Of the four hundred and eighty-eight pictures we took during Christmas this year, this one is easily my favorite.

Santa!!

We took Tressa to meet Santa for the first time this past week at Bass Pro Shops. They were offering free pictures with Santa which was right in our price range. We were a little worried about how Tressa would react to such a bearded figure since she's just started to be wary of strangers, but she loved him! (unlike the much older child in line ahead of her who cried like he was getting a flu shot)

Checking each other out for the first time.

She's really not straining to escape his arms, this is in the middle of a big smile for Mom.

Merry Christmas!! (and a Happy early Kwanzaa)

Little Reindeer

I just love this little hat on Teresa. And, it was only a dollar at Target, which makes it even cuter, I think.

How to tell if your pants are too big...

I had to laugh today when I looked down to see that Teresa had crawled right out of her pants.

Christmas Tree

I keep forgetting Teresa can get around as well as she does. And as fast as she does. I set her down on the other side of the piano while I was playing and turned around to find this just a few notes later. So, of course, I had to find the camera and document it. I was surprised at how quickly she headed for the tree since the first time we showed it to her she wasn't too impressed.







She had a hard time reaching the ornament with her little hands and eventually just started lunging at it with her mouth instead. Neither method was effective. Which is why she looks so irritated in that last picture.

Picture of a cute baby

Teresa and I were in Austin this week for her six month doctor's appointment, and this is the only picture I took. Ciaran is such a cutie, and his mom doesn't put enough pictures of him up on her blog, so I had to post it ;). Teresa and Ciaran still aren't too interested in each other but we sure have fun with them together. T was great at the doctor, got some shots that she did well with. She had an oral vaccine that she LOVED. The nurse was surprised when T just slurped it all down right away. She's 28 inches, which is above the 95th percentile, and is down to the 75th percentile with weight at 17 lbs, 8 oz.

In other news, Marc comes home in less than two weeks! Teresa can't wait.

Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving! Late, I know. I love Thanksgiving, especially this year, when I have so much to be thankful for. I would make a list, but it would be ridiculously long. Teresa would definitely be at the top, though, if I were to make such a list. She'd probably be on there several times, actually. And I'll just warn you now, this post is really long, and has A LOT of pictures. I really am trying to cut down on how many millions of pictures I take... Anyway, this year we got to go to Florida to visit Marc for Thanksgiving. Turns out Pensacola is just barely in Florida, only about 8ish hours from Houston, so we drove out for the long weekend. The drive was so beautiful! We went through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, it was such a nice drive. Especially since I wasn't driving ;) Teresa was great in the car, she slept most of the way, with only a little complaining thrown in. She was excited to see her daddy. I was a little worried about her reaction to him, since she has recently started being a little clingy, but she had a great time with Marc.

Waiting...





We ate Thanksgiving dinner with the LDS Branch on base, and it was delicious! They probably only had less than fifty people there, but they had tons of food. Way too much food, including possibly the best green bean casserole I've ever had. Ever. Seriously, it was really good. The weather was really nice, a little on the cool side, but we had fun hanging out outside after lunch. It was fun to see Marc in his dress uniform, that was a first. I liked it ;).







I made him pose by himself, just 'cause he's cute...



Matching cousins! I don't know if I've gushed enough about these cute outfits Melissa made! So fun.







And some more...







Friday morning Marc's mom, Melissa, and I left the hotel around 4:30 to do some Black Friday shopping. My first experience with Black Friday last year was pretty horrible, I pretty much just stood in line and tried not to throw up, so I wasn't really looking forward to going this year. But, it turned out to be pretty fun. Not actually as crazy as I imagined it would be. Black Friday shoppers are pretty efficient, they pretty much know what they want and just get in and out. Our camera decided to break Thanksgiving afternoon. I knew it was coming, it's been acting up for a while now, so I guess the timing was good, cause we were able to pick up a new one super cheap at one of the sales.

Marc isn't allowed to leave base yet, so we went bowling Friday afternoon. It was pretty much the only family activity available on base, since it was too cold to be outside much on Friday. How awesome does his uniform look with bowling shoes instead of boots?



Teresa had fun eating the table (did I mention she's teething?) and examining the bowling balls.





We were sad to leave without Marc, but he gets to come home for Christmas in less than three weeks! In other good news, he got to start his advanced training class yesterday. He had originally been told it might not start until later in December, or even January, so we were pleasantly surprised that he got to start earlier. He loves it, so far, but we'll see if that changes in the next 15 weeks.

Don't you wish...

...that you had a sister-in-law that's as fabulously talented as mine is? Melissa made this ridiculously cute outfit for Teresa. Yep, even the bow. Love it!

Blast from the Past

My mom was doing some cleaning and organizing recently and came across a box of heirloom clothes she had put away for her grandchildren to wear one day. She pulled out a beautiful sweater that just happened to be Teresa's size. It was made by my beautiful, wonderful, rich Auntie Helen WAY back when Erin was small enough to fit into it. So...28ish years ago. Mom and Dad both had fun remembering a little Erin wearing it while we were admiring Tressa in it. And, of course, we had to have a photo shoot with Teresa once she got it on.









Just so you know, in real life, her bow is almost exactly the same color as the sweater. For some reason they photographed different colors.

Who needs bibs?

Not us! We need something much, much bigger than that. Here's the thing. Teresa likes to grab stuff. Especially stuff that's headed for her mouth. She'd rather put it in there herself, you know. Except she's still working on that whole coordination thing. I was pretty naive when I thought "she'll just wear a bib, that should protect her clothes". Wrong. I'm pretty sure the food got everywhere EXCEPT on her bib. So we had to improvise. Because her clothes are just too cute to be getting mushy sweet potatoes on them. Now we just wrap a big dish towel around her and pin it in the back with a chip clip. Not only does it protect her clothes, it keeps her arms down too. No more grabbing! I expected her to protest her lack of arms, but it's been surprisingly effective so far. Plus, it makes me smile to see her like that.

Have I mentioned...

...how fun it is having such close cousins?

Graduation!

Marcus graduated from Basic Training! Teresa and I flew out to South Carolina this past week to attend. Teresa was a dream on the first plane, she was just perfect. She nursed during take off, so her ears wouldn't pop much, and then she was happy and playful for a while, until she fell asleep next to me for the rest of the flight. I had to wake her up for landing, and she was all smiles for that part too. She was pretty much the exact opposite on the next flight. Although, I'm thinking the main reason for that was because our plane from Atlanta to Columbia was one of those tiny little Delta Connections planes. I know I felt the pressure changes a lot more on that plane, so I'm sure Tressa did too. Coming back she did pretty well, she squawked a bit on the last leg of our flight, I think she was just done with the whole traveling thing by then. People were SO helpful the whole time we were traveling, we had lots of help from random people at the airport.

Playing at the Atlanta airport



Thanks goodness for our GPS...pretty much the best thing that ever happened to me. Well, top three, at least. Because Teresa wasn't very helpful when it came to finding our way from the airport to our hotel, and then to Fort Jackson.

Thursday was Family Day. We started out in a big auditorium, where we sat on ridiculously uncomfortable benches for over an hour because we were told it started at 9:00 am, but it really started at 10:00. They started the program with a prayer (shh, don't tell the liberals...), which was nice, and then they had a little slide show with pictures from training. Which I thought was nice, but it would have been nicer if they had just let us go then to see our soldiers in real life. They introduced all the drill sergeants and important people, and talked about stuff for another 15 minutes or so before they excused us and we got to go find Marcus. We got to spend the rest of the day together, but couldn't leave base.

I'll just warn you now that there are about a million pictures in this post...

Feeding T her bottle. She doesn't get a bottle very often, but she loves it. She gets VERY upset when it's empty. And don't even think about taking it away from her if there's still something in it...







Teresa was pretty interested in the trees...she had to taste the leaves, which she (surprisingly) didn't like.









Marc and Teresa in front of our tiny, tiny rental car.



The next day was graduation. It was freezing! We were totally under-prepared, since the day before was nice and warm, and the news said it would be the same way on Friday. It wasn't. It was super windy and cold. Luckily, some nice people sitting near us gave us a blanket to use. They had a little more than 1200 soldiers graduating. The little ceremony was really short, they just talked for a little while, presented a few awards, and then had the soldiers march by us. I tried getting a picture of when Marc was going by, but Tressa was not cooperating, and my fingers were frozen, so I was unsuccessful. Here are some other soldiers, though, so you can just pick one and imagine that it's Marcus.





Teresa had so much fun finally getting to hang out with her Daddy again! I think she recognized who he was. She didn't really show any preference for me over him, except for once after waking up from a nap. I think she was a little confused then. Marcus got to re-figure out how to change her diaper. I guess I should have helped him put her tights back on...I think she looks a little concerned in some of them ;)









We celebrated Marc's 27th (wow!) birthday while we were there. It's actually today. Happy Birthday Marcus! We went to Outback, where Marcus had a partially cooked steak and Teresa had a bottle. For his birthday, I let Marc change Teresa's blow out. You know you're jealous.






We forgot to have someone take a picture of all three of us, and T doesn't know how to work the camera yet, so we had to use the self timer.



Teresa was all kinds of tired at the end of the day



South Carolina was beautiful, and we had so much fun visiting Marcus and seeing him graduate! I'm so proud of him, I know Basic Training was really, super hard, and all three of us are glad it's over with!