43/52

"A portrait of my daughter, once a week, every week, in 2013."

penny: while we were down in atlanta for a week and a half you grew so very close to your gaga & pop pop. you've always loved them, no question about that, but by the end of this trip i think you were pretty sure that their house was our new home. you cried a little when we left, and though it made me kind of sad, it also made me so happy that you so obviously love them as much as they do you. grandparents are a pretty special thing, and you are already well aware of that.

linking up with jodi.

35/52

"A portrait of my daughter, once a week, every week, in 2013."

penny: so, they say you eat a pound of dirt before you die. this past holiday weekend, while enjoying your vegan cheese puffs at the beach, i'm fairly certain that you filled your ingested sand/dirt quota with no problem!

linking up with jodi.

beach bound baby!

today penny and i are driving out to the beach to spend a few glorious days with our toes in the sand. papa will ride out tomorrow and meet us there, and we are all pretty darn stoked about it. i can not wait to see penny splash around in the ocean, and listen to the waves crash on the shore. it's making me sleepy just thinking about all the relaxing that's about to come our way. better go and get me some coffee though, because i still have a 4 hour drive ahead of me!

skippin' town!

tomorrow morning bright and early, penny and i, along with her gaga & pop pop, are hitting the road for busch gardens in williamsburg, va! we'll be meeting up with my brother, sister, friends, and quite a few of penny's cousins. good times are sure to follow!

sadly though evan isn't able to join us because his work just doesn't allow the time away right now. pictures like the one above from last weekend make me so sad that he's not going to be there with us. why can't we just win that dang lottery already so that we can concentrate on living life without that pesky thing called money that always gets in the way.

papa bear, we'll miss you more then you can know...

ps... you can follow along with our adventure on instagram is you so desire!

milestones and sleep

this is our past 24 hours...

i just wanted to share what we've been going through here for the past day now. first i'll explain that i've been having penny take her naps in her pack-n-play for the last few days, because we're going out of town this weekend and i want her to get used to sleeping in there now, so that when we're on vacation i don't have one freaked out little lady who can't sleep because she's in a new place. now with that run on sentence all squared away, i'll explain what's happened in the above photo.

two days ago penny learned to go from laying on her belly, to sitting up. woohoo, so very proud of our little baby. we clapped and cheered, and were so happy... then bedtime came. she just couldn't get enough of her new trick, and in her squirmy sleep state would suddenly find herself sitting up, with no clue how to lay back down and fall asleep. our baby who was sleeping though the night was now suddenly waking up every couple hours sitting up, and had no idea what to do about it. so we tried to teach her to lay back down and go to sleep. only, when we go in to lay her down, it completely wakes her up out of her sleepy state, and now we have a fully awake crying baby on our hands, who still doesn't know what to do when she sits up at night. no bueno!

so we had to do what no mama ever wants to do, and let her work it out on her own. knowing penny's personality, i know that she's a quick learner, and she'll get it if i just leave her to it. so after some crying (i'll admit, from both her and i) she fell asleep. but alas, she fell asleep in the least comfortable yoga position possible. once she's out, i just go in and ever so gently shift her to her side. i say gently meaning, holding my breath the entire time that she doesn't wake up, because if she does it's all over! hopefully she'll figure out soon how to just lay down, because nap time, which was a breeze, is now taking an extremely long time to achieve these days!

it's so true what they say, once you've got a little routine down pat, they go and switch the whole thing up on you. thanks for keeping me on my toes penn!