Trimming the Tree

Grace helped me decorate the house for the Christmas holiday on Friday! I think she did a pretty good job:

Our tree includes two new ornaments this year to remember the addition of our sweet little girl.

We bought the first one at the 2010 Chi Omega Christmas market. Our friends John and Lana invited us to go to the market with them last month, and we had a great time. I'm hoping we continue to go to the market every year!

The second one is an ornament I bought for Grace to have when she's grown. I thought it would be a good idea to buy her a new ornament every year, and then when she leaves home she has a set of 18 ornaments to remember her childhood.

Giving Thanks

The last few years we've decided to stay in DFW for the Thanksgiving holiday for one reason or another. This year we had so many things to be thanful for: a new position for Trinity that allows him to work from home, having an easy and safe pregnancy, delivering a healthy baby girl, our wonderful family and friends who provided lots of support, and most recently a new job for me! So, we decided to go home to Midland, mostly because we wanted our extended family to meet Gracie.

We decided to drive Sunday morning as soon as we'd fed Gracie her early morning feeding at 6:30. Two hours later we were actually on the road. Funny how much extra time you need for a little baby...who had her own suitcase full of necessities! Thankfully she did great in the car and slept the entire trip. We stopped in Abilene to eat dinner, feed Gracie, fill up the tank, and walk the dogs. Amazingly we made it to Midland in six hours, which is as much time as it takes us with traffic on a Friday night.

Trinity worked from my mom's house on Monday and Tuesday while Gracie and I made our rounds of visits and played. Thursday was a big day with two huge Thanksgiving meals: lunch with Trinity's family and dinner with mine. Gracie mostly behaved and let us enjoy our Thanksgiving meals.

My first thanksgiving!

Trinity's family has quite a few little children and babies, so it was fun to watch them notice Gracie. She got to meet cousin Luke for the first time, and he loved to pat her and say "Baby!" We can hardly believe how big he's gotten since we saw him in August! I can only imagine how much fun it will be in a year when Gracie will be running after all the other kids.

Meeting cousin Luke

At my family's house, Gracie was most definitely the center of attention. We hardly had any room in our stomach's at our second meal, but somehow I managed to eat a whole plate of food and a slice of pumkin bread for dessert!

Four generations!

The rest of the weekend we made rounds at some of our family and friend's houses and tried to relax. We must have worn our little girl out because she slept 8 hours almost every night! The first morning I woke up thinking, "Wow, I feel amazing!" We were hoping that the sleep pattern would continue when we got home, but I think the 5 hours of sleep on the ride back home did not help. Our first night home she woke up every 3-4 hours, which was hard to go back to after a week of good, long sleep. Thankfully it only took a few days for her to get back to her regular schedule, and she's back to sleeping 6 hours straight at night. And now we have two more things to be thankful for: a good traveling baby and a sleeping baby!

Gracie's first trip

I got a call to head down for a day trip to Houston on Monday and Diana and Gracie tagged along. This was the first trip we had ever taken with Gracie and wanted to test out how she would do in the car before our longer drive to Midland for Thanksgiving.

She did fantastic. Most of the ride was spent sleeping and we were able to finally experience how much longer a car ride is with a child. We stopped for dinner for both us and Grace which added about 30 minutes to our ride. Then we decided to stop at Buc-Ees for some beef jerky and shopping and we stopped at a Babies-R-Us to cash in a coupon while in The Woodlands. All the while she kept quiet and asleep and when we finally arrived at the hotel it had taken us about 6 hours.

I had somehow forgotten to pack diapers when we were throwing everything into our bag so overnight we just had to hope she wouldn't run through the 3 that we had left. We ran in the morning to get more and Diana spent the day with her friend Anna and her two girls, while I went into the corporate offices. After dinner with one of our surrogate moms(Jessica's mom, Kim) we headed home on Tuesday.

Grace, Lexa, and Ellie

The drive back was just as uneventful and we made better time. Now we are just trying to catch up on sleep and prepare for Sunday's drive to Midland.

Trinity

Grace and the love of reading

One thing I have really enjoyed about being a parent is that I get to revisit children's books that I haven't read in a long while. We have tried to make it a habit to read to Grace every day, and while we may miss a day or two, we want to instill the love of reading.

When Diana had her baby showers, we asked that instead of cards, that everyone give us a copy of a children's book. We now have a small library but Grace will not have a shortage of reading material as she grows up.

One book that we were given was Knuffle Bunny. This is a favorite of Addison, my god daughter, and with it we discovered a slew of books that I would never have heard of before. The author is Mo Willems and his list of works include The Pigeon Series, the Elephant and the Pig series, and so many others.

We frequent our local Half Price Books a lot. So we have started buying up some of the other books from Mo Willems. We picked up almost the entire Pigeon series which had Diana and I laughing as I read them to her while we were driving home. Grace was in the car so please don't look at us crazy. As far as I can tell the books are all about teaching children to know boundaries and obey rules. This crazy Pigeon insists on doing things that are not allowed. As you go through them, the reader is encouraged to stop the pigeon from doing bad things. Things such as driving a bus even though he isn't supposed to, getting a puppy, eating a hot dog, and staying up late. You find yourself arguing with this cartoon pigeon and it kind of prepares you for parenting.


I picked up a new one yesterday entitled "Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed". It is all about being different and trying things even though others say you shouldn't. Pretty much this naked mole rat likes to wear clothes and his other mole rat kin think he is weird for it. It has a happy ending and everyone dresses in funny clothes. Gracie didn't seem to interested in it when I started it last night but I was thoroughly entertained.

I can't wait for Gracie to be more involved in these activities. She does seem to enjoy some of the books we have for her and even squeels occasionaly as we read so I think we won't have too much trouble as she gets older. If you are looking for a good kids book, check out Mo Willems. You won't be disappointed.

Trinity

Happy Halloween!

After our attempts to attend Autumn at the Arboretum were thwarted two weekends ago because of the torrential downpour, Trinity and I decided to take Grace to the Arboretum on Halloween day. It was a great day to go because they had trick-or-treating for the kids, so we got to see lots of kids (and some parents) dressed up in costumes. Since Grace was only a month old, we didn't want to spend the money on a costume, but we did find this great jack-o-lantern t-shirt and matching socks in the $1 bin at Target.

I realize that she is not buckled into her car seat in this picture. Please do not call CPS. I promise that this picture was NOT taken in the car! There were so many photo opportunities at the Arboretum that we just left her unbuckled as we strolled around...she tends to fuss quite a bit when we buckle her in, and I didn't want a crying baby in all the pictures.

Uncle Steven and Aunt Megan joined us (and Uncle Steven even got us all in for free - thanks Uncle!), and we took lots of pictures, most of which are on Aunt Megan's camera. Here are two cute ones that we have on our camera.

Family shot

Trinity came up with this great idea... I love it!

The Arboretum is truly a beautiful place, and it was definitely all decked out for autumn. There were over 40,000 pumpkins throughout the gardens and even a little village made of pumpkins. We even had time for a stop at the Oktoberfest Garten, where Trinity enjoyed a Spaten Oktoberfest beer. The whole event was a lot of fun, and I hope that it becomes a new Vaughn family tradition each year.

Momma's Favorite Newborn Pictures

As promised, here are a few of my favorite pictures from Gracie's newborn photo shoot.

Newborn Photo Shoot Slideshow

Grace's newborn pictures arrived this weekend. I'll upload a sample of pictures later this week, but the photographer made a nice slideshow I thought I'd go ahead and post.

www.poeticexposure.com/graceelizabeth

If anyone in the DFW area is interested in using him, he did a great job with Grace. Unfortunately, he only does newborn family pictures. But he is great with babies and comes to your house to take the photo shoot.