21 Months Old!

Emily is 21 Months Old Today!!

The monthly update pictures I get of Emily are just getting better and better : ) She won't sit still for a picture to save her life! So here she is at 21 months old. We hear "Emily yes" about 500 times a day now. She wants to sit at the computer and see all the pictures and videos of herself and look thru picture books. I suppose we have created a monster : ) Last night she was sitting on the couch next to Joe looking at a picture book, and saw a picture of herself crying. She looked up at Joe and said, "Emily cry" and then squinted up her eyes and poked out her bottom lip and let out the biggest fake cry we've ever seen. Of course we busted out laughing which was probably the biggest mistake in the world . . . but it sure was funny! The other night I was putting on her pajamas and she put her arm up to her mouth and blew on it and said, "Emily burp" . . . um what? Where in the world did she learn how to do that????? We got a kick out of it. I guess Joe has taught her a bad trick : )

She continues to love going to Bible class and going to the Mother's Morning out program and she still LOVES to go outside. Our neighbor next door continues to bring all his toys over to Emily so she now has a lawn mower that she likes to push up and down the driveway. I keep asking him if he wants his stuff back and he says No, that he wants Emily to have them. So we risk our newly cleaned out garage getting filled up with all his left over toys : )

More cleaning

The more we clean, the more Emily finds to keep for herself! Sunday afternoon we cleaned out all of the CD cases that we had in the computer room and set them out to throw them all away (old computer games that no one would want, etc) . . . well wouldn't you know that this is the first thing Emily goes for each morning to play with . . . so I haven't thrown them out yet. She goes thru all the cases and carries them to different rooms in the house. She figured out the other day how to get a case open so now I have old CD's and old cases spread all over the place. You can go to any room in our house and will find a CD or two hanging around.

She also has her own special keyboard that she digs out of the computer room closet and drags around. She hadn't played with it in a while so she had to get that out too. Here she is with her new set of "toys" in the hallway:

Emily Talking

Well we cleaned out our garage today. I'm so glad we got it done! Most of the boxes were empty because we've been saving them for a future move one day. So we put all the empty boxes in the attic and threw away a bunch of junk we haven't used since we moved it into this garage almost 6 years ago : ) Here's a before and after shot:


The big green tarp below will also be gone at Christmas when we give Emily her kitchen set that we're hiding under there. We also plan to put a freezer in place of the table so we can start storing more food. I love that I can now easily walk to that part of the garage and can also store the 3 play cars that Emily has now.

This morning we went to the Cobb County Library book sale. They happened to be having a rodeo at the same place so one of the men let Emily pet the horses:
We were definitely amateurs at this book sale. People had their list of authors and were walking thru the aisles with their big boxes and suitcases to buy lots of books. Hardbacks were $1 and paperbacks were 50 cents! I bought 3 books. Next time we will come more prepared and can fit in with the crowd : )

I FINALLY got Emily on video saying as many words as I could think of while I had her attention. She keeps saying "Emily" and bouncing up and down because she wants to watch herself on the video. I kept drawing a blank on words to ask her to say, so we went thru a bunch of names. Enjoy!

It's amazing to me how much she is talking now. Check her out just 4 and a half months ago starting to talk . . . wow!

Ice Cream

Tonight we met Joe for dinner and then went for ice cream. Emily calls it "i-keam". I got this picture of her with my phone:


Earlier today we enjoyed going up and down the street in her car. The neighbors came over and pushed her up and down the driveway so she got a lot of "car time" today!
I'm in the process of cleaning out all my old work stuff that I haven't used in a while. This is in an attempt to move all my "junk" to a smaller desk. I've had this support notebook since 1995 when I started working in support. Back then when you needed to remember something about how our software works, you typed or wrote out a support tip and kept it in your notebook. Now we have an FAQ database that we store all our tips in . . . but I would still use this notebook from time to time on "old" support calls that would come in. But I realized today that I don't really use it anymore . . . so I pulled out a few things that I might still need and chunked the rest . . . I was a little sad throwing my old notebook away. This notebook is how I learned to support our product line . . . times have changed:

October

Emily wore a pumpkin dress today in preparation for Halloween! I can't wait to dress her up and take her trick or treating this year. It has rained the last two days so we've had a little bit of cabin fever. Today I opened up the garage door and Emily rode around in the car my sister gave us. I'll have to post a picture of that soon.

We had planned on selling our house and getting something a little bigger, but with the economy going in the tank we decided to make due with the house we have. So I've been on a cleaning kick lately. I cleaned out our hall closet, computer room closet, all my junk on my computer desk, and cleaned out Emily's toy box. I don't like clutter so I do this about once a year. It amazes me how much we accumulate. We are in preparation for rearranging furniture in our house to make our living situation more doable. I hope by the end of the month we'll have everything done . . . as I don't like things in limbo either. Our plan this Saturday is to clean out the garage . . . hoo hoo!!!! Joe is thrilled : )

Fun Trip

Wednesday afternoon I flew to Texas for our annual college roommate trip. This is our 5th year to do this and we had so much fun! We went to Angie's house this year in Temple, Texas. We enjoyed staying up late and talking and sleeping in each morning. We never left the house before 1:00 p.m. each day. We talked, laughed, shopped, ate great food, watched movies and enjoyed being together again. As always I get a little sad when I get home because we only get to see each other once a year. But the Lord is good to us in allowing our time together to be so blessed.

Me (Marietta, GA), Michelle (Columbia, TN), Danielle (Dallas, TX), Angie (Temple, TX)

Here's a picture I scanned of us at my wedding. 13 years and 11 children later we really are getting older!!!

While we were there we went shopping at IKEA. So I decided to buy Emily a place mat and plastic plates so she could start eating at the table with us. So bye-bye high chair! I bought a $10 booster seat today and Emily ate her first meal at our table tonight. She looked like such a big girl that I had to get pictures:
Since Emily stayed with my parents for part of the time I was gone, they went ahead and gave Emily one of her Christmas presents early. Here she is sitting at the table and chairs they gave her. She enjoyed coloring and playing with stickers yesterday at her new table:I went 4 days without seeing Emily and it was surreal today being around her. I felt like she added so many words to her vocabulary while I was gone. I just stared at her this morning listening to her talk. I was changing her diaper and she said "hold the wipes" . . . I said, "when did you learn how to use the word the!!!" It blows me away how fast they learn.

Cooler Weather

We finally have some cooler weather this morning so I put a sweater on Emily. We went to story time at the library this morning. That was hilarious! Out of about 12 children, only 2 stayed on the mat for story time. The rest of the kids either sat in their parent's lap or walked around and looked at each other. Emily stayed engaged for a little bit and then started turning around to see the other kids. One girl came up and took her bow out of her hair. This child was WAY active. I felt bad for her mother because her little girl kept wanting to come up and touch all the other kids and would talk really loud. She finally just picked her up and left . . . bless her. We had a good time. After singing and listening to a couple of books, we colored and then Emily got a stamp on her hand.

Emily is keeping us on our toes. Every time we pull up into the Wal-Mart parking lot (which is a lot) she starts saying, "sticker man" because of the Wal-Mart greeter that always gives her a sticker. She also immediately starts saying "more fries, more fries" when we go thru ANY type of drive thru : ( When she wants to play with something now she says the word and then nods her head and says "Yes". . . .like "stickers" . . . "Yes", "Busy Bible" . . . "Yes". Too cute! Her appetite has slowed down at meals now. After 3 bites she pulls off her bib and says "all done". So we have to put her bib back on and get her to eat some more . . . this is so different than before because I couldn't get food on her tray quick enough.

I'm heading to Texas today to see my college roommates. We get together once a year . . . so Emily is going to have a big time at PawPaw and Dee Dee's house.

Here we are this morning enjoying the cool breezes of Fall: