Our big adventure!

Aaahhh, vacation was finally upon us. Here are some pics and details from our big adventure across Texas!

We started out the week in the LBK celebrating Carol's birthday! Happy #30 Cici...

...and celebrating Fathers Day! We sure do love our Daddy's :o)

We then headed north to Shamrock to have our with the folks for a while. Mollie sure was a big helper making dinner...

and playing in the sand at the river!

Then we headed south to Wimberley to the annual Malone Family Reunion! We found another river, "The Blue Hole" swimming area, and swam...

...and swam...

...jumped in the pool at the house and swam....

...and swam :o)

The three of us girls enjoyed a day at the spa in celebration of Carol's birthday...

...and we had a GREAT time visiting with everyone, playing catch phrase on the porch every evening, eating some delicious home-cooked meals, and just relaxing with family! We're already looking forward to next year :o)

16 months!

Our little stinker is 16 months old today!

Here's what she's up to this time...

If you remember from Mollie's 15 month update, she was having a reeeeally hard time with teething...it caused all sorts of drama! We've been grateful for a little break from this craziness and have seen a lot more of our sweet little Mollie. She's certainly working on some more teeth at the moment, but it seems to come and go and luckily the drool usually kicks in before the fussiness so we can be prepared :o)

She still has a heightened sensitivity to things, but her easy-going personality is still predominate.

For being SUCH a good eater, can be picky at times. I have learned that she likes something one day and not the next. To help with this, I've started letting Mollie "help" me fix her meal (holding a lid or spoon, pushing buttons on the microwave, etc.) and she becomes way more interested in it and almost never complains when she helps.

Related to the last point, loves to help! While still having a VERY short attention span and limited motor skills, she does a great job of helping pick up toys and put them in something (not always in the right "something", though! hehe), closing door and drawers, holding things for me (diaper rash ointment), etc. The more you offer praise for her efforts, the more she does them. She even signs "thank you" to herself after she does them! Haha!

Pushing boundaries: she will head towards something that's a "no no", look at you, say "no no", and proceed to disobey. The main thing lately has been climbing on the high chair. She starts to climb with a sly little grin on her face and waits to see what we'll do. Boy it wears me out to remain consistent!

Still talking up a storm! Saying more and more words every day, has pretty much added the sign "help" to her vocabulary (although she's still working on it), and is getting better and better at communicating. She still gets very frustrated at times when she can't get her thoughts across, which leads to whining, which drives me crazy, but we'll just keep on encouraging her to use those words appropriately!

Learning to use utensils! When we're at home, we practice a lot using a fork and spoon. In just the last few weeks she's gone from using it as a toy, to putting the right end in her mouth, to putting the right end with food in her mouth, and just today I witnessed her use the fork to stab the food and successfully put it in her mouth! It's still a messy endeavor, but we're making progress!

Her favorite foods right now are raisins, bananas, blackberries, lima beans, chicken fajitas, cheese, yogurt, hot dogs, iced tea (out of my cup!) and eggs. She likes LOTS of other things, but those are the things that she'll really put up a fight for right now!

Loves for us to sing to her. I love this. The ones she wants to hear again and again right now are Old Mcdonald, Itsy Bitsy Spider, and the ABC song. She'll sign "more" after each time and it's so sweet. That will definitely keep us singing to her :o)

Hugging and kissing! She's starting to perfect her hugs by actually using her arms and her kisses by actually smacking her lips! It's not just a big wet slobber anymore. She even has started showing a little boy at the gym some love by giving him a hug and kiss when he leaves...uh oh!

Here are some pics of our little lady! I decided when Mollie was born that I'd take a picture of her each year in her Daddy's shirt then we'd have them to look back at to see how much she's grown. Here are the pics we have so far!

Above: Week 1!

Below: Year 1!

Mollie's First Camping Trip

We survived our first camping trip as a family of 3!!

We headed out to Bottomless Lake State Park, NM on Friday night. It was less than a 3 hour drive, so that wasn't too bad. When we arrived we started to set up camp and I immediately had to put my cleanliness concerns aside as Mollie proceeded to head straight to the rocks and give herself a dirt bath. Awesome. But hey, who cares? We're camping, right?

We get the tent set up and get all our gear situated and start to head to bed at our normal time (which was pretty early because Jason had a Triathlon the next morning). However, since we're in a tent, it's daylight for way too long and it didn't cool off until the wee hours of the morning, so we all laid there tossing and turning for hours. Mollie was amazing through this process, however, and didn't make a peep even though she was as uncomfortable as could be. So somehow, we all managed to fall asleep at some point and the woke up at 5:30 or so because we're in a tent and are at the mercy of the sun. And Jason had a race, so we all had to get up early anyway.

We headed to Dexter, NM for the Milkman Triathlon. The race started at 8:00am, and it was already getting hot. Mollie and I found a playground to play on while Jason was racing, and she had a blast! In the meantime, Jason was enduring grueling heat while swimming, biking, and running, but ended up doing great and placed 4th in his age division! We hung out at the park for a bit until we were all miserably hot, then drove into Roswell to borrow some air conditioning (I mean, eat lunch :o).

Mollie and Daddy before the race

Deep thoughts...

We arrived back to our campsite and decided to go swimming, because did I mention that is was miserably hot?!? The campsite was next to a nice little lake (which just happened to be ice cold...yesssssss) so we spent the rest of the afternoon there. It was the ONLY way to cool off because it miserably hot. We all had a blast playing in the water! But before too long we were all exhausted from being in the sun and decided to head back to the tent.

At this point, we just couldn't get a break. You could cool off in the water, but get zapped by the sun. You could get out of the sun, but get zapped by the heat. We sprayed each other with a water bottle for the next few hours, ate dinner, and tried to go to sleep (I didn't mention that Mollie woke up at 5:30am with us, and didn't get to nap at all, and was still doing awesome at this point). As we were all laying there in a pool of sweat, we thought, "Why are we still here?" We accomplished all we wanted to do (sleeping under the stars, Jason finishing his race, swimming in the lake), so by golly why be miserable all night! At that point, we packed up camp in record time and headed home! It was worth it to get to cool off in the car and sleep under my ceiling fan and the air conditioning :o)

So we spent the next day rehydrating, catching up on sleep, and just being lazy. Looking back, that particular weekend probably wasn't the best weekend to be camping due to the heat, but we had an amazing time as a family, let the little one get a taste of being in God's creation, and made some memories! It was a blast and we absolutely plan to go camping again...when it cools off a little bit :o)

We also had the pleasure of celebrating our wonderful Lacye's birthday on Sunday!!! This fantastic sister, momma, and friend is a year older and is loved very much! Happy birthday lady :o)