Here's Ava saying "Dada"....when she's good and ready of course!

Scrapbook Pages

I don't know if I've ever shown scrapbook pages on here before and I have nothing else to write right now, so here goes. I have been scrapping like crazy lately. I feel like I'm frantic to capture every nuance of my children when they are babies. I know how fast it goes and how wonderful and sweet this first 12 months is so I am capturing lots of things about Ava that I want to remember. Maybe in a later installment, I'll show you some pictures from the family scrapbook but for today, I'll just show you the latest pages I've done of Ava. Enjoy.

Title: Unimpressed---Ava's 1st taste of food

Title: Two for the Price of One---Ava's 1st 2 teeth

Title: Je t'adore

Title: Chubby Cheeks---full of 743,522 kisses and counting

Title: Happy Girl---I love this page because it came from my head and took me days to do. It was a lot of work and it turned out to be a wonderful accident.

How it all started

I have been asked to tell the story of how Shawn and I met and fell in love. I love to tell it even though it's not all that exciting...but when you're telling your story, it's always special to remember those moments when love was new. Before I tell the story, I have to say I got a really sweet present for our 8th anniversary. Shawn brought me a beautiful bouquet of flowers that he had had made. What was special about this bouquet is that he asked the florist to make it look like my wedding bouquet. It was so special when he brought it home. As soon as I saw it, I knew exactly what he had done. I had wanted to replica of my bouquet for years and it meant a lot that he did that for me :)

Okay so on to the story of how that all began. I went to ACU to get my MRS degree. After my freshman year, I came back to Tyler for the summer. At the first church college class I went to back in Tyler, I met Shawn and his roommate. His roommates younger brother and I had been friends in High School so that was the common ground. Both of them were talking a lot to me and I actually thought Shawn's roommate was flirting more than Shawn. We talked much of the evening and they gave me their phone number and told me to call them. As we all walked outside, I spotted the coolest truck in the world! I immediately blurted out "Who's truck is that!?!?" It was Shawn's :) I'm sure that that made him feel SO good! I really didn't know that it was his but I was definitely impressed with it. (It was an extended cab Toyota, jacked up a little--so cute!) So, the college group was headed to the lake days later. Where they were all meeting I was unfamiliar with so in talking to Shawn on the phone he agreed to pick me up--how convenient! At the lake that day, we flirted and spent most of the time with each other. Later that evening, we had our first kiss! Don't lecture me on how it was too soon...I like to kiss!

Sparks flew and for the rest of the summer we spent almost every day together. Early one maybe before we even went to the lake, Shawn and his roommate invited me over to their new apartment for a housewarming party....turns out I was the only one invited. Thought that was funny.

So in July less than a month after we started dating, Shawn told me he loved me. I wasn't ready to say that yet. I always believed saying "I love you" was so so so sacred and I just didn't feel ready to say it back. I left in August to start my sophomore year at ACU. One day after I returned, I told him I loved him too. My entire sophomore year was a waste. We did the long distance thing for the whole year and we were both miserable. Lots of tears and lots of phone calls and emails. I decided that if I wanted to continue in this relationship, we needed to live in the same town. I moved back to Tyler to go to UT Tyler. I remember walking into the first day of one of my classes in August and everyone was suppose to introduce themselves and say something about themselves and I said "My name is Emma Lanier and before this class is over I WILL be engaged." It got a lot of laughs, but everyone thought I was kidding. Well, one month later, in September, I was engaged. Shawn came over to my apartment one morning and was going to bring me breakfast (a ring) in bed but I said I wasn't hungry---why can't I ever just play along! So, he dropped down on one knee at the end of my bed and asked me to marry him! How exciting!!! I was 20 and he was 21. We planned our wedding for almost 9 months later, in May. One year and eleven months after that fateful day at the lake, we were married. After getting married, we stayed in Tyler one more year to allow me to finish school. Now it's eight years later, and ten years since we started dating, and we have 2 wonderful children and a lifetime of craziness ahead of us! Hope you enjoyed an abbreviated (yes, that's actually the abbreviated version) story of Shawn and Emma.

Progression

Ava is really starting to learn a lot. Well, she's been soaking it up all along, but now she's starting to use what she's learned. She had been really babbling a lot in the past few weeks. Finally Saturday she started saying "Mamamamamama". I was excited because I knew that "Mama" wasn't far away and Monday she said it for the first time. Now she says it a lot. She usually says it when she's in her high chair waiting to be fed, or when I walk away and she starts crying. It is music to my ears. Maybe soon I'll catch her on video. She is also saying "Bye" and waves anytime someone comes up to us or turns away to leave. She understands quite a few commands now also. She knows what "no" means and will stop doing what she's doing if I say "No!" She's definitely all girl because when I say no, she usually starts crying...girls are so dramatic! She also knows what "Give Sissy a kissy" means. She will give all of us a kiss now and it is the sweetest thing ever! She's very gentle about it and afterwards she seems to know that she's done a good thing. :) She is in the beginning stages of crawling and this is new for us because Elle never wanted to even try it. Ava has a sissy though that's always out of reach and I think that's her incentive. Every time we try to change her diaper she rolls onto her tummy and starts pushing forward with her feet. It's almost like an army crawl where you use your elbows. We are excited about that. She has also found that rolling will get her to a toy she wants. She doesn't do it really often, but last night she did roll all over the living room floor at her leisure getting to different toys. She is doing wonderfully. The only thing she's not doing all too well is nursing. She is just so much more interested in what is going on, that I think having to lay there facing away from all the excitement is just too hard! Oh well, she's still gaining. She can also pick things up with her fingers now and put them in her mouth...most of the time. This is good and bad...good because she can feed herself some...bad, because that means I need to vacuum more often and baby proof everything which is impossible with all of Elle's toys. But, I have given Elle a lesson in what can make Ava choke and she seems like she will fall quite naturally into the little mama position and police everything Ava even gives a sideways glance to! Anyway, have a great Wednesday and enjoy the picture I took this morning. I think it's so cute!

8 years

Today is our anniversary....8 years together! Sometimes it seems impossible that it's been 8 years. We are so excited and proud that we've made it to here. We are an anomaly in our generation . For our generation it's almost like dog years for marriage where every year you're married is more like 7 so really we've been married 56 years in Generation X years. Anyway, it was 8 years ago on a Saturday afternoon at Shiloh Road church of Christ at a little after 2 in the afternoon that we became husband and wife. Shawn was 22 years old and I was 20! That seems SO young now. This is a very special day for us. It definately hasn't always been a smooth straight road the whole way, but I really can't imagine traveling down it with anyone else.

Muddy Hands

will the mud ever come off the back of these shorts???

Yesterday while Shawn was baptizing our new front yard, Elle found where the water was running down at the street. It was mixing with the dirt that had been there from the last storm. As he was watering, he overheard her singing "Muddy Hands, Muddy Hands" and he looked over and she was playing in the mud. It started off with just her fingers and an hour later was pretty much her whole body. This is the same child that when she was first starting to walk, if she fell down, she couldn't get back up because she didn't want to touch the ground to push herself back up. She wasn't a big fan of dirt for a long time, but I guess she's come around. I feel like we are so blessed. We got a little girl that is as petite as can be, is SO girly, but can throw a football (really!) and catch one, loves to wrestle (working on a scrapbook page of that) and now likes to play in the mud!

Gramme turns....

before

after

....another year older! She will love me for not putting the actual number on there, though I think she's VERY young! :) We went to Tyler yesterday afternoon to spend the evening, night and today with her. We took her to Jason's Deli and just had fun at home with the girls. It was nice to do something different and also we know it made her very happy to see all of her babies. We came home this afternoon and Shawn has been watering the yard since...in case you didn't know we got our entire front yard resodded yesterday and it looks AWESOME! It looks like we got our front yard carpeted with green carpet. Shawn and a couple of good friends got all the grass down (6 pallets) in about 1 1/2 hours! They were fast! Anyway it's been a busy and wonderful 36 hours. Enjoy the last 36 hours of the weekend.

8 months old, mother's day, cutest kids in the world

I had to make the title long because I knew I'd have a lot of unrelated stuff in this post. So, here's the Stats on Miss Ava. She is 8 months old, weighs a whopping 16 lbs 1/2 ounce, and is 28 inches long. She has grown 3/4 of an inch and gained 10 1/2 ounces this month. She is doing wonderfully and we are excitedly anticipating when she will decide to attempt the thought of crawling! :)

Elle is doing great. We took some pictures of her in an outfit that Aunt Laura gave her for her bday. I thought it was the CUTEST thing in the world and she obviously felt cute because she was striking some serious poses. I am working on her ABC's with her and I'm already about to lose my mind and we are on the letter "B". Some days she's a sponge and others a piece of wax paper with water! Today was the wax paper day. She kept saying the first letter of the alphabet was "V". But I did get her to spell "ball" and she can also spell her first name and Ava's name...of course I cheated and made my children's names easy to spell! Here's a sample of the conversation we had this morning: " What is the letter after the b in ball? Elle says "V". I say no, the next letter in ball is the first letter of the alphabet. So she thinks and says "V". Then I say okay no, ummm....The first letter of the alphabet is A so what's the first letter of the alphabet? Elle replies "V". So, you see where the frustration is kicking in at this point. We went on like this for a good 10 minutes.

I had a wonderful Mother's Day. Truly I felt very at peace and blessed with my children this year. I feel so so so blessed to have these two girls. If I knew a 3rd one would be like these two I might consider it! We didn't do much on Sunday. We ate left-overs for lunch and then vegged the whole afternoon. It was nice. Yesterday we headed to Terrell to try to find some pants for me. It's a good problem, but I am down to one pair of jeans and one pair of khaki capris that fit. I am going to take all my other pants to an alteration place to see if they can make them a little smaller. I'm hoping that would be a lot cheaper than buying all new stuff and I hate trying to find clothes anyway. It's so frustrating! Especially with two children who are, I think, putting on a show for the store to see. They seem to smell the new clothes and it affects their brains. They get really loud, cry a lot and pretty much go berserk. All the while Shawn, poor Shawn, is trying to rein them in while I fly in and out of 20 pairs of pants in 4.7 seconds flat. Well, that's all for now. Enjoy the pictures. And enjoy your Tuesday...it feels like it should already be Friday!

Early Mother's Day

I would rather do nothing for Mother's Day than battle the crowds in Greenville with 2 young children just to eat mediocre food served by overtired waiters. So, having said that, we did Mother's Day today! Shawn took me to Rockwall and we ate at On the Border (I got fajitas...very good!) and then we went shopping at Target and Gotta Scrap (my fav. scrapbook store.) We haven't been to Rockwall in a while so it was nice to get out of Greenville for the evening. I think Sunday we'll get some fast food and head home and get comfy while everyone else is crammed into the few restaurants we have!
Here's a funny Elle story. Elle wanted to chew some gum the other day and we said No. This is a reoccurring thing we go through numerous times each day. Anyway, she said Barbie can chew gum. Then she said "I'll be barbie" and Shawn asked her how she was going to do that. She went into her room and got a drum stick and pointed it at herself and said "Bibbity Bobbity Bo" and said she was now Barbie and could have some gum. Clever girl. Also, we decided 3 days ago that pull-ups were so unfashionable and that it was time to give it up! She had been sleeping in them for naps and bedtime. We quit them cold turkey. She has had 2 accidents but has made it 1 full night and for 2 naps totally dry! That is a big deal for her and us too. Pull ups are really expensive!
Ava is doing just wonderfully. She is happy happy happy. She is really waving at everyone now. We also think she said her first word a few days ago. Shawn was leaving for work and we were waving and saying bye-bye and once he walked out the door, she said "Bye." Who knows??? She has also started turning herself over in her crib and sleeping on her tummy. It is so cute when I go in to get her. She also sleeps with a teddy bear now and when I go in to get her, she is usually holding it or chewing it. She is VERY attached to me lately. If Shawn even walks towards me, she grabs a hold of me and buries her face in my neck. She does that with people at church too. She throws a fit if I leave the room, even if Shawn has her. It's endearing, but annoying also. I love to feel needed, but this is a little too clingy for me! She's also feeding herself sometimes and loves baby food still. She is a very fast eater. She has mastered the sippy cup quite well. She's drinking out of it really good, though she can't hold it on her own yet.
Tomorrow will be a pretty busy day for us. We have a friend who's having a college graduation party tomorrow afternoon, and then tomorrow nite is the Senior Banquet where we honor our seniors. There are 6 seniors participating this year. Should be a lot of fun and it's being catered by one of my fav. restaurants here.
Well, that's all for now. Maybe I'll post some pics tomorrow. Have a great weekend.

Saturday Picnic

Shawn did such a great thing on Saturday. We were all just ho-humming around the house because we were bored and had hours of time to fill and nothing to do. So, Shawn took the initiative to take us on a picnic. He got everything ready and packed it all up. All I had to do was gather the girls and get in the car. We headed to a roadside park about 10 miles down HWY 69. It was perfect. There was no one there and it was overcast with a nice breeze blowing. We had such a great time. I think besides all the yummy fruit Shawn cut up, our favorite part was lying on the quilt and watching the girls have such a great time. I didn't want our picnic to end, but alas, Ava said she'd had enough and was ready to go home and take a nap. Plus within about 5 minutes of leaving it started to rain. Thanks Shawn!

Cheesy Bottom

Here's a picture of Ava with a slice of wooden cheese stuck to her booty. Thought it was funny. Reminded me of a picture of Elle with "Moses" stuck to her bottom.

(Moses has a pink shirt on)

Almost ran over a turtle

On our way home from our almost daily trip to Walmart (sorry Uncle Chad), we barrelled into the driveway and noticed something weird in the middle of the driveway. It was a turtle! So, to keep from running over it, I drove on the grass, narrowly swerving back onto the pavement just in time to make it into the garage. We all hopped out as fast as we could and scrambeled to see this wild animal. (okay so we're city dwellers) Elle and Ava both were mesmorized by each little movement it made. I ran inside and got the camera and a piece of lettuce (someone has to eat it) and had lots of fun trying to feed it. Before heading inside, I put the little fella in our flowerbed (minus any flowers). After putting Ava down for a nap and then putting up the groceries, Elle and I went back out to look at it again. Notice my new invention for walking in the Greenville black clay without ruining your shoes or carpets! It worked like a charm.

What an invention!