White Rock

Al's fam has some property on the mountain behind Grantsville that they call White Rock. Every year they go up there for the dear hunt (although I'm not entirely sure if any of them actually hunt), and just hang out, eat food, ride the four wheelers, and paintball. They have a perfect little gully where people can watch from above as they go down in pairs and shoot at eat other. They also like to bring their guitars and sing around the campfire at night.

It's a pretty fun event, unfortunately I left my phone in the car, so the only pictures I have are ones people sent me of Lyla.

Lyla with uncle Adam and cousin Degen. She looooves her uncles.

This cute little thing is Karter, he's one of the cousins. He is about 3 weeks older, but somehow Lyla must be super intimidating because they will sit there and "talk" to each other for a few minutes, and then Karter will often start crying, and then Lyla will cry. I guess they have a complicated relationship. Anyway, they were hangin in this play pen together, and Karter had a bottle, so Lyla decided to tackle him and wrestle it away. She is definitely an intense baby.

 Lyla LOVES her backpack.

There were some pretty brutal paintball wars that drew blood on more than one person, and some delicious cream of broccoli soup.

Guess Not

Apparently she doesn't want to be a bear for Halloween…at least if laying on your face and crying is any indication. 

She did try to crawl out of it, but the costume was too tight...

9 Months

I can hardly believe that 3/4 of a year have gone by and my baby is 9 months already!

Lyla's nine month stats:
16.2 lbs - 12th percentile
29.25 in - 94th percentile
Head size - 27th percentile

Needless to say she is a long skinny little thing. She is pretty difficult to hold against my hip; she just slides right through my arm. When I hold other babies her age that are a little more solid, they are much easier to keep in place…if that even makes sense?

She FINALLY learned to crawl just a couple days before her nine month mark. I was pretty sure she was going to just skip straight to walking because she is so determined to stand up by herself. I guess she decided she should start crawling to get around in the meantime. She still prefers to have someone help her walk around the house, though, and is constantly pulling herself up into a standing position.

Lyla is LOUD. Thankfully it is usually a happy loud. She is constantly screeching and babbling and gets extremely excited when she sees other kids or my mom's cat. If we are in a store I will have to tell her to use her inside voice because she will let out an earsplitting, ridiculously high-pitched screech whenever she sees other kids, and then she will start to laugh as she sees them running around. She LOVES being around action, and is very social with other kids.

She never turns down food, and will try to eat anything she can find. She may or may not have eaten grass on several different occasions.

 We love her! (and it's very difficult to get a non-blurry picture of her)

Officially Official

As of yesterday it is officially official: Al and his best friend Jeff now own their own company! Yesterday they signed all the agreements and closed.

Unfortunately I don't have the best of pictures. 

The company is called Interstate Specialties: it is a marketing company that can sell you anything from pens to sweatshirts to water bottles to golf bags with your/your company's name and logo on it. Super random, but an awesome deal came around to these two that they just couldn't pass up. 

So, if anyone is looking to order custom specialty products for their company, send them our way! These guys will take care of you!

Just email interstateali@gmail.com or interstatejeff1@gmail.com

The Poop Chair

Back in the day there were some pretty cool baby things that unfortunately were decided to be "too dangerous" to sell anymore. Luckily for me, my mom decided to save one of those awesome baby walkers that are no longer made or sold because babies apparently kept going down stairs in them (don't worry I, make sure she is always far from stairs).

We have lovingly called this the "poop chair" because before Lyla was big enough to walk in it, we would just put her in there and let her play and, well, let's just say it was an instant fix whenever she was a little backed up.

Now that she figured out what it's actually for, she uses it to get into all kinds of mischief, which makes me very concerned for when she actually can walk. She can spend long amounts of time running from one side of the kitchen to the other, running into stuff, opening cupboards, making messes…it's pretty much her favorite thing ever. And for some reason she has an obsession with the dishwasher, all I have to do is open it, and she will come running. Every. Time.

Gotta love recalled toys.

Babies Everywhere

Seems like 2014 is the year of the babies! Lyla loves her cousin Kate, she laughs and smiles and tries to grab at her whenever she is around.

And two days ago she got a brand new cousin, Olivia! She will have so many fun girl cousins to play with.

Can't wait for Lyla's next cousin to be born next month!

Real Life Ramblings

So it hit me the other day. I was just going about my usual business; singing a song about poop while I struggled to strap a clean diaper on my child who was trying desperately to roll away from me, and I realized: I am somebody's wife. And I have a child. When did I suddenly become a grown up?

It seems like just yesterday I was rescuing the bird I saw get hit by a car with my best friend who lived across the street in the dead of night without my parents' knowledge (the dead of night back then was 8:30 pm). But then not long after that I was in high school thinking how crazy it was I could drive, and before I knew it I was graduating and then struggling through my 5000 level college classes so I could graduate from the U. What the? Somewhere in there I met a pretty awesome guy and got married and now 3.5 years later we have a kid? Nobody ever told me how time seems to go by exponentially faster with every year and every life event. But I will say, the craziest experience so far for me has been motherhood.

When Al and I first found out we were having a baby neither of us believed it at first. In fact, I was just taking a pregnancy test for fun in an attempt to (jokingly) freak Ali out, but then the test came back positive. Al didn't believe it and tried to say the test was faulty at first (I had bought a pack of about 30 from amazon for like $8, so he didn't really believe they were legit tests), so he decided to take one as well to prove it. Well, thankfully, his prego test came back negative, and after taking three more we had to accept that we were going to be parents.

Obviously we didn't grasp exactly what being parents would entail until nine months later when little Lyla Ann came into the world. For me, the initial adjustment was much harder than expected. I remember when I got home from the hospital thinking I would never sleep again. And then people kept wanting to visit and all I wanted to do was sleep and ice my crotch (maybe tmi?) and figure out how to keep my child fed through the excruciating pain of nursing, which is not something you want the general public to see anyway. By the way, because of this I vowed to never visit anyone but immediate family within two weeks of child birth, you are welcome new parents.

Anyway, the point to all of this is that I adjusted just fine and now all of the sudden I have an eight month old, and I am doing my dream job of staying at home with my baby girl.  It is the hardest and most worthwhile thing I've ever done and it is going by way too fast. Some days I get pooped on. Some days I get mushy, slobbery food spit into my face. Some days I realize it is 4:00 and I haven't even gotten dressed yet and I couldn't tell you what I've done all day. Sometimes I realize that I have lost all shame when I find myself at the grocery store with greasy hair, no make up, wearing flip flops with socks, sweat pants, and a dirty t-shirt. Some days I wonder how in the world people make it with more than one kid, and laugh at myself when I realize that this will seem like a piece of cake when we have another kid. But when I see Lyla learn something new, or when she wants to come to me and no one else, when she manically runs around laughing in her "poop chair" (more on that to come), it makes me happier than I've ever been.

Sorry for the cheese.

Randoms

So, 8 months later, I figured I should maybe get the blog up and running again. I am not going to even try to catch up on what has happened so far this year so this post is just going to be a super random jumble of things.

First of all: once upon a time my sister sent me a couple of pictures from when I was pregnant. These are not of my proudest moments, but I figured they were worth remembering. This was during Christmas, I was nine months pregnant and swollen, and my mom decided to make everyone pajama pants.

I'm not sure why, but she decided tiger print was the best for the men of the family, sadly we did not get a picture of all the guys together, but they matched. Clearly Al enjoyed his. And, apparently, if you are prego, pajama pants have to stretch up over your belly, because it's not hot enough to already have a small heater inside of you. Bless my mom's heart, she tried so hard.

This was a week later on New Years Eve. Al said I had to hold the baby in until January 1 because of insurance reasons, so we figured 10 pm on December 31 was safe to start trying to unsettle the baby. For some reason we came up with the idea of doing a handstand to go into labor. I promise it felt like I was completely vertical. Most uncomfortable thing ever. It didn't work. 

But I did have her 11 days later so, whatever.

Anyway, here is Lyla nowadays

We love her. Don't mind the boogs, she had a cold when I took this. 

More posts to come, hopefully sooner than 8 months. 

The Story of Lyla

I know I'm a month late on this, but I thought I should write Lyla's birth story before I forget everything - so if you are into this sort of thing, read on. If not, feel free to stop here.

It all started on January 10th. I was 2 days past my due date, and had pretty much accepted the fact that I would most likely have to be induced. My mom and I  spent the day shopping for stuff to finish up her nursery (more on that later - like, when I actually get it finished), and then later Al and I ran a few errands and went to dinner at 5 Guys. When we got home, being the cool people that we are, we decided to finish off our Friday night watching 20/20 and playing card games with ourselves.

I had been having very mild contractions on and off for the last couple weeks, so even though I was having them that night, I didn't really think much about it. Around 10 pm I realized that I had been having even more contractions than usual, and that they seemed to be getting stronger, and were very close together.  By 11pm they were getting painful enough that I had to pause during our game of Gin Rummy and writhe around every few minutes so we decided to start timing them. Turns out they were already between 2 and 4 minutes apart, and they were definitely gaining intensity very quickly. At this point I was pretty positive that this was the real deal, but Ali was still skeptical (obviously he was not the one feeling the contractions). He took it on himself to call up the doctor and ask if we should come in with intense contractions at 2 minutes apart that had been going on for more than 2 hours (it was now midnight). I could hear the doctor just laugh at him when she told him that, yes, yes we should.

So at that point we started getting our things together to head towards the hospital. I had to stop every time I had a contraction because they were so intense, and I told Al that any desire I have ever had to go natural was gone and I wanted an epidural right then! Now, at this point I have to stop and say that if you know Al, he likes to be efficient with his time, and any time we go ANYWHERE (like, even the grocery story) he gets annoyed if I take extra time to put on make up or brush my hair, or anything like that. In this situation, you know where I was getting ready to birth our child, he just wanted to take his sweet time...and spent forever picking out movies to watch, flossing his teeth, trying to find a pack of gum, deciding what to wear...needless to say I was just a little annoyed at this point. He even stopped to take a picture of me having a contraction, how sweet.

Finally I got him out the door and to the hospital. It was already 1am when we got there, and I was very upset to find out that I could not get an epidural right then, because they wanted to monitor me for an hour to make sure I was actually progressing. I had been stuck being dilated to a 1 for the last month, and was still a 1 at my appointment the day before; when they first checked me at the hospital I was at a 2plus. So, I spent the next 1.5 hours (because it took forever for the nurse to come check me again) in the worst pain of my life. Seriously, I don't know how people ever give birth naturally, because the only way I can even come close to describing the feeling is that it was so intense I thought I was going to throw up, poop my pants, have a heart attack, and pass out all at the same time. meanwhile Al was just having the time of his life flipping through channels on the TV and telling me stories of his childhood. He really was a good support, I was just a little perturbed he didn't seem to feel bad that I was in pain, haha. 

Anyway, the nurse finally came back and checked me and I was a 3.5, and around 2:30 they got me settled into a delivery room. It was 3 am before I finally got that epidural and after that, labor was bliss! As soon as it took, they checked me and I was a 4, and the nurse said she would be back in 3 hours to make sure I was still progressing fast enough, and said that they would have to give me pitocin (which I did NOT want) if I slowed down. I probably would have battled that if it happened, but when she came back at 6am (after Al and I had gotten a solid 2.5 hours of sleep), I was at a 10 and ready to push! Needless to say she was shocked at how fast I had dilated, but they got the room ready for delivery and left me for about another hour so that the contractions could do most of the work and I wouldn't have to push as much. After that it was pretty routine: the nurses came in around 7am, I started pushing and little Lyla Ann came into the world at 9:01am! It was an amazing experience, and Al was so good through it all, once he accepted that the baby actually was going to be born that day, he held my leg and told me I was doing great the whole time I was pushing. It was so amazing to see his reaction when he saw his baby girl for the first time, I just loved it! Baby Lyla turned pink and let out a nice healthy scream as soon as she came out, and we have just been loving having her ever since!

Right before leaving for the hospital: I definitely look like I am 3 days overdue

Please note her foot here: she has the biggest feet ever! We have no clue where they came from!