I Don't Have A Title

Sarah and I started this blog over a year ago so that we could keep family and friends updated on Noelle and all that she is doing. We did not start the blog so that I could talk about how worried I am about A&M's football team, how suspect they looked against I-AA Montana State last week, or how embarrassing it was that it took triple overtime to beat Fresno State yesterday. It would be out of place for me to talk about how poor their pass defense is, how one-dimensional their offense is, and that even though they won their first two games, they may have a very long season ahead of them once Big 12 play begins. None of this has anything to do with Noelle or the purpose of our blog, so I won't mention any of it. I'll just share some recent pictures of Noelle with you.

New Picture

No, this isn't a picture of Noelle. This is actually a hippopotamus. We don't have any new pictures of Noelle, so I thought I would give you a picture of something else in the mean time.

Update

The boil water notice only lasted about a day. Thank goodness that's over with! Since then we've had tons of rain from tropical depression Erin. There are many parts of Abilene that are flooded like they were during the flood of 2002. We're fine, but we know several families who have been evacuated from their homes, so please keep them in your prayers!

Again, it's confirmed...I'm SO not cut out for the pioneer life!!

Our city has announced that we need to boil our water until further notice. It's not really that uncommon for some of the smaller cities around here to have these notices every once in a while. But I thought we lived in a big enough place that we'd never have to deal with it. So far the news has said that we may have to do it for a few days or possibly even weeks!! I've heard that because people aren't using as much water as normal this summer (due to all of the rain), that the residual chlorine levels are low. (I'm not sure if all that is right or not.) I honestly doubt that this will go on for too long, but it's been a little bit of an inconvenience so far. All of the grocery stores in town are out of bottled water!!


I can't imagine being a pioneer and having to first find a water source, haul it from a creek or a well, and THEN boil it. As much as I love reading about the Old West...I'm definitely not ready to let go of my modern conveniences!!


On to other topics...Noelle had her belated birthday party today at playgroup. We still had a puppy party, which is what we had planned in July. My mom found this really cute outfit that had weenie dogs on it. Since all of our families have weenie dogs, she just had to get it! It was fun that Noelle even had an outfit to go along with her party theme.

Noelle got to have another piece of spice cake, and seemed to enjoy it. Afterwards she was saying "more, more."

She had a great birthday and enjoyed playing with her friends!

Is it illegal to wear earplugs while driving??

We've been out of town for a week seeing grandparents, and right now I should be unpacking, doing laundry, making a grocery list or any number of productive things, but I'm stalling by blogging!

Anyway, during our trip we bought a car seat in Dallas because we had some coupons to Babies R Us and got a great deal. So now we have officially made the switch to a forward facing car seat! I'm loving how much easier it is to get Noelle in and out of. I was surprised at how high the seat is, but it's great because she can look out the window. Noelle has done well in it so far, but can be VERY loud. I guess in her other car seat the sound had to travel to the back of the car first, and it didn't seem as loud. It's also harder for her to go to sleep with all of the distractions around her. In fact, on our trip home Noelle only slept for about 30 minutes and then stayed awake until we got home at 10pm. (She's normally asleep by 7:30.) She was pretty cranky.



Also, yesterday we went to the doctor for her one year check up. (Her original appointment had to be delayed because she was sick.) She's 20 pounds & 5 ounces (35%) and is 30 inches long (75%). The doctor said she looked really healthy and gave me some more tips about food allergies. Introducing table foods has been a really slow process because we have to watch for allergies pretty closely, and she's kind of picky about the texture of some foods. She's now eating frozen mixed vegetables (major victory!) and will eat canned peas & carrots, fruit and bread. We still give her baby food meat & some vegetables. She's also drinking rice milk because the soy bothered her when we tried that. I haven't gotten the courage to try the rice milk yet, but Noelle doesn't seem to mind it.


OK...I really have to get something productive done!! I hope you're having a great day!

Being Productive...At Midnight!

Well...I can't sleep. So I'm up late on the computer researching car seats. It's time for us to turn Miss Noelle around to face the front. Fun! She does so well facing the back, I wonder what it's going to be like now. I'm sure we'll be blogging about that soon!

I also thought that while I was online, I'd upload some of the pictures I was trying to do yesterday. It turns out that our USB cable was bad, and we switched it out for another one.

Here's Noelle "cleaning" her high chair with a sock she got out of the laundry basket. I wonder why she's playing with that when she has a bajillion toys??

This is when Noelle and Chris were reunited after a week.

Here's us taking a dip in Noelle's kiddie pool. I love her hat!

OK...now I'm either going to try to go to sleep or find some reruns on TV!

What We've Been Up To

Well, it's been a while since our last post. I figured if I didn't post some pictures soon, the grandparents would revolt! OK...Unfortunately, I'm getting an error message about my USB cable malfunctioning, so it looks like they'll be disappointed. Sorry!

I can at least blog about what's been going on. Chris and I dropped Noelle off with my parents a couple of weekends ago. We'd been wanting to paint our bedroom for a while, and figured that grandma's house would be a much better place for Noelle to be during all of that. We got it all done in one afternoon! That was great because we had the rest of the weekend just to goof off. Here's what we did with our baby-free time:

• Slept as late as our bodies would let us (which was only about 8...we're getting so old!!)
• We went to the pool
• Had a picnic at the state park
• Took as many naps as we could
• Went to a movie
• Drove to a small town about 40 minutes away and had dinner
• Ate out for every meal...no cooking whatsoever

It was awesome! But we were sure glad to see our baby girl! It had been 3 days for me, but Chris had also been at pre-teen camp and hadn't seen her for a whole week!

During all of this time, I had a cold or something that developed into a really bad sinus infection. I was really stubborn about it, and thought I would just treat it with OTC stuff. Big mistake. Once the doctor's offices closed for the weekend, it got way worse. I felt like the lady on the Sudafed commercial whose head blows up like a big balloon. Anyway, I went to the doctor on Monday and got a shot and a bagful of sample meds. (My nurse practitioner is so nice, and she knows our insurance is not great, and so she always gives us samples when she can.) I'm not up to 100% yet, but am feeling a lot better. Yea!

Noelle is doing great. She has learned new words the last couple of weeks. She says "ball" all of the time. In fact, many times when we get her up in the morning that's the first thing she says...I guess she's ready to play! She's also learned the word "more." We've been trying the baby sign language thing forever it seems, and now that she can finally say the word, she also can do the sign. She mainly says it at breakfast when she wants more banana. She's not walking yet, but can cruise and crawl really fast and keeps us very busy.

Well, I guess that's all of what's going on at our house. Hopefully I can figure out this USB error soon! Blogs aren't as fun when there aren't any pictures!