Family pics...sort of.

This Friday, I scheduled Hadley to get a real portrait done at JC Penney for her first birthday. I'm excited to have a professional shot taken, since most of the pics we have of Hadley are random snapshots. I also rely heavily on Heather for great pictures, since she is an amazing photographer and has an excellent camera. My sis-in-law Avery also just got a fancy camera, so she's going to come over next week and take a couple family pictures of us. I'm debating on whether or not to invest in a nice camera. I have no talent as a photographer, so I'm not sure a fancy camera will fix that. On the other hand, I'm so tired of my sub-par camera. I'm lucky if three out of fifty shots turn out. Sigh. Something to think about, I guess...
In the meantime, here are some shots we took a couple of weeks ago of all of us.

This picture cracked me up. We struggle to get a decent shot around here.

I did get one great shot of Hadley while we were shopping at Craft Warehouse:

Hadley at Eleven Months

Hadley is now eleven months old! My mind is officially blown. In one measly month, we will be celebrating her one year birthday. I cannot believe it!
In this last month, we have been blessed with Hadley learning how to put herself to sleep. After months of anguish of not knowing if we were handling her sleeping habits correctly, she suddenly decided that she could put herself to sleep in her crib and even has a *gasp* awesome nap routine! She takes two naps per day (unless her first nap is later in the morning, then she'll just have one) and they average between 1-2 hours. I can't believe it! We sleep so much better now and everyone in this house is happier.
Besides learning how to sleep in her crib, Hadley has also done the following:

• Hadley can "read" her board books, and will sit for long periods of time flipping through the books and making quiet comments about them, usually in the form of squeaks and squeals.
• She can walk when holding only one of our hands. I don't think she realizes how close she is to walking on her own. It doesn't seem to be a priority for her, and that is just fine with us!
• She is starting to eat a variety of food. She doesn't actively seek out grown-up food, but will eat it if we help her.
• An amendment to the above statement. She doesn't actively seek human food, but will actively seek cat food. I have caught her several times dumping out Louie's bowl and picking out a piece to put in her mouth. Gross! We finally moved Louie's food and water bowl to higher ground and hopefully this will keep her out of it. Silly girl!
• Along with cat food, she also loves eating toilet paper. She'll pull handfuls off the roll and shove it in her mouth before we can get to her. We're seriously going to have to take the roll off and keep it somewhere high. She is so funny!
• She is still a cautious little girl and can take a little while to warm up to people. I always have to remind people that it's not personal, she does love them, she's just wary and doesn't leap into people's arms. I'm still surprised that Levi's daughter isn't a total social butterfly, but I watching her study people and decide if and when to go to them. I love that little girl!

I still can't believe that we'll be celebrating her first birthday soon. Laurie and her kids are coming up and we have reserved a room at the BSU bowling alley (the same place we had Levi's 30th birthday party.) I'm so excited and I can't wait to see her eat her cake! Every day with this little girl is a blessing and I look forward to the day when I can explain to her how hard we tried getting her here and how much we love her. She is the best!

She fell back when I was taking these pictures and I thought this picture was so funny.

So smart!

She loves her puzzles too!

Naughty baby!

So big!

Busy Little Baby!

Moms Group meetup! I can't believe how big they all are. Hadley, Ayla, Lili, Anna, and Solveig. Such cuties.

Have you ever seen anything so cute!?
Last week Hadley and I got to meet up with our Moms group again and I was so excited to see all those great ladies and their wonderful babies. The babies are only a couple of weeks apart in age, so it's always great to see them and compare notes. Right now, they are all mobile (crawling, cruising, etc.) and they are all so freaking adorable.
We went to a great place called Just Kidding Around, which is an indoor play center for young kids and babies. It has lots of couches for the parents to sit and hang out and a coffee and deli bar. It really ended up being a great place to meet up while it's still cold outside. Along with crawling, the babies are all obsessed with putting things in their mouths. Normally this doesn't bother me at home, but in this public place I was DYING. Hadley would pick up a toy train or a big lego block and start sucking on it and I couldn't believe how anxious I was getting about germs! How many kids and sucked on that toy? How long had it been on the ground? The place was very clean, but I knew there was a possibility Hadley was going to bring home some nasty germs.
Sure enough, three days later, Hadley came down with a nasty fever. On top of the fever, she's been teething, coughing, having poop issues, and is just overall miserable. Poor little girl! On Saturday night, Brad and Julie invited us out to dinner and we thought Hadley was well enough to go. Just after ordering, I was holding Hadley and letting her snack on a french fry (don't judge me!) After a couple of bites she looked up at me, her eyes getting big, and then threw up about a gallon of barf all over me. I've actually didn't know that my entire sweater could be covered in puke, but Hadley proved me wrong. Luckily she was ok after that and luckily Levi brought his jacket, so I just zipped that up and enjoyed my meal as much as I could. Thank heavens the Red Robin employees were nice and Brad hopped up and grabbed a towel as soon as it happened. I just shudder to think what it would have been like if it didn't land on me. Could she have puked on the people at the next table? All over the ground? Yuck!!

Yesterday evening was spent trying to keep Hadley from offing herself. Now that she crawls so fast, she can get anywhere in record time and can do some serious damage before I realize what she's up to. First, I caught her crawling to the cat's food bowl and got there just in time for her to flip the whole bowl of food over. I cleaned up the food, but looked at Hadley and saw that she was sucking on something. Sure enough, I fished a big piece of Cat Chow out of her mouth. Eww! About ten minutes after that, I was helping my mom on her laptop and Hadley was playing in the kitchen. It couldn't have been more than a minute when I realized that she was being too quiet. I go into the kitchen and see her holding a bottle of Comet and realize that she has the powder all around her mouth. I panicked! Luckily my mom is much calmer in these situations and she helped me get her cleaned up. Phew! Crisis averted (or something) again. About ten minutes after that, I take Hadley down into the living room to play, hoping to keep her safe for at least ten minutes! No sooner had I put her down that she proceeded to crawl over to our end-table, pull herself up, and then shake the table until the big heavy lamp on top of it came crashing down and missed her little head by mere inches. As I was picking up the lamp and trying to plan all the extensive baby proofing we need to do, I looked over at Hadley, who was happily eating a bunch of tissue out of the Kleenex box that had fallen with the lamp. I give up. It will be a miracle if this child sees her fifth birthday :)

Even with her being sick, and even with her trying to make me go gray before my 30th birthday, I absolutely adore this little girl! Levi and I just laugh at how funny and smart she is. I can't believe she'll be a whole year old next month!
Look at this busy, busy girl!