8 months old

brennan grace, you are EIGHT months old. it has gone by in a blink and you get more and more fun each day.

* you LOVE to move around. you crawl everywhere you can and are a wiggle worm in our arms because you now know the fun that can be had as you explore your world

* you are now pulling yourself up on tables and look like such a LITTLE GIRL when i see you standing all by yourself without me around

* you love to eat and my unofficial weighing on the bathroom scale said you are 19 pounds. to be confirmed by the doc, but still. 19 pounds.

* you make friends everywhere we go. strangers comment on my 'beautiful, happy baby.' you are all smiles

* i think that your favorite food might be sweet potatoes. you also like avocados. and yogurt and pears. i'm trying to hold out as long as i can before i introduce sweets or processed foods of any kind to you. you'll thank me later, though we'll see how long that lasts when you spend the week with mimi & nana. ;)

* you've discovered the fun, unexplored worlds that exist behind cabinet doors and are constantly trying to open everything you can

* you have a feisty streak in you that i am interested to see play out through the years.

* you are FUNNY. we are beginning to see your outgoing little personality come out. you love to laugh and make us laugh. our favorite sound of the moment is your squeals of joy when you are too excited to even get a laugh out and it comes out as a high pitched squeal. so cute

* you HATE to have your nose/face wiped. it causes such a disproportional reaction of screams, flailing arms, and arching back that i wonder if we are causing some deep trauma that might manifest itself in future years

happy saturday

let the christmas festivities begin!

a record of firsts

what firsts should a mother know about?

these are the ones i can remember...

umbilical cord fell off at 10 days old; first bath

first smiled at 6 weeks

first solid food- 5 months (bananas)

first crawled- 7 1/2 months! 12.5.11

we were even able to capture it on video!

turkey day, PA & DC excursion

we spent a wonderful thanksgiving with lane's family, complete with my first turkey trot thanksgiving morning. proud to say that this whole crew completed the race, old and young alike. ;) i also love that brennan and brett are reaching out to each other over sydney.

then, EARLY friday morning, the three of us caught a plane out to the east coast for lane's 10 year high school reunion. brennan did great both ways on the plane, except for about 15 minutes per flight where she was THAT screaming baby. thankfully, she fell asleep and i just did not move for the rest of the flight for fear of waking the beast.

military gets free tv on frontier, so i absolutely played that card for our flight. technically, it's only supposed to be for those in uniform, but it's always worth asking, and they always says yes. we had the whole row to ourselves on the way out which was a godsend, considering how much room we required for the babe. at least my stress over keeping brennan occupied took my mind off of the plane crashing during take off.

brennan about to ride on her first metro. she's very excited.

one of my very favorite cities. we were about to walk into the library of congress for a tour and i'm sad i didn't get a picture of the building; it's beautiful. we did get to see the guttenberg bible though which is so cool.

our second day in d.c.- we made it into arlington and lane was able to visit his buddy ben. seemed fitting that it was a rainy day. super sad.

oh, thomas jefferson. i do love you. what an amazing memorial.

after walking about 14 miles around the mall and the tidal basin we made it to the new mlk monument. can't really tell, but it's a really neat stone sculpture of him.

all in all, it was a FUN fun trip. it was really good to get away, just the three of us, and take a breather before finishing the semester. brennan was a champ and it was a well rounded trip of seeing good friends, being together as a family, and enjoying the east coast!

7 months old

brennan grace, you are 7 months old today...

* you are SO CLOSE to crawling and it is so cute to watch you try, get frustrated, and try again

* some of our favorite moments are early in the morning when you have just woken up (and woken us up), so either daddy or i will go get you and pull you into bed with us. you never go back to sleep, instead deciding that grabbing our face and arms is much more fun. i love waking up to your squeals of delight as you roll around in between us

* you sleep like a rockstar. most nights. not last night, but most nights

* we're still introducing solid foods, but so far your favorites are pears and pumpkin.

* you are sitting up by yourself now and look like such a BIG GIRL. i can't even handle it

* you LOVE faces. your hand is always reaching out to our eyes, nose, mouth. it is not uncommon for me to have to carry on a conversation with your fingers grabbing my lips

* we sing together. when i get you from a nap, as i change your diaper, as i carry you around the house... i'll sing and you get a big grin and go 'aaahhhhhh'

* you still love to do raspberries, though not as much as when you were 6 months old. i think you're too cool for them now, but i hope they make a reappearance because it's super cute as your go-to response for everything

* you are starting to get ticklish. especially on your tummy and it makes you double over in laughter. i LOVE to hear you laugh

happy 7 month birthday baby girl!

this looks like i caught you in the middle of being naughty.

maybe i'll see this look many more times in about 15 years

starting yesterday, this is what greets me after naptime. a little girl who is sitting up by herself, content as can be, playing with her lovies.

a collection of favorites

over the last two months we have been able to have a couple of photo shoots and i LOVE the way these pictures came out.

the first was with the whole sandifer crew, and though all of the kids at some point were DONE with the shoot, our photog somehow still managed to get amazing results. our little peanut was ms. serious the whole time, just staring the camera down and not being her super smiley happy self, but somehow still came out looking super cute.

the cousins

95% of people comment on how much she looks like lane. i don't mind that because that means she'll be super cute, as long as i can have dibs on some of our future kids looking like me.

every picture. so serious.

and a few faves from our shoot at home- a friend just came over to snap a few pictures to help build his photography portfolio, with which we were more than happy to help him

cousin-filled weekend

It had been waaay to long since we had seen mimi and papa so brennan and i took advantage of lane being gone for the weekend and headed down to monument to get some time with family.

gabe, makena, and ford were around for much of the time, and if i know one thing, it is that they LOVE their littlest cousin.

case in point: i walk in saturday morning to the three of them gathered around brennan 'playing' with her... "but auntie sarah, she loves to have toys piled on her. look! she's a butterfly in her cocoon!"

"she likes my glasses!" "she thinks i'm funny" "she likes my shirt!"

i think all in all it was a good self-esteem boosting weekend for all involved.

they really would play for long amounts of time with her... i think they have yet to realize that she can't move, talk, or really interact with them in any way yet besides stare and smile.

then we were off to the children's choir concert that makena and ford were in. ford possibly had a rough time being pried from anne's thigh in order to go sing, hence him holding the puppy dog

though it's not very clear, makena even had a speaking role in the performance and said a bible verse that she had memorized

cousin time! if i was nursing b or letting her sleep, it just wasn't acceptable to makena. she wanted to be playing with brennan AT ALL TIMES.

the sitting up on her own thing is new by the way... i propped her up to prove to anne that she could not, in fact, sit up on her own yet... then she just stayed up! atta girl!

somebody is mighty close to crawling

lets establish something first and foremost. it is just a fact that this child is going to grow up with a camera stuck in her face in my attempts to capture every single moment.

i think that in her heart she is saying 'maaaaaammmmaaaa, seriously?' i think i will see this look many times about fifteen years from now.

perfect form! i give it a 10. she just needs to work on her technical elements of moving arms and legs at the same time, which actually sounds fairly complicated. it might be a bit before perfect form translates into actual movement.

might i point out several things i love about this picture: #1: her amazing headband. #2: her cute little tuckus. #3: i really really love my wine barrel side table.

and just because she's beautiful:

a day in the life

our days typically consist of the same basic framework. in a typical day, brennan will:

play with her very favorite dog in the world: sophie. she thinks that sophie is just the funniest thing and will laugh at her and try to talk to her when sophie rolls around on the carpet. it is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

do her exercises. she is currently perfecting downward dog which mostly happens when she is tired or upset

and plank.

all of that work gets exhausting, so she needs to take a break. even though i always lay her on the ground on either her playmat or blanket, i will undoubtedly find her somewhere on the carpet other than where i placed her. the girl can roll.

we are in the midst of introducing solid foods. this was the first attempt at avocados. subsequent tries were met with more food making it in her stomach than on her chin thankfully.

and then blessed naptime. her two lovies: her puppy and blankie are always found in her arms as she sleeps. love it.

*happy halloween*

we had a fun halloween! brennan celebrated her first halloween by spending the day in her adorable outfit...

i took a video of her right here too but its being feisty and i can't figure out how to get it to upload... this is not an admission of defeat though, just a minor setback. i will prevail.

and THEN it was time to put on b's amazing ladybug costume. and my not-so-awesome homemade bumble bee.

but the real attention grabbing outfit came from this guy:

all of the little kids thought winnie the pooh was the coolest thing and kept coming up to him to give him high-5's. this is most of the kiddos that were at the party; despite about 10 pictures taken, this is the best shockingly. brennan seems to be obsessed with getting the flower off her friends head.

and here's the three of us celebrating our first halloween together! pretty cute crew if i do say so myself. especially that little ladybug

6 months in review

in order to catch myself up to current day, here is a photo montage of some of my

faves of the past 6 months

bringing b home from the hospital. it looks like she's got a really good tan but no, it was the jaundice. also, where did that beautiful head of dark hair go?!

darn jaundice. this summarizes our first week... we hated the bilibed!

we had our final leadership gathering of the year scheduled for april 29th assuming that we would still have a few weeks before having a baby but since brennan surprised us and came 2 1/2 weeks early, she got to be at her first party when she was one week old! She'll get to hear stories of attending her first young life event at 7 days old. kind of fun.

daddy sneaking in some snuggle time.

i was so sad when she outgrew this outfit, it was so cute.

just the cutest thing in the world. i was actually sad when she outgrew this one too.

this is the brennan we know and love... SO HAPPY

possibly one of my favorite pictures of her to date... she's staring at lane and looks like such a big girl!