Family Visit

By: Ryan


This post is long overdue, but better late than never, I guess. Amber has been keeping us quite busy lately, and even when she's not running around the house being cute, her favorite thing to do is sit on my lap at the computer and watch Pixar movies on the second monitor while I try to work with one hand. Not very conducive to blog writing. :-)

So anyway, this past summer we had the opportunity to have Shanna stay with us for a little while. We definitely enjoyed having her around, and Amber was quite excited to have someone to play with. The door would open and Amber would whirl around, pointing and saying "Sha-sha!" Lots of fun. :-)

Then, in July, we were treated to a visit from my family. They came down for a week and stayed at a hotel near SeaWorld. We had a great time hanging out with them, going to the various theme parks, and watching Amber be her adorable self.

Birthday Girl

By: Shelsy

Our little baby is finally a year old. It's hard to believe, but it has been such an amazing year. She has grown and changed so much. In the last couple of months she's started really communicating with us. She said her first word, which was "duck." She loves playing with her rubber ducks, and if you ask her where her duck is, she'll look around the room until she spots one. Same goes for balloons. We have quite a few in our living room from her party, including a giant mylar birthday balloon, and she gets excited about them every time. She can also spot balloons from across the Magic Kingdom. :-)

She is working on a bunch of other words also, and she does a lot of pointing and gesturing to tell us what she wants. It's a lot nicer than having to guess all the time, although she still baffles us pretty often. :-)

She's not walking yet, but is getting close. She can cruise pretty easily and often will let go of whatever she's holding on to and balance for a second or two before grabbing it again. She'll also lunge from one object to another one if she can't quite reach it, but she always gets this wide-eyed look of terror on her face mid-lunge.

My mom and dad, Mindy, Von, and Carter all came down last week for her birthday. We celebrated her birthday on Sunday afternoon. I made a ladybug cake, which didn't turn out too badly. Amber got her own little ladybug cake too. And she daintily picked at the spots for awhile before she finally got into it a little more. But even then she didn't make a big mess, despite promptings from her Pappy and uncle.

We spent the rest of the week hanging out and visiting some parks. We went to Universal and Islands of Adventure one day, and we also went to Magic Kingdom. It was Von's first time going to any of them, and he really seemed to have a blast. :-) I think everyone did. Magic Kingdom was open until 1am the day we went, and we were there past closing. None of us could believe we stayed that long, but we all had fun, and got to do everything we wanted to. The whole week was great and everyone had a really good visit. It was too short, though.

I still have a hard time believing it's been a whole year since we first met our little girl. It did go fast, but it was very full. We enjoyed every minute and are super excited to see what next year has in store. :-)

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Family Visit and Nine Month Update

By: Shelsy

On New Year's Eve Ryan's family got here for a visit, including his grandparents and Aunt Kathy from Iowa. They stayed in a hotel near SeaWorld, so we went to visit them every day. We didn't really do anything for New Year's Eve--they had just gotten in and Ryan had to work early the next day. But we had dinner and then headed home. We celebrated Christmas the next day--it was so nice being able to celebrate with both of our families the week before and the week after Christmas!

Amber's First Flight!

By: Shelsy

Wow, seriously a TON of stuff has happened over the last month and a half, so I'm going to split this up into several blog posts over the next few days.

Amber got her very first tooth on December 11th, and her second tooth followed on Christmas day. Her smile looks so cute with those two little teeth down there! Here's a good picture of them:

Amber's First Trip to PA!

By: Shelsy

I have a lot of things to write about, so I'm going to break it up into a few separate posts over the next few days.

Last week Amber visited PA for the very first time! This will be the first trip of many. :-) We drove, so this was also Amber's first road trip. We were kind of nervous--we didn't know how she'd do. But, she did great! We drove straight through to get there. It took about 20 hours exactly, which is only 2-3 hours longer than it would have normally taken us. Considering we had to stop for about 45 minutes every time she needed to eat, that wasn't too bad!

We were all pretty beat when we finally got there, though. Amber slept most of the drive, and then got really cranky for the last two hours--understandably. Ryan and I didn't sleep at all--and I was cranky for the last several hours. :-) But we got there around 9:30 in the morning and once we all had some naps we had the whole day to spend with mom, Mindy, and Carter, which was really nice!

Speaking of Carter, he's getting so big! He's running all over the place now, becoming very independent. And he and Amber look so much alike, it's crazy! There's no denying they're related. :-) Here are some pictures of him, including a little photo shoot we had with the two of them. So cute!



The reason we headed up to PA was because Ryan's second cousin got married. It just worked out perfectly that the wedding was being held on the bride's family's property about 15 minutes from where my family lives. How convenient! The wedding was beautiful! And Amber got to meet all of her extended family on the Joseph side. Here she is meeting Situ for the first time!

Here's a video of her first slow dance with daddy!



The next day mom and dad had a bunch of family over to their house so that my whole side of the family could meet Amber. Here she is with her great grandparents:

It was so nice to get to see everyone and give them all a chance to see her. :-)

Our last day there was very relaxed. Mindy and Carter came over and we just hung out on the porch with mom pretty much all day. It was wonderful. Gram and Grandpa came over for a little while too, and we just did whatever we felt like, which wasn't much. :-) Here we are going for a little walk in the afternoon:

We got out the little kiddie pool for the kids. Amber loved it! Carter was not too interested in sharing his pool with her, but he was in there long enough for me to get some pictures:



Then it was time to come home. We took it a little slower getting backed and stopped in a hotel halfway. We ended up with a room that had two doubles, so here's Amber all sprawled out on her bed while Ryan and I shared the other one. :-)

I'm sure she liked being able to stretch out after being in the carseat for all those hours. I don't think she really appreciated having to go back into the carseat the next morning either:

When we got home we made sure we didn't go anywhere for about two days so she could recover a little. :-) It was a great visit and I can't wait until we can go back!

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Family Visit!

By: Shelsy

July isn't even over yet and this has already been quite a month! Her Grandma, Aunt Shanna, and Uncle Aaron came down to visit for two weeks, and were joined by other visitors at different points during their stay. It was very exciting! And very busy. :-)

They arrived on the 4th, and Amber was all ready to go in her 4th of July outfit (the back of it is blue with stars).

The next day we were joined by the O'Neills and we went all kinds of fun places! We hit some of the parks, of course. Here are a couple of pictures of us at SeaWorld:

And here's a picture of her hanging out with Uncle Aaron at Universal:

The O'Neills left after the first week and then we were joined by Jidu and Ryan's Nana and Papa. Here she is meeting Nana and Papa for the first time!

And of course her grandparents and great grandparents were fully prepared to spoil her rotten. :-) Papa made her some beautiful wooden puzzles. I can't wait until she's old enough to play with them!

This one has the alphabet painted on the other side!

We went to Downtown Disney and, as I said, she got very spoiled! This Mickey was the first thing she's ever really grabbed and put in her mouth. As soon as Nana showed it to her she started chewing on his ear! She continued to chew on his ear (and anything else we gave her) for the rest of the week.

She was also dedicated at church on the 18th. We were excited that Ryan's family and his grandparents were able to be there. We were planning on having her dedicated anyway, but we were glad that it happened to fall during the time they would be here!

We did some swimming while they were here, which is always fun. Amber seems to really enjoy the water. Here's a video of her making some of her signature noises to express her excitement.

Speaking of noises, the day after everyone left, she started doing this screaming thing. It's just a new noise she figured out, so she enjoys practicing all the time. It's very loud and high pitched and gives me a headache. But it's hilarious at the same time. I've started referring to her affectionately as my pterodactyl baby. Mom thinks she'll sing higher than Mariah Carey if she keeps it up. See for yourself:

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Family Visit and Two Month Birthday!

By: Shelsy

Well, I'm combining two posts because I haven't gotten around to updating in awhile, plus our Internet has been down for the last three days, so that didn't help much. But my parents, Mindy, and Carter all came down for a visit a couple of weeks ago, which was awesome. This was the first time my family has been able to see Amber, so I was really excited for them to come. We had a great time! We did some shopping, hung out around the apartment, and went to SeaWorld. It was fun seeing Carter again too--he wasn't even crawling yet the last time I saw him, and he started walking by himself the first day he got here! (We think he might have been a little jealous that his mommy and grandparents were paying attention to another baby!) Here are some pictures from their visit:



And, our little baby turned two months old on Tuesday! I seriously can't believe it. She's already gotten so big. She weighed in at 14 pounds 2 ounces and she's now 23 3/4 inches long. She's almost too big for her bassinet. This month she morphed out of being a newborn. She's smiling a lot more, and making all kinds of cooing and cute baby noises. She's very alert and loves looking around and watching us. We also started a bedtime routine with her every night, which we've all really enjoyed. She's sleeping beautifully at night, and is generally just a joy to be around. She's seriously awesome and we can't get enough of her! :-) Here are some of my favorite pictures from this past month:




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Carter

Well, as most of you know, just over a month ago my sister welcomed her baby boy into the world. I had the chance to go up and see him just over a week ago. He's so sweet, as you can see from the pictures. He's the first grandchild for my parents and the first great grandchild in our family as well. So he's definitely getting a lot of attention. Ryan and I are his only aunt and uncle, also, so we plan to spoil him just a little. :-)

It was nice going back to PA and seeing everyone again, meeting the little guy, and just hanging out. When I was there I was almost always holding him, which I enjoyed immensely. :-) I also got to celebrate father's day when I was there, which was very nice. Here's a picture of Von and Carter on Von's very first father's day.


So it was a good week. I miss Carter and everyone else already. Hopefully Ryan and I will both be able to go up again soon. Maybe next time Carter will actually know who I am...probably not. :-)

Here are a few more pictures:

Carter with the block Ryan and I made for him.

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Easter Weekend

Well, Easter was our last holiday here in Pennsylvania. Knowing that, we invited my parents, Mindy, and Von down to stay with us for the weekend. We had a great time. They all traveled down on Friday night just before Ryan had to leave for work. We ordered pizzas and watched Mindy and Von's wedding video that Ryan had just finished earlier that day.

On Saturday mom and Mindy wanted to head to the mall (the shopping in Williamsport is seriously sad, people--Exton is practically the holy grail). Surprisingly enough, all of the boys joined us. They bailed out when it came time to head over to Babies R Us, though, and went to Barnes & Noble instead. Mindy's registered at Babies R Us and wanted to take a look at some of their stuff (again, Williamsport--the closest Babies R Us is 60 miles away..)

Here's a pic of Mindy in all her pregnant cuteness.



That picture was taken over a month ago (in their new house!). Can you believe she still has two months to go?

After almost dying from cuteness overload we headed back to the apartment and invited Ryan's family over for dinner. My dad made lasagna and we all had a great time, except Shanna who had to be at school (what is wrong with these colleges? Geez.)

The next morning we headed to the Joseph's after church and enjoyed an amazing Easter dinner before my family had to leave to get back home. It was a really great weekend. I'm so glad we were able to spend it with both of our families all together. I know that holidays in the future are going to be tricky and it was wonderful that our last one here could be so memorable.

Speaking of which, the best quote of the weekend goes to my mom: "You could have hyphenated your name and been Stroble-Wubbles."
You definitely had to be there, but trust me, it was hilarious.

Number of boxes packed to date: 8

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