Blue Bonnets

The Blue Bonnets here in TX are BEAUTIFUL!  Last year, without much rain, was kind of a sad Blue Bonnet year...but this year we've had some really nice rain showers, so the Blue Bonnets are having a great year!  I've never been big on running out to snap pictures of them, but since Brie is a native Texan (UGH, I have to admit, I kind of sort of hate that...but I'm coming to terms with it.), I figured she needed a picture in the Blue Bonnets.  This was easier said than done.  We did happen upon a great place, at McKinney Falls State Park, but trying to keep Brie from touching (and eating) the flowers was not easy.  However, I managed to snap a couple pictures :).  Hopefully we can make this a yearly tradition!

 What?  I'm not supposed to eat these?  Are you sure mom...

3/4 of a Year

8 months ago, we welcomed our little Brielle into the world...it's so hard to believe she's 3/4 of the way through her first year.  She is definitely still in the baby stage, but it's not going to be long before my baby isn't a baby anymore.  Time is just going way too fast!  She's had lots happening this month, so here's a little recap:

• She babbles (or jabbers, as daycare tells me) a lot.  She mostly says strings of bababa and dadada, but we get a mamama every now and then.  
• She loves apples, pears, bananas, peas, carrots, tofu, rice, chicken, sweet potatoes, squash, mangoes and banana oatmeal.  Now that she's 8 months old we'll be introducing more fun foods for her to try.
• She can get a puff into her own mouth about 2 times out of 5.  She tries very hard, but still misses quite often.  Once she has this mastered, I think she'll have more fun feeding herself than eating from the spoon.
• She can army crawl like a champ.  She gets herself onto her hands and knees, rocks and looks around, then plops to her tummy and scoots off army style.  We know that some day soon she'll take off on those hands and knees!  Given this new mobility, we're working on baby proofing the house and we are realizing that we really have to keep a very close eye on her because she's quick when she wants to be.  
• She thinks the dog bones are her own personal teething toys...we're working on convincing her this is not the case.  We were worried about the dogs eating her toys, when apparently we should have been worried about her eating their toys!
• She now has four teeth, two on the bottom in the middle and two on the top, one on each side off-center.
• She doesn't really laugh much yet, she still likes to squeal, but I've gotten her to laugh a few times by blowing raspberries on her tummy and it's just about the sweetest sound I've ever heard!
• And, she's 17 1/2 pounds and probably about 28 inches, she's gonna be a tall girl :)

The photo shoot was more difficult this month, attempting to crawl and find things on the floor was more enticing than smiling for the camera :)

Six Years

Lately our blog has been mostly dedicated to the life of Brie, so I wanted to pause and take a moment today to thank my amazing husband for a wonderful six years of marriage.  It is really kind of hard to believe we said "I Do" six years ago.  The time has really flown by and I'm so lucky to have such a wonderful man to spend my days with.  I love you sweetie and I look forward to the many adventures the coming years will bring us!

Dedication

This past Sunday we had the joy of dedicating Brie at our church.  This was an extra special day, because five other families in our community group also dedicated their children.  We held a special, small ceremony in the chapel on our church's campus.  It was so wonderful to share this moment with not only our families, but also our community of support at our church.  We are blessed to have a wonderful community group that we've been apart of for almost six years now.  We were so happy that all of my family was able to come, even though they live far away.  Mom was able to stay for a few extra days as well, since it is her spring break.  Then, by some weird twist of fate, TSD had major electrical problems so I ended up with this entire week off (and we have next week off for spring break), so we were able to make an unexpected trip to the outlet mall where Brie was a little trooper and shopped with us for almost seven hours (with a couple of naps here and there).  She is such a good baby!  We loved having grandma here and were sad to see her leave yesterday, but we look forward to spending a whole week with her in July!

In other news, we officially have a babbler and almost crawler.  Out of the blue on Sunday night Brie just started strings of "bababa" and then on Monday tried out "dadada".  It is so fun to hear her talk all day long, she's definitely a talker, I'm thinking she got that from her mommy :).  She's also trying SO HARD to crawl.  It's adorable!  We think within a few weeks she'll have it mastered, but we'll see!  She also still doesn't mind rolling to get to what she wants, so she might not have the motivation for crawling just yet.  Here's a few pictures from our special day.  And if you haven't seen the JC Penney photo shoot pictures yet, you can see them here.