New blog! With pictures!

Yes, the exclamation points were necessary. I wanted to try and update the blog every night, but sometimes my mind is just blank and I feel like I have nothing new to say. And I don't want to be saying the same stuff over and over.. "Blah blah hubby's deploying and I miss him.. Blah blah Alexa's growing up so fast.. Blah blah boring life of a stay-at-home mom..."

So anyway, that's why I haven't updated in the past couple of days. It's just been the same ol' same ol'. I did finish a slideshow that I made for Alexa's first birthday. I'm not an expert at slideshow making but I think it came out pretty darn good. It's the make-you-cry kind of slideshow and I'm pretty proud of it. I put her first cries in there and eveything. We still have over a month until she turns one, but I was so anxious to do it. It's fine the way it is, but I left a little room in there just in case I take some cute pictures in the meantime and want to add them in. Plus, I wanted to make it in time for the hubby to be able to watch it. There are some really sweet daddy-daughter moments in there. I'm sure I will put it up on here some time. I just don't think I'm ready to share it with the world yet.

I do have pictures to share!

Here are some pictures from a little family bar-b-que we had while Elias was here. His aunt took them--she takes great pictures.

Alexa with her daddy :)

The whole family

So, who does Alexa look like?

Elias with his cousin and her little boy. He was born just two days after Alexa.


Us with Elias's dad

Can you tell someone was a little bit antsy? (I cropped my mom out because she didn't like herself this picture.)

And here's the "three generations" picture.

Good times! Can't wait until we have the WHOLE family (Elias included) back together again. :)

I said "11 months" out loud today

Oh my goodness. Nine days and Alexa will be ELEVEN months. (Lol, I just typed "ten" and had to backspace.. it is truly unreal.) Eleven as in, ONE month away from being a year old!!! I just want to squeeze my baby while she is still a baby because this time is just flying by and I feel like my baby is slipping away from me! Literally! Haha.. She doesn't let me snuggle her anymore. But really, I feel like she's such a big girl now.

May we take a little walk down memory lane?

I cry when I look at these ultrasound pictures. My little inside baby!

My little snuggle baby. I was 20-something weeks here. 22 I think?

I was 30 weeks here.. This one really gets me because you can really make out her face, and she still looks so much like this picture!

Me and my hugeness. Looking at this picture makes me glad I had a c-section. Not that she was really big (like we thought) but I am just a very small person!

My sweet little BooBear on the night she was born. This picture makes me want to rewind time just to go back and kiss and snuggle my tiny baby some more.

She was so little! Only a couple weeks old. The matching was a coincidence, I swear.

Here's Alexa at one month old. Who's that sexy guy? ;)

Two months old. I had to put her in the Jumperoo as soon as we put it together. She was too little, but I couldn't resist!

Three months. She loved having her talks with daddy after he was gone all day at work.

Alexa's first Halloween. She was four months.

Five months and sitting all by herself for the first time!

Six months. Look at my little cutie with Santa.

7 months. We had professional pictures made for Grandma's birthday.

Eight months.. First ponytail!

Nine months. At Laguna Beach right before we moved away from beautiful Southern California!

Ten months old and back in Houston.

And here's my girl now at almost eleven months....

People say kids grow fast and you hear that all the time, but man... You don't really know until you have kids of your own and time just flies by. I remember Alexa's birth like it was yesterday. Now I almost don't remember her being so tiny and I wish I could go back just for a moment and hold her seven-pound body against me. At almost eleven months now, she is her own person completely. She has the biggest personality of any baby her age that I've known, and I think I've known a lot! Before I know it, it will be this time next year and I'll be wondering what happened to the little crawling monster that she is now. I am trying my best to enjoy her at this age while I can, because I know it won't last.

Mother, O Mother, come shake out your cloth,
Empty the dustpan, poison the moth,
Hang out the washing, make up the bed,
Sew on a button and butter the bread.

Where is the mother whose house is so shocking?
She’s up in the nursery, blissfully rocking.

Oh, I’ve grown as shiftless as Little Boy Blue,
Lullabye, rockabye, lullabye loo.
Dishes are waiting and bills are past due
Pat-a-cake, darling, and peek, peekaboo

The shopping’s not done and there’s nothing for stew
And out in the yard there’s a hullabaloo
But I’m playing Kanga and this is my Roo
Look! Aren’t his eyes the most wonderful hue?
Lullabye, rockaby lullabye loo.

The cleaning and scrubbing can wait till tomorrow
But children grow up as I’ve learned to my sorrow.
So quiet down cobwebs; Dust go to sleep!
I’m rocking my baby and babies don’t keep.

-Ruth Hulbert Hamilton

This is me trying to stay positive about the deployment.

Thinking about the hubby's deployment just depresses the crap out of me.. and I am tired of being depressed. Though the negatives completely outweigh the measley positives, I can still think of what good will come out of this gosh darned deployment.

Here we go:

-Money. Lord knows we need it.

-It will be a great opportunity for Elias to move up and get promoted faster. It's stressful, but he is given a lot of authority and responsibility in this unit. He just got promoted to Staff Sergeant in November, so next is Gunnery Sergeant. Big boss man! I know he can do it.. He's very motivated.

-It's only a seven-month deployment. He would have been stuck doing a year if we'd stayed in California. Seven months is a long time to be away, especially when Alexa is growing so fast, but one year.. I couldn't imagine. He had a year deployment in Iraq (cut short) and six months in, they are required to take leave for two weeks to visit family and get their sanity back. That's only if they're doing 12 months. It's all great to be able to come home but the bad part is saying goodbye again, for another 6 months. Saying goodbye to him after those two weeks was THE hardest thing I've ever done. I just got him back and I had to let him go again. It may seem silly that I'm sort of glad he doesn't get to take leave, but I just remember how torn apart I was that day. Deployments are never easy, but that was just like a little cruel tease. Here, have the time of your life with your husband/significant other for two weeks then send him back overseas. Not fun at all.

-Just getting this deployment over with will be a relief. Going to Afghanistan at some point was pretty much inevitable, so at least we are getting it out of the way now. And like I said, it's only seven months as opposed to a year.

-My husband is in radio communications, so I'm hoping ::crossing fingers:: that will give him an advantage when it comes to being able to contact me while he's gone. He had internet and phone in Iraq, and even though Afghanistan is a whole different situation, hopefully he will still have some capabilities.

-I will miss next football season... what a shame.

-This is time that I get to spend back home. My mom and my friends are all here. I may not get to live here again until Elias retires which is at least 11 years from now.


And that's all I can think of for now. Even though all those good things added together and multiplied times a thousand could never be equal to the security of having him home, I still try to keep them in mind so that I remember with the hardships in life, there are also positives.

Almost every day I think about what life would be like if Elias had a "normal" job.. the kind where he worked 9-5, Monday through Friday, and came home to his family every evening and never had to worry about going into a warzone overseas. I am envious of wives who don't have to worry about their husbands in the way that I do. I hear/read wives' day-to-day complaints about their husbands and I think: How lucky you are that he is there for you to be arguing with. Elias can drive me nuts at times too when he's around, but in the big picture what really matters is that he's even there at all. What I wouldn't give to have a stupid little quarrel with him right now, in person. So if you are a non-military wife, just feel grateful in that your husband is able to be with you. You do not know how lucky you are.

Although it is far from easy, I am (and will continue to be) very proud and supportive of my husband.

Can't wait to see you again. ♥

How about a video today?

I got Alexa on video today. She started walking with her stroller! Maybe this means she'll be walking soon... And be sure to watch until the end when she gives dada a little shoutout. :)

We have a party theme!

Yay!

I had a couple of ideas for birthday party themes, but I wasn't sold on anything yet. Then as I was browsing on Etsy, I found this cute mermaid banner with graphics from this site and fell in love with the mermaids! So I have decided to make the decorations myself... a daunting task, but I think I can do it.

Here are the graphics:

I'm excited to make everything now. :)

Unpopular Opinion Thursday

I've decided that when I don't have anything on my mind to blog about, I'll just go along with the themed days of the week (Attention Whore Wednesday, Flame Free Friday Confession, etc). I would love to do a "Thankful Thursday" but half of what I'm thankful for (my hubby) is not here for me to enjoy, so it makes me a little sad and sentimental. Maybe next week when/if I'm in a "puppies and rainbows" kind of mood.

So, here's my unpopular opinion of the day: You cannot claim to be an animal lover and eat animals. It's one or the other. All animals were created equally; therefore it's no more justified to eat a cow than it is to eat a dog. And there you have the main reason why I quit eating meat.

As a sidenote, I don't judge people who eat meat and I certainly don't try to push my beliefs on them (I hate it when people do that so if I did, I'd be a hypocrite). I just think it makes zero sense to claim to love animals, and have a dead one right on your plate.

That is all. :) I will be back when I have something more interesting to write about.

I hope to one day be back in a bikini...

I know it is a long shot, but a girl can't help but wish. It is amazing (amazingly depressing) how much the body changes after having a child. Now, my situation is backwards from what most moms experience post-baby. I am actually trying to gain weight. I am skinnier than what I was before and I think I am too skinny now. I miss my old body!

Right around the time we got married/pregnant (they are within days of each other, but I promise the pregnant part came after, lol), I was about 10 pounds above my normal weight. I think I was so uber-happy that I was eating everything in sight. I got pregnant and in my first trimester I lost weight. I gained about 35-ish pounds throughout my pregnancy and happily lost it all by the time Alexa was maybe six weeks old. Then I kept losing. I have no mommy pooch anymore but my ass, thighs, and everything else also shrunk. Ummm, what the hell?! I wanted to keep those! I also have many beautiful stretch marks.

Why in the hell was I ever self-conscious about my body before I had Alexa?? Seriously. I will show before pictures but don't ever expect any after pictures! Here is a picture of me that was taken probably a year or so before getting pregnant.

It is a shameless, headless mirror shot. I think I took it at my tanning peak and wanted to get a picture. I never thought I'd look back on it and think about what once was. ::sigh:: Now, weight-wise I am pretty much the same. But take away the tan, loosen the skin a little bit, and add some stretch marks and voila! ...that's me post-baby.

There is nothing you can do for loose skin or stretch marks that I know of (if there is, do share) besides surgery. So like I said, getting back into a bikini is a long shot. Maybe one day after I am done having children, we will have enough money saved up (hahahaha!) for me to get a little tummy tuck. THEN, I will think about revisiting the bikini department.

P.S. Did I say long shot?

What's been going on?

I'm going to go ahead and jump start this blogging thing with a little overview of what's been going on in our lives lately.

We moved away from lovely Southern California in the beginning of July. My hubby, Elias, who is a Marine, is changing duty stations from Cali to North Carolina. The sad part is, he is deploying to Afghanistan some time in July, so I will be living in Houston with friends and family while he is away. He got to stay here for a few weeks, then had to fly out to NC... alone. :(

Here are the last couple of pictures that Alexa took with her daddy. It was at the airport just before he boarded the plane.

I try to be strong but it is really, really rough. I miss him a lot and I hate that not only is he going to be away; he will be overseas in Afghanistan for over seven months. I don't know how we will be able to communicate with him while he's there, if at all. I absolutely hate the unexpected. It scares me.

So, my little BooBear and I have been daddyless for over two weeks now. I'm living with my mom and stepdad for the time being. The living situation drives me batty at times (read: most of the time) but it's rent-free, so I can't complain... Well I can, and I will, but the rent-free part is nice.

My first Mother's Day pretty much sucked ass. I'm not going to lie. I did get a really cute picture from Alexa that my mom made for me. It's Alexa's picture in the middle of a flower with her footprints as the leaves. I seriously want to frame it and cherish it forever!

So, what's new with Alexa? She's been crawling, pulling up, and standing alone for a while now. Still no steps! She's mastered cruising. She is such a busy body and never wants to sit still. She "meows" with the cats and "sings" to music. She's an expert at waving hello and goodbye, and if she's extra enthusiastic she does a double-handed wave. :)

Here are a few huge ones.. She now (drumroll, please)..... Sleeps through the night! Doesn't wake up for feedings or cuddlings anymore! Puts herself to sleep! And is completely weaned from breastfeeding!

Ok, that last one was kind of sad.. but we were both ready and I'm glad I finally took the plunge. Breastfeeding was a long, hard road but I would do it all over again in a heartbeat.

Another sort-of big deal accomplishment for Alexa is that she is doing great on finger foods. She now eats mac & cheese, green beans, whole peas, toast, edamame, carrots (cooked), and cheese.. all with her teeny little hands. I was a total scaredy when it came to giving her "real" food, but she has been doing awesome! We've been trying something new every day.

Here's the big girl eating big girl foods..

Did I mention my little girl is a growler? Yup.. in all my years of working in child care, I never came across a growling baby. And boy, does she growl... all the time. Sometimes she sounds downright possessed. It's crazy. She usually does it when she's happy or excited, or just feels like making noise. I will have to get her on video and share it here. It's the funniest thing!

I think that's pretty much it for now. I'll leave you with a few pictures we had done just before Elias left. :)

First post!

I have decided to get into the blogging thing... again. My last blog was sadly neglected. Daddy is is North Carolina and will be deploying soon, so I am going to try and blog about things going on with me and Alexa while he is gone. Well it's time for her bath, so I've gotta go!