T minus 28

Days until our baby girl is 1 YEAR old! I've gotten over the denial hump, and although I'm still sort of in shock, I'm super excited about celebrating her birthday! It's been a little while, so I wanted to share what the munchkin has been up to over the last month!

Madelyn officially starting crawling at 10 months.  She loves how crawling allows her to explore and she sort of takes her time putzing around.  Along with crawling, she is now pulling herself up on everything... in her crib, the coffee table, couch, pack 'n play. I was excited for her to start moving and now that actually she has, I understand the significance of this milestone! Maybe chasing her around more will help me lose the last of the pregnancy weight ;)

We've determined, at this stage anyway, that M is a picky eater. I guess she's trying to keep up her trim figure.  She'll eat 3 meals a day and usually a few snacks in addition to her bottles. But her "meals" are pretty small.  Some oatmeal here, a few bites of pastina there and we just discovered she really likes grilled cheese! Thankfully, she LOVES fruit, and she's pretty good about eating veggies too. M seems to like variety, so she sort of grazes and if we give her a lot of options, she'll most likely eat more!

This month, Madelyn was hit with her first real sickness. We're not really sure what it was, just some kind of virus. She had a high fever for 4 days, and the poor thing had no energy! Once the fever broke, she's slowly getting better. Hopefully in a few more days she'll be 100%. It's so hard to watch your baby be uncomfortable and sick. Ugh, I hated every single day last week that I couldn't hold her all day long and try to make her feel better!

Miss M is really becoming more and more expressive, and we love watching her personality develop. She just started to blow kisses when prompted, which is just the cutest thing! It's so neat that after all that repitition, she's starting to follow along. Auntie Sara has also been teaching her sign language and she's starting to regularly practice it by telling us she's "all done" with a bottle, or asking for "more" food! I'm not totally convinced that she knows what no means, but she has the no head-shake down like a pro.

Madelyn loves waking up to Quigley at her crib in the morning, usually muttering "ill-ey" or something similar when she sees him. She reaches for him through the spindles and he immediately goes up to give her wake up kisses.  M has also start to reach for people quite a bit. It melts my heart when she reaches for me when I get to pick her up after work! Its funny how little ones have a much easier time saying Dadda, or so it seems but I am happy to report that Madelyn says "Mum-ma" often too :)

M continues to love daycare and being around other kids. I credit daycare with her quickly picking up crawling once she started going and being more vocal! I think we can also thank them for the germs she picked up, but we expected that ;) We recently have had the chance to get together with some good friends and their little ones, and its SO fun to watch them play together. Another post on that later this week!

Here are some pictures of our little lady in action!

perfecting her pull ups

cheese!

 

  

Open....close, open....close - this amused her for about a half hour!

Peek-a-boo!

discovering Quigley's dishes

my babies - hanging at Grandma and Grandpa's

buddies

First time having grilled cheese:

More cruising

Watching Quigley play outside

Mom - I'm not hungry, no more food! Or pictures :)

I have to explain this one... M had just been pulled from her crib and a sound sleep at G&G's so we could go home on Sunday night. Immediately upon seeing Brian downstairs, she whined and reached for him, snuggling right up on his shoulder once he had her... she sure loves her Daddy :) It was a very sweet moment and Brian was over the moon!

Lights, camera - update!

During the last few busy weeks, we managed to squeeze in a little update that we are thrilled about! Like most things, one little thing sort of dominoed and we ended up with not 1, but 3 new light fixtures in our kitchen/dining area.

My parents recently gutted and completely updated the kitchen in their home. As they got used to the new kitchen, they decided to fill the space with recessed lighting, doing away with their awesome chandelier.  They were planning to bring the chandelier to the DUMP. Nope, I couldn't let them throw it out! I've always loved it and I knew it would be a perfect update for our eat-in-kitchen area, so we graciously accepted the hand me down :) To say we love it is an understatement!

While we were debating on when to call the electrician to install it, our other two light fixtures in the room stopped working. So, 1 little light swap, turned into 3 new pieces. We decided to switch the other two lights from brushed nickel to oil rubbed bronze and now the look is complete.  This was one of those simple updates that really makes a difference... take a peak, do you agree?

BEFORE

AFTER:
 

 

"new" chandelier

 

new pendant

Remind me...

While I was vacuuming tonight, I found myself giving myself a reminder. "Remind me not to do that again" Not sure who I was talking to, but if you're reading this, remind me, when I'm shopping for a new living room rug not to make the silly, impulsive, decision I did a few years ago. I bought a thick wool rug from Pottery Barn, that is white... I mean, what was I thinking?!?! With a dog, that loves romping in the back yard, it's just a lost cause. It absorbs everything and I find it SO hard to clean.  Next time around, I'll go simple, not as thick and DARK.  I think I have to let go of the dream of my house looking like a Pottery Barn catalog. Not only is it tough on the budget, but its just not pratical, for us anyway.

There is no doubt that I can be impulsive sometimes. Other times, I'm very indecisive and have the hardest time making a decision on my own. Weird how that works. Recently, I've been looking around our house and recognizing that I actually don't like some of the decorations or accessories, I've picked. Kind of like the living room rug, I quickly picked a large cotton rug after our kitchen renovation to complete that look. I went with a 5 x 8, very thin, red and tan striped rug, again from Pottery Barn. While the colors were perfect (originally, my main concern) I often felt like it was too big for the space and it covered our new hardwood floors. Everytime I vacuumed it, I moaned and groaned as the vacuum sucked up the corners and forced the vacuum to stop. Remind me not to buy a rug like that again for this space. Because of the size, it could only be washed at a laundromat which is so annoying.  It's also not really practical and as you can imagine, it got SO dirty with our everyday traffic. Our recent flea bombing, left the rug pretty hard to clean/vacuum up. So in a fit one night, I rolled it up in a ball and threw it out. Ha! Impulse, yet again. Now, i'm missing having a rug in there but it's been so easy to vacuum and clean the floors this week. Amen.

Lastly, the oversized faux oil painting in our living room.... What was I thinking? Remind me not to buy everything I see at Home Goods! Not everything they sell is a must-have. I get so excited about the price tags sometimes, I act too quickly. We have a large wall in our living room that just asks to be a focal point of the room. Instead of planning what to put there, I brought this home and it's stayed there ever since. Brian hates it, always has, but it was something I could check of the list and it does fill the space. Honestly though, Brian is right, it's ugly. Now, 2 1/2 years later, I have a plan of what I'd like to go there instead. But until then, I look at the print and I'm reminded not to act so quickly all the time!

Whenever we're able to update each of these things, I'll share pictures because each in their own way, will be big improvements! Until then, remind me not to do that again :)

Weekend in pictures

This is the best I can do for a post... just feels like there has been lots going on in the Gerges house lately. Like I mentioned, we spent Friday night with Bruce, which was awesome! Seriously, he's the best! Then much of the rest of the weekend was just us, at home and it was perfect. I even slept for 11 hours on Saturday night - yup, you read that right 11 hours :) I went to bed at 10pm and woke up at 9:15am. The hubs and I have continued our routine that we started when M was a newborn of taking turns on weekend mornings to let the other sleep a little more (I get Saturdays and he takes Sundays). I rarely fall back to sleep once I hear the little munchkin making noise, but I must have needed the zzZzz's because I cozied right back up in bed and kept sleeping!

Anyway - our weekend was all about lots of smiles and fun with our sweet pea, cozy family time and we even mixed in some (spontaneous) productivity - weeding and cleaning up our yard! I love this time of year and all that it brings!

Hope you had a great weekend too! (I wrote this on Monday and am just getting around to posting it)

Pre-concert hanging with Miss M

 Bruuuuuuuuuuuuce!!!!

 Quigley spent much of the weekend curled up on his bed.

All the playing with his cousin tired him out!

TGIF

I don't know about you but I am ready to kiss this week goodbye! I am so happy it's Friday and we're kicking off our weekend with a night at Giants Stadium, with this guy:

I've talked about our love for Springsteen before, here and here. We bought the tickets a few months ago, floor seats no less, and we've been counting down the weeks. Until, this week sort of unraveled and we toyed with selling our tickets.

The whole gang spent the night at my parents house last night, it was a big old sleepover. Sidenote: my family is the best! Anyway, we wanted to make sure we let the house air out and stayed off the carpets for 1 more day. So, although we'll stay there again tonight and we're living out of a suitcase, we decided we HAD to go to the show.  Its the perfect remedy for a crazy week.

If you never been to a Springsteen show or listened to his music, I strongly encourage you to. He's a talented songwriter, some of his bests songs being the ones that aren't his most popular. On stage, he NEVER stops moving for 3+ hours. He's got more energy than a toddler on a sugar high and its immediately infectious.

So that's how we're kicking off our weekend. The rest of the weekend we'll be on the lookout for fleas, doing more cleaning and bringing in fall! Hope you have a great weekend!