A New Obsession

I've discovered a site to help edit photos and I'm obsessed with playing around with my hundreds and hundreds of Scarlett and Alyssa pictures!  Here are a few so far:

Visiting Uncle Max at Texas Roadhouse--they have delicious pickles, apparently!

(Can you tell that I love rounded corners?!)

Scarlett's 1st Thanksgiving

It was a hit!  Here's a little background of our family tradition on Turkey Day...we go out!  My mom cannot cook to save her soul, so it's always been a family tradition to go to The Senator.  They have an amazing Thanksgiving buffet with the BEST EVER dessert table in the universe!  Just ask Molly, she's the dessert expert and makes it her goal to visit the desserts at least 13 times.  True story.  Anyway, so whether we went with our family of 6 from our childhood, or with our crazy, crazy, crazy ass Uncle, or random fiances of my mother's, or with childhood favorites (yay, blog shout-out to Liz!!!), we have ALWAYS  gone to The Senator. 

LOVE:)



Fast forward three months, and my insanely insane mother has gotten herself married to a man who cooks.  And not only that, he has been planning on preparing our Thanksgiving feast.  Like there is no possibility that we're going out as a new family of 8.  Um, what?!  No crazy-fun car rides blasting Christmas music?  No thirteen trips to the buffet?  No pictures taken in the over-sized chair?  No pictures taken of all of us next to the dessert table, just to make Mary jealous??  No pecan bread???????????  WTF kind of Thanksgiving is that?!  This was my mentality going into yesterday.  I was bummed...and a little bit P.Oed.  But if I'm hating life bummed, then Tyler gets grumpy and annoyed with my mom, so I had to put on a happy face (to save Scarlett's 1st Thanksgiving!), blasted the Christmas music, and decided to have fun! (after consuming copious amounts of DD coffee!)

As you can see, Thanksgiving was a blast!  Things may have been a little different than we were used to, but it was a definite success.  Camdyn was nice to Alyssa (this. is. HUGE!), Mum's desserts rivaled The Senator's, table talk was fun & light-hearted (even though Molly was prepared!  ;), and we all left STUFFED full of yummy food.  I feel like new traditions have been started and I'm pretty much okay with that!  There's no denying that I WILL find a new reason to dine at The Senator and eat my body weight in their pecan bread...


Oh!  P.S.--Does anyone know how to add text or pictures to a heading without photoshop??  The new header is my reminder to figure it out...that clearly hasn't been going well! 

P.S.S.-- Scarlett's newest thing is clapping!!!  And dancing!  All the timeeeeeeeeee!  So sweet! 




This was after dinner, and I forgot a bib, so she was a mess!



DOUBLE DIGITS!

Scarlett is TEN months old today!

And a lady mistakenly called her a him this morning...um, hello, her jeans have ruffles! 

On a more positive note, Scarlett fell asleep in time for me to watch Kathie Lee & Hoda...love them!  And it's Friday!  Hooray!  :)

Shopping!

Totally sitting on the table!

Alyssa loves to pose!

Wonder what Alyssa is thinking...!?

Love this!

Scarlett loves her Cousin Alyssa!

Hey, It's OK!

(I stole this idea from this blog who stole it from Glamour magazine...I think "Hey, It's OK! is my favorite section) 

...to have been listening to Christmas music since Halloween!  I'm so excited for the 1st holiday season with Scarlett!

...to get my butt KICKED in aerobics class.  (The instructor was just a little bit insane; the poor old ladies in the class!)

...to absolutely love that Prince William gave Kate Middleton his mother's engagement ring!  (and I'm just a smidge jealous!)

...to be up worrying all night about your sick baby, even while she's sleeping soundly right next to you.  (Why is she sleeping so long?!?!)

...to get excited every day that this blog has a new post!  I love Kelle Hampton's blogs!

...to already have my Thanksgiving outfit picked out!

I hope the rest of my Tuesday will be as fun & productive as the morning!  And now here are some Christmas pictures that didn't make it on our cards:

Alyssa's sharing her fluffer nutter!

 Snack break

 Love Molly's pose!

 Smith Family

 Alyssa also shared her lollipop--awesome!

 Another lovely "Molly pose," haha!



Coffee & Blogging

...make the perfect morning!  Scarlett is fed, dressed, and playing quietly on the rug.  I have the Today Show on for background noise and I just sat down at my computer with a nice, big cup of strong coffee in my favorite pink mug!  Life is good!  We are actually just killing time until I start the process of getting dressed up for my mom's wedding.  My sisters and I are still trying to decide how we feel about this; my mom and her future husband's 3 month anniversary of dating will be on the 11th.  And my mom is adopting his 6 year old daughter.  But there is enough juicy info for an entire post of it's own...

Back to my perfect morning...

So much has been happening!  Scarlett started swim lessons yesterday; she absolutely loved everything about it, although I think the other swimming babies and their mums were her favorite part.  At first, I was thinking, "come on, Scarlett, reach and pull, reach and pull, kick, kick, kick, kick!" but then I let go of the idea that she'd be a start swimmer and just had fun with her in the water.  You're supposed to let the babies do as much as they can on their own (like pull themselves out of the water) and Scarlett did so well!  I am not very good at letting her do things for herself--maybe that's why she's content to never crawl or walk!  It's definitely something that I'll have to work on!  She did do the motions of pulling herself up out of the water and even leaned into the pool to jump back in!  It was amazing!  Scarlett was the youngest baby, but there was a little 13-month-old who was her little friend.  Meeting the other moms was so cool!  I live in the same town where I grew up and I still didn't know a single mother in the class.  Very fun!  I did make the mistake of bringing Scarlett in a 2-piece, which was annoying to have to pull down every 3 seconds.  I promptly went home and ordered a little pink one piece swimsuit that has a tutu...Alyssa would approve!

It was also a very festive Halloween here on Morrill Ave!  Scarlett was a cupcake and Alyssa dressed up as Princess Tiana!  Molly had to work Sunday night, so Uncle Tyler, Auntie Meg, and Cousin Scarlett brought Little Miss trick-or-treating.  What a hilarious evening!  At every house, Tyler would say, "Alyssa, what do you say?" and she would reply, "Tricker!"  Amazing!  And then she said, "thank you!" on her own.  Such good manners!  After we hit about 10 houses, we were ready to go home and hand out candy.  Alyssa was in charge of that and she took it very seriously!  For every trick-or-treater, she hand-picked the candy they received.  It was a long process, but super-cute! 

And here is Alyssa handin out treats:

I have also been without my car for 2 weeks and right now, she's sitting pretty in my driveway!  Yay!  And my broken blackberry has been submitted in an insurance claim, so that is fantastic!  Happy times:)

Ok, I'm off to bathe and dress Scarlett and then get ready myself...I'm sure I'll have some photos of this evening, so get excited!