Who is this man, and why am I sitting on his lap?

Abby, Grant, and I are enjoying the beautiful snow at my parents house in Park City, UT. My mom graciously volunteered to watch Abby the yesterday while Grant and I went skiing. Having been two years since hitting the slopes we had a grand ol' time, although we are both feeling our time that we spent on the slopes today. Tomorrow we head up to Wyoming to be with Sue which we are very much looking forward to!

Now to share what Abby has been doing....

This of course being Abby's first Christmas we wanted to get her picture with Santa. Little did we know how scary this experience could be.

For the first attempt of pictures I tried pictures with the Santa that came to my school:
As you can see here she was not a fan. She could not understand why I would set her on this strange man's lap and then walk away across the room while waving and smiling at her.

So we turned to plan B:


Don't I look happy? It's been a while since I've done this.


Our next attempt was at the mall where we had Abby dressed for the event. For the first shot she got to sit with her good friend Kyler, who didn't mind the big guy.



But as soon as Kyler left she shared with Santa that she would really rather not be on his lap.


Next year we hope that the Santa experience will be a bit more pleasurable.

To end this post I wanted to share two clips of our big girl.

In this first clip you get to see how mobile see is becoming. Abby also shows off her two bottom teeth that came in last month.

Then after seeing an advertisement for the new remake of the Karate Kid I was motivated to try out some of my karate moves for Abby:

Diaper Rash Blues

We have been fighting a diaper rash for the last week and a half. We ended up at the doctors to get some medicated cream which is finally clearing things up thankfully, unfortunately that is not before several other attempts at trying to clear things up.

Grant and I discussed several things that we could try since the layering on the Desitin was not doing the trick. Well we thought taking our time to change diapers would help air out. After telling this to my father he laughed as he replied saying that would do nothing. For things to really to dry out she needed to be hanging out sans diaper for hours. So we went to taking a nap without a diaper. After a fairly large diaper deposit before a nap I thought it would be a good time. We layered the crib with waterproof pads and laid her down. She drifted off to the dream world or so we thought until 15 minutes later there was an urgent crying escaping from her room. We quickly went to check on her to discover she was indeed not done depositing and had finished her business then proceeded to spread the mess around the crib. I'm sure mental images are enough, there will be no posting of pictures of this terrible mess. A bath and thorough crib cleaning followed.

Did we learn out lesson with this....NO.

The diaper rash continued. So after returning home from school Abby had fallen asleep I was again thought this to be a good time to dediaper our baby. After successfully getting her into the crib without waking Sweet Abby D, I took off her pants and diaper without waking her! 5 minutes later I peeked my head into the room to check on my sleeping girl, I was greeted by a smiling baby standing holding onto the edge of her crib...... happily peeing all over the place.

My lesson learned from this adventure, if you would like to call it that, is solving diaper rashes for Abby is best to do with keeping her diaper on!

Here are some photos to showing Abby enjoying the Christmas season!

These first few pictures of our family at Silver Dollar City in Branson, MO. They decorate their park with over 4 million Christmas lights for the holidays!

Grant's mom came down for Thanksgiving, and helped Abby decorate the Christmas tree!

Lastly, here is Abby doing her best reindeer impersonation!

Abby & her Granddad

Well, it is obvious that we have let our blog posts slip for quite a while, and that means that we have some catching up to do. However, most of the updates on Abby and all of her new milestones (crawling, new teeth, pulling herself up to a standing position, generally keeping mom and dad on their toes) will have to wait until the next post. We promise that it won't be a month and a half between posts this time too!

As a general rule, our blog is about Abby and her adventures through life. This post won't be an exception to that rule, but it may depart from the "normal" post a little bit. As most of you know, my Dad was diagnosed with a very aggressive type of brain cancer in April of this year (Glioblastoma Multiforme for you medical types out there). He underwent whole brain radiation and oral chemotherapy treatments during this spring and early summer, and had a few treatments of another drug called Avastin early this fall. Unfortunately these treatments weren't able to extend his life as much as we had hoped, and he passed away on October 26th. It still doesn't seem real in a lot of ways to know that he is gone. I am very thankful for the time that we got to spend together as a family during the 6-months that passed from the time that he was diagnosed until he passed away, and very very thankful that he got to meet Abby before he died.

Having grandkids was probably the biggest thing that my Dad was looking forward to for quite a while. He had been dropping subtle, and not-so-subtle hints to Peggy and I for quite some time to let us know that he was highly in favor of us starting a family. When we told our parents last year that we were pregnant, I think that my Dad was probably the most excited prospective grandparent out of both sets of our parents. My parents were actually down in Arkansas when we told them that we were having a baby, and when my Dad found out, he instantly had a huge smile on his face, and all he could say at first was "Really!?!" He was just so excited that he couldn't believe that this time had actually come!

When Abby finally arrived, my Dad was very excited to meet her, but unfortunately he had a very minor medical procedure (unrelated to his ultimate brain cancer diagnosis) scheduled which kept him from coming down right away. My parents planned to come down to Arkansas to meet their granddaughter a few weeks after he had his procedure performed. As he was recovering from that procedure, he started to have some weird memory problems which were our first signs that something wasn't right. These memory problems ended up postponing their travel plans to Arkansas for a few weeks while doctors tried to figure out what was going on. By the end of April it was apparent that there was something serious going on, so Peggy, Abby, and I all drove out to be with my parents in Wyoming and give them a chance to meet Abby (she was 1-month old at the time). I wish that Dad had gotten the chance to meet Abby before he was diagnosed with cancer, but that doesn't mean that they didn't have some good times together. We were sure to take lots of pictures and videos of Abby and her Granddad when they were together, and I thought it would be nice to share some of those with everyone as a bit of a tribute to one of the proudest Granddads around.

This is a picture of Abby and her Granddad about 5 minutes after they first met back in April. Abby is a bit tired from the long car ride, but Granddad is pretty happy to be holding his granddaughter!

Here is another one from our April trip to Wyoming. Abby had found a pretty comfortable spot in her Granddad's arms.

This is a video of Granddad finishing reading a Sesame Street story to Abby. She had been quite fussy during the first part of the story, and you will find out why she was fussy in the middle part of the video. At the end you will get a glimpse of how special Abby was to her Granddad.

In June we all flew out to visit the Grandparents again (this was Abby's first airplane trip), and here is a picture of Abby's Granddad riding in a fire truck and waving to Abby during the Flaming Gorge Days parade. Granddad served on the GRFD for more than 25 years, but had been retired for the past 8 years or so.

Here is Abby handing her Granddad a card for Father's Day. Actually, if I remember right, I don't think that she wanted to let go of the card, but she did eventually give it to him!

This last picture is from September when we all flew back out to be with Abby's Granddad on his 61st birthday. This is a picture that we will all treasure for years to come, both Abby and Granddad having a great time together.