Happy Valentine’s Day

With this sweet little valentine I had one of the best V-day’s I’ve had in a long time.  Nothing exciting, but as you can see Chloe was in an entertaining mood so I laughed a lot.  My little baby is growing up.  This weekend at Grandma and Grandpa’s she started drinking coffee!

Ok, it’s really chocolate soy milk, but she was so proud of herself and so excited about it I couldn’t take that joy away from her.  She was as always very dramatic about it and kept going with it all weekend.  She’s amazing and I can’t think of any new ways to say that so I’ll sign off with one more picture.

Grandma’s Birthday

My family had a get together this weekend to celebrate my Grandma’s birthday.  She is such a wonderful woman and is and has always been such a positive supportive force in all of our lives.  As always we had a great time.  Chloe loves being at my parents’ house so much.  I love it too, because they almost always give me at least one morning of sleeping in, and usually two!  Tomorrow night I have to attempt bedtime at a reasonable hour again because Chloe was up late again tonight and that’s not a great combo after a long weekend with too much excitement and not enough sleep.  My cousin had a great idea to create a scrapbook for Grandma with letters from her kids and grandkids telling her what she means to us, thanking her for the beautiful person she is, and sharing memories that we all have of her.  We had a great time finishing up the scrapbooking part of it late Saturday night and the great part is that my best friend came over to check on us and offer a little moral support when we still weren’t finished at 2 a.m.!  

I love looking at old family pictures.  We have done a lot of that lately because my dad has a new photo scanner that he is putting to good use.  It is amazing to see and hear the stories of all of the family members and try to keep the family tree straight in my head.  It makes me sad to think about how different this type of experience might be for Chloe some day.  She will have a million family pictures to look through and she will be in 97% of those pics because she is so darn photogenic and incredibly fond of the camera.  What she won’t have is the possibility of looking through old pictures and finding a shot of grandma when she was 3 looking exactly like her.  Grandma looks like her cousin Grace, not Chloe.  Maybe Chloe will not be the worrier that I am, maybe she won’t be as insecure either.  Maybe I’m raising the first child in the history of the world to be completely comfortable in her own skin and self-assured enough to not need to find those type of answers?  Maybe not.  Maybe, despite how amazingly happy-go-lucky she is at age 2, she will be your average teenager and young adult with questions about who she is and how she fits into the world.  Maybe on top of all of that she’ll wonder why she is where she is, who she came from, how she got here, and why it had to happen to her.  Maybe she’ll try to second-guess the decisions that were made for her by a bunch of adults that she didn’t know.  Maybe.  Maybe for her those questions will be impossible to answer.  That’s not fair.  That’s the part that makes me sad for her.

Who ever said life was fair?  That’s a favorite quote from a very wise friend of my mom’s who I really miss.  It’s not fair for any of us, at some point we all have to realize that.  No one’s life is “perfect” but there are people who have figured out the secret of being perfectly happy.  I’m not necessarily one of those people, but I have a tremendous amount of happiness in my life.  I just usually find a way to balance out the happy with a hefty dose of worry.  I wish I could leave out that second part, but no luck yet!  I hope Chloe is better at this than I am.  I’m not sure how to teach her to look at life in a more realistic light than I sometimes do, but I’m really trying.  We’ll see how it goes…

I haven’t really proofed this post, just kind of getting some thoughts out of my head so I can get to sleep.  Here are some of the cute pics we took this weekend at the birthday party!

any excuse for pictures

Yes, I might be guilty of spending too much money on pictures of my tiny pumpkin, but I looked at her the other day and realized that she looked different than she did a few months ago.  My Grandma’s birthday is on Wednesday and I decided that was a good reason to get more pictures taken last weekend.  She wasn’t sure she wanted to smile for the camera at first, but she decided it was pretty funny when the photographer’s assistant attacked Mommy with a furry monster/hand puppet!  

  

These were the earlier shots.  Maybe not a big smile, but I’m sure Gap would sell a million of these outfits if they decided to use them in an ad campaign.  

 

We had one of those weekends where I just felt like my heart might overflow over and over just from looking at Chloe.  She is in such a fun and wonderful stage right now.  Still some temper issues and some extra screeching that I wouldn’t miss if it became rare, but she’s such a sweetheart most of the time.  I carried Chloe around an antique mall for almost an hour and she didn’t fuss about it too much, she even snuggled her head on my shoulder and chattered about all the treasures we saw.  We had lunch in the park and played on the toys and she had a ball playing in the sand and climbing around.  I worked with my camera a little more and got a couple of shots I really liked.  I’m hoping to continue to improve with this camera, but after six months I’m proud of my progress.  The next thing I need to work on is clearly shadows.  It’s kind of a trade-off between the shadows on her face or her annoyed look at the sun blinding her.  Next time I’ll bring something to wash her face after lunch and before photos!

Yes that is her own 6-in sub sandwich, but she didn’t eat the whole thing.

She loves balls, but was not impressed she couldn’t move this giant cement ball by kicking it or batting it with her hands.  

This is a new face my silly girl is making a lot lately.

She really liked this little rock.  She snuggled it like a baby and wanted me to take the picture of it.

She liked playing in the sand almost as much as she likes playing in water.  I was just excited she could play outside without a coat on in the middle of winter.  She was very brave going down the slide by herself.

I just love this one.

Hope everyone else had a great weekend!  This week we might get to go wedding dress shopping with one of my cousins so I’m really excited for that.  Nothing much planned other than that.  What did that groundhog see today?  I think I could be ready for spring now.