Year in review 2011

The year flew by! going to be hard to beat 2011 in the happiness department! Lots of changes happened this year! Here's some of the milestones in order as they happened throughout the year...

Going from this...

..to this.

Going from 117 lbs pre-pregnancy to 110 in the first 3 months to 132 at 9 months was quite the adjustment! Finding maternity clothes that were my size was quite the chore too! I did manage to find some, though by September I looked like I was about to explode!

  Going to Vermont in March. Other than having to fly on not one, but 2 planes(4 actually) to get there and back, we both loved Vermont. Alan had a business trip and I took advantage of that and tagged along. We stayed in Manchester but traveled to Burlington to do some shopping and visit the Ben & Jerry's factory. A tad boring but we did get to sample some ice cream. If you plan to go, go during the week when they are in production. That would have been interesting to see. We have recently joked about having a Fall house in Vermont. If I'm ever brave enough to get on a plane again, I would love to go back in the Fall. I can imagine it's just beautiful! And we promise next time to let our friend Brad know we are there.

 Finding out in April that we were having a girl! We both had a feeling from the beginning that she was a girl and seeing it verified was such an emotional moment. I didn't really realize how much I wanted a daughter until they told us we were having a girl! We kept going back and forth with the names Madison and Riley and once we saw her beautiful picture, we knew she was a Madison!

 Also, getting our house painted was in April. We kept putting it off and finally after 3 years, we finally committed! I'm so glad we did! It's made a huge difference. I still have not decorated the walls like I want but it's good for now. See all of the wall colors here but here is the living room painted in Sherwin Williams Grassland. It's a sage green, since you can't tell by the picture.

Alan's work threw us a huge baby shower in June. I mean, Madison is 4 months old and I have yet to buy a pack of diapers.. We were so blessed to get so much stuff!

Our baby shower in July given by my best friend Amanda, her mom, my mom and Alan's mom. We had a lot of fun and I got more great, much needed things! I'm so lucky to have such good friends and family!

 Finishing Madison's room in July. This seemed to take for.ev.er. but we did it and love it! The tree pulled it all together and hopefully she will like the color when she gets older so we don't have to paint it every time she changes what cartoon character she's into at the time! 

Quitting my job in August to be a stay at home mom and wife was the easiest and hardest thing I had done in a long time! We both knew that's what we wanted, even before getting pregnant, but telling my friends of 7 years and the greatest boss that I was leaving was hard! Not getting up and going through the motion of that work routine was an adjustment. We are so blessed to be able to let me stay home and I love spending my days with Madi and I love seeing all of her firsts firsthand.

Also in August was a not so pleasant thing- Wilma's accident. She got hit by a truck and broke her front leg. She had an external fixture for 3 months and is back to normal! We are not letting her play hard for a few more months just to be on the safe side. I didn't blog about it but she had surgery last week to remove a knot on her chest. She's had it for years but our vet decided it was best to go ahead and remove it. She is doing just fine but now has to wear that horrible e-collar again!

And of course, September was a fantastic month! Our sweet Madison was born! Lots of major changes from here on out! She has brought so much joy, laughter, smiles and exhaustion! :)  Bringing her home from the hospital on our 5 year anniversary was the best gift ever! She has changed our life for the better and seeing her and Alan playing has made my love for him grow bigger. I thought I loved him as much as I could but I was wrong!

Our 5 year wedding anniversary in September. As mentioned above, we got to bring Madi home that day and it was such an emotional ride home! I think between the happiness of bringing her home, happiness of it being our anniversary, exhaustion from lack of sleep at the hospital(boy were we in for a rude awakening when we got home!), confusion of what to do when we did get her home and the reality of "Oh my God, we have a child!", we cried the entire ride home-about 20 minutes. Being married to my best friend for 5 years has been great and now sharing the joys of parenthood with him make things even better! Love you babe!

Madison's first rollover in November! Just proves that our little girl is growing up so fast! Excuse the cheesy mommy 'yays' :)

Wilma's removal of her fixture was in November also. This was a big day for everybody! Madison got to spend a few hours with her Grandma(my mom), Alan and I got to go to eat alone(for the 2nd time) and of course Wilma came home without her fixture! We were so thrilled to bring her home without it!

Madison's 1st Christmas! She loves all the things everyone got for her! Already looking forward to this year's Christmas! A baby brings a different kind of joy at Christmastime.

Also in December, my dad passed away. It was and has been a trying time for my whole family but we are dealing with it. At least he isn't in pain anymore.

Hopefully 2012 will be a great year for us! I am anxiously awaiting all of Madison's firsts this year.. Sitting up, standing, walking, tooth, word.. Wow. This is going to be a great year! Hopefully Wilma will have a less stressful year and can get completely back to normal! Cheers to 2012!

Gorgeous Vermont mountains...

Alan had a business trip planned for Manchester, Vermont March 24. He asked me if I wanted to come up there with him for a weekend getaway. Of course I wanted to, even though it involved a plane ride.. Alan got a phone call that our 8am flight to Washington got cancelled. He then called to reschedule and we got an 11am flight to New York City. I held the plane up the entire time. It was horrible. The takeoff is what I hate the most. The super fast speeds, the slant of the plane, the cloud turbulence, the plane trying to get even, the turning on a dime(I mean you have the whole sky, Mr Pilot)... oh boy. After a layover in NY, they called our plane to board. We walk outside and it's a prop plane. *sigh* I look at Alan and say "Are you serious? Is this our plane?" He, being the husband that will try to make all bad things in my life sound not nearly as bad said "Yeah, it ours, they ride a bit different than regular planes but it will be okay, they are just really loud" So of course I proceed to freak out because I know when Alan says something is "different" than it should be, it's going to be bad. It really wasn't that bad. Other than the loud propellers, I actually liked that ride better than the normal plane. It didn't seem as bumpy to me. Then we get to Vermont, look out the window as we are landing and see these gorgeous mountains and all is well:This is the scenery all over Vermont. The mountains are huge. There was snow on the ground and it was in the low 30s Thursday. We get our rental car, type in the hotel address and go on our way. What was supposed to be an hour and half drive took 2 hours since our lovely GPS took us 30 minutes out of the way. I hate trusting those stupid things. We did make it to our hotel around 9:30, went to get something to eat and headed to bed. It was a long day in the airports!

Friday morning was Alan's meeting so he got up, broke an out of town rule by going to McDonalds(I have a rule that we can't eat at chain restaurants when we are out of town) and got breakfast. I'm glad he broke the rule cause the food in Vermont is not as good as our food from home so that bagel was the 2nd best meal I had the whole trip! Then I took him to where he was going so I could have the car to wander around. I dropped him off and headed into town to find out the shops didn't open until 10(it was 8am). So I head back to the room to watch some tv when Alan called. We had planned to stay in Manchester Thursday night, check out and head to Burlington and stay Friday and Saturday night. Alan said the guy at the plant he was touring said that Manchester was the place to be for scenery and to get the 'true Vermont feel'. So I go to the office, see if we can stay 2 more nights and she says yes but we have to change rooms. I agree and check out of one and into another. They had a huge group of military men coming in and I guess they had reserved a block of rooms. Here is the front of the hotel. Pretty nice view!

Around 10, I head to the Carters(baby clothes) outlet and snag some, hopefully neutral, clothes. I was able to get everything below, except the jeans and the red onesie beside the blue one for $19 total! Everything was on clearance and I think it's pretty neutral. The little blue outfit is a little boyish but our little girl could wear it too. Who says girls have to wear frills? :) After that, I went to Gap and got the jeans and the red onesie for $7! The jeans are way too cute! And for $5, marked down from $25, they are even cuter!

While standing in the checkout line at Gap, Alan called saying he was ready to be picked up. I pick him up, head back to the room for him to change and we decide to take a roadtrip to see some scenery. We are on the road for about 3-4 hours. Here's one of the stops we made. It was at a ski slope. We didn't ski but stopped by to take some pics.

We're not in Kansas anymore...

Snowmobile crossing... We don't see these around South Carolina!

The roads were dry. All that snow on the ground and we never once passed a snow plow or salt/sand truck. They know what they are doing up north!We saw lots of small ponds that were frozen and on a few of them were ice fishers.
This makes me nervous!
We saw lots and lots of stunning mountains
On Saturday, we decided to leave and head to Burlington and see what it had to offer. We booked a room and checked out of our current room. We saw just the right amount of snow without being annoying or way too cold and nastyand lots of cars that looks like this...We got to Waterbury, Vermont and Alan noticed the original Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream factory was there. We decided to stop and do the tour. The plant wasn't working so the tour was a little boring but I learned some things I had no idea about. Like that they use non-hormone induced cows and no artificial colors, which is pretty great. We made it into Burlington, checked into our room and headed out to check out the town. We find Lake Camplain and luckily it's sunset! Isn't this gorgeous?This is how cold it was. This is the shore of the lake. All ice. Crazy!
We did lots of looking around at some stores, went out to eat at a seafood restaurant that night and then went to a local coffee shop afterward. We then went back to the room. We checked out about 11:30 Sunday morning, went back to the Lake where Alan took a few more pics and we headed to the airport for our 3:00 flight to Pennsylvania. We made it safely to Pa where we were looking forward to a 4 hour layover. Around 8:30, the plane should have been boarding but it was not. Around 9, the announcer guy said they called maintenance on our plane and it would be delayed until 10. Great. The waiting part for me wasn't the worst part. I didn't want to be on a plane that just had maintenance called on it. I'm just sure it was the engine they were working on! After waiting for a while, around 10:30 they said they called another plane in and we would be leaving soon. We finally head out about 10:45. Luckily we are able to sleep on the plane since it didn't land until 12:20 or so. We got our luggage and headed home. By the time we got in bed it was 1:30. Since both of us worked Monday, it was pretty rough getting up. I caught up the whole rest of the week and should be in bed now but this blog has taken way longer to type up than I thought it would. But now I'm heading that way! Alan is going back to Vermont in a few months I think and I will be sad that I won't be able to go since I either be too far along or will have a tiny newborn! I would love to go back in the Fall, at some point.

16 weeks! March 17-24, 2011

Baby's now the size of an avocado! Tiny bones forming in baby's ears mean he/she can now hear you! Eyebrows, lashes and hair are filling in and taste buds are forming! This week was great. My appetite is still growing. I can eat until I pop and 30 minutes later, I'm hungry again. Belly measures 33" this week and my weight was 108.6 at the end of the week. Bedtime is 10-10:30.We also painted the entire inside of the house this week(except the bonus room upstairs- pics of house to come later this week!). Baby's room is now green!
Lacewing from Sherwin Williams to be exact. Hard to tell from the tiny square but it's a little more limey in person. We went out last weekend and looked at some nursery bedding/decorations and came to the conclusion that light limey green was the color that was used in both boy and girl bedding. I can't wait to start buying things to decorate!

We left for Vermont on the 24th(Thursday) and came back yesterday(27th). Alan had some business up there and I decided to tag along! We had a great trip. Baby's first plane ride! I will blog about that later this week too. In the meantime, look at these precious clothes I got for the baby on our trip. Carters and Gap were having a great sale! Closeup of the sweetest onesie! And couldn't be more right!All in all, week 16 was a really great week. I'm glad Alan and I got to get away for a few days, even if our flight situation wasn't the best. More on that later!