Ten Months

Tressa turned ten months old today. It makes me sad. She's getting way too big, way too fast :(. She is such a joy, I'm listening to her play at the toy box right now, chatting away to all the toys she's pulling out. We went back to the doctor this last week to do another weight check. Since she only gained three ounces between her six and nine month checkups, the doctor was a little concerned, and sent us home with instructions to work on fattening her up. He suggested formula, but we ignored him (mostly) and loaded her up with ground flax seed and coconut milk. She LOVED her coconut milk. It worked pretty well, she weighed in at 19 pounds 5 ounces this time around. The doctor said she was "a good, chunky girl".

Are you ready for some pictures? I was blog hopping the other day and came across this website doing a giveaway for a free baby hat. I never, ever enter giveaways, but for some reason I thought I would win this one if I entered, and I did! So random. Anyway, I got to choose a cute, hand made hat for Tressa, and we got it in the mail today. So, since I was planning on documenting her tenth month birthday anyway, here she is in her cute new hat. She kept it on longer than any hat yet. Which is exciting to me, because I really love babies in hats. Maybe she'll start letting me put more hats on her...

I'll warn you now, there are A LOT of them. I just couldn't decide which ones I liked best. And yes, that is a tin of mustard she's holding. She swiped it from the table while she was eating dinner and just wouldn't let it go.



This is her reaction when she sees a camera now, usually. You have to be quick to catch that first smile, though.







Just ignore that mess in the background. Did I mention that we're packing to move to Florida? We leave on Thursday!













Cute hat, right? I think the bow is supposed to be in the front, but it kept getting in her eyes, making her try to pull it off, so I just turned it to the back and she forgot about it. If you want one like it, go here. She makes cute boy hats too!

Three days later...

I've been trying to post this for the past three days. Blogger FINALLY decided to let me load the videos. So. They're probably not worth all the effort, but there they are.


She actually wasn't too pleased about being in the pot. Go figure...

And, sorry these videos are sideways. I know, it's annoying. I never remember that I can't rotate a video like I can pictures. But, you know, just tilt your head a little, and it's not so bad.

She's gettin' there...

Just a little video of Teresa and the little walker we got her today at a thrift store. She's been cruising around the furniture for a while now, and once used an oatmeal box to walk across the room, so I had been thinking about looking for one of these toys for her. And then today we spotted one at a thrift store for $3.77, which happened to be exactly in my price range ;). She refused to interact with it at the store, but luckily changed her mind after we had it home for a while. We're all pretty interested to see when she'll start walking on her own. My dad is hoping she starts before we leave here, and Marc is, of course, hoping that she waits until we're back with him. I used to be really eager for her to start walking early, but now I'm a little sad at how fast she is growing, so I'm okay if she waits on that milestone.

This week, but mostly today.

We haven't had the best week around here. It's been quite the sick house. It all started when Nuala got pink eye last week. So that's been making the rounds. Teresa was blessed to get it yesterday. Lucky girl. Have I mentioned how much I hate pink eye? (Because most people just love it, ya know :) Chalk it up to a really bad pink eye experience I had the summer after my freshman year of college. (Thanks again, Mellors :) Anyway, so Teresa got pink eye, and we got some eye drops from the doctor. Well, from the pharmacist, but the doctor prescribed it. Have you ever tried putting eye drops in a nine month old's eyes? Not too easy. We tried distracting her with a bottle during the eye drops, but she caught on to that real quick.

What else...I got the flu Saturday night, driving home from Dallas. We had a blast at the Irish Festival up there, but regretted staying as long as we did when we straggled in to Boerne after 1:00 A.M. and had to be at church at 9 Sunday morning. Well, I didn't, thanks to the flu, but Fiona and Erin were sure tired the next day. And then today. Oh, today. And last night, really. I don't think I've ever coughed so much in my life. Ever. Luckily, Teresa has been really good about sleeping through all my hacking. And seriously, I took some cough medicine that was supposed to last for eight hours about a half hour ago. But guess what I'm doing right now? Besides blogging, of course. Yep, coughing away.

We're just a pathetic bunch here. All the children came in from jumping on the trampoline and we were treated to a wonderful chorus of coughing. Poor kiddos. I think most of them are on the upswing. And thankfully, T has only had to deal with the pink eye. She somehow avoided all my flu/coughing germs.

And then I talked to Marc. And the day got even lame-er.(More lame? Neither one sounds that good to me...). Anyway. His foot had really been hurting him a few weeks ago. So he went to the doctor, and they told him it was probably broken, and to make an appointment for further discussion later. Which he did. The results? After looking at the x-rays, his doctor came in and said "Your foot is seriously effed up", only with less polite language. It was a Navy doctor, after all. Turns out Marc will be needing some awesome surgery on his foot. The good news is, the doc said if it isn't bothering him, we can probably wait until we get to Maryland to have that done. Which brings me to the saddest part of the day...

Last week Marcus found out he will be able to do the advanced training he was hoping for. Which is a good thing. He really, really wanted to do it, and it will be great career wise, etc, etc. It means six more months of training in Florida. Tressa and I will be moving there the first of April until about Septemberish. Then we will go to Maryland for the next 3-5 years. Which is pretty exciting. We're both especially excited to get to live in one spot for more than a year finally. The sad part? Today, Marc found out that if he hadn't gotten the class, and we had just gotten our orders, we would have been sent to Germany. Which was easily our number one pick of where we would have loved to be sent. Can you believe it? I'm trying not to be too bummed about it. I know we'll still have a great time in Florida, and I am really excited to go to Maryland. But, seriously, why couldn't they have made our orders to Georgia (the one place neither Marc nor I wanted to go)? That would have made me SO much more excited about Florida and Maryland.

The Germany news came just about five minutes after I talked to my cousin to cancel our weekend plans. You know, due to the flu/coughing up a lung/T's pink eye. We were supposed to meet up in Houston, Sarah, Angie and me. (Well, Sarah and Angie are already there, I was the only one meeting them there, I guess) Sarah finally got home from her mission in January (February?) So it would have been our first time back together since she left. And the first time the three of us would have been back together since...I don't know when. More than two years, I think. So I'm pretty bummed about that. Because in a week or so Sarah is off to California, and I'm off to Florida, so this was pretty much our only chance.

And to top it all off...we're out of Rocky Road ice cream. I guess I'll have to settle for Cookies and Cream...

Oh well. Maybe next week will be better. And as long as this little girl is involved, we'll have a great time wherever we go...

Are you ready?

Because this post is going to have A LOT of pictures. We just got back from Baytown and Katy, where we were visiting Marc's side of the family. Teresa is so lucky to have all her grandparents and so many cousins close by! She had a ball visiting everyone. She and her little cousin were so cute together, they're the main reason for all the pictures. It's just hard to put the camera away when there are two cute babies around!

Here she is with Olivia:



They both just loved this toy so much. Actually, they both really loved whatever toy the other was holding. There was quite the showdown over the tube of A&D diaper cream one night. They kept stealing it from each other. Too cute.





They did manage to figure out how to share the measuring tape...






Poor T, this is possibly one of her worst pictures. It made me laugh ;)



Her new thing is to flap her arms up and down when she's happy or excited. That's why they're blurry in the second picture. She just really loved her cousin, she would crawl over to him and flap her little arms with a big smile on her face.





She loved this Tigger toy. He bounces up and down, and he actually got a few giggles out of her. She was cute, I would start him up, and as soon as she heard him she would smile and kind of brace herself for the bouncing to start.



The babies with T's Aunt Melissa. Kinda hard to get them both to smile at once...



Melissa made Tressa this cute little pillowcase dress for St. Patrick's Day. Here she is standing in front of Gigi's St. Patrick's Day tree.



With Gigi and Poppie, and her Great-Granny:





Teresa turned nine months old on March 1st, I guess it was, since February is without a 29th. She had her nine month appointment last week while we were in Austin. I wanted to take her in because of all of her weird hives/skin issues, so we went ahead and made it her nine month check up, even though it was nine days early...the doctor wasn't too concerned about her little allergic reaction, he just thought she might have really sensitive skin, since she's also been having dryness issues. She's down to the 25th percentile for weight, so we're working on fattening her up a bit. She's still tall, and did awesome with her shots.

She got her third tooth this week, one of her upper ones. (Hmmm, she got her bottom two when we were in Baytown over the holidays, maybe there's something in the water...). She had a really rough night Saturday night, so I wasn't too surprised Sunday morning to find that a new little (sharp!) tooth was working its way down. Her teething was accompanied by a little diaper rash, so Gigi pulled out some cloth diapers hoping those would help heal it faster. They did, plus I thought they were cute on:



We are so excited for it to finally be March! Marcus graduates from AIT in 24 days! After over seven months of training we are ready for him to be done. We're still waiting to hear where we will be going after AIT. Right now it's pretty likely that we'll end up in Florida for another five months of training, but we're still waiting to hear the final word on that. I guess we'll find out sometime between now and the 26th...