To you, Abbie

To my dearest Abbie~
Tomorrow you will be 4 months old. It's hard to believe when it seems like yesterday I was going to bed each night feeling you kick and roll around. How I miss that feeling sometimes, but it's nothing like holding you in my arms each day. I am struggling right now with being away from you during the day. I think I got spoiled having a little bit more time off work. I cherish each second I spend with you, and live for the weekends and evenings so I can be with you and Dad. You two are my everything, and I thank God every night for you. You woke up last night gagging on something and all day today I have thought of what might have happened had we not been right there to pick you up and take care of you. I still don't know what it was, but it has made me a little paranoid, to say the least. I want you to know that as long as you allow us, we'll be here for you, and even when or if you don't, we'll be here for you. As you lay beside me sleeping peacefully I just think about my life before you, and it's like it wasn't complete. Everyone says we would feel this way, but I never believed them. Sure, I knew I'd love you to pieces, but not the kind of love where your heart aches when you are apart. So I'll stop rambling now because one of these days you will probably be embarrassed by this post, but I want you to know, our dear daughter, how much you are loved by your Mom and Dad and how you have rocked our world in the best way possible. We love you sweetheart. We love you.

Goin' to Carolina....

Just wanted to update real quick...I am sitting here on the floor in my almost empty home, among boxes and such. Abbie is in a bouncy seat that Dawn let us borrow, since ours is now packed! Tonight is our last night in Salt Lake, and I will be meeting up with Wes tomorrow in Nashville, TN. Now that he is gone, I definitely feel more ready to leave too! Abbie and I miss him already....

Hopefully we'll get a chance to post again soon, but it will be from NC. Talk to you all soon!!

Sayin' goodbye

Well, this weekend was our last in Utah, and it was so bittersweet. Part of me is excited to go back to the mountains of NC that we know and love, and another part of me is sad to leave all the friends we have made here. I know things wouldn't have worked out this way if they weren't meant to be though, and I know we'll be happy back in the south again! We had a very full weekend of fun and friends. Thursday night I had a girls night out at MacCools Irish Pub. We went to our good friend Jeremy's graduation party Friday night, then Saturday we met with the listing agent (this picture of Abbie is during our meeting with him...real estate talk was too much for her!!) then went out on the boat....then Sunday Abbie got dedicated at church and the Trostruds had a going away BBQ for us! It was an awesome weekend and we were so happy to be able to spend it with all of our friends!!

As for our dear little one, she will be 15 weeks old tomorrow!! She is doing great - grabbing at everything, and once she has it, putting it in her mouth! She is sleeping from 9 til 4, eating, then going back down for several more hours. I could probably cut the 4 am feeding out, I just haven't tried it yet. Now if she does wake up before the feeding, I usually just give her the paci and she goes right back to sleep. So I could try to do that at 4 too. She is also taking good naps. And we are actually able to put her down now awake and she will go to sleep on her own usually. She is grabbing at her feet all the time, and is just really intrigued by everything going on around her. I can't believe she is almost 4 months!!

Changes....

I have been meaning to write about all the happenings in our lives for a while now, but these days I don't feel like I have much time. So while Abbie is sleeping (for the moment!) and Wes is playing basketball, I thought I'd try. Many of you already know this, but we are moving back to the Asheville area next week! It's been a fast, crazy thing, with applying for a job, interviewing, and receiving the offer all in less than a month. We love it here in Utah, we really, really do. We have met SO many awesome friends here. Friends that will never leave our hearts and minds, and friends that we know we will always keep in touch with. We have become a part of a church here, something that Wes and I as a married couple had not done together before, and we even had the opportunity to be a small part of the planting of the church. We have served, and grown, and enjoyed it immensely. The cool thing is that so many of our friends here were in the same boat with us, not having family around, and so your friends then become your families, in a sense. So to all of you in our Utah circle, we love you. Please don't take our move as us not thinking you are special enough to stay!! But our lives are different now. SO different than 3 years ago, when we moved here without anything holding us back. We took the opportunity then because it was just us, and even our families said "go, do it now, while you can!" And now it is time to go home. We want Abbie to grow up in NC, and more importantly, to have her family around, close enough to see more than once or twice a year. And for us, we love Western NC. Wes is from there, of course, and I pretty much consider it home. We have lived there before and been very happy, and I know we will be again. We have great friends there too and are looking forward to hanging out with them again! If there is one thing I have learned, it is that happiness comes from within, and not from your circumstances. So as we go through the relocation process of selling our home, finding a home back there, etc, we will keep you posted on how things progress. The most important thing on my list is finding a great sitter for Abbie. We love our sitter here, Debbie, and we will miss her. But I have faith that God has someone picked for us and her already.

So speaking of Miss Abbie, she is 14 weeks today. I must say the last few nights have been rough. She is just not sleeping as good right now. Part of it is probably because she has some head congestion, which seems to be getting better even since earlier today, but I am not sure what the other reasons are. Other than the sleeping part though, she is really doing good. Wes is staying home with her this week because his job is winding down, and they have had two really good days so far. He seems to get so much done with her...mostly laundry!! I came home today to a big stack of clean, folded clothes. He is a much better laundry-doer than me. When I do laundry, I do a load, wait a day, do another load, then by the time I get done, I am not done, because there is more! He just gets it done. He does it all in one day. Even the random stuff that sometimes I think you have to wash alone. So I have appreciated that, and of course the fact that he is willing to take care of her when he could be doing other things.

Alright, I will sign off for now. Oh, is anyone else enjoying watching the Olympics instead of all the other junk that is usually on TV??? I haven't even watched the news for days!! It's fabulous.

Three Months!

My how time flies...Three months ago today our lives were changed in the best way possible. We are having a great time being parents and are enjoying each special moment we get to spend with Abbie. At 3 months, Abbie is:

- rolling over from her back to her tummy (see video in previous post)

- finding her voice and using it a lot!

- smiling constantly and starting to laugh

- a very happy baby in the mornings especially, but is doing much better at night too

- usually sleeping from 9pm til 3am, then back to sleep until around 7am

-going to a sitter each day during the week, where she gets to play with three boys that adore her!

-loving the outdoors like her Daddy and Mommy

-enjoying her play mat a lot and will even sit still to read a book every now and then

Oh yea, and that chocolate chip looking thing on the side of her nose in some of these pictures is a scab from her scratching herself really bad yesterday. I cut her nails last night and will just have to make it a point from now on to do it regularly.

Watch this!!

I sound like an idiot in this video, but it is kind of funny how quickly she does it after I tell her to!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsE23oYKdAM

Up the mountain!

This weekend marked another first for Miss Abbie - her first chair lift ride! We went up to beautiful Solitude ski resort on Sunday afternoon to play frisbee golf. I just hiked around w/ Abbie while Wes and our friend Michael Trostrud played. We rode the lift up the mountain, then played the course going down.

Tomorrow Abbie will be 12 weeks old! I don't know why, but that seems like a milestone to me! She is "talking" more and more, smiling all the time, and she is so squirmy it seems like she could roll over any minute! She really is a good baby for the most part. She sometimes gets a little fussy in the evenings, but nothing like before, and it's usually just because she's tired. Thankfully we can give her a pacifier and it soothes her immediately. She is doing great at the sitter's house too. She seems to be very happy there, and I am certainly happy with Debbie and the care that she is giving Abbie.

Can anyone tell me how you click on the picture to enlarge? On this post you can do it with the top pic, but not the rest! Help!