Big Number One

Well, what a year it has been. My precious baby girl is one year old. I can't believe it. If every year goes this fast, she will be off to college in no time. It makes me so sad to think about it. She blesses me every day with more joy then I could ever have imagined before she came into my life. I wanted to take this opportunity to document some of her tricks and favorite things.

She is taking a few steps here and there, has been "cruising" for months...but still hasn't taken off. She loves to flex her muscles and blow kisses. She smiles at anyone and everyone and will fake laugh when anyone else laughs. She barks like the dogs next door. Her favorite words are Mama, Dada, Hi, Bye Bye, Uh Oh, Thank you, Purple, Bubble, and "No Meg, No Meg, No Meg". She gives the sweetest neck squeeze hugs. She plays with my hair when she is sleepy. If she can't reach my hair...she plays with her own. She pulls my hair and say "ouch". She will eat anything she finds on the ground....including a roly poly in the house the other day. She loves little gym and her best friends Merrick and Olivia. She can't sit still for even a second. She absolutely loves swimming. Her favorite game is pulling all of her clothes out of her drawer or all of the movies out of the shelves.

Those beautiful blue eyes and luscious little lips melt my heart over and over every day. My favorite book to read to her is "I Love You So Much". I love the line that says "I can't imagine life before you came along...Me there singing senseless, no meaning to my song." I truly can't imagine what life was like a year ago. I know it was not complete.

"Lord, lead us in raising this precious child in your ways. Thank you for intrusting us with her life. Protect her daily, despite our mistakes. Bless her and use her always for your glory and the growth of your kingdom"

It is a crazy weekend. Our Nephew's party was this morning and we have a wedding tonight. I will post pictures of Meg's party when I get a chance. It is tomorrow.

We are in!!

(If you like pictures....you will really like this post. It is a long one.)
We are in our new house. We moved on Friday. Quite an eventful day that I will give details on later in the post. So, we moved in on Friday and had to have everything ready for a Broker's tour that was yesterday. He had signed up his house before we knew we were moving into it. So I worked non-stop for four days to get everything ready for that yesterday morning. There was not a very good showing of realtors (which is fine with me, because I am not up for moving again in the very near future)....but it feels good to have everything finished already. That is the way I have always moved, but I have never had a little "mini me" in tow. I hardly sat down until today, so I thought I would fill you in with pictures.

First of Meg in her new house. She loves to unpack.....not putting away or arranging....just pulling stuff out of boxes, off shelves(that I just arranged) and out of drawers. She has really enjoyed exploring her new house. I always know where she is because of the pier and beam foundation and the old wood floors.

My mom will get on to me for posting this....she doesn't like crying pictures. It was actually pretty funny. This was her reaction to me not letting her play in the toilet. It only lasted a second. I found her something else to do.
She was really enjoying playing in the flower pots with Dad.....mainly because he is too slow and she got quite a few handfuls of dirt in her mouth before he could stop her.


Here she is "helping" to unload the DVDs.....her favorite pastime.
Ok....so the movers who have moved us 5 times went out of business. Probably because we have not moved in two years. So Chad started calling around and asking questions. He called about 15 different companies to ask them their rates, if they charge for mileage or have extra fees etc. He forgot to ask how big their truck was, however. This is what pulled into our driveway......

They were nice, but I am not sure we have a single wall that is not chipped or a piece of furniture that is not scratched. I don't think moving is going to be a real successful venture for them. They should stick with BBQ. He talked all day about the restarant he owns in the hospital district in FW. It took two full loads and that was just furniture. I had already moved everything else over. Needless to say, cheap is not always the way to go!

So here are the pics of the house.

Master bedroom
My office/guestroomKitchen

Living Room

Living Room-I purposely left the movies in a pile on the floor, where Meg left them. She is really loving the bookshelves that come down to the floor. I am already regretting that.


Dining Room-I know...the high chair is a great accessory.


Guest Bath
Meg's Room- It is a lot less pink then before, but really cute.

Come and see us anytime. We really love it here. I can walk to Starbucks and Walgreens. I love the view from every window. Our mail even gets dropped into our house through an old mail slot. You never have to wonder if the mail has come yet! We are so close to everything. I loved our neighborhood before, but most of our life is on this side of town. It is great.

Moving and Sleepy Head

Well, the move is going well. We are living in caos....but that is just how it goes. Chad has to do things while he is the mood or it won't get done. Last night he took our bed apart. I was thinking, "great now we get to sleep on a mattress on the floor, for two weeks"....but he was so proud of himself for working ahead. After reading my last post I was thinking that technically I have moved almost every year for the last 10 years....because I moved each year that I was in college (twice a year to be completely specific). It never ceases to amaze me though how much stuff accumulates in a short period of time. I just finished cleaning out my office closet, for instance...it was crazy. I LOVE to get rid of stuff. It is such a great feeling to throw things away or just get rid of them. I took a load to the resale store today and I have sold a few furniture items on craigslist (my first encounter). I just love to simplify! It makes me feel so good. I always like to feel like I have a clean slate when we move. We plan to be completely moved by next weekend. I will post pictures of our new house when we get there.

Most of the time when we stay out past Meg's bedtime she falls asleep in the car on the way home and then wakes when we get home just enough to scream while we change her clothes and her diaper and then falls right back to sleep in bed. Well, the other night when I got home she did not wake up. I put her on the changing table and started to take off her clothes, but she was a limp rag. She was so sound asleep that I could not bear to wake her up. I just put some socks on her and called it good. I had changed her diaper before I came home, so that was good. I just had to take her picture because she was the sweetest little sleeping angel I had ever seen.

Don't you just want to kiss her sweet little lips?

We started a Little Gym Class this morning. It was so much fun....Meg is practically an olympic gymnast already. We did forward rolls. jumping, hanging from the bars, playing with bubbles and all kinds of fun things. I will post some pictures when I get them.

Moving Again

We are about to make our 6th move two months before our 6th Anniversary. Which is pretty amazing since we have lived in the house we are in now for 2 years! That tells you something about how often we moved over the first 4 years. Anyway....we just decided last weekend and we have already done a lot of packing and even moved some things over. We are moving to a house Chad remodeled in the Arlington Heights area of Fort Worth. It is a really cute little bungalow style house. I say little, because it is about 600 square feet smaller then our current home. It will be cozy with all of our stuff. I love that area and we have been wanting to get back to that side of town, so I am excited. Lori....we will definately have more play dates now! I am sad to leave our swimming pool though. Meg and I got in it the other day and she had a blast.

Here are some cute videos of her helping with the move. She isn't walking yet on her own, but she is really good at pushing boxes around like a walker. Ignore my annoying baby talk. Isn't it funny how silly you sound when you hear yourself? I don't even think about it when I am talking to her.

Maclane Mercer

Well...we have a precious new neice as of Sunday morning at 3:15am. Chad's sister Shaye and her husband Michael had their baby girl Maclane. She is beautiful and she looks absolutely nothing like her brother Knox. As you can see...he has white blonde hair and fair skin and she has black hair and darker skin. I think it is funny for one child to look so much like one parent and the other child to look so much like the other parent.

Papa...Chad's dad brought this Spiderman costume for Knox at the hospital. He started taking his clothes off as soon as he opened it. The funniest part was that he has on Batman socks, Superman undies and a Spiderman suit. He was so excited!!

These are just some funny pictures of my bathing beauty soaking up the sun. Not really.....she had sunblock from head to toe...don't worry! We were washing our cars in the 90 degree heat, so I decided she needed to wear her swimmies.

She was not too crazy about wearing the hat. I thought it was really cute, however.

On another note....it's time to break out the leg warmers. I am starting back to teaching aerobics. I just had the thought come into my head, last Tuesday, that I have this 7 year old certification that I could put to good use, get back into a regular work out routine (it's been about 10 1/2 months), take Meg to the child care at the workout place and make a little extra cash. The first place I thought of was Fitness For Her....looked up their website and it said in huge letters on the front page "Now hiring certified land and water Aerobics Instructors." So if you live in Fort Worth, I would love to have you in my classes. I am starting tomorrow with a Body Pump class. It should be interesting since I have never taught that. I am really excited. I hope they can't tell that I am struggling more then any of the students, since I am so out of shape.

Busy Week

This is my second post in less then a week. I really don't have a lot of time on my hands. There are a thousand things I should be doing while Meg is napping right now. Unfortunately I have a lot of pictures I wanted to get posted on here, so I am procrastinating on everything else. Which is exaclty why I did not want to start a blog in the first place. Shoot! (That is what Molly would say) Fortunately she is taking really long afternoon naps.

Last weekend we went to Mayfest on the Trinity River with Chad's Mom. It was a little too crowded....a bit overwhelming for me..... I can't imagine how Meg felt. We had fun anyway. We walked through the botanical gardens because Chad refused to pay for parking or ride a shuttle from TCU. So he parked at the back of the Botanical Gardens and we walked through and played frogger crossing University without getting hit by a car. Anyway...the walk through the gardens ended up being the nicest part of the whole trip.

Meg enjoyed the Chocolate Chips cookies, lemonade and Corndog that Chad gave her. I could just imagine her little arteries clogging as she ate the fair style corndog. Oh well....it was a fun day. I created a Hallmark Smilebox to send to Chad's Mom so instead of uploading the pictures, I will just post it for you to watch.

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Monday we went to Gainesville to see my 92 year old Grandmother. Here are some sweet pictures of her with Meg. Meg was her 20th Great Grandchild!! She now has 21.

Tuesday Lori and Annalee came over for lunch. Neither of the girls wanted to stay still long enough to get a good picture, but here are some snapshots.

Sippies, Cousins, Loving the Sun

Randomly....Meg has mastered the Sippy Cup. She wasn't quite sure about it for a while, but now she loves it. Sadly, she is getting more and more independent. I know that is a good thing, but it make me sad. She won't be a baby much longer. Yesterday I handed her a bottle in the car and she drank it by herself in her carseat. She handed me an empty bottle when we got to Target. I was so proud and so sad at the same time.

She loves to crawl around on her puffy chair and play with all of her little friends.



Almost two weeks ago, we went to Prosper to spend some time with Mallory, Brian and Audrey....Jacob was in Florida with his Grandparents.

Meg loves her cousin Audrey...almost as much as Audrey loves her!

It was so sweet of Audrey to share all of her girly toys, jewels and purses.

Audrey decided that she wanted to have a bow on top of her head like Meg and a "Pink" bib. These really are pink, but she calls everything pink. Here they are sharing a pretzel stick snack.
Here are just some cute pictures we took yesterday in the beautiful weather.

She really hates to wear these. She prefers to eat them. I did get a quick picture though.