to help my grandmother. Lunch was quite the feast as usual, and then the kids and some of the men headed out to the yard to play ball. I was hoping to play around some, but I started getting some pains from being up on my feet too much so I had to take a break. We headed over to Ben's parent's from there. Emma fell asleep in the car, so I sat out with her a while to let her get a decent nap. I wasn't up to getting back on my feet yet anyway. I ended up going on inside to sit while the men and kids played ball there. Unfortunately I didn't get back on my feet in time to get some pictures of them out there. We had a wonderful time catching up with everyone there as well as another great feast! Later in the evening, we bathed Emma and headed on home for the evening. What a great holiday set aside to enjoy our loved ones and reflect on God's many blessings in our lives!

Refreshing Days

This slide show is from a couple of "Refresh" Thursdays, first a day at the park, second, a baby bash for some of the girls. I love taking Emma to the park, but she scares me so much. She takes off and wants to spend the majority of the time on the big kids playground. Being there with friends is much easier because there are a couple of older kids who can help her a little if she needs it, and there are lots more hands and eyes around the place. She gets braver every time and went down the biggest slide that particular day. I thought she'd be too scared, but she just followed her friends Kayleigh and Drew up the steps and decided to go down right behind them. She actually loved it and did it several more times; I was so scared she was going to fall over the edge or something. I was much more at ease with our time spent on the toddler part where everything is much smaller. One her favorite things to do is "swing", and there is a "swing bar" as we like to call it on that part of the playground so she was loving that. She is such a little monkey and climbs and swings on anything and everything. A few things around the house she holds onto and lifts her feet to swing by her arms...our desk top, the kitchen table, the bar on the oven door, the fridge door bars. Last night she actually grabbed onto the bar on the back of my seat in the van, lifted her feet, and started saying, "swing, swing"! Wondering if she'll be a gymnast...
Our Refresh baby bash was lots of fun as we celebrated four moms and their babies. One girl had her first in August, and the other three were pregnant with their second; one had hers the day before Thanksgiving, the other two are actually overdue at the moment. My poor friend Stephanie was the one that was overdue with her first while I was with Emma. I'm praying I don't go so long this time. She at least has made a LOT of progress, so we're hoping and praying the baby will come VERY soon! Aimee wrote a fun mad libs kind of story with lots of lefts and rights in it. After getting the girls to fill in the blanks, she read it aloud and they had to move whichever direction came up in the story. They got the gift bag of baby "essentials" that was at the seat where they ended. It was cute; I didn't get great pictures because I was feeding the baby while I tried to take pictures. Anyway, lots of fun to be with some great women, as always!

Growing Up

Emma loves to do whatever we do...the first picture is of her after I found her in my mascara. Actually, we were together, she wandered off, I called her name, about 20 seconds later she was coming out of my bathroom with the mascara open, putting it on as she came to me. Apparently she'd been waiting for an opportunity to get her hands on it!! She is getting into dress ups more, and my sister gave her the outfit in the picture. Boy does she LOVE the heels with the fur toes!! She has actually worn them out in public once already; yes, she is my child! "Build fire, Dada" is one of her favorite phrases and activities as well. She loves to get down and blow on it to help get it started since the first time she saw him do it. So precious! Still painting her nails when she can sneak off long enough; her fine motor skills have really gotten pretty good, so I let her finish it the day I took these pictures. It's not too bad now that she can keep it on her toes and not the floor and clothes. The picture of her with her babies and hats on is what I found one afternoon when I went to make sure she was still napping. I looked at the clock and thought it had been a good while for her to still be sleeping...well, who knows how long she'd been up and content by herself! : )

Fall

So fall is just about over, but we have been enjoying it immensely! I love the changing leaves, and Emma and I have had fun talking about the colors and watching the leaves fall off the trees. The cooler weather was definitely welcome as the heat was extra hard being pregnant and already sick feeling, so I finally started taking Emma back out a little more. I got some pictures of her playing with Tanner one day; one of her favorite pasttimes is poking sticks through the fence, saying, "here Tanner, here!". It's so cute to watch even though Tanner loses interest after 2 or 3 sticks. She has loved gathering treasures from the yard and on our walks; sticks, rocks, pinecones, pine needles, leaves, etc. I got a picture of our house and yard because it has changed soooo much in 2 short years! Ben has done such a good job with the yard and been so patient with time and our budget; it's much harder to keep up an acre as opposed to our former .18 acres!! : )