Celebrations

This weekend we flew to Midland for two important celebrations: Luke's 3rd birthday and Steven and Megan's engagemenet party! It had also been a while since we'd seen our families, so it was great to spend the weekend with them!

Saturday morning we got some good pool time with Mimi. Gracie loved floating and playing in the water with Daddy! The water was a tad on the cold side, so I stayed on the sidelines and watched them play. Once she got tired of being on the float, Mimi pulled out some new water toys, and Gracie sat and played happily on the pool shelf.


After an hour or so of playing, it was time to eat lunch and go to Luke's birthday party. Kim had rented a huge blow-up pool and slide set for the kiddos. Gracie was a little too small for the slide, and it was pretty hot in the sun, so Trinity's uncle pulled out the baby pool for Gracie. It was perfect for her, especially with the HOT weather. She splashed around and laughed at the kids running around and splashing each other in the big kid pool. Cousin Luke got lots of great presents from the family, and he was pretty excited about the bike that Gracie gave him!

Saturday night we celebrated my brother's engagement to the sweetest girl in the world, Megan! We are all so lucky to welcome her into our family, and we couldn't be happier for the two of them. The party was a huge success and had a great turnout! We had delicious brisket, ham, and a ton of sides, complete with plenty of wine and beer. Mimi and Pop sure know how to throw a party!

The Family

The rest of the weekend we spent visiting with Mimi and Pop or Nana and PopPop. Thanks to our family for another great visit! We love you all so much and wish we could spend more time with you all.

10 Months

With only two months until our baby girl is no longer a baby, I wanted to share our daughter's life as a 10 month old.

Gracie is crawling all over the house like a champ. She loves to speed crawl between our living room and kitchen while panting! She'll even chase the dogs around, which she thinks is great fun. I can't tell if they are playing with her or running away from her, but she obviously thinks it is a fun game! She will occasionally still crawl in her own special way, but I don't see her do it as often as she used to do it.

Grace is also walking along the furniture and walls with no fear! I keep thinking she'll let go and take her first steps any day now. We keep trying to get her to let go and walk on her own, but for now she still holds on to our hands with an iron grip! If she happens to let go, she quickly plops on her bottom and begins to crawl where she wants to go.

The other day Grace stood unsupported for the first time! She was standing at our coffee table and trying to drink her bottle with one hand. At some point, her other hand let go of the table, and she was standing with both hands on her bottle for at least 30 seconds. Thankfully Trinity caught my attention and I quickly snapped a photo with my iPhone.

Bedtime is finally becoming less of a struggle! After talking it over with a friend of mine, I decided a more rigid nighttime routine was necessary, and it worked like a charm! Sometime I'm going to blog about an average day in the life Grace Vaughn (also an idea stolen from my wise friend above), so you'll get to hear about our new bedtime routine when I get around to writing that blog.

Thankfully, feeding Gracie is still an easy task, and she'll eat just about anything you stick on her tray. Every once in a while she'll decide she doesn't want "insert dinner item here" for dinner and will stick it in her mouth and immediately spit it out, but then the next day she's eat it ravenously. I guess that is no different than my tastes on any give day. Just ask Trinity. He gets SO annoyed at my random pickiness when we're trying to decide what to eat!

Gracie has started to get a little bit more attached to her first doll, which she sleeps with at night. Although she doesn't carry it around with her or cry for it like some kids do for their "lovie", she does cuddle with it when we put her in bed each night. I hope that Grace continues to love on this baby doll, as it brings back great memories of my favorite doll, Polyanna. I actually still have Poly-oly, as I called her before I could say Polyanna, but she is VERY dirty and falling apart! I just can't bring myself to get rid of her. She used to comfort me when I was sad, even after I was too old to have a doll.

Right now, Gracie's favorite activities include stacking blocks, pulling toys in and out of a box, and reading books. Trinity and I are both glad that she loves books, even if it means she pulls ALL the books off the shelf on a daily basis. We have two canvas boxes of her toys in the living room, and almost every day Grace will pull toys in and out of them. Her teachers says she does the same thing at daycare!

Speaking of daycare, she is doing great there! She has made lots of friends, and it is so fun to drop her off in the morning and watch the little babies get excited at seeing each other and start playing before I've even left the room. I absolutely love her morning teacher, and I will be extremely upset on the day Gracie has to move on to the toddler room. I am sure the toddler teachers are great as well, but Miss Sylvia has been an amazing teacher. I know she is the reason I'm so comfortable with Grace at daycare.

I'll leave you with a recent picture of our growing girl, who's hair is finally long enough for a small clip!

July is Over?!?

Wow, this summer sure has flown by, and it sure has been a hot one! We are on day 30 or 31 of 100+ temperatures, so it's been too hot to spend much time outdoors with Grace. We have, however, spent a morning in a baby pool our friends were kind enough to let us borrow. We just hook it up to the water hose, and it's like a mini-waterpark for babies! Hopefully we'll get some more use out of it throughout the rest of the summer because Gracie loved it!

Unfortunately, the hot weather made our trip to Rahr & Sons almost unbearable! We scheduled a trip to the unairconditioned Fort Worth brewery with Erin and Craig a month in advance (I know, crazy that our schedules did not accomodate a trip for an entire month), so we had no idea the weather was going to be quite so hot. But it was good to catch up with them while drinking three good beers in a keepsake glass for a cheap $7 entry fee!

We knew we were in FW when we saw this man...

The last week of July was my 29th birthday, and Trinity made it a special one! He took me to eat at Fearing's for a wonderful meal complete with a bottle of wine and scrumptious desserts! I've been wanting to go for quite a while, so it was good to celebrate a special occassion there! Trinity had to leave town on my birthday, so he ordered flowers and had them delivered to Grace's daycare. So when I went to pick her up that evening, I had beautiful flowers to take home along with my beautiful daughter! Her teachers also put together a birthday card from Grace, which was so sweet of them! We met Steven and Megan for dinner that night. It was one of the best birthdays I've had in a while!

Grace and I ended the month of July with a trip to Houston to visit Trinity. He's been working there a lot lately, so we decided to take advantage of the free hotel room for a weekend getaway. Grace did great in the car both to and from Houston! I was a little worried, as we haven't been on a roadtrip with her since Christmas when she was only 3 months old, and I would be solo on this trip. But I shouldn't have worried. She slept the entire trip, except for the stop at Buckee's to buy Daddy some beef jerky!

We split Saturday with Anna and her family and then my aunt, uncle, and cousins. It was so fun to see how much Ellie and Lexa have grown, and Gracie was very interested in watching them play! She loves, loves, loves to watch other children. I don't blame her; they are very entertaining! It was also great to catch up with my family. We were supposed to watch Hayden play baseball, but his tournament was canceled due to a flooded field, so we just hung out their house and then went to dinner instead. They are always so much fun to hang out with, so I was glad we were able to spend some quality time with them too!

Sunday Trinity, Gracie, and I met two of his coworkers from brunch and then headed to the Waterwall, which is a 64 foot waterfall right next to the Galleria. I had seen pictures of the wall from Jessica's trip to Houston but had forgotten about it until Anna mentioned it to me on Saturday. Our hotel was just down the road, so it was a convenient place to go! I'm not sure Grace knew what was going on, but it was fun to get some pictures; one of which is my new favorite picture of the three of us!