End of Summer

It's finally starting to feel like the end of summer around here. Addy is back at school after a great summer staying with her Nana during the day and we've had some nice cool gloomy days

To celebrate I stole all of my mother in law's pictures from over the summer,

since someone (who will remain unnamed) broke our camera at the beach. Thanks to that there has been a huge gap in pictures of the wonder baby. Thankfully grandparents are notorious picture takers so I present the Nana photo dump!!

Playing with Coco. Well poking Coco in the ear, but she doesn't seem to mind

Perfecting her innocent "What!?" look

Hanging out at Great Grandmomma's house

The jury is still out on whether or not she's going to get Mommy's squinty eyes. Based on this picture I'd say she's in for a future of hearing

"Smile! Ok, now open your eyes, Ok Smile! Can you smile AND open your eyes?"

Addy and Coco are HUGE friends. In fact Coco is one of the words she can say right now. Normally proceeded by "NO!"

Yes, we're going through a transitional growing our hair phase right now. It's coming along though!

We've really gotten into reading lately, YEAH!!! I signed her up for a program in TN where Dolly Parton (yes I know, we do live in TN) will send her a free book every month till she's 5. It's an amazing program designed to foster a love of books in young children. Just in time too, if I have to read 5 Little Duckings to many more times I may go insane

GO TITANS!!!!!

Playing dress up. One of our new infatuations is purses. She can hardly walk across the room without a purse slung over her arm

Go to grandmomma's, get pretty and then apparently knock a few back :)

Nate is a little jaded about the kiddie pool these days. There was an incident earlier this summer that involved our kiddie pool, the Adster and a very large poo that Nate didn't know about. I'll spare you the gory details but let's just say that poo left in a diaper in the water tends to dissolve and create POO WATER!! Those were the words I heard being screamed at me as I was running errands. "She's covered in poo water!! (gag) Poo Water Mary!! Come HOME!!!" He was less that impressed when I doubled over in laughter, started crying and then told him he would have to deal with it lui meme.

Going to see the ducks with Papaw

In short it's been a great summer. Addy is getting so big, learning new stuff everyday and getting to be quite the little character. Hopefully we'll have a new camera very soon and my plan for the fall is to get at least 1 family picture that doesn't make one or all of us look like an eejit. I can guarantee at least two of us will have our eyes closed though :)

Small Photo Dump

These aren't the best pictures, having been taken with Nate's new phone. But in the absence of a real camera I just had to post a few pictures to show how much the Adster has grown this summer!!

Sporting her new Titan's jersey and pigtails. I can't believe she has enough hair that we have to do pigtails everyday. I never thought we would get out of the emo bangs in front/mullet in the back phase

Slow Road to Recovery

Well miracles of miracles everything went well. The only Mary-esque thing that happened was a nurse pricked herself during the surgery so they had to do the whole battery of tests to make sure I wasn't going to give her AIDS or hepatitis. And of course the hospital billed us for the tests. Stinking medical system. I don't even know why I'm surprised. We're also the proud owners of a $65 ACE bandage.

The first week post surgery is just a haze of pain and a nice Oxycodone induced high. I was really out of it. Which is a good thing considering this ranks right on up there on the pain scale, coming in between childbirth and having my spleen removed. The worst part for me was that Addy was terrified of the full leg brace and crutches. She wouldn't come near me for days and screamed when anyone would try to bring her over for cuddles. Thankfully she got over it and now considers a Mommy stuck on the couch a good thing as I'm always available to read books.

Now I've started physical therapy and while excruciating its going quite well. I've re-gained about 80 degrees of flexion and already have almost total extension. I'm still on crutches of course, and will be for several more weeks. I should be able to drive in 2 to 4 weeks and be back to normal in about 6 months. It's a long rehab but thankfully the crutches are giving me a great arm workout. Everything has a silver lining!!

I appreciate everyone's thoughts and prayers while I was out.

ACL Reconstruction

The day I've hinted at several times is upon us. The day I've been dreading and looking forward to since March. The day of ACL reconstruction surgery. And it's tomorrow.

You might not know but I don't have the best track record medically. In fact if there is a one in a million chance of something going wrong it will happen to me. I'm going in for an ACL reconstruction but I've prepared myself for possible amputation, surgery on the wrong knee, even the wrong medical procedure altogether. Prostate exam anyone? I believe in preparing for the worst and being pleasantly surprised.

I've got the best man in the world taking care of me at home, some incredible pain pills and a baby girl who can cuddle when I'm feeling really bad so everything should be all right. It will just be a long and painful week. So for those of you who's sites I visit on a daily basis (ok twice a day) that's where I am. Stuck at home, hopped up on pain killers with a wireless router that just gave out and no internet. I'll be back in a couple of weeks! I promise! With an play by play of what went wrong and hopefully a quickly recovering knee :)

No Pictures for Awhile

Sadly while we were in North Carolina at the beach Addy got ahold of my camera. Apparently opening and retracting the zoom lens while burying the camera in the sand messes them up? Who knew. Anyway we were lucky to get the pictures out of the camera but that was all she wrote. Thankfully we have this wonderful thing at Dell called airpoints. Sell specific items = earn more airpoints = trade those airpoints in for prizes. We already have a TV and a vacuum from airpoints and if Nate can just sell a few more printers I'll have a new Nikon D60. The big daddy of digital camera's. The camera I've been coveting for some time now.

I hate that there will be this gap in Addy's life with no pictures. Especially since she is now WALKING! That's right, walking like a fiend and Mommy has no photographic evidence.

So if anyone needs a couple of server switches......... :)

The Beach

It's starting to seem like all we do is go on vacation! I swear most of the time we're boring homebodies immersed in chores, work and the daily grind. There have just been several "too good to pass up" opportunities this year. The latest was a week in the Outer Banks of NC with our 4 best friends and a house right on the water. The 6 of us have done everything together the last three years except go on vacation so who could pass that up!

I am posting these in no particular order since blogger and me have issues with posting pictures. One of these days I'll figure out how to cut and paste them in the order I actually want but until then....

This is the view off our back deck, and the beach was that secluded almost all the time. We were really lucky to have the last house on the street with an abandoned golf course on the other side so we really enjoyed the "private beach".

The nice thing about being that close to the water was coming back to the house for naps while everyone else could stay out. Well that and getting to snuggle and fall asleep to the sound of the waves.

Addy and Aunt Kristen, the worst spoiler of the bunch :)

Most of the week saw Addy in nothing but a diaper and a head full of tousled beach hair. It's a good look for her!

Loving the sand.

The funny thing is we put her down on the sand the night we got there and she screamed bloody murder. But then for the rest of the week we couldn't keep her out of it. A lot of us got a mouthful of sand thanks to Addy's exuberant throwing and a good stiff wind.

Playing with Uncle Lance...

And then crawling like heck when a wave would come in.

By the end of the week she was letting waves wash up to her neck and over her head a couple of times but that first day she was pretty cautious.

The first morning she was so excited she threw herself off our bed and got a wicked rug burn by her eye. That was actually the first of three times that she jumped off the bed. Some people just never learn

Her favorite place in the world. Anything is better if you're on Daddy's shoulders

You cannot imagine how many shots I had to take before I got one of her wearing sunglasses. She can whip those things off her head faster than you can say "take the picture"

Uncle JJ cheesing

Daddy looking stern and failing miserably

Mommy and Addy. You can tell who the picture taker in our relationship is since this is one of perhaps 12 of the two of us.

Such a beach bum

I just fell in love with her beach hair.

Daddy and Uncle Lance cheesing as well. Sadly a whole week away and no pictures of Aunt Jess. I don't know how that happened since she's normally more than happy to pose for a picture. I promise she was there and even uttered the funniest line of the week

"I hate the kite, the kite is dead to me now" And trust me, she meant it :)

Daddy and Uncle Lance buried and then made a sand car around Addy. You can kind of see one of the "wheels" in this picture. It was quite creative but Addy was "helping" so it lost it's car shape pretty quickly

Taking a walk and no one to disturb us as far as the eye can see.

It's incredibly hard to sit back and let your kids eat it in front of you. I know it's part of the whole parenting process, and letting them figure things out for themselves but still. Thankfully I think she learned her lesson about crawling full speed down a slight incline.

And she's a tough kid. After we washed all the sand out of her mouth and ear she was raring to go again

Who needs toys when you have Uncle JJ's blackberry?

One last "cheesing it" picture of Addy, Daddy and Aunt Kristen in the car.

I wish we had gotten a picture of everyone together but it's tough to get three couples and a toddler to stay in the same place long enough much less find someone brave enough to suffer the 37 false starts while one or all of us makes a goofy face. One of these days we'll grow up but not anytime soon

As always you can see a lot more pictures if you click on the link "Ayden's Pictures" I just didn't feel like captioning 15 pictures of Addy throwing sand, no matter how cute they all were.

A good cause

I don't normally push products but this was to good not to share. By buying one t-shirt you can feed a child in the Buduburam Refegee Camp in Ghana for a year. Whenever possible Nate and I buy products in which a portion of the proceeds will benefit someone else and this one is so close to home since I spent most of high school driving through and visiting Ghana.

Obviously the baby in the picture ISN'T Addy but you can be assured she'll be sporting her own version soon. That and the "War is Poop" shirt :)

http://www.tinyrevolutionary.com/this-shirt-child.html