A year ago

We were planning Bella's birthday party and getting ready to head out on our first family vacation to Hawaii.

This year we are planning Bella's birthday party, but we have no family trips planned. I have told Bella that as soon as she can eat cold foods and drink cold milk, we will take her on a trip. We have accomplished the cold foods and were making good progress on the cold milk. Now Bella has decided to spit out cold milk again, or take very little. So maybe once she drinks only cold drinks for a month we will take a family vacation. Maybe it will be this winter and we can go somewhere warm and beachy....Florida might be nice.

By the way, doesn't it look like Bella is trying to hula in the picture. Pure coincidence, but it looks cute!

My beautiful balloon

Bella has a new favorite toy, it's a balloon. I'm not quite sure if it's the balloon itself, or the strings. But she loves to look at it, play with it, and try and put it in her mouth.

I think we can almost say we accomplished...

eating cold foods. For three days in a row, we have eaten our afternoon snack cold. This is a huge feat for Bella. Normally she won't touch anything cold. We have had a little luck with yogurt in the past, but she will still only take about a fourth of a cup, and you can tell it isn't very easy for her to handle it. But this weekend, we managed to eat cold cereal and fruit, yogurt, and even drink cold milk. Now I'll admit the cold milk had a little yogurt mixed in for some added flavor, and only about half of it actually went down her throat. But at least she was attempting to drink it, instead of spitting it back out as she had done in the past. Hopefully this keeps up and we can finally stop having to heat EVERYTHING up in the microwave.

Hanging out with friends

The other day we had our old neighbors over to see the new digs. We took some pictures of the three girls Taylor - 3, Bella - almost 2, and Avery - 4 months

I think Bella might be kind of a camera hog!

The camera phenomenon

I'm sure you have noticed in most pictures that Bella does not often smile for the camera. It's not that she doesn't smile, she actually smiles quite often. It's just that our camera has this red light that comes on and stays on, regardless of the light in the room, which immediately grabs her attention and makes her intently stare at it. And most times she is sensitive to the flash, so often we catch the picture, after she has reacted to the flash. So we try really hard to get her to still look at the camera, but not directly at the light, and maybe once in a while....actually smile!

Staring at the red light........

Oh wait....we got the tail end of a smile....right after the flashAhh success, we caught a smile!!!

Hanging with my puppies

Just another day, hanging out on the floor with my two big black dogs. Sometimes they pay attention to me, sometimes they ignore me. But their breath sure does stink!

Things are looking up

Bella is still teething, but she has been in a little better spirits the past couple of days. And for the first time ever, she slept through the night last night without taking her benedryl. I don't know if it was a fluke, or if it means she might actually be able to sleep on her own. Maybe we will try it again tonight. Granted she is currently napping on the couch, since she decided she didn't want to nap earlier today. At this point I don't know if she will just go ahead and sleep for the night, or if she will be wide awake and well rested just at the point that we are ready for bed. Speaking of bed time, I wanted to share a few photos of our normal bedtime routine. Here we were working on some more head control while looking at our books. Always have to sneak in the working whenever we can.