I can’t believe it’s been a week since my last post. This past week has been a whirlwind of getting ready for a house full of guests. And not just any guests, in-law guests. Don’t read that to mean that I wasn’t happy about my in-laws coming. I actually like my in-laws a great deal, but when I find out that they’re coming to visit, I go into a crazy frenzy of house cleaning and preparation. Of course I always do this to a degree whenever anyone is coming to stay in my home, but somehow when it’s my husband’s family, things get cranked up to a whole new level. I’m not sure what it is about having in-laws come to visit that makes me slightly insane for a few days before hand, but that’s how it typically works. I guess it’s better than feeling insane after the leave, right?

Anyway, that’s my excuse for not blogging for a week. I cleaned my whole house like mad and then had a great time visiting with three of my hubby’s siblings and their spouses and children (a total of 13 people) for a long weekend. Oddly, considering how camera crazy I’ve been since I got my new camera, I have hardly any photos from the weekend of festivities. The condensed version of events is that we had some guests arrive Thursday night, I went outlet mall shopping with one of my sisters-in-law on Friday morning, then we all went to the pool all afternoon and had a great time, ordered pizza for dinner, the rest of the guests arrived by late Friday night, Saturday morning I went to the farmer’s market with three of my sisters-in-law, then we went to the pool again for most of the day, my hubby and I had to take Miss for a brief appearance at the wedding reception of our beloved babysitter, then we came home and the kids played in the backyard until late at night, including some hide-and-go-seek in the dark. Everyone was gone before lunch today and we have been catching up on relaxation since. As I don’t really have photos from the weekend, here are some cute ones of Miss from today and last week, just because.

I love the curls out the bottom of the bonnet.

We got back late Saturday night from a week-long vacation. I started the trip by going to my parents’ for a family reunion and service for my Papa. It was wonderful to see so many of my family members, many of whom I haven’t seen in years. I loved that Miss got to be surrounded by such a loving bunch of people. Then she and I went to meet my hubby at the “Farm,” which is his family’s vacation property on a lake in Missouri. Here are some of my favorite things from the trip:

1. My parents have this small antique rocking chair that Miss enjoyed sitting and rocking in, which was adorable. I learned that the chair was actually my Dad’s when he was little, which makes it just that much more special.

2. I got to spend some time with my Grandma B and go through some amazing photo albums she has put together with lots of old photos. My favorites were the ones of she and my Papa when they were “courting” and in the early days of their marriage. I love that I always learn new things about my family and my heritage whenever I see her.

3. Bloomers. I loved Miss in these from Three Yellow Starfish. In my opinion, bloomers beat shorts any day (on a baby/toddler anyway).

4. The slide. It was pure joy watching Miss on the slide with her Daddy.

5. Watermelon. Not my favorite fruit to eat, and I don’t think I even had any to eat during the trip, but I sure did love watching Miss try so hard to pick this one up.

6. Fishing. Here is Miss watching her cousins fish in the pond at the Farm. Her cousin caught a fish, and in the first photo she’s making her fish face, which consists of her opening and closing her slightly-puckered mouth. She wasn’t afraid to touch the fish or the worms they were using for bait. My hubby was pointing out all the important elements of hooking a fish to her while they watched the bigger kids. She ate it up. I can’t wait until she’s big enough to fish herself.

7. My hubby’s new no-hair do. Yowza! Love it.

8. Raspberries. They were delicious, but even better than eating them myself was watching Miss pick them right from the bush and put them in her mouth. The berry face afterwards was priceless.

We had a great trip, and there were many things to love about it. Another wonderful part of any trip is coming home. We got to spend yesterday (Father’s Day) together at home and it was a great day. A belated Happy Father’s Day to all the fabulous fathers in my life (you know who you are).

After Miss took a nap and had lunch, we went to the pool for the afternoon while my hubby went golfing. No puking this time, fortunately! Miss and I had a wonderful time playing in the water. She is getting a little bit more confident and enjoyed splashing and bending her knees to dunk her booty in the water. By late afternoon it started to get cool and cloudy, so we got dry just as my hubby was finishing his round of golf and we had a snack of ice cream before it started to sprinkle and we went home. Miss took another short nap and then I made dinner of venison tenderloin, butternut squash, and asparagus. I gave Miss a bath, put her down to bed, and experimented with our new macro camera lens while waiting for some people to come purchase some furniture I posted on Craigslist yesterday. Check out a couple of the pics below.

The furniture sold and I started making a new pair of pants for Miss. I really fell in love with these pants, but couldn’t justify spending that kind of money on a pair of pants for a toddler, so I found a pattern and some cute fabric and just have to manage to add the ruffles at the bottom (the pattern doesn’t include these). Anyway, I got the pants cut and put together. Tomorrow I just have to try them on Miss to adjust the elastic and length before putting the elastic in the waistband and adding the ruffles to the bottom. I’m so excited to see these on her!

I found myself just enjoying so much about today. It really did just have the feeling of the perfect summer day.

My girl makes me laugh every day. She does so many funny little things that I just love to watch. Who new having a toddler was such great entertainment? Here are just a few of her new things that crack me up.

She loves to play in my closet with my clothes and shoes. She just sits in the middle of a big pile of stuff she has pulled off the shelves and has a blast. She has a natural affinity for jewelry and loves to put on my necklaces and carry my purses. She has made such a mess of my closet, and I love it.

Miss loves to get into my drawer of hair stuff while I’m getting ready in the bathroom. She pulls out brushes and bobby pins, clips, and scrunchies (I swear I only wear these when I’m working out or washing my face 🙂 And speaking of jewelry, she always puts on my hair rubber bands like a bunch of bangle bracelets. I never showed her to do this. And I don’t wear bracelets. My girl just knew what to do. She also loved the mass of clips and other things I put in my hair for this photo:

Miss found this pashmina in my closet and loves to play with it. She brings it to me so I’ll put it around her head like a little babushka and then gives me this huge smile. Then she throws it around and twirls it and poses in front of the mirror with it.

She loves the full-length mirror behind the door to our bedroom. She makes funny faces, strikes cute poses, and shakes her booty in front of it so adorably I could just watch all day.

This is just a tiny glimpse of into all the things that my gorgeous funny girl does. I am such a lucky Momma.

Today Miss played in the pool for the first time. She had a wonderful time, but after playing hard for a few hours, we sat down to have a snack and wait for my hubby to get done playing a round of golf and join us for dinner. As I was encouraging Miss to eat her snack and drink some water, and feeling quite puzzled as to why she was refusing both, she got a funny look on her face and promptly vomited her lunch all over me. I was very surprised, as she has never been sick before, and hasn’t thrown up since she used to spit up as a tiny infant. I think I froze for a moment, not knowing quite what to do with myself or her. I recovered rather quickly though and took her into the locker room to shower the vomit off both of us (kind of lucky really that, if she had to throw up all over herself and me in public, she did it while we were wearing bathing suits and had showers readily available for our use). She seemed to perk up rather quickly, after she recovered from her own apparent surprise about throwing up. So we went back out to continue waiting for my hubby. Shortly after he arrived, once I filled him in on the vomit drama, we began discussing ordering dinner vs. getting food to go so I could get her home (at that point we weren’t sure if we were dealing with a virus or a one-time random vomit). I was just about to say that I really thought we should just go ahead and take her home just in case, when she proceeded to vomit again all over me. We did a repeat of the shower and I got her dressed in dry clothes to go ahead and go home while hubby ordered dinner for us to go. After we got home, I went upstairs to change out of my stinky, vomitty bathing suit and came back downstairs to see my hubby giving Miss her sippy cup full of milk!!! Well, I don’t need to tell you that the milk came back up within a few minutes, all over my hubby this time. At that point, after cleaning himself up, he volunteered to go get her some Pedialite while I finished cleaning her up for the third time and got her to sip a little bit of water. Needless to say, Miss had a little bit of a rough evening. Though in between bouts of puking, she seemed almost her normal cheerful self, just maybe a bit subdued. She did manage to keep some Pedialite down and got a bath before bed.

At first I was thinking the sickness had something to do with the pool, really just because we happened to be there when she first got sick. Now I am wondering if she caught a bug from being around so many people this past weekend. We went to a family reunion in Iowa for my husband’s family to celebrate his grandmother’s 90th birthday. There were about a zillion people there, spanning four generations. It really was a great time, so to make up for sharing all the gross details of Miss’s pukey evening, I’ll also share some great photos of Miss’s more fun times this weekend.

She got to run and play on my hubby’s cousin’s farm.

I just love that she is tall enough now to hold my hand while she walks beside me. Every time she reaches her little hand up to hold mine I just melt.

At the big birthday party she danced to a song her uncle wrote and had some birthday cake.

She got kissed by her “Cousin Brother.” This adorable guy is Miss’s age-mate cousin in my husband’s family. He is just shy of 2 months older than her. In my hubby’s family, 10 of the 12 grandchildren have age-mate cousins, which we call “Cousin Brothers” and “Cousin Sisters.” The youngest baby (who is about 2 months old right now) will be our Baby Girl’s Cousin Sister, and there is just one little guy who doesn’t have a cousin his same age. Anyway, here is Miss getting a kiss from her Cousin Brother (maybe he got her sick?!?!)

Or it could have been any one of these other little ones 🙂 I just love this picture of my husband’s 90-year-old Grandma with all 21 of her great-grandchildren, ranging in age from almost 13 to about 4 weeks old. Miss is right up near the top of the photo, being held by her oldest cousin.
Hopefully my girl will be feeling much better tomorrow! I hope all of you have had a wonderful holiday weekend.

Ahh, the Muscle Flex. Miss started doing this particular move a few months ago. At first it was hard to get her to do it on command, particularly when her Daddy had the video camera out to capture the move. So initially any time she did it, my hubby and I clapped wildly and cheered to encourage her to do it more. As a result, she turned the Flex into a two-part move, where the first step is the muscle flex, followed by hand clapping. Then she added another component, the fist pump (or to those with a cheerleading background, the “Fight Motion”). So for a while it always went like this, Muscle Flex, hand clapping, fist pump. Over time she decided the applause wasn’t necessary, and she has streamlined the move to be just a Muscle Flex and then a fist pump. I crack up every time she does this. The facial expression that accompanies the Flex is the best. Unfortunately, she is much more willing to do it when the camera is not around (of course) so I don’t have many good photos of the Flex move, and none of the fist pump. But here are a few I do have, in various stages of the Flex:

Finally, the last few photos are just an add-on while we’re on the topic of muscles. Here are Miss’s first attempts at a medicine ball dead lift.

That’s my girl!!

Yesterday it was 94 degrees here. It was fabulous. Lots of people around here were complaining about how hot it was, but I was just thankful that we had a breeze and relatively low humidity. Having lived in North Carolina and knowing what it’s like to feel as though you have to chew the air when you step outside at 7 am in May, I will certainly not complain about a very warm but pleasant day here in Wisconsin. Except to say that it really wasn’t so nice that our air conditioner stopped working yesterday. That part wasn’t so pleasant. Fortunately, I have discovered my pregnancy uniform for the rest of the summer. The loose, cotton dress is a must-have for hot days while very pregnant. I have purchased several now, and found them to be the utmost in comfort when it’s hot. I was still sweaty yesterday, as was Miss, but it was a what-a-fun-day-outside-playing-hard kind of sweaty, which is a good kind of sweaty. And speaking of playing hard, Miss has been working hard on being able to climb up onto the couch all by herself. She gets so determined to do it and just doesn’t give up. Yesterday my hubby caught some fun photos of her sweaty little strawberry-stained self persistently working to get up onto the couch and right into his lap (I did give her a little boost as you can see). She’s such a Daddy’s girl.

Success!!!