Let's call those HOGS!!!

We've been staying busy. The snow storm ended up canceling the entire week of school (now to be made up in June). I really enjoyed having the extra time with Abby. The first week back was crazy which I expected it to be, although it was great to see my students.

This past weekend Lisa, whom I've been friends with since elementary school, came up from her Grandparents to visit us for a few days. It was wonderful to see her as I don't get to very often because she works on a cruise ship running the ship's theater productions!

We had a fantastic weekend dinning out at some of our favorite restaurants, going to Abby's first Razorback basketball game, watching the 3D Avatar movie, and of course some good ol' catching up time. It was such a great weekend I hated to see it go by so fast knowing it will be a while before I'll get the chance to see Lisa again. She is such a wonderful, happy person who I love being around.

Lisa brought a bag of goodies for Abby. This ball with a monkey on top was part of the gift. Abby was very interested in it. Thanks for the wonderful gifts Lisa!

Abby is very used to cameras by now. But she was sure to show Lisa what she likes to do with them.

To the mouth it goes!

Oh the Razorback game! Our seats were right behind the students section, aka loud, scary students. As soon as the first shot was made the crowd erupted scaring Abby terribly. We quickly exited and walked around until she calmed down. Grant noticed that one of the upper deck sections was pretty much empty so we relocated there. Abby soon got used to the sounds and actually enjoyed all the action. The ring of lights around the court especially caught her attention.

Being in the upper deck we had a bit more room to spread out, which is very good to have with a 10 month old who doesn't like to sit still.

Lisa and I taking advantage of a time out to take a picture.

The Razorbacks actually pulled out a win, making it an enjoyable game. Much better than the game this past weekend where they lost to Kentucky by 31 points. Not too pretty.

Despite the fear of the loud noises at first, this is how Abby spent the fourth quarter of the game and the walk back to the car.

This is just a picture of Abby I took the other night. Wild hair and all.

Just this week Abby is experimenting standing by her self. She is up to about 15 seconds. She is just getting so big. Looking back at this picture I had to laugh at our matching sweat pants.

Snow Day Take 1

Living in the south has some definite advantages... at the drop of a snow flake school is usually cancelled. This storm that arrived Saturday night left us with 3 inches of snow, which is a quite a bit when there are not many snow plows to take care of the roads. As an added bonus Grant's office was closed in the morning (the roads were ugly!) so he got a half snow day! Taking advantage of this extra time with Abby we decided it was time to introduce Abby to the snow. Here is Abby's experience: 5 minutes of getting ready to go outside for a whole 2 minutes.

Oh no, the hat again.

You guys know I don't like this thing on my head, it messes up my hair.

Please take it off.

Daddy, mom won't help me, Will YOU?

Geeze what does it take to get someone to help me

Maybe I'll try this look again, PLEASE dad.

Time to take matters into my own hands.

Wow it worked.

Freedom, Yes!

You have got to be kidding me.

So now what.

Hey, what do you know, this is kind of fun.

The world it's....white.

Okay my nose and bum are getting cold.

It's time to go in!

And this was our favorite shot from the whole experience, it speaks for itself:

Abby and I are very excited for our next snow day together, which just happens to be tomorrow. Oh Happy Day!

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity-jig

We are back in Arkansas after our wonderful trip out west. We had a lot of fun seeing family and friends. As with our normal holiday trip we spent time in both Park City and Green River. Although good times were had, it was bittersweet being without Howard, as we missed him dearly.

Here is a picture recap of our trip:

Christmas started early in Arkansas before we left as Abby explored her new activity table. She is a cruiser now and loves the fact that she can stand and play at the same time!

Grant has the most wonderful people as neighbors. Twice a year they get together for neighborhood parties, 4th of July and Christmas Eve. Although there were many people out of town this year it still went on and it was good to see everyone. This is Ashley and her daughter Stella who is several months younger than Abby. Although this year the girls didn't quite understand how to play together (Stella was very interested in Abby's pigtails), next year I'm sure they'll be running around together causing trouble.

Abby loving the coffee table, trying to figure out how to get at the nativity scene.

As you can see getting a picture of the two girls together went well.

This is Christmas morning. Abby actually helped open this one present. The remainder of the time all she wanted was the teething biscuits she recieved in her stocking. She was not very interested in her other gifts.

A quick family shot.

Merry Christmas!

Christmas Day we drove back to Park City for the traditional Christmas Brisket Dinner! Yummy! Here are my Dad and Abby enjoying some time together.

This is Cody and Emma. Playing with my new camera I got his teeth to sparkle. Don't ask me how I did it because I'm not sure. :-)

A view of the mountains from my parents house. I love the mountains!

A few more pictures playing with the camera.

Here Abby is taking Dad for a walk around the room. Watch out, I don't think it will be much longer before she takes her first steps.

We hope that you had a wonderful Christmas as well!

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.