Kaylee crys out Mama

Yesterday, Kaylee woke up from her nap and was crying. Usually she will wake up, sit up in her bed and contently play with her bunny and bear that she sleeps with. But yesterday she was crying. I was in the middle of something and could not get to her immediately. While finishing up what I was doing quickly I thought I heard Mama. Well, I listened to Kaylee on the monitor closely and she said it again. It was so sweet even though she was crying. I told Josh about it when he got home and he said she had done it the night before when she woke up in the middle of the night and he went and got her for me. He said she was crying out mama! I never thought it would mean this much to me to be called out for. Not because she said Mama before Dada but because I am her Mama and there for her whenever she needs me..Lord willing. It is like our Father. I know He loves when we cry out to Him, in praise and song or tears rolling down our cheeks. If only we cried out to Him more. He is and always be there for us. He will never leave us nor forsake us. No matter what He is waiting to hear our voices call out His name! I pray as Kaylee's Mama that I can be there for her and give her biblical guidance in all her situations in life but I will not have all the answers and can not always be right by her side. One day she will grow up and be on her own but she will always have the Lord to call out to no matter where she is in this world! Abba, our Father Loves us dearly!

We have been parents for 9 months!

Yum! Yum! Kaylee loves her crackers!




Kaylee just turned 9 months old. Time sure has flown bye us! We are loving being parents and are having such a blast with Kaylee. She is so much fun!!! Every day is more and more exciting with her moving all over the place. Kaylee LOVES bathtime. I think she could stay in the tub all day if we let her. She has duck and fish bath toys that she plays with the whole time to where mommy usually has to take them away to be able to give her a bath and then she gets to go back to playing. She loves splashing all around. She also loves playing peek a boo with someone in the shower. She loves crawling over to the tub, standing up and then jerking the decorative curtin back and giggling. Kaylee and daddy play this game a lot. He will sit down in the tub while the shower is running and she has a ball. She doesn't want to stop. She finds this so humerous and enteraning! So, I think in one of my most recent post I said she said MaMa. Well, she has not said it clear again. She talks alot of gibber jabber such as mamama, dadada, bybybyby and so forth and a couple of weeks ago we started teaching her Bye Bye and waving to someone when they leave or she leaves. Now Bye Bye is her favorite word and she loves to wave to people, all the time. She has been going through a lot of adjustments recently. She is loving her new room and home..it has dogs, cats, a bird and turtles. Kaylee LOVES animals..she will chase after them..aka...crawl after them all over if she can. Her favorite animal is a dog right now, especially Kyra...Sara's golden retriver. Kyra is almost two and has tons of energy and feeds off of Kaylee's energy. Kyra can get Kaylee giggling and not stop. She was trying to stand up on her own a lot for a couple of days and then all of a sudden she quit trying. She still trys every once and a while but not as often. She loves to dance. Daddy beat boxes and she can move to the beat. She loves music and loves to move to it! It is so cute. She does this crawl we call a monkey crawl. She is up on her hands like she is when she normally crawls but instead of being on her knees she straightens her legs and "monkey crawls". This is how she crawls now....it is very rare for her to crawl on her knees and now she is really good at the monkey crawl and can go really fast. She is great at playing all by herself...which is great for the early morning wake up call mommy gets. Mommy goes and lays back down on the couch in her bedroom and rests while she starts playing in the mornings. Mommy has not quite gotten adjusted to the move in the sense of everyone else in the house stays up late...really late..dinner is not usually until 8:30/9 pm and then everyone stays up and talks afterwards..with Kaylee getting me up around 6 am I am struggling to be coherant due to lack of sleep. I am trying to go to bed earlier bc my body just can't do it. Kaylee is roughly 15 pounds and is struggling to fit her 6 to 9 month clothes. Some of her clothes fit great but some still swallow her hole. Due to the transition of moving she started waking up again in the middle of the night and I would nurse her. Now she is teething again. I can see her 5th tooth coming in on the bottom and we think another one on the other side is also coming in. So due to all of this mommy had not gotten to sleep through the night. Kaylee also has changed her nap pattern. The first four months of her life she did NOT nap so when she finally started I didn't know what to do with myself. NOw I have plenty to do and all of a sudden a couple of weeks ago she started sleeping for an hour in the mornings compared to the 2 hour morning nap and an hour to hour and a half in the afternoon which she use to also sleep for 2 hours. So she only took two 2 hr naps for 5 months and she is already cutting them back. She is waking up from her afternoon nap as I finish typing.
Josh got a great job doing home watch. It is a dream job for him bc he gets to drive his dream cars for the homeowners. (in the sense of a secular job) and such a blessing from the Lord. He makes sure everything is taken care of while the people don't live in their homes down here in Florida. We can't believe we have already started thinking about her 1st birthday party...crazy huh?
I am a little sad today due to Kaylee finished off all the homemade baby food I made for her back in June. It is bitter sweet moment bc as of tonight I am putting her on all table foods and no more baby food. She has been eating cantalope, bananna's crackers, toast-toddlers toast, puffs, and so forth and now we are going to move onto the rest of the foods. She is still being nursed and will still have her otmeal baby cereal for breakfast but to me it just is one more thing to remind me that she is growing up quickly and appriciate every moment we have with her.We have been so blessed from the Lord with such a happy and healthy baby girl.

Trip to Jacksonville, Fl; Washington DC and St. Augustine

We took a a spur of the moment trip. We got in touch with our great friends Garrett and Lara Conner...meet at seminary. We actually moved on the same day to Florida. Josh called Garrett at 8 pm to see if he wanted someone to ride with him to DC and to help him move. He meant to call earlier that day and we had been talking about calling for a few days. So at 8:30 we rushed to eat dinner, rushed to pack for 3 people..one including our little baby girl and drive 6 hours to Jacksonville, Fl. We got there at about 3 am. Josh got up early the next morning and headed to Garrett's house. Then they headed to Wake Forest, NC. Loaded up the truck and spent the night. The next day they headed to DC. They spent the next couple of days unpacking, hanging out with some of Garrett's friends from the intership they are about to start at Captiol Hill Baptist Chruch and toured DC. Their new home is going to be on Captial Hill. Lara, Jack-her son who is 4 days younger than Kaylee and Kaylee and I got to hang out for the next 5 days. It was great getting to hang out one more time before they offically move to DC. On Monday we headed to St. Augustine for the day. We ate at Harry's and then had some amazing homemade icecream for dessert. The picture of Kaylee in a pack n play is when I found her after a nap wondering why she wasn't crying for me to get her and feed her. She had pulled the toast box off the table, gotten through the plastic slit and pulled out all the toast and had one in each hand eating on it. Too cute. I was blown away that one she knew that there was food in that box and how to get into it. That afternoon I got a huge scare. I went to put her down for her second nap and she was throwing a fit so I left her in her room to cry herself to sleep and walked out. About 45 minutes later Amanda, Lara's sister said I think she is still crying..I didn't hear her but all of a sudden I got this feeling like I needed to go and check on her and now! I went in and she was sitting up crying. I noticed she was gagging on something. I had moved all the food from the table next to her except the cereal box. Her cereal box has a big cap that you screw on and off. I thought that there is no way she could get into it so I didn't move it. She had gotten the cereal container down, somehow got the cap undone and put it in her mouth. I grabbed her out of the bed, trying to hit her on her back not realizing at the time what she was chocking on. Then I looked inside her mouth and saw the cap and had to use my fingers and reach all the way into the back of her mouth to pull the cap out. My heart was racing. It scared me half to death...not literally but I was shook up. I don't know how she got the cap off but she did. From this point on everything has to be out of reach, no matter how difficult it is to get into! Praise the Lord Amanda told me that she was still crying bc I couldn't hear her at that moment. Praise the Lord the cap was large enough she couldn't swallow it and it become stuck in her throat! Praise the Lord that nothing was extremely wrong to the point of something happening to Kaylee. God is so good!

Kaylee's New Bedroom

These are pictures of Kaylee's new room while we live with Josh's parent's for the next couple of years. Jennifer and Sara went out of their way to paint Kaylee's room and surpirse us when we got to Florida.

First Christmas as a Family of 3

Our first Christmas as a family of 3 was spent at our new home (Josh's parents house) in Florida. We did not get our tree up until 2 days before Christmas. It was very important for us to have our own family Christmas tree. Sara had a white 2' tree with pink orniments all over it with lights in Kaylee's room when we arrived. I sadly did not get a picture. After I had taken the tree and the decorations down I realized sadly that I did not get one. We had our reef on our door and our stocking we hung (off of our desk hatch). you do what you have to do when the situation is not necessarly ideal for putting up Christmas decorations.
This was Kaylee's first Christmas and we wanted to start traditions and make our own family memories...and we did! We planned on reading the story of Jesus's birth on Christmas Eve but we went to church and did not get back until her bedtime and there was no holding her off. So Christmas morning we woke up and got the video camera and went into her room. We got her and brought her back to our room with the Christmas tree.
First, daddy read to Kaylee the story of Jesus' birth. Then she opened up her stocking and boy did she know what to do! She pulled out her sippy cup and a hot pink bathing suit. Next, was her ornimant. It was a bird..for all the bird faces and sounds she made this past 8 months. (she was also a bird for Halloween)Then it was onto what Santa brought...which was wrapped...at least for this year :) She got books and a Leapfrog BrightLings toy. She didn't really understand the ripping the paper off even with mommy and daddy helping out but once the paper was off she had a ball with it! The it was onto Kaylee helping mommy and daddy opening our stockings, orniments. Our gifts to each other were our orniments this year but mommy got daddy good buy getting him the National Treasure 2 movie for his stocking. Joshua always goes over budget while I work extremely hard to use every single penny without going over. We had a $10 limit for our stockings this year ...just enough for some candy but I got him good! He was expecting for me to do that and he was excited!
After we were done Kaylee, Josh and I went downstairs and had Christmas with his parents and sisters. They were all ready and waiting. Kaylee was ready. She ripped through her stocking that had stuff overflowing from the top. One thing I learned is that my family is not the only one's who do Christmas BIG!! Kaylee was a pro at taking things out of her stocking one by one. The onto the gifts... Kaylee participated a little more with the unwrapping..aka..she actually pulled a strip of paper off of most of the presents. She was hillarious. She knew exactly what to do...unwrap the toy and play with it for a second and then she was ready. She knew there was more and she was estatic. She wanted to open more. As soon as the one was opened she looked toward the tree where more of her presents were and would get giddy and clapp her hands in excitment!
It has been a whirl wind moving, unpacking, getting up decorations, celebrating Jesus' birth, Kaylee opening gifts, organizing all the new stuff and still get our home together. It has been such an amazing time to see Kaylee grow and try new things. She is now eating bread...it's the kind for teething, unsalted crackers and yogurt puffs. She is about to start testing out cheese in the next couple of days. She now has two more teeth in and has started standing up on her own. She stood up on her own and actually balanced herself instead of just falling down on the Monday after Christmas which was Dec. 28,2008. We are having a blast being parents and are so blessed that the Lord has brought Kaylee into our lives. Joshua has so much fun playing around with her and he is such a great dad and husband. He helps me out a ton when I need it. I am truely blessed!