Emmeline at 10 Months

Emmeline is turning into the cutest little monster, but a monster nonetheless. She gets into everything. Though, I'm not sure why we're surprised--that's what babies do.

• Some things are still the same from last month. She still puts everything in her mouth, whether its harmful or not--I recently learned that this nasty habit is something babies do for a very long time, something about it's how they learn, or some such nonsense ;)

• Starting to be a bit more of a picky eater

• Took the scariest tumble down the stairs ever! Lately, Emmeline has been getting up around 5:30 or 6:00. She sleeps all night, so no complaints there, but I'm still exhausted, so after she eats, I am usually in and out of sleep on the couch while she plays. Well, I should have gotten a baby gate awhile ago, but we haven't. And then one morning, I woke up to the most horrifying should of a baby thud, thud, thudding down the stairs. I leaped up just in time to see Emmeline rolling down the last few stairs, and start screaming as soon as she caught her breath. Needless to say, we sat and held each other for a long time. She was fine, but that didn't prevent me from feeling like the worst mommy for not doing my best to prevent such a foreseeable mishap.

• Crawling up the stairs. She can only do a few at a time, but it is only a matter of time. 

• Fascinated with my eyelashes and insists on grabbing them every chance she gets -- which may be how I got pink eye--GROSS, ICK, GROSS! Apparently, we need to wash her hands more...

• LOVES other kids and babies, and crawls too them the moment she sees them. Thankfully, she doesn't try to touch them, but just wants to look. 

• Follows other babies and toddlers around. When we go to the mall playground she'll just follow older kids around. You can tell, she so badly wants to be big enough to play with them. 

• Has figured out how to wave bye-bye :) Such a pivotal milestone for babies and parents, but yet so simple. Ah the joys and triumphs of parenthood :)

• Still charming people right and left. I love to take her on errands with me, because she chats, waves, smiles, and coos at everyone. It's adorable!

• Starting to "dance" to music, which really means to twist her upper body back and forth :)

• Stands on her own for sometimes nearly a minute

• Got her first pet, Tonks. When we got married, Eric was going to get me a cat as a wedding present. But I decided that it would be better to wait until we had a house to get a pet. Well we have a house now, so we have a kitty now. 

Such a little chubbster :)

Emmeline with her new kitty Tonks

Emmeline at 9 Months

So, this time last year I was already behind on blogging, and I just sort of stopped blogging all together. Life got busy. Well I'm ready to start blogging again--no guarantees that there won't be another long hiatus in the future. This blog was a draft that was half-written. It's fun to see where Emmeline was at, and how far she's come--and makes me wish I hadn't stopped blogging. Sigh. 

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At 9 months old, Emmeline is: 

• Standing! She can stand on her own for up to 11 seconds. It is fun to watch her balance on her feet. She stands every chance she gets. She spends her day crawling from different pieces of furniture that she uses to stand up.

• Getting into EVERYTHING--it has happened. She spends the other half of her day getting into things she shouldn't. She is destroying my piano music and magazines--it needs a new place. She pulls out sheet music after sheet music and ensign after ensign out of our little basket. I've dragged her away from it and told her "NO" hundreds of times, but she doesn't seem to understand... yet. I guess I should be glad she has yet to figure out that the cupboards and drawers open.

• Had her first bloody encounter. She was using a chair to stand up, fell and cut her lip on the table. It was pretty sad :(

• Eating dirt, pebbles, bark. Everytime I turn my back outside, she crawls over to the mulch and starts to feast. Nom, nom, nom. 

• Loving the outdoors. I love how much she enjoys being outside, it makes it easy to work in the garden, if I can keep her from eating something dangerous that is. 

• Rubbing her messy, sticky hands in her hair. Arg! She only gets one bath a day, but needs more... "but ain't nobody got time for that."

• Missing Daddy. When Daddy has to leave for work she cries for him. It's really sweet.

• A plum eating machine. But mommy doesn't love the poppy diapers that plums create. Ick. I cut them open and take out the pit so she can eat them. But one time got into a bag of plums from Grandma Daun's plum tree and ate several while my back was turned. She had me worried and Googling to see if eating plum pits was dangerous. Apparently, not very, because she survived. I'm not even sure she realized she swallowed them in the first place.  

Getting our Pumpkins

Bath time!

Caught in the act!

Sure love my baby girl!

Things I've Sewn

Poo Poo Trunk-or-Treating

She thought the method of passing out candy was as a lame as we did.

We had a quiet and fun Halloween. Our neighborhood did a trunk or treat. The whole trunk or treat phase came after I was done trick-or-treating, so I'd actually never done it. It was fun to get out and see all the costumes and see all the neighbors. But passing out the candy felt like a mechanized assembly line to maximum candy received in the shortest amount of time possible. It totally felt gimme-gimme. Maybe it's just me, but I much prefer going house to house, and working for the candy. I felt so accomplished and proud of my candy as a kid--I just don't see how the kids can get that same feeling of accomplishment, when they walk in a slow line with their bag held continuously open repeating monotonously "trick-or-treat." And I hardly heard a "thank you."

Not to mention--most of the people there, were just there to "get" candy. Only about 1/4 of the people were also passing out candy---that's not how Halloween works folks. 

After the trunk-or-treat we went home, hoping to pass out more candy at home. We did, a little. We had maybe eight small groups of trick or treater's for the rest of night. Spoiled my night a little, I've waited to pass out candy for oh... since I moved out of my parent's house--you don't get trick or treater's when you live in College apartments--so we've had really lame Halloween's for the past few years. 

All in all, I think we should scrap the trunk-or-treat idea and get back to good old trick-or-treating. You can go on and on about it being safer...blah blah. My dad went with us until we were about 10, and he had as much fun as we did. 

We'll come to the trunk-or-treat next year, but we'll be saving the good stuff for those who actually put forth the effort to come to our house. We'll be waiting ;)

Our cute little Strawberry.

Ben

Grandpa Andrus and Ben 2010

I hardly know what to say. But I feel like I should say something and not pretend like nothing happened, and that everything is okay, because it's not.

On October 12, 2013, Eric's little brother Ben passed away.

It was unexpected and tragic, but we are dealing with it thanks to the knowledge of the Plan of Salvation and the Atonement (which heals all pain, not just sin).

We miss Ben so much. And it hits us at expected and unexpected times. Thanksgiving was hard, Christmas was hard, many times in between were hard, and I'm sure Ben's birthday in April will be especially hard.

I think the hardest part of all of this for me has been watching Eric struggle and miss his little brother. The little brother closest in age to him, that he shared a room with for most of his childhood and adolescence. A little brother that shared a love for similar hobbies and outdoor activities. A little brother that he loved to joke around with.

Or watching Eric's parents struggle. He is still their precious baby boy, their baby boy that they won't get to see for a very long time.

I can't imagine loosing someone and not knowing that we will see him again, it just makes death far too tragic. Thank goodness for The Gospel. It is sad, it is hard, but we can carry on. He is absent, but he is not gone forever.

But at every milestone, every family gathering, every happy moment he will be missed.

We love you Ben.

Carving Pumpkins

Usually every year we get too excited and carve our pumpkins weeks before Halloween, and then they are completely withered and the designs unrecognizable by Halloween. But this year, because October was so busy, we carved them just a few days before Halloween. We made it our Monday night activity. 

She had so much fun playing with the pumpkin guts and seeds. And it was hilarious to watch, until I realized I had one sticky baby to clean up. I always seem to forget how much the pumpkin stains your skin too, oh well, it's all part of the fun. 

She was pretty proud of the pumpkin daddy carved. 

She loves leaning her head back to look at things, so cute. 

After we cleaned up Emmeline and got her to bed, I carved her hands and feet into our other pumpkin. 

Pumpkin Patch Round 2

My sister Heather is pregnant with her third baby and was put on bed-rest for several weeks. Unfortunately her bed-rest coincided with Halloween. Their daughter Aleksa was disappointed that they wouldn't make it to the pumpkin patch this year. Since we came to town to visit the week before Halloween, we thought it would be fun to take Aleksa to the pumpkin patch to get her pumpkin. 

This pumpkin patch was the I ching of pumpkin patches. This place was insanely cool and full of harvest magic. 

There were pumpkins already cut, or you could ride their "hay ride" out to the pumpkin fields and cut one yourself--we didn't have time or we would have definitely done that. They had orange pumpkins, they had white pumpkins, they had cinderella pumpkins, but seriously I have never seen so many pumpkins in my life.

You can see the pumpkin fields in the distance.

This is not actually her pumpkin. Aleksa had to have the biggest pumpkin she could find. It was so large even I couldn't carry it very far. 

On top of that, they had a miniature maze for the littles and a large maze for the adults. Although it was a blast, the small maze was a lawsuit waiting to happen with kids climbing and running all along the top of the maze. 

And furthermore they had a giant corn-pit. It was crawling with babies sucking on kernels and kids throwing handfuls of them at each other. I'm sure there were thousands of germs floating around, but what fun!

I stayed with Emmeline in the corn-pit while Aleksa went down the slide--yes there was a slide too! This was a full on fun-house! And all of it was free too. You only had to pay for the pumpkins. 

I heard some moms talking about this being their second or third trip to this seasonal fun-house. Nothing is better than free entertainment for your kiddos. Wish someone would do something like this in southeastern Idaho.