The Growing Caldwell Family

I just love babies and he is a cutie.  It feels kind of neat to be an aunt and have a nephew!  I just wish we weren't so far away.

Yes, I know she is wearing a t-shirt for a disposable diaper manufacturer.  No, we have not started usng disposable diapers.  They gave it to us one day when we were in Babies R Us and I just threw it on her the other night because she needed something to run around in before it was time to put on her pajamas.  When she is fifteen she will thank me for not taking a video of her topless. :)  That's one less thing for her to discuss during therapy.

Today, Aaron and I became an uncle and aunt and SG gained a cousin!  Arden delivered sweet baby Austin this afternoon.  He weighed 7 pounds, 9 ounces and was 19 1/2 inches long.  What a sweet boy! We wish we could be there to celebrate his arrival.  Hopefully, we will have more pictures soon! 

This picture does not do this dress justice, it is adorable.  Ms. Margaret Anne made it for SG late last summer and I am so excited that it fits her now.  I love all the cute detail with the parasol on it and purple is a great color for her.  We are grateful for such cute things!

Dear Sarah Graves, Boy, fourteen months old and you are a funny toddler.  You run, climb, and have such a funny little personality.  You seem to be developing a sense of humor that is cute to watch.  You get tickled by certain things and you still enjoy mimmicking.  The funny part is that now you know that you are doing it and get tickled yourself.  As an infant you physically grew so fast, but you seem to have slowed down a lot.  I bought your fall clothes in an eighteen months size and thought for sure you would need the twenty-four months size for the spring.  Some of them are fitting now, but some are very roomy.  You seem to be getting taller, but I suspect you may end up being more petite.  I still love those chunky thighs and little rolls on your arms!  You are really trying to say more words.  One of the funniest things you say is, "oh baby!"  You have said it a few times so I'm pretty certain that is what you said and you say it when you get something that you re

Yep, that's what these things are.  She had never even had one and she was pointing and going crazy for it.  Once she had one, it was all over.  She wants to eat the whole box.  I wonder who she might get that from...

I heard this story on the news this morning about a girl with peanut allergies that are so severe, they are considered a disability.  The Americans with Disabilities Act requires that her school make accommodations for her.  The accommodations are in the form of requiring the kids in her first grade class to wash their hands and rinse their mouths out before entering the classroom.  Her allergy is so severe that breathing peanuts can harm her.  Parents are protesting that this is unreasonable because the accommodation is impacting their children.  I personally thought that banning peanut products in most schools was a bit much, but this seems extreme.  As a parent, I think I would feel this was unreasonable to ask my child to do multiple times a day, every day.  I can also understand the girl's parents wanting her to be safe.  I wonder how she goes anywhere in public?  Eating peanut butter sandwiches seems like such a normal kid thing, but all of these kids with allergies are put

Sarah Graves has some new shoes!  She has a pair of Keen's for babies!  They are tiny, pink and purple, and about the cutest things ever!  The great thing for me is that they are washable!  Thanks to Lovie for picking them out for her!

I have been waiting with great anticipation for Sarah Graves to say Momma.  She has been saying Da-Da for a while and she can say Pop for Pops.  I thought for a while that the mmm sound was hard for her, but she can tell you that the cow says, "mmmmm", so that isn't it.  Finally, last week we realized that she does call me, she just calls me Ba-Ba.  I guess that is kind of appropriate because I serve the purpose of a bottle in her world, so why night just refer to it that way! :)   So now if you ask her to say Momma, she will emphatically say Ba-Ba.  She is a funny kid.

I hear a lot of moms talk about needing "me time", but I haven't felt that urge yet.  I enjoy time to do things like watch TV or be on the computer when she is asleep, but I don't feel a desire to leave her to go and do things.  I guess this keeps coming up when I have junior league events.  I joined junior league when I lived in Baton Rouge and it was a lot of fun because my dear friend, Alexis, was also a member and it was a chance for us to hang out.  I don't have any really close friends in this league and now with Sarah Graves it sometimes feels like more of a nuissance than a treat to go to the events.  Sometimes I really do enjoy it and take pride in the things we do to help our community, but other times it feels like something else to work into my schedule. So that has me wondering if I should continue to be a member, or just give it up.  You can't really start again once you quit, so I need to think it through.  I know that right now I would not mis

She was a St. Patrick's Day princess today wearing her four leaf clover crown.  Okay, she wore it for a few seconds and then wanted it off, but she is always our princess. Lovie made her this shirt with an "S" and four leaf clovers around it.  She looked so cute in it with her jeans on!

Yep, we have a swingset in our backyard.  This swingset has been a labor of love for Aaron and my Dad.  Neighbors of my parents had it in their yard and offered it to Dad.  He and Aaron took it apart last summer and brought it here, but it needed a lot of work.  Over the past few weeks they replaced some rotten wood and got it put together.  It's pretty big with 3 swings, the climbing structure/club house, the slide, tire swing, and the trapeze bar (the kind of thing I loved as a kid).  It still needs some more work, but we were really excited for her to try it out!  She has a baby swing and she loves to go down the slide!  She can sit on the tire swing and likes it, but I have to really hold her so the won't fall off.  The other parts will have to wait until she is older.  The swings are set up so that we can all swing together.  She is so cute when she looks over and smiles at you swinging next to her. She likes to swing high!  None of that slow baby stuff for my girl! She l

Sarah Graves wants to sit on everything, so Lovey bought her a chair that is just her size.  Well, almost.  She is just slightly too short, so she can't walk up to it and sit down.  She knows how to climb up, but has a hard time turning around to sit down. She is so cute when she does sit down and starts tapping her foot!  This is the part where she can't figure out how to sit down.  She will soon.

I am just now uploading last week's baby shot photo from the camera.  She is such a funny girl!

Leading up to the beginning of Lent Aaron and I decided that we would start the 17 Day Diet.  I had a few reasons, the two biggest were probably my dreadful addiction to sugar and my desire to model good eating habits for SG.  We gave it a lot of thought, talked about the foods we would be eating, and some of the foods that we would not be eating.  In case you haven't heard about it, the 17 Day Diet  has been quite popular with TV shows like The Doctors  and the Dr. Oz show.  The program goes through 4 phases and each one lasts for 17 days.  During phase 1 you can eat as much lean chicken, turkey, and fish, non-starchy vegetables, and egg whites as you like.  You eat 2 servings a day of fat free, no sugar added yogurt (greek yogurt is recommended) and fruit.  You are encouraged to drink green tea several times a day, warm lemon water in the morning, and at least 7 glasses of water a day.  You can have up to 2 T. of olive oil or flaxseed oil a day as a fat and you can also have 2 e

Since SG was about a month old hostesses have been bringing us kids menus and little packs of crayons.  A few weeks ago I decided to let her try the crayons.  She wasn't sure how to actually color on the paper and she had a hard time deciding which hand to use to hold the crayon.  After a minute I noticed that she bit the tip of the crayon off, and quickly put them away.  I know they aren't toxic, but who wants to see that when you change a diaper.  The other night at dinner we let her try again.  She doesn't understand to put pressure in order to color on the page, but she liked holding it and trying.  We watched her carefully and explained that crayons aren't for eating.  We still aren't sure which hand she prefers.  She switches back and forth.  Aaron and I are both lefties, which of course explains why we are in our right mind :), so we are interested to see if she will prefer her right or her left.  We don't really care either way; we're just curious. 

Santa left a toothbrush in her stocking and we have been trying to brush her teeth before bed.  She doesn't seem to mind it.  Sometimes she wants to chew on it, but she lets us get in there and brush around.  She really is good natured and willing to try what we introduce to her. 

I made the decision that today would be the first day I wouldn't pump at work.  I feel really guilty quitting pumping because I know that my milk is the best thing for her.  On the other hand, it made me feel stressed worrying about my dwindling supply and finding time in my day to go pump.  In the end, it was my choice to stop.  She has to have something to tell her therapist about, after all.  Physically, I was just fine today.  Emotionally, I felt like leaving my pump at home was like going to work without a friend.  My time to pump was also my time to take a break during my busy day.  It was my time to relax for a few minutes and just be.  It was also a time when I felt like I was doing something really good for my baby that no one else could do for her.  No one could have ever made me understand how torn I would feel as a mother.  I am constantly feeling pulled in different directions.  Of course, no one ever made me understand that the love you feel as a mother is exponenti

On the weekends, I like to have what I think of as fun breakfast.  Fun breakfast to me is the kind of breakfast I don't have time for on a weekday.  French toast is one of my favorites.  When I was a kid, my Dad would get up on Saturday mornings and often he would make french toast.  He called it Daddio's Famous French Toast.  I have a lot of fond memories of those Saturday mornings.  Yes, I like a lot of powdered sugar on mine. Sarah Graves had french toast, too.  Minus the powdered sugar.  She at a whole slice of her own!  She had a hard, round tummy when she was finished.  I handed her pieces that she fed herself.  Self-feeding is something that we don't do a lot of, but this was something she could have on her own. 

Church has been a struggle and I have been reluctant to try the nursery.  I just don't want to leaver her thinking that she is going to cry.  Today she was particularly spirited in the service.  She was trying to talk a lot, banging her book on the pew (even padded baby books make noise if you bang them hard enough), and climbing all around.  When people were turning their heads to lok at us, I made the decision that we needed to give the nursery a try.  It isn't fair to ask her to be quiet and still and she is only behaving like a one year old behaves.  So, I took her over to the nursery, signed her in, and told her bye bye.  She looked at me like she could care less because she was in a room with lots of stuff she had never seen before.  I walked out and stood a distance from the door and waited.  I could hear the caregivers talk to her and occasionally she would cry out for a second, but she never went into all out wailing like I feared.  All in all, she was in there for 15

Sarah Graves is really strong.  She has no qualms about moving something that is in her way, or as I think, just to show that she can do it.  She can move kitchen chairs wherever necessary and frequently lifts up toys like her ride on train.  Here she is moving the baby gate around for reasons not obvious to me.  She likes to push the laundry basket around.  There are several of them stacked inside one another and she got the idea that she wanted to take them out.  It took her a while, but eventually she was able to pull them apart.  Why do we buy her toys?

I love these jammies.  I always get sentimental when she outgrows her jammies.  It feels like such a loss to admit that she has grown taller and pack them up.  But it's always good that she is growing taller, even if I feel sad about the jammies that don't fit.  Maybe I could make them into little pillows or something so that I could keep them around?  How about putting them in shadow boxes and I could line the wall up the staircase with them?  No? 

Monday i brought my aging Volvo in to see what was causing a service light to come on. Getting up early enough to leave with SG and Aaron is almost enough to kill me. I was pretty sure i was going to die later as my cold like symptoms got worse. You know, put me in a pasture so I can go with dignity kind of bad. Those who know me, know that I don't ever have my cell on. It's more a device for outgoing calls than it is for incoming. That would explain why i made a special effort to turn the ring volume on yesterday and didn't recognize that little song I kept hearing from it. Eventually, I figured it out and was pleased that it was the repair shop calling to tell me my car was ready. Today I am feeling much better and my car is running great! SG has picked up some new words that I need to get on video. Let's just say that she has secured her place in my Dad's heart, oh for forever. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPad