Every.Single.Moment.

In case you haven't realized it yet, I love taking pictures of my little girl.

She's just so darn cute and such a huge part of my life, I can't help but document it all the time.

Maybe someday, She'll have a sibling so I can document the two of them laughing and wrestling and fighting together.

But for now, I have her. I love her with all my heart and enjoy every.single.moment.

Note to Self:

Make sure to eat food when you're working on big projects. Not eating leads to not thinking very well and low blood sugars at the most in-opportune times.

Make sure to drink liquids when you're working on big projects. Not drinking leads to a serious fuzzy-minded-me on top of the already fuzzy-minded-hungry-me.

Remembering to do these things will help you remember to:

A. NEVER EVER Drink the baby shower punch!! It is NEVER sugar free or made with diet soda.

B. Remember to ALWAYS bring your own drink to a baby shower! They don't think to serve something as simple as water.

C. By remembering to eat and drink during your big projects you won't feel the need to binge eat/drink whatever you can get your hands on.

D. NEVER EVER EVER try something new and untested the night before deadline. Ever.

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I Spent my day at work yesterday to run from that to my parents' house to finish working on a baby shower cake for today. Not just any baby shower cake, though. It was the biggest cake I have ever made. It was for my soon to come baby Nephew.

I have done so much this week preparing for last night. Little steps all along the week to make the actual putting together of the cake go as smoothly as possible.

Last minute I decided to try a new technique for this cake. Mistake #1. That one mistake snowballed into me not getting home until 4:30 and getting into bed and falling asleep until 5am after getting Rylee back to sleep.

It's 6pm here now and just barely 13 hours since I fell asleep and it's been 9 hours I've been on my feet and busy today.

I am exhausted. I am irritated. I am enjoying sitting on my butt typing this out. I wish Rylee would stay asleep until we get up for Church tomorrow so I can sleep from now until church tomorrow. I'm keeping myself from napping, though, because I won't sleep well tonight if I do. And Murphy's law makes it so that as soon as I start drifting off to sleep in my nap Rylee's nap will end. So, I just stave that off by not napping.

My camera quit working last night so I don't have my pictures of my Cake. My mom has them on her camera. I'm really bummed I can't be sitting here right now fiddling, editing and sharing. Soon, though, I will.

I'm going to end this for now so I can stop looking like a complete idiot on here and continue my looking and behaving like an idiot back in my real world.

This was just the weekend I needed!

What started with Rylee Projectile Puking on Friday night turned into quite a nasty weekend.

Saturday morning we woke up Rylee still wasn't feeling 100% right away, poor girl. I noted that I was feeling just the faintest bit nauseous but nothing crazy. I went about our morning making breakfast, cleaning up, getting showers and giving cuddles to the still slightly under the weather baby.

I start to feel a little worse, but really need to go to the store, which gets delayed by other little things constantly coming up. My blood sugar is 224. Finally when I'm able to go I don't feel well at all and decide to abandon my trip to the store - who needs baby wipes when you're down to 4 anyway?

The rest of my day is spent on the couch. I felt TERRIBLE. My blood sugar is 214. I haven't felt that bad since 2004 when I was in serious DKA after being sick for several days and the batteries in my meter were bad so I wasn't able to treat my blood sugars properly.

I only ate breakfast yesterday. I couldn't keep anything down. Even a sip of water had me dry heaving and then crying. Rylee constantly wanted to cuddle with me on the couch but she wanted to move around all the time - something I was not feeling up to dealing with. Poor baby didn't understand and I felt awful I couldn't do anything for her without running back to the toilet.

Finally got Rylee to bed with Kenny's help. I slept on the couch the rest of the night. It was while I was laying there writhing that it occurred to me my blood sugar wouldn't budge below 200 and I hadn't been able to keep even a sip of water down. Crap. I was going to be making a trip to Urgent Care in the morning to get some fluids pumped into me to get my sugars down and then hopefully get over this stupid stomach bug.

Fortunately one last dry heave middle of the night episode seemed to be the last of the worst. I was finally able to sleep and woke up feeling 100x better this morning. Though still queasy I am quite happy to take that over what I was dealing with yesterday. Quite pleased to be able to keep fluids and some toast down, and able to give my baby attention again. Quite pleased that no urgent care visit was going to be needed. My blood sugar has still hovered in the low 200's today but I'm okay with that. Actually really okay. I was so terrified of crashing into nasty lows because I wouldn't be able to treat the lows- then I'd really be going to the Urgent Care.

Kenny was a total Dear last night. Put Rylee to bed after she fell asleep with me. Went in for her when she woke up in the middle of the night screaming. Laid her back down. She woke up again, he brought her to bed with him! He cuddled her when she woke up crying "mama!mama!mama!" She wasn't feeling her best yet either.

We're both much better today, not fantastic but definitely on the mend! This little adventure was NOT in my plans for the weekend! I was hoping to maybe go on a date with Kenny. Get some photography in of my brothers girlfriend. Play with Rylee outside in the beautiful weather we've been having. Well, maybe in the next couple days. Now I have to focus on what I'm going to do for a baby shower cake I'm making for this coming weekend, which hopefully will got like a normal weekend!

Scrapes, Scratches and Puke

Yesterday Rylee had her first major run-in with Concrete. I tried real hard to get a picture but she was not in the mood to allow a decent shot to show the full extent of the damage done. Skinned up her nose real nicely. One of those very sad, yet humorous things for a parent to watch. New found freedom in the outdoors after many months of very wet, very cold days, she's running along and trips - as toddlers do innumerable times through the day. She puts her hands out to catch her, as usual, but the momentum she had built up carried her straight through onto her face.

Poor baby was gun shy the rest of the day from going anywhere on that darn cement. Of course she was back at it today.

Today is another story, though.

She slept in late. When she got up she just wanted to be held. I tried to give her breakfast but she wouldn't touch a SINGLE THING I gave her. She chose to just sit there in her highchair for 20 minutes with a lot of different food choices in front of her and didn't touch any of them.

I passed it off, sometimes she does this because she's just not ready to eat yet. She finally snacked on some french fries and chicken nuggets later then a few cheese-its through the rest of the day, while I worked away and my mom watched her.

It was a looooong day at the office. Things were going great until just ONE silly little thing had to go wrong, of course, and then it snowballed from there - making a job that we were going to be done with at 2pm not be done until nearly 6pm.

Anyway, once we got home Rylee was happy to play, though she was quite clingy for me - which she had been all day. She really didn't want to be with anyone but me. She tolerated other people but wanted me. She didn't even want to sit with Kenny tonight. She ate some pizza then took a nap with us on the couch. Which she fought so hard - Kenny wanted to lay with her and nap with her but she didn't want it. We compromised and she sorta got to lay with both of us.

When she got up a little while later she just wanted to sit with me still. She didn't get off the couch to play. She didn't have any toys in her hands to play with. Just laid her head in my lap and sat up from time to time. I got up for something and when I came back she projectile puked allllllllll over my legs as I was standing in front of her. She kept puking after that.

I hate puke. HATE. I made a deal with Kenny that I'd do all the dirty diapers if he cleaned up the puke. Guess what didn't happen tonight? Yep, I cleaned up that puke.

He did give her a bath, though. There really is only so much you can do at a time with a puking baby, though, so he bathed her and I cleaned it up - gagging most of the way.

After that she just wanted to sit with me again. Sit she did until she fell asleep for the night, with sips of gatorade in between cuddles.

Our little girl has her first stomach flu. Her first major scrape on her body. Toddler-hood isn't treating her so well these couple of days. I hope she's feeling better in the morning. It's making it hard for me to sleep tonight, though, knowing she doesn't feel good.

With that I'm going to try and get a little rest.

To articulate, babble, broach, chant, chat, chatter.......

Communication is something God has really laid on my heart, mind, and soul lately.

I am by no means a relationship expert or marriage genius or anything at all. I just try to understand situations I am in, and others are in as best as I can. I do like to live life vicariously, learning from others' mistakes if I can.

I cannot stress enough that communication is key to a good relationship with anyone, whether it be your Mom, Dad, Siblings, Children, Husband, Relatives, Friends.... with anyone - you have to communicate. It takes a lot of work too.

Especially in a Marriage relationship (or one potentially heading towards marriage). If you and the other person involved do not tell each other the little things in life that make you happy or sad, your wishes and dreams, your opinions, likes, dislikes, political views, religious views - whatever! You are not going to talk about those "big things" when they come around. Big things like marriage, children, and money.

Relationships of any sort (worth-while ones) must be a two way street. It has to be a "give and take" thing. HAS to be. If there isn't communication, there cannot be joy, peace and compromise.

Many wonder why there has to be compromise and the answer is really quite simple: You are two DIFFERENT people. It's a beautiful thing to be different than the person you love, if you were the same it would be just another "drone" relationship like something out of hollywood that has been done 100 times already. When you are different people you will like different things than eachother: He likes Action films, she likes soap operas. Both hate the others favorite - so you meet somewhere in the middle when you want to do something together. Like a sorta chick-flick with a lot of guy humor, or something silly like that.

If there is no compromise on both sides it is inevitable that one person in the relationship will always be "giving" into what the other person wants and that will in the end create a bitterness that will not turn into something good, and will take a long time to "fix." The other person will always get their "way" and that just emboldens them to continue on - leaving everything horridly lopsided/unbalanced and things will sooner or later come to a head and explode like Old Faithful - without fail.

This is especially important when bringing a child into the mix. Something I didn't realize when I was pregnant. I had no idea that having a baby would cut into our "talk time" SO badly! I didn't know that actual communication other than - "how was your day?" "Rylee didn't take a good nap all day" "She had 3 poopy diapers today and has diaper rash" "I got all the laundry done today!" "so, tell me about the job you worked on today-" - was going to be all that we were going to have anymore. When we started getting genuinely mad at each other over stupid things like dirty carpet I realized that the problem we had went much deeper than the dirty carpet and I agonized over it for the next couple weeks. Finally figuring it out we confronted it and moved on - because we communicated about it... ...finally. It took awhile, though, for me to realize that the lack of real talking about issues, struggles, wants and desires was really at the heart of our recent issues.

When a new baby is going to be thrown into a already rock situation it seems a lot of couples think that they'll "come together" over the baby. I've got a news flash for you! It doesn't really work that way! Babies are SO much work. You WON'T sleep. Your judgment will NOT be at it's best because of your lack of sleep and hard work through the days. You WON'T talk, especially when you realize that everything that comes out of your mouth is mean - because it's all that's in your brain from your severe sleep deprived state. Things don't just "get better" when the baby comes. How will you continue to live and act as that baby becomes a toddler? They learn behavior quite early, you know, what is it you want them to be really learning?

Communication needs to happen every day whether it be simple things like telling your love you appreciate that he goes to work every day even when he doesn't want to. Vacuuming 4x a day because it makes your love happy. Having dinner on the table when he gets home because he'll feel special. Good old fashion talking, gestures of love - that's what's really missing in so many homes today.

I love my husband and so thankful he's willing to talk to me - so long as I let him know it's what I need at the moment! Thank you, Jesus, for my Husband!

Contentment

God is teaching us contentment.

As a result of all my self-inspecting and Kenny's and my many "serious" conversations this last week I came to a turning point in my life.

Nothing huge, but just changing little things: Not being on facebook for 1/2 of my day, not letting Rylee eat wherever she wants in the house. I realized she is now at an age where she's really learning things very quickly. I decided that I wanted to cut out all the stupid things in our lives to commit to more meaningful things.

I've been teaching Rylee to color, took her to a play ground to really play for the first time today, and I've been reading to her. Lots of reading. I had this awesome bible as a small child and I wanted to give Rylee one of her own (as mine was thoroughly used and abused). Our Church had that bible and I was so happy. My Mom bought it for her and I've been reading out of it to her every day. This morning I sat down at our kitchen table while she was eating in her highchair and I decided that would be a good time to maybe read with her. I did then picked up my own bible and read the same passage for my own enrichment. I think I'll be going through the whole bible with my 1 year old, in hers and mine. Haha!

I feel so refreshed to be finally forcing myself back to this place of a love for my Savior, a love for knowledge and understanding.

Of course, that doesn't come without trials. An increase in trials, I find.

As I was going over our budget for the next month today I was nearly giddy with the realization we weren't going to be strapped for cash like usual. Not because I wanted to spend it all, I just like not being under $20 in our bank account after paying for necessities.

On Kenny's way home today from one of his many out of town trips he got a speeding ticket. It's his first "real" ticket. He got one as a teenager but he got it deferred at the time and it was never put on his record. He was, and is, so beside himself because of it. A major hit to our bank account this next month as well, so we're not really as well off as I had thought, anymore. Ha!

I knew it was bound to happen with how much driving he always does. I respect him and did my best to show him my support and respect, but he was still so upset he curled up on the couch at 7, fell asleep before 8 and is still there.

God is teaching us to be content no matter what. Whether we have extra money in our account (so I can maybe refill my prescriptions, it looks like I'll be going back to shots for a month!) or whether we have nothing in our account. Whether we have clean or dirty carpet. Whether we live in an apartment or a home of our own. Whether we like the job we're at or not. Just to be content in every situation.

Crunching numbers again tonight after that I realized that something will inevitably go unpaid for a couple days because of the timing of this ticket, and God spoke to my heart telling me to sit back and trust in him for a little while. So, that is what I'll do, what we'll do.

It feels so great to give it all to Him who loves and provides unconditionally. Being Content in every situation, my challenge.

::mean mommy::

I wasn't expecting two nice days in a row. When we woke up this morning it was rainy and foggy and gross out, So I thought we were grounded inside again. When it all burned off and the clouds almost disappeared I couldn't stay inside a moment longer!



Amidst all the running and playing the little girl fell down.



She got good and dirty! Just like little kids should in the muddy "spring."



When she started crying and asking to leave I didn't set her down on the picnic table and continue taking pictures.



I would be an awful mean and unfeeling mother to do that sort of thing!



...Well, maybe I did...