Illinois Trip in Review

Well, we made it back safely!
I already told you about the first few days in my previous blog. So here are the pictures to go with it. Here's Amanda in the Airport (Long Beach) before we took off on the 20th:



We were very surprised by how small and easy it was to get through the Long Beach Airport. There are only 4 terminals, so while ours was pretty busy, as you can see the other three were practically empty. So I let Amanda crawl (and walk) around to wear her out so she'd sleep on the plane ride. It worked like a charm!

Here's Amanda at the waterpark:



Mike brought the Wii with us because his mom likes to play tennis on it. He got a second controller for Christmas, so we were able to play against eachother. Here Mike's playing boxing against his friend Tom:




Meanwhile, Amanda loved to play Mimi's piano. My little music-maker in training :D



Christmas Eve was spent at Mike's sister's house. Amanda played with her cousin Zach's toys

Zach liked to climb on the presents before we opened them:

Cousin Natalie just watched the fun everyone was having:

Christmas morning we went to Church mass (Amanda did great!), and then opened the adult's presents. Christmas day was pretty laid back. We were supposed to have a ham dinner, but someone forgot to take the ham out of the freezer, so we ended up just having pulled pork sandwiches, and had our Christmas dinner the next night.

We flew home on the 27th, which was again pretty non-eventful. The TV's didn't work on our return flight, which sucked, but Amanda did really well again, sleeping through the last 1.5 hours. We landed at 8pm CA time and hightailed it home.

I had to work Friday, but Mike stayed home with Amanda. He set up her new walker she got for Christmas, which I wasn't sure she was ready for. But she surprised me by immediately getting up on it and walking!

Ahhh, my little girl is growing up!

Not much planned for New Years, just having a few friends over to play some games. Hope everyone had a great Christmas!

Merry Christmas from Illinois!

No pictures this time!

We flew from Long Beach to Illinois on Thursday December 20 and surprisingly had an easy time! I booked our seats on JetBlue with an empty seat in the middle, hoping no one would book it and we'd have a "free" seat for Amanda, but alas no luck. It was still unbooked the day before, but sometime between 10:30am Wednesday and 10:30am Thursday, someone booked it. So Amanda sat in my lap the whole time. However, she did really good! She slept during the whole first hour, including take-off, then ate and played the rest of the time. I had her suck on a pacifier during descent and she watched out the window as we landed. She didn't seem to have any problems with her ears!

Amanda's Uncle Mark picked us up at the airport, and we headed to Grandma Mimi's house where a surprise awaited us! Mimi and her Mark announced they were engaged (as of about an hour before)! We are so excited for them!

Friday was spent at home until the afternoon, when we joined Amanda's Aunts (Laura & Kathy) and their kids (Alison and Zach) for a trip to an indoor water park! Pictures are forthcoming after I can download my pictures at home. Amanda had a ton of fun! She played in the shallow baby area, then we took a couple laps around the lazy river before warming up in the hot tub. Did I mention it was a balmy 82 degrees inside?? Such a relief from the 37 degree freezing temperature outside! After a quick dinner, it was back to Mimi's for the annual "neighbors party" where all the neighbors got to meet Amanda for the first time.

Tomorrow several more family members are coming over to meet Amanda, and then it's on to the Christmas festivities.

I hope everyone is enjoying the balmy CA weather that I'm sure is much warmer than it is here, and that everyone has a very Merry Christmas!

Bowling

I totally forgot to post these pictures before. The weekend before Halloween in October Mike and I decided to go bowling at the local bowling alley on Sunday afternoon, so we took Amanda down there in her stroller and a good time was had by all!
Here's Amanda keeping an eye on the action:

Here's Amanda smiling up at the camera when she realized what I was doing:


Here's Mike bowling:


And me with the FIRST Turkey I've ever made!

Playing with napkins

I just discovered I can post directly from my new flickr account, so this is a test to see it works.
Amanda has decided she loves ripping up napkins and playing with the peices. I took some pics of that, and here they are:

Crawling and Standing

So Amanda is full on crawling now, and she's starting to pull herself up to standing. It's hard to keep up with her sometimes, as she's always moving! But it also comes in handy when I leave the room, now she follows me rather than just crying! Anyway, here are some pics. First is when she pulled herself up to standing using my hips (I was laying on my side on the ground):



And here's a pic of her crawling:


And here's a pic of her just being cuuuuuuute!

Haunted House pics

Here's the pictures of our haunted house. First is the porch. That's "Ben B. Headed" on the bench with his head sitting next to him. I also had blacklights all around so the webs glowed.


Here's the front lawn graveyard. The names on the tombstones all describe how they died: "Anne T. Social", "Barry D. Alyve", "Ilene Dover", "Rigger Mortis", and "Barb E. Cue"

Halloween!

Yay Halloween! One of my favorite holidays. This year Mike made me some tombstones out of wood so I could have a "real" looking graveyard in our front lawn :) I'll take some pics on Wednesday after it's all set up. To hold you over though, here are some pics of Amanda in her bee costume last night. I had to make sure it would still fit!

The Hills are on Fire!

So as most of you have heard (or experienced), Southern CA had a bunch of wildfires this week. Ok, not a "bunch", but a TON. I think at one point they said 19 fires were burning out of control! While we weren't too affected by it (we live in the heart of the city), the amount of smoke pouring into our air and being blown our way was pretty bad. I took the following pictures on my way home from work on Wednesday.
This is looking down Motor Ave. at the Sony Pictures tower. You can see how discolored the sky was


And here's a picture of the sun that same night. All day it looked like this, sort of red and muted.

REAL pic of teeth!

Here ya go, I finally got a real picture of Amanda's teeth!




So I'm home from work today because the new daycare called and said she was vomiting and I needed to pick her up :(  We are going to see the doctor at 3:15.  I think it's the Albutrin he told me to give her to stop her wheezing, I don't think it's agreeing with her, and she's had diarrhea and vomiting the last couple of days.  Hopefully she'll get better soon.

Ladies & Gentlemen...

Amanda has her first tooth!!! Yay!

This weekend she made a sudden spurt in progress. She broke her first tooth on Friday, then she showed us she could sit up on her own. Then she started putting food in her mouth on her own. I gave her some Gerber finger foods, and she went to town!

So of course, here are some pictures
First is my attempt to get a picture of her tooth, but it didn't seem to work very well:



Here's a cute pic of her eating a biter biscuit:


And here are a couple where she figured out how to get a Twizzler out of the bag and the fun she had with it!




So this is her last week at the current daycare center. Mike & I decided we're fed up with the director and the shoddy way she runs the place. So next week she starts a new, much more organized place that I hope we'll all be happier at!