Four Months

Already half a month ago, Baby Bub turned four months old. Alas, holiday cards demanded my time instead of blogging, but here finally is her update. This precious girl is still growing like a weed! And it's proven: her doctor's office stats jumped from 5th to 23rd percentile in height, 20th to 35th percentile in weight, and a whopping 38th to 78th percentile in head circumfrence. Must be a big, beautiful brain in there!!

and compare :)

What a month it's been-- little Maddie Brynn's personality has blossomed so much and we are loving every minute of it...or maybe I should say every minute of daylight, because night time has not been quite as fun. Although she teased us at 3 months with sleeping more at night, this past month she has consistently woken around every 3-4 hours. BOO! Her already voracious appetite seemed to increase all over again, and this hungry hungry hippo wants her food.

This past month she has also made a lot of new discoveries, mainly her hands!

She likes to watch her hands and fingers, move them around, and most of all

stuff them in her mouth!

She also made the big step of starting to grab her toys with both hands. We call her a little hoarder because she likes to grab as many as possble in one swipe, and it's really cute to watch.

Baby Bub has also officially discovered her tongue...which she likes to stick out at us.

A lot.

Other discoveries? That she has her daddy completely wrapped around her finger...

(not surprising)

And how much fun it is to look in the mirror!

totally captivated :)

She continues to practice sitting in her bumbo, and likes to be where the action is, like hanging out with her sister and grandaddy!

Frequent blog readers already know that she had a great Thanksgiving, where she allowed mommy and daddy to have a calm, peaceful dinner,

and hung out with family, like her fun Aunt Alysia, who makes her laugh :0)

And last but not least, this was the month that she became mommy's little fashion plate!!

I love dressing up my little doll-- Maddie Brynn, you are the (second) light of our lives!!

Christmas Highlights

Best to post some xmas pics before time gets away from me again. Bub the hub and I absolutely LOOOOVED celebrating Christmas with our TWO beautiful girls. We started the festivities on Christmas Eve celebrating with Grandaddy. We discovered that Grandaddy has a super special baby knee bouncing ability that no one else can replicate. It takes babies from this:

to this:

pretty cool huh?

Then Avery slept in until 8:30am on Christmas morning, which was a bloomin' miracle and just a wonderful overall present to her parents!! Here are the silly sleepy girls--

hey girls, want to see if Santa came??

And boy did Santa pay us a visit! My living room simply exploded with presents...Bub the hub enjoyed all his presents,

and we almost lost little Maddie Brynn in all her gifts...

Avery's favorite part was having a gingerbread cookie for breakfast!

(yum)

Next we traveled to Nana's house for another morning celebration, where some of us stayed in our p.j.'s and lil'bub might have enjoyed playing with her present bows more than her actual presents.

Baby Bub was amused her new giraffe pillow :)

Then it was time to get dressed for the rest of the day! Here is sweet Avery in her annual holiday dress photo with her momma-

and her past three Christmas days, of course :)

what a precious joy she is!

We think Nana and Uncle Drew had a pretty good time as well. Then it was on to the next place-- Christmas lunch with Bub the hub's family, where it was nap time for big sister, but little sister got to hang out with more family.

cuddling with Pops

makin faces at MawMaw

and the quickest and most enjoyable way to calm a fussy Maddie Brynn:

looking at that "other" baby in the mirror...she sure is pretty!!

THEN it was time to head to Chappell Hill and Christmas with my mom's side of the family at the Barndominium, which you can see in these lovely photos from my aunt's Christmas card--

There we ate some amazing food and winded down from a long day. We tried for one good family pic...

but the floor was evidently too fascinating.

Hope everyone had a merry merry Christmas!

Checking Back

Checking back in to say I am NOT in the loony bin, but still exhausted and insanely busy. Also glad to say that all of the client holiday cards from Sugar Bee Designs made it out and they are all unique and wonderful in their own little way!! Now I have a few more presents to buy and a ton of wrapping to do... and I've almost made it through the first vacation week home with two girls, with a lot of help from Nana and Grandaddy. I have the best parents.

Speaking of Nana, here she is with my lovely, holiday attired daughters, thanks to my sweet Aunt Christine:

Avery looked so grown up!

and happy with her Nana <3

and some awesome out-takes:

My sweet Baby Bub passed the four month mark last week and I can't wait to share how she's doing-- it's been so much fun to watch her grow and change so quickly!  I just need to carve out a little more blogging time soon. In between all the holiday craziness. No problem at all...

Currently Feeling...

like this:

Between my business, the girls, xmas shopping, teacher's gifts and overall holiday craziness, I am trying VERY hard not to go INSANE!!!!!!!!!! I'll check back soon and tell y'all if I've officially lost my mind or not. Do they let you blog from the loony bin? Not sure. Will send message through Bub the hub if not.

Thanksgiving Recap

Thought I should probably post about Thanksgiving before I turn around and it's the new year! We had a really nice day celebrating with family, and everyone stuffed themselves with lots of delicious food!!

WHAT?!? I don't get any of the food??

Well, everyone except Baby Bub stuffed themselves.

But she did get lots of good milk!!

Avery's favorites were the butternut squash

and skillet apple pie with ice cream!

Not so favorite...

mashed potato casserole (we liked it though!)

we visited with family

there was even an Uncle Drew sighting!

(promise Avery was more excited about it than this)

The next day we got to visit with even more family at the Barndominium, it was so much fun! And we finally got some good photos of Madeline with my cousin Kingslea's new precious baby, Johnny.

She looks like she's about to shove him out of her photo lol :)

Here's a good one! so excited for these two to be good friends

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! I can't give thanks enough for the blessings in my life. Even if my girls DO drive me a little nuts sometimes ha! Seriously though, it's hard for me not to remember being in and out of the hospital at this point with baby Avery, with no end in sight. Instead, we are just soaking in this new experience, mindful of how lucky we are...today I heard Madeline laugh for the first time! I think I might have scared her with my shreak of happiness. It's those moments of pure joy that I want to soak up, never forget.

Three Months

Baby Bub turned three months old last week and I can hardly believe how much she is changing before my eyes!

and for comparison-

precious girl, you are growing too fast! slow down!!

Madeline is now just over ten pounds and right above 21 inches long. She finally graduated to size one diapers, but still fits into most of her newborn clothes, which are not baggy at all anymore. Those little legs are definitely growing, no doubt about it! She continues a pretty consistent night time schedule where she is out by 9 or 10pm, wakes up once in the night, and then up anywhere from 5-7am. Weirdly, the clinical definition of sleeping through the night is 12-5am, and she is definitely not doing that yet, but hopefully once her tummy gets a little bigger we can give up a feeding.

This past month we took our sweet baby girl on her very first road trip, which was to Dallas for our annual State Fair trip. She slept all the way there and all the way back, which mommy did not expect, but appreciated greatly! While we were there, it was discovered that this little tyke has started ROLLING and already needs to be watched all the time!!

This month has also seen the development of Madeline's FULL face--brilliant--awesome--cannot help but return--SMILE. Exhibit A:

And even better, she has started "talking" a lot. Quite the conversationalist! She coos back and forth with everyone that catches her eye, and her little voice is so sweet I can barely stand it :)

This past month Madeline definitely began appreciating the car a lot less, and gets quite fussy at almost all stop lights>1 minute, which is exactly what her sister did at the same age. Something she is doing ions before her sister, however, is sitting like a champ in the bumbo! She likes watching the lights on t.v. while her sister watches Mickey Mouse.

She also still enjoys her swing, which is really nice in the mornings when I am trying to get her sister off to school. If she gets fussy, I tell her that it's all for a good cause: so mommy can return and we can have "Madeline time."

Although her milk protein sensitivity seems a lot better, we started having a great big spit up (and sometimes projectile) problem in the past month and did get some medicine for that, which might be working (I'm not entirely sure yet) but she has been keeping a little more down recently. Meanwhile, we are doing a TON more laundry.

For Halloween, Baby Bub was sweet enough to be a white rabbit for her sister's

Alice in Wonderland....

she wasn't 100% thrilled about it though.

Her sister made a beautiful Alice however!

and only because you all know how much I like comparisons,

look how my little princess has grown up through the Halloweens!

don't you think the biggest change was definitely this year??

all the sudden she's such a little girl, not a baby :)

Back to sweet Madeline, this month she also got to meet one of her soon

to be very closest baby friends, Ms. Skylar McKinney.

They are only about a month apart :)

Their older sisters are a little farther in age, but only by about 7 months.

Their first meeting looked a little different though!

 2 month old Leila and 9 month old Avery--

these girls bond over their mutual love for shoes!!

I know I keep getting distracted! But back again to Madeline, she so far continues to be a very sweet sibling, which includes keeping her big sister company during therapy.

Little Madeline Brynn continues to bring us utter joy and we can't wait to see what she does next. And because obviously I haven't posted enough photos yet, here is one more.