Aly's Christmas Pictures

Well, picture day at Sears went pretty well, although Alyson decided she DID NOT want to stand on that backdrop WHATSOEVER! She kept running out of the room into the waiting room to see this little baby that was out there! We finally realized that she did best when she was sitting, so most of the pictures we got are of her sitting in this little white wicker chair or on a wooden sled! She'd sit there JUST LONG ENOUGH for them to get a picture, then she'd be off running again. Take chasing after Alyson the whole time, combined with the hot bright lights in the room, and mommy was sweating bullets by the time we were done taking pictures!! It was interesting to say the least. Made me think back to last year, when we plopped her down into this fluffy cream-colored pillow for pictures and she just STAYED THERE. hehe...

So here are the pictures they took... smiling AND crying ones! She cried a few times, but was all smiles again about 2 seconds later.

Gettin' that Christmas feeling!

Well, we got our first official snow lastnight. Snowflakes came down on and off during the day yesterday, but it really built up lastnight! There's a decent coating of snow on the ground now! My husband is really happy because that's his livelihood during the winter--- snow plowing and salting parking lots! He was all excited to go out and work lastnight. He's always like that the first time it snows... he gets all excited to go out, but once he's awake for more than 24 hours he's not so happy anymore...lol. He slept for a few hours lastnight and was planning to wake up around 2am and get everyone started on their jobs, but his pager kept going off and his phone kept ringing (how it always is this time of year!) so he's been awake since about 12:30am. Knowing him, he'll just stay up all day and go to bed at, like, 8pm or so.

This snowfall is the first time Alyson's really seen snow! Of course she saw alot last year but she wasn't old enough to remember it or really know what was going on! She was all excited looking out the window yesterday at the snowflakes falling down. She kept pointing and looking at me saying, "Da?" Then of course she's say, "Hi dada"...lol.

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So today is the day I take Alyson to get her Christmas pictures taken at Sears! I'm excited... I hope she cooperates and isn't fussy! She's always a little reluctant at first, but the girls who work there are awesome and so she warms up fairly quickly!

I bought two different Christmas dresses for her this year... one to wear on Christmas Eve and one for visiting on Christmas Day. I bought them about a month and a half ago, and had never tried them on her. They're both 18 mo. so I didn't think there would be a problem with them fitting, but I decided I'd better try them on her lastnight JUST INCASE. So right before she was going to bed, I tried both dresses on her to see which one I wanted her to wear. Luckily I had a backup, because the one dress I got her is still a little too big. I might have to try to put my sewing abilities to good use and take it in a little. It's too cute to take back, and it seems like it'd be an easy fix.

The dress I wanted her to wear for pictures fits pretty well though. It falls a little below her knees, which it's supposed to... and it looks adorable on her. It's all one piece with a little red attached jacket with candy canes on it, and the skirt part has green and red polkadots. The underside is poofy tulle lined in a candy cane print ribbon. I love it! I've been into making hairbows for her, so I made a cute little red and green bow for her to wear. I just hope she keeps it in... she's in that "I don't want anything in my hair and I'll pull it out 2 seconds after you put it on me" stage!! I have to slyly slip it in her hair and then try to distract her so she won't feel around on her head to see if there's something 'foreign' there. LOL.

I'm not sure if I'll get a picture CD of her proofs or not, but I should get a link to sear's site so I can share her pics with all of you. I'll update as soon as I can and let you know how things go :-)

Have a great Tuesday!

8 things

I got this from Maria's blog and figured I'd do it too...

*8 THINGS*

8 SHOWS I LOVE TO WATCH:

1. Law and Order: SVU
2. The Biggest Loser
3. What Not to Wear
4. Desperate Housewives
5. The Young and the Restless
6. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
7. Take Home Chef
8. House Hunters

8 FAVORITE RESTAURANTS:

1. Olive Garden
2. Red Lobster
3. Applebees
4. Smokey Bones
5. Gaslite (local)
6. Da Peppino's (local)
7. Naple's Spaghetti House (local)
8. Outback Steakhouse


8 THINGS THAT HAPPENED TODAY:
1. did laundry
2. talked to my mom on the phone
3. went out to dinner with Russ and Alyson
4. took a nap for a change (Aly woke up at the buttcrack of dawn)
5. did some christmas shopping (starting early, or TRYING to anyway)
6. updated my blog for a change!
7. played with Alyson
8. watched a movie


8 THINGS THAT I LOOK FORWARD TO:
1. Vacation in the Outer Banks
2. Losing weight
3. breakfast with our friends and their kids every Sunday after church
4. Sleeping
5. Holidays
6. spending time with friends and family
7. having more kids!
8. eventually buying/building our dream home!


8 THINGS ON MY WISH LIST:
1. Pay off bills
2. Vacation
3. 1 or 2 more children
4. a bigger house
5. Mother's ring
6. I'd like to have a plot in my yard cleared to start my garden (me too, Maria!)
7. a date night with my husband
8. For Aly to start saying "mama" again!


8 OF MY FAVORITE MOVIES:
1. The Mummy
2. Armageddon
3. Billy Madison
4. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (older version)
5. Labyrinth (LOVED it when I was little too!)
6. Wizard of Oz
7. 40 year-old Virgin
8. When Dreams May Come

The slacker's back

Wow, I guess I am WAY overdue for a post.

I'm gonna try to update the best I can.

For starters, I'll begin with the little princess in my life, Alyson. She's getting soooooooo big, it's so hard to believe. She's turning into such a little lady. Seems like it's something new everyday with her. She's just so curious and inquisitive (which can be good AND bad!) Because of her curiousity, she gets into EVERYTHING. I mean EVERYTHING. To the point where I now have to keep doors closed to rooms I don't want her in, and I feel like I need to padlock all my kitchen cupboards!! See, I'm kinda screwed where the child locks are concerned. The handles to our cupboards are so far apart that I can't find a lock that will fit through them, so that's out... so then I got the plastic ones you actually have to screw into the cupboards, but those wouldn't work either. I was so mad... I put them on my cabinets where I keep my cleaning products and everything, and was all proud of myself for doing so. I then tried to close the cupboard and.... IT WOULDN'T CLOSE!!! So I'm officially SOL where the child locks are concerned.... therefore I now have to resort to tying the handles with ribbons so Aly doesn't ingest Windex or something.

So once that cabinet was locked, she went for the spice cabinet. I came into the kitchen one morning because I heard her banging things around, and she had cornstarch all over the floor.... and all my spices and everything were scattered all over the kitchen. Thank God she didn't bust my bottle of balsamic vinegar I had down there, or then we'd have had problems!!

So the ribbon went on that cupboard too... and I thought I was safe. HA! Yeah right. She now gets in the cupboard with my pots and pans and gets them all out... but her favorite thing now is to get in all my cans/boxes of food. She grabbed the syrup one day, flipped the lid up and started writing on the floor with it. And her OTHER new thing is to push out the dog's water and food bowl holder away from the wall, sit behind it, and put little pieces of dog food into the water and stir it around like she's making soup or something. Unfortunately, she LOVES the dogs' water bowl... she likes to put anything she finds into it. The other day I found my dish towel in there, along with a pen and my sunglasses. (Not to mention I found my cell phone in there awhile back...ARGH.) Yeah. Fun times in the Hunt House. LOL

So most of my days are spent cleaning up the "Aly Bomb" that goes off 24-7. Russ just doesn't understand how I can let her get into everything. He says, "Just tell her no!" (Ha-- if it were THAT easy, parenting would be a piece of cake!) I say, "Honey... you aren't here all day every day with her. If I cleaned up right after her EVERY TIME she got into something, I'd be cleaning ALL.....DAY.....LONG." So as long as she's not getting into anything too crazy, I'd just rather clean it up once instead of 10 times. When I DO tell her no, she smiles, points her finger at me and goes, "No! No no noooooooooooo!" then runs down the hall.

She's saying more things these days, though she understands more than what she says. When I tell her she's getting a bath, she runs down the hall into the bathroom, peeks into the bathtub and starts turning the water on. When I tell her it's time to eat, she'll run up to her highchair... and she knows 'yogurt!' I give her one of those Dora Yoplait yogurts at night, and when I say "Let's get yogurt" she'll run up to the fridge and try to open it. When I open the fridge up, she knows exactly where her yogurt is and will pick one up.

She's babbling alot more.. her little toddler language I guess you'd say. She points to alot of things to show us what she wants, and will babble while pointing to it. She says "No" alot, "yeah", "Hi", "uh oh", "oh no" , "Doh-dee"(which I don't know if it's 'doggy' or 'Cody...Lucy's name comes out more like "Zu Zu") and her big thing she says ALL. THE. TIME. is "Hi Dada!" She was saying mama alot last month, then she just stopped and now EVERYTHING is "Hi Dada!" We'll be in Walmart and some strange guy will walk past and she'll go, "Hi Dada!" and wave at him. LOL. She waves at ME all the time and says "hi dada".... Must just be the phase she's going through now! I tell her, "Ok, you've mastered 'hi dada'... let's move on to 'hi MAMA!'


So that's a not-so-short update on Alyson. For Halloween I took her to my parents' house to help give candy out. She was dressed as a butterfly! We didn't go trick-or-treating, but she absolutely LOVED being dressed up and seeing all the other kids in their costumes! Usually I'd make a slideshow of the pics, but I decided to make a family website, so all the pics I take are posted on there. I had alot of friends/family members asking me to email them pics, so I figured it was just easier to make a website and give people the link and let them know if/when it's updated.

So here it is:

http://thehuntfamily917.shutterfly.com

There are pics of our trip to the Outer Banks on there, plus pics of Alyson from summer til now. A little bit of everything. I'll be updating it again soon... I've been slacking on the picture-taking so I don't have much to post on there as of right now.

Well, I'm getting tired and I should have been to bed a few hours ago. I am SO not a night owl anymore!

More updates soon.

Updates

It's been awhile...yet again. The Hunt family's been pretty busy lately! I'll try to update the best I can.

Well, we took our vacation to the Outer Banks the week of September 6-13. We rented a beach house with a few friends of ours and their little boy. And it figures that right before we go, "Hurricane Hanna" (which luckily ended up being a tropical storm by the time it hit) was headed toward the Carolinas. We left home the night of the 5th so we wouldn't be driving the WHOLE TIME in the rain. Plus, we didn't know how Alyson was going to take her first long road trip. We figured it would be easier to do half the trip one day and the rest the next morning. WRONG. We ended up getting a late start the night of the 5th, so we only got about 4 1/2 hours away to Frederick, MD before it got too late and we decided we'd better get a hotel room. The hotel gave us a portacrib to use, which unfortunately Alyson wanted NOTHING to do with. We decided to try and let her sleep in bed with us. Another bad idea. We've never had her in bed with us and it's not something we wanted to start... so she had no idea that she was supposed to fall asleep, and she just thought the bed was a big trampoline for the next hour. It was 2:30am and we were all SO TIRED. I put her back in her portacrib and THANK GOD she fell asleep. For a whole THREE hours, waking back up bright and early at 5:30am. We wanted to get an early start Saturday morning, but not THAT early!!

Anyway, we got ready, ate breakfast and started driving again. Basically the whole six hours was spent in pouring rain as a result of the outer bands of Hanna. It was a mess... I think we saw about 10 wrecks on the way to NC.

We got to NC about 2pm, and thankfully the weather had cleared up by that point. THe rest of the day was just overcast, and the following 3 days were BEAUTIFUL-- blue skies and sunny. Wednesday was our only rainy day, so we all took the kids to the NC aquarium over on Roanoke Island. Thursday and Friday were beautiful, so all in all it was a great week.

Alyson absolutely LOVED her first beach experience. At first she was really hesitant to step on the sand since it was a different feeling to her, but once we took her down by the water and let the waves crash over her feet, she was IN LOVE. She would no sooner get back to the beach blanket and then she'd take off again, wanting to go explore. I took lots of pics, and will put them up on here in a slide show.

Before we left, we stopped in at the place we rented the house from, and booked it for the same week next year. Yeah, it's hurricane season, but it was such a great week to be down there... it was so peaceful and relaxing, and not so hectic like during the summer months. If we had the option, I'd LOVE to move down there :-)

I'll post pics as soon as I put them in a slide show.

As for updates with Alyson, she's doing great. SHe's a little over 15 months old now, and had her 15 mo. checkup last week. She's 26 pounds 8 oz. (92nd percentile) and is 32 inches tall, or 90%. Her head is still off the charts (big noggin like her daddy but doc said all is normal!) She's talking alot more now...still mostly babbling but some new words too. She says mama, dadda, dody (which is either 'doggy' or 'cody', i haven't figured which...), yeah, hi, uh-oh, dop (for 'stop')and she points her finger and shakes her head while saying "no no no no no." LOL. She's repeating alot of words now (well, trying to) so I told her daddy he'd better watch his mouth a little more these days!!!

Well, I'd better go...Alyson is getting annoyed that her mommy is spending time on the computer and not with her.


Alright, better go play with Alyson before her naptime. Later on we're gonna have girly time and go shopping... Aly needs some more cold-weather clothes. And so does mommy :-)

Weekend update

Well, I hope everyone had a great weekend :-) Mine ended up improving, thank goodness. Alyson is doing alot better now, which I'm SO happy about. It was so hard seeing her hurting like that! Her teeth are still bugging her, I can tell...so I've just been keeping up with the Ibuprofen.

We ended up going to our friends' son's 2nd birthday party on Saturday... it was a good time. Alyson plays SO well with other kids! The only thing, she thought she could eat what everyone else was eating... she was trying to pick up a whole hotdog and huge pieces of fruit and stick them in her mouth..lol. All the kids at the party had ice cream cones, and there were baby cones for the little ones. The tiniest little baby cone I've ever seen. Alyson THOROUGHLY enjoyed her first taste of ice cream...even crunching the cone. It was too cute.

One thing I've realized now... there is NO relaxing at events we go to anymore. Whether it's a birthday party or a family gathering, I am CONSTANTLY chasing after Alyson. Russ just 'happens' to head outside with the guys so that he doesn't have to be the one to look after Alyson. So HE gets to relax and kick back while I'm watching to make sure Alyson isn't falling down stairs or shoving something she shouldn't into her mouth. Then Russ doesn't understand why I come out to him and say, "Can you puhleeeeeeeeeease help me watch her?!" LOL. Ugh.

As for yesterday, we went to church, then out to breakfast... then my parents came over later with dinner. My dad made AWESOME beer can chicken and baked potatoes on his grill, so they brought that over for us. All I had left to do was make a veggie and that was it. Oh, and we had some banana cream pie too :-) Nice easy dinner for me! But OH MY... if you have not had beer can chicken, you're missing out. It was even better than the rotisserie chicken they sell in stores. YUM.

So that was the weekend. Glad things ended up working out.

Well, Alyson is getting fussy so I'm gonna end this here. Have a great Monday!

Baby butts and babbles

Post about baby problems and poop ahead... just a warning for all those without kids.

Yesterday with Alyson was a repeat of the day before. I've finally figured out what ALL the problems are due to.... TEETHING. Ugh. I remember hearing about all the side effects of teething, and for some reason I didn't put two and two together the other day and realize, "So THAT'S what the problem is."

Not to be TMI, but Aly's been, uh, "going #2" ALOT lately, and it's causing MAJOR problems. Her stomach was rumbling and making all kinds of crazy noises yesterday, and she was NOT a happy camper. She was crying and screaming and kicking her feet. Ibuprofen and Mylicon didn't seem to help. And everytime she would dirty her diaper and I'd go to change her, she'd just scream and cry big 'ol crocodile tears. Her poor butt is so red. She's never had any kind of diaper rash up until now, so I've never had to deal with her being in pain like this. It sucks, because my little girl is in pain and I feel helpless that I can't do more for her. Yesterday she didn't even want to sit down on her butt. She just stood by the couch and leaned against it, then layed her little head on the cushion. I wanted to cry! Things finally settled down last evening... the stomach pains went away and she was *almost* her usually peppy self. She went to bed close to 9pm and slept through the night, so that was a relief. I thought we were going to be up half the night.

Today she's doing a little better... she had a little episode this morning when her diaper was dirty... her little butt is still hurting her. She cried for awhile but then settled down and was totally fine, and has been since. So I'm HOPING AND PRAYING that the rest of the day goes smoothly. We have a birthday party to go to tomorrow and other plans this weekend, and I just hope we can make it to them... I'd hate to take Alyson if she's still having 'poop problems.' I don't think people at the party would want her running around with her bare butt hanging out... lol.

But enough talk about my daughter's butt. I just had to get that off my chest... this is the first time I've had to deal with this, and it's just frustrating. As a mom, you want to think you can just wave a magic wand and everything will be all better with your child, and it sucks when you have that helpless feeling, ya know? *sigh*

Anyway... I have a funny story to share about Alyson. Last night I had her in her highchair, trying to get her to eat something before bed. While I was getting her food ready, she sat there playing with her pink Barbie cell phone. I just about lost it when I walked back in the dining room and saw her... she was holding the cell phone up to her ear and babbling into it. At first I thought it was just a fluke and that she just happened to put it there... then she put the phone down. When she picked it up again, she did the same thing. She put the phone right to her ear and goes, "Yeh? Neh. Na Na. Ya." LOL. I was cracking up. I put the phone up to my ear and said, "Barbie? Oh.. you want to talk to Alyson? Ok... here she is." Alyson watched me do that and was smiling, then took the phone and started babbling again.

Here are some pictures... she has the phone backwards, but she has the idea!







Guess she watches her mommy and daddy's actions a little more than I thought!