The Definition of Irony

Last night, after 12 long weeks, was my last physical therapy session!! It's been a painful road, and I have to keep working out my knee at home on my own. But at three times a week and a $20 co-pay per session for the last 3 months I was THRILLED to finally be done.

When I got home I picked up the mail and started looking though it. At the very bottom of the stack was a brochure and a discount from Snowshoe inviting us to plan our Ski trip for this year. AS IF!!

Future Blackmail

I couldn't resist. Even mad and pitching a fit she's cute. I believe I had just taken away the remote control. Heaven forbid!!

Playing

Needless to say we're quite happy to have a camera again and have taken a lot of random pictures just to fill the gap of the last few months.

Daddy and Addy playing. He can always get her cracking up

Waving bye-bye before she runs away from home. She is also obviously a daughter of mine. Not many people can walk barefoot on agragate, especially with tender baby feet. She has no problems. Nate will limp his way to the mailbox while Addy runs full out across the rocks without a whimper. That also resulted in her worst injury ever. She fell on the agragate the other day and cut her head open. Not only was their blood everywhere but a goose egg the size of golf ball. We took a picture but its so gruesome and disgusting that I decided not to share.

I'm not really sure what's she's looking at here but it cracked me up. She kept looking at the rabbits butt and then laughing. I really wonder what goes through her mind sometimes.

She's still such a poser. Pull a camera out and she looks up and smiles adorably. I don't understand how two totally un-photogenic people can spawn such a camera hog.

I think it may be time for a toy purge. The living room is being overrun and Nate is notorious for kicking the loudest toys in the middle of the night and setting them off.

Funny side note : The school bus push toy has a button where a bunch of little kids start laughing, very children of the corn. Earlier this week we were in the living room watching TV and kept hearing this creepy laughing. The toy had gotten left out in the rain and must have gotten a short since it kept setting off randomly. We were pretty creeped out until we figured out what was going on.

Addy loves to go into her room and take everything out of the drawers, item by item. Thankfully she also likes putting everything back so we let her go crazy.

Mimi gave us a great wheelbarrow with little gardening tools. I doubt this was what she meant the wheelbarrow to be used for but Addy loves putting all her stuffed animals in there. And seriously, who can resist that face :)

Don't you love her emo look? The hair just gets shaggier and shaggier but I'm afraid to trim it. I'm convinced that any day now she'll wake up and have lovely flowing girl locks.

Riding her school bus outside in the driveway

One of the perks of living in such a hilly place. She'd push the school bus up to the top of the driveway and race back down it a hundred times a day if we let her. I try to get her to go from side to side so she's not hurtling down at breakneck speed towards the cars but she's an adrenaline junkie I guess. She prefers the possibility that she'll slam into a muffler at the end.

The Wedding Dance

Addy's newest love is dancing. She dances to everything, cartoons, music on the radio, Mommy and Daddy singing. She loves to dance. A few weeks ago we went to a friends wedding and saw the extent of dance fever in action.

As is often the case at weddings people were hesitant to get out on the dance floor. No such qualms for Addy! She was out in the middle of an empty dance floor getting down! She also kept trying to touch the violinist's bow. Thankfully Uncle Lance was quick and averted that disaster.

I love that at that age there is no shame or embarrassment. I wonder when that ends?

I don't know why Nate always makes that sideways leering face. We're hoping they make pills for it :)

I missed the full shot but Addy kept going up to the wedding photographers and posing in front of them. They obliged every time by giggling and taking her picture. I'm sure Vanessa is going to wonder why there are 45 shots of Addy in her wedding album.

Addy and her Aunt Kristy. Interesting side note there. Kristy is my sister in law. She is also an MK, her mom and aunts and uncles grew up in Africa and went to ICA, my Alma mater. We also share the same birthday, January 26. Talk about a weird coincidence!! Nate always jokes with Lance and tells him to get his own wife and stop copying.

Addy and Papaw sharing some cheerios. Papaw was the one that taught her the trick of holding out a cheerio to share and then snatching it away right when the other person trys to grab it. It makes her laugh hysterically every time. When she gets really tickled she snorts. I'm sure she'll hate the snorting later on in life but at the moment it's the funniest thing I've ever heard.

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.