Pics from Nana

These are some pics my mom took, while they were watching Brooke for us on Saturday.

Where did that cat go?

Yeah, swimming!

Look at this fun pool all to myself!

Another Busy Weekend

I will start this post with last Thursday. I wanted Brooke to make something for Father's Day this year. So, I bought finger paints and a picture frame with a mat and some travel mugs (for grandfathers) that you can insert a picture or artwork. I thought Brooke would really take to doing the finger painting because I know she has done some at daycare, but she didn't want to stick her fingers in the paint. I brought out some sponge brushes and she liked painting with those much better. Her is some pictures of her in action making her art gifts. Don't worry about the paint on the tile. It is washable and came right up with a wet cloth.

Making her masterpiece

Wanna help?

Then on Friday we headed home to close on our house in Longview. Yeah! We are so excited to be moving back. We now own 2 homes and I hope that it will soon just be the home in Longview!

A couple of weeks ago Ryan's great Uncle Burt died. He was Ryan's grandad's brother. So this past weekend they had a lot of family in town for a memorial. Friday night Ryan's parents had a huge cookout for everyone that came into town. So we headed over there after the closing to visit with everyone.

Brooke and her Aunt Sara

Brooke and Big Mama

Our new house

The AWESOME kitchen

Living room

Part of the master bath

Then on Saturday Ryan and I headed back to Dallas for his End of Residency Party. Brooke stayed in Longview with Nana and Poppy. I am so happy Ryan is done with residency, well, almost; he has to work until June 30th.

All of the graduating residents with the head of residency, Dr. Jones.

Then on Sunday, we went to church and met up with my parents in Terrell to exchange Brooke. She had a blast with Nana and Poppy. They bought a kiddy swimming pool and she loved swimming in that. Then she had a lot of fun playing with our cat, Calypso. My mom took pictures, but I will post them as soon as she emails them to me. We also celebrated Father's Day with them. Poppy really liked his travel mug with Brooke's art work. After we got home it was Daddy's turn to open his gift. I found this recordable card from Hallmark that had the Jungle Book song, I wanna be like you. (The Jungle Book is Ryan's favorite Disney movie, so this was a perfect card for him) You were supposed to record a message then it played the song. I thought it would be really easy to get Brooke to say "Daddy" since that is one of her favorite words. I tried so many times to get her to record it and she was silent every single time I wanted her to say daddy. I finally resolved that I would just have to record "We Love You Daddy". Then after we got home on Sunday, I decided to take her into her nursery and while I was changing her diaper I would try one more time to get her to say "Daddy". I started off saying "We Love You Daddy" and then she followed with "Daddy". I was so happy that she finally said it and I got it recorded. Of course her favorite part is listening to the song and dancing.

Helping Daddy open his gift

Playing with the gift bag. I think she looks a lot older in this picture.

Dancing to the song.

Brooke's Father's Day Gift

My Ears are clear

Today Brooke had her 2nd check up visit after finishing 2 rounds of antibiotics trying to clear some cloudy fluid in her ears. All was clear and we don't have to see an ENT. Yeah!!!

Happy 16 months!

Brooke is now 16 months old. I can't believe she is already 16 months. I often think about when she was a newborn when I am rocking her to sleep. It seems just like yesterday and now she is so independent! She weighed 20.6 lbs at the doctor's check up today. She is a great eater (although currently on a vegetable boycott). She loves to go outside and play and discover things in the yard, like grass, leaves, flowers, plants. She is babbling so much now and trying to imitate our words. She understands a lot more than you think. I can tell her to go upstairs and get Daddy and she will stop whatever she is doing and head straight for the stairs saying "Daddy". She tries to run away when I ask her if she has a dirty diaper. She likes to play with other kids. She is fascinated by puzzles and how buckles work. She can buckle herself into the grocery carts. I know there is a lot more that she is able to do now, but I am running a blank. I will update as I remember.

Weekend Fun

Playdate Friends

On Friday, we had our last playdate with our friends from church. I met a couple of ladies that go to the same church we do and we all had our first born children within a month of each other. It was really great to get to know these ladies and watch our children develop over the first year together. We will miss them so much!

Ryan had his end of residency party thrown by JPS (the Ft. Worth county hospital) surgery staff on Saturday night. Sara (Ryan's sister) and her husband, Lane, came up on Friday to spend some time and also watch Brooke for us while we went to the party. It was nice to catch up with them. Brooke loved playing with her Aunt Sara and Uncle Lane. Unfortunately I forgot to capture some pictures of them playing with her. Here are a couple of pics from the party. The man in the white suit is head of the surgery department. The male residents grew out mustaches the week of the party in "honor" of the head of surgery and also wore medallions around their neck. He got a kick out of the residents copying him. It has been a gag gift to give away plastic dinosaurs, so every resident got one to take home. It is about as big as Brooke, but she likes to knock it down.


On Sunday morning, Brooke discovered that she can climb inside the dryer if mom leaves the door open. She didn't want to come out and had fun banging on the sides.

Body Parts

I was trying to take a video of Brooke pointing to her body parts and she got upset that I wouldn't let her look at the screen on the video camera. So, I turned the screen so she could see it and this is the video I got.....


We have been working on naming and location of our body parts. She knows where her nose and belly button are, but I have to point to the other parts to get her to point to her own. If you listened carefully in the video she says nose.

Vacation: Part 2

Brooke learned to go down slides on her tummy.

While Ryan and I went to San Diego, Brooke stayed in Longview with grandparents. The first night she stayed with my parents. They took her to the Caldwell Zoo in Tyler the next day. She had a blast and everything was a 'dog'! She now has begun to differentiate between animals, but just a few weeks ago, anything with 4 legs was a dog. They took her in the petting zoo area and she wanted to touch all the goats! The rest of the week she stayed at Ryan's parents because my dad was out of town and my mom had to work. Although, my mom got to spoil her in the afternoons.

Unfortunately, Brooke was sick the first part of the week. At her 15 month well visit, the doctor found fluid in her ears. She wasn't acting sick at the time and I decided to just wait it out. I did have the doctor write a script for amoxicillin just in case she got sick while we were away. Ryan's mom had to get it filled during the week and after she started the antibiotics Brooke started to feel better.

More fun at the park

She was nicknamed the baby that never sleeps. This was the first time we were away from her for so long, so I was wondering how the whole sleep issue would go. Brooke is a baby of routine and if her routine is different in any way it is very hard for her to adjust. I have not had any trouble in months with her sleeping through the night, but I think she woke up at least once every single night we were gone and didn't want to go back to sleep. Despite her lack of sleep she still was full of energy and loved going to the park and playing with the dogs. Ryan' s parents have 2 dogs and they are also babysitting our dog, Sam, while we are trying to sell our house. Annie, Ryan's parents boxer, growls a lot and Brooke learned to growl back at the dog. It is really funny to watch her. Bath time fun

One day, Ryan's mom took her to meet her 2nd cousins at Pump it Up, an indoor bounce house. I have taken her to one in DFW before and she loved it. She had a lot of fun, but I think some of the obstacles were a little large for her. She also enjoyed a trip to the indoor play gym at Dairy Queen and a visit to Ryan's brother's farm. He has donkeys, a horse, goats (which she learned to say), sheep, dogs, and chickens.

The big bounce house

After returning back home and getting back into a routine, she has gotten back to a normal sleep schedule. She has also made leaps in her language skills. She is mimicking lots of things that Ryan and I say. Her recent words include baby, shoe, sock, lemon, biper (for diaper), boo (when we play hide-and-seek or peek-a-boo). She has said a lot of other words, but these I have heard her repeat multiple times. If you ask her where is her belly button or nose, she can point to them. She can sign eat, all done, and bath time.

I had to take her to the doctor this week for a check up visit to make sure her ear infection had gone away. Once again he noted cloudy fluid in her ear and gave her another round of antibiotics to make sure all the bugs are cleared. Even though she is not acting sick in any way. He wants to check her again in a couple of weeks and if there is still fluid then we will evaluate whether we need to consult an ENT for possible ear tubes. I hope that everything clears up because this is really bad timing with us moving and changing doctors.

Speaking of moving, we will be finally moving on June 30th. We are so excited to be moving back to Longview. We close on our house in a couple of weeks. We have had no luck selling our house in Arlington, so please continue to pray that the right people will buy our house in the near future!

VACATION!!!

Part 1:

Ryan and I took a vacation last week to San Diego! Brooke stayed in Longview with grandparents. I was sad to leave her because this was the first time since she was born that I have been away from her (besides going out for the night). I felt like I was always forgetting something while we were in San Diego! We did have a fun vacation. The weather was fabulous. It was cloudy the first couple of days, but the temps were in the 70s-80s with a nice cool ocean breeze.

The first day we decided to sleep in and take it easy. We toured the USS Midway aircraft carrier. San Diego has the largest navy base in the US. This was a really cool ship and it was fascinating to learn how the soldiers lived and worked while on the Midway. It was in operation during WW2 all the way through Desert Storm!

The next day we spent the entire day at the San Diego Zoo, which is one of the best zoo's in the US. They had pandas, polar bears, 2-hump and 1-hump camels, lots of koalas, a fossa, free roaming peacocks, and everything else in between. I felt like we walked 10 miles that day. It was so much fun. Ryan and I love to visit zoos. Here are a few of my favorite photos.

Mama camel and her babyPolar Bear

Koala family

Panda eating bamboo

Otter posing for a picture

Peacock strutting his stuff

That night we ate fish tacos, which were invented in San Diego. It was good to have a local treat.

The next day we went to Balboa park, which is full of museums and exotic plants. This must have been where Dr. Seuss got his ideas for illustrations of plants in his books. I felt like I was looking a plants and trees that came from his books.

I have no idea what this plant is, but it looks like it is straight out of a Dr. Seuss Book.

We had purchased a discount card called the San Diego Card and it includes admission to most attractions in and around town. So, we visited as many museums as we could. We went to the Science center, Museum of Natural History, Model railroad museum, Museum of photographic arts, botanical building, Air and Space museum, and Automotive museum. It was really neat to see all these things and even better knowing that we saved money.

The next day we went to the San Diego Wild Animal Park. It is more of an African safari park. We started of the day with a tram ride through the wild animals. It reminded us a lot of our Fossil Rim Park just 1 1/2hrs from DFW. They did a really nice job replicating the animals natural habitats and most of the time you didn't notice the fences/gates. It was the best views we have ever had of cheetahs and lions. They also had a really rare type of rhinoceros that is almost extinct. They also had a lot of other animals that we walked around and watched. After the wild animal park we headed to the Museum of Making Music. This museum was really neat and had many rare types of instruments. You also got to sample some instruments that are either rare or really expensive. Since, this was the last day of our discount card we really wanted to get our money's worth, so we headed over to an indoor go cart track. Even though I couldn't ride, Ryan had lots of fun.

The next day we headed up to Torrey Pines state park and did some hiking. We had gorgeous views of the ocean and the torrey pines. They are the rarest type of pine and only grow in San Diego.

Torrey Pine

Next we headed to a beach in La Jolla. First we stopped at a Whole Foods and picked up some sandwiches for a picnic and then laid out on the beach. The water was way to cold (~65 degrees) for me to get in, but Ryan got used to it and had fun playing in the ocean. After we got cleaned up we headed to Coronado island, which we nicknamed "clean" Galveston. We walked on the beach and took pictures of the sunset. Then we had a nice dinner along their main strip and enjoyed some window shopping.
Coronado island

Someone's sandcastle that we thought looked neat in the setting sun.

The next day was travel day, but we had some time to spare before our plane took off. We went to Point Loma, which is a light house on part of the naval base. You can also drive to the cliffs and look at the ocean pools created in the rock.

It was a really nice vacation! I am glad Ryan and me got to spend some alone time together especially before baby #2 arrives. Thanks to all the family that helped make this possible by watching Brooke. My next blog will be about Brooke's vacation away from us.