Evie and Kaelyn

Posted on Monday 15 June 2009

One of the many joys of our new Evie is seeing Kaelyn interact with her. Most of the time, there are more exciting things for Kaelyn to do, but several times a day she’ll become interested in Evie. Everyone asks us how Kaelyn gets along with the newborn, so here are a couple of videos that are a good example of how she interacts.

She loves feeding Evie the bottle.

A lot of times she just likes to hold her and say, “baby, baby, baby”.

One of the cute things Kaelyn did today was Evie was laying in her crib crying to Kaelyn walked over to the crib and said, “It’s OK, baby” and tried to give Evie her pacy.

One thing Evie does is what we call her shifty eyes. Where she’ll barely crack her eyes open and kind of look back and forth to decide whether it’s worth staying awake.

This always reminds me of that Simpsons episode with the shifty eyed dog.

Matt @ 11:12 pm
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Links for 2009-06-08 to 2009-06-14

Posted on Monday 15 June 2009

TV Fool
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Matt @ 4:00 am
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Evie’s First Week in Review

Posted on Sunday 14 June 2009

Evie’s first week at home has been great! So far she is an easy baby to care for. She literally sleeps all the time. Most times during the day I have to actually wake her up to feed her and then she usually goes right back to sleep. At night she wakes about every three hours to eat and then goes right back to sleep. I hope she will always remain such a great sleeper. :) She is also successfully going back and forth between nursing and taking a bottle of pumped breast milk. That has been really nice so that others could enjoy feeding her sometimes and so I could be away from her when needed.

She’s been out and about this week including her first doctor check-up, Target (twice), a birthday party, out to dinner at Red Robin, the swimming pool (twice) (not actually in the pool), and church! She pretty much slept through most of it all. :)

Kaelyn is a wonderful big sister! She loves to hold Evie and talk about her “teeny tiny hands” or her “nice hair”. Seriously, those are her own words that she came up with. She amazes me. She does all kinds of caring gestures like if she hears Evie crying she will bring a paci over for her and try to put it in her mouth. She’s had a couple of meltdown moments when she needed more attention from mommy than what I could give, but she seems to be doing better in that area already. I think it’s helped as I start to feel better and can do more things with her. Kaelyn also seems to be starting to cut her 2-year molars so that hasn’t been very fun the past couple of nights. Hopefully it doesn’t take until she’s actually 2 before they come in.

Nana and PapPap were here with us all this week. Boy oh boy did Kaelyn have fun with them! They played with the water table, went to the pool several times, went out for treats, went to the museum, and much more. Kaelyn was sad when they were gone today.

The other major event from the week was Thursday night when I all of a sudden started feeling really bad like I had the flu – major aches, chills, and a high fever. Matt called my doctor for me and the doctor told me to go straight to the emergency room. I guess fever + just given birth in the past week doesn’t make for a good combination. I was pretty upset that I had to go to the emergency room. I’ve never had to be in the hospital for anything other than giving birth and it was a little scary, plus I didn’t want to leave the girls, and I really didn’t want to be sick right now. Fortunately I had pumped some milk earlier for Evie and Kaelyn was already in bed so we left them behind with Nana and PapPap and Matt got to have the frantic drive to the hospital that we’ve never got to experience with either of my labors. :) We were there for about 4 hours and I was diagnosed with mastitis. After getting some antibiotics into my system I am feeling much, much better!

So far life with two beautiful daughters is wonderful! I haven’t had to be with both girls all day by myself yet so I’m sure things will get a little more difficult then, but I think I will be able to handle it with my sweet, sweet girls.

Just this afternoon Matt asked Kaelyn if she wanted to go to the swimming pool or to play with the water table. Normally she is begging to do either of those activities. But she actually said no, and what she really wanted to do was “hold baby Evie.” So we all sat on the couch while Kaelyn held Evie and Evie was actually awake for a few minutes and I could have just stayed in that moment forever.

Kaelyn peeking in to watch Evie sleeping…

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Mommy and her girls…

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Leigh Ann @ 5:02 pm
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Kaelyn’s New Things

Posted on Monday 8 June 2009

Some random moments of joy from Kaelyn recently:

  • She’s really getting good at stringing together nouns and verbs to make some simple sentences. One of my favorites is sometimes when she sees a bug and then it crawls away, she’ll say, “I don’t see it. Where’d it go? I don’t know.” and throw her hands up. Unbelievably cute.
  • Uncle Jared got this awesome video of her playing with a photobooth distortion:

     
  • She loves laughing with PapPap:


     

  • Who knew how much fun you could have with a house fly:


     

Matt @ 12:02 am
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Welcome Evie Wren!!!

Posted on Sunday 7 June 2009

Just a quick post to let you know that Evie Wren Miller was born on June 4, weighing 6 lbs. 15 oz. and 20 inches long. Both her and mommy are healthy. You can check out all the pics in this album.

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Matt @ 11:53 pm
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Links for 2009-05-25 to 2009-05-31

Posted on Monday 1 June 2009

Top 10 Password Crackers
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VMware/Player – Community Ubuntu Documentation
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Installing VMware Tools with VMware Player
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LyricWiki
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Matt @ 4:00 am
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A Day of Firsts

Posted on Sunday 17 May 2009

We woke up yesterday to just another normal Saturday which quickly turned into a day of firsts for Kaelyn.

In the morning we decided to go strawberry picking. I was a little nervous that Kaelyn would just want to run right through the plants, be more interested in bugs, or try to eat all the strawberries. I explained everything to her on our way to the strawberry patch, and much to my delight she behaved perfectly! She loved helping us find the red strawberries and she would put them right in her little bucket. Unfortunately the crop hasn’t been too great this year so we didn’t get very many, but it was still a fun time. We came home and ate all of our strawberries – yum yum! Here are the pics.

2009_05_StrawberryPicking_005.JPG

After enjoying our strawberries we took Kaelyn to Snip-Its to get her first hair cut! Again, I wasn’t sure how she would handle the experience. She’s not a big fan of getting her nails trimmed and things like that so I was afraid she’d be very wiggly and upset. Again, she surprised me and did wonderfully!

I think she liked the atmosphere at Snip-Its – it is made for kids and so there were many things for her to look at. She got right up in the little kid sized chair. Her chair happened to be hot pink which was a bonus for her. She just held right on to the little handles and sat perfectly still. We had to make her look down for a bit while the lady cut the back of her hair. Matt used one of their magna-doodle things and drew letters and pictures for her and held it down low so she would look down at it. She never really smiled during the whole process, and a couple of times she gave these looks like “what the heck is going on here?” but she never got upset at all. I was so proud!

The hairdresser kept saying what a good job Kaelyn was doing. At the end Kaelyn got to go to the prize machine where you exchange a piece of your hair for a prize. I also gave her a sucker when we left as an extra special prize – it’s one of her favorite treats. Here are the pics.

Before with stringy, baby hair in back and long bangs in her eyes:

2009_05_KaelynFirstHaircut_001.JPG

After with trimmed bangs and a cute little bob in the back:

2009_05_KaelynFirstHaircut_009.JPG

In the afternoon I put Kaelyn down for her nap like normal in the pack-n-play. She crawls out of her big girl bed at nap time (but does great at night), so we have been using the pack-n-play for naps. I went to take a shower and as I’m standing there washing my hair in walks Kaelyn with this big grin on her face. I hollered for Matt who was downstairs at the time. I thought he must have gotten her out of bed for some reason, but nope, apparently she learned to climb out of her pack-n-play all by herself. AHHHHH!!! So now we are back to square one on getting her to take naps.

It is pretty amazing to us to that she can climb out of the pack-n-play. Matt put her in the pack-n-play so he could see how she climbed out. Apparently she holds onto the corner and kind of walks up the side and then she kicks her legs over and shimmeys down the outside. We should try to get a video of our little monkey.

=========================
In other news we got our new crib last week. We had to get a new one because the one we used for Kaelyn was recalled. It came in a really big box which Kaelyn and I turned into a super cool fort for a few days. Matt and I stayed up late one night last week taking the old crib down and putting the new one together.

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Old crib…

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New crib…
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There are also some new Kaelyn pics added for April and for May.

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Leigh Ann @ 5:39 pm
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Links for 2009-05-04 to 2009-05-10

Posted on Monday 11 May 2009

instantwatcher.com – Movies and TV to Watch Instantly on Netflix
Easier way to find Insant Watch movies on Netflix.
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Matt @ 4:00 am
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Another Amazing Moment

Posted on Tuesday 5 May 2009

This morning’s moment happened before we even made it downstairs for the day. Kaelyn was playing with some of her toys by leaning over and talking to them. Then she says to them, “I love you! Kiss.” And then she kissed them all!

Okay, okay, now you can bend over and pick your melted heart up off the floor. That’s what I had to do. :)

Leigh Ann @ 9:21 am
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Amazing

Posted on Monday 4 May 2009

Kaelyn says at least one thing everyday that just completely amazes me and usually makes me laugh uncontrollably. For example, this evening she had been playing hard with all the other kids in our Life Group. I could tell she was all sweaty. When we got in the car to go home she exclaims, “Really Hot!” HAHAHA! I have no idea how she learned to use the word “really” but apparently she knows. I just love seeing her little brain in action.

Leigh Ann @ 8:42 pm
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A Naming Story

Posted on Monday 27 April 2009

We have had a difficult time choosing a name for baby girl #2. In the beginning we just couldn’t seem to agree on any names. Finally we narrowed the list down to two names – one was Matt’s favorite and one was my favorite. How would we ever decide? We took polls, asked our friends and family, and even considered just flipping a coin. We still continued to go round and round in circles not being able to choose. We each wanted to go with our favorite name, but also didn’t want the other person to be disappointed in naming our child.

It was becoming quite stressful (especially for me) because I really wanted to know her name. I wanted to be able to get things monogrammed, wanted to put her name up on the wall in her room like we did for Kaelyn, wanted to start calling her by name so Kaelyn would get used to it, and I definitely didn’t want to wait until we were in the hospital to decide (that seems like too much pressure and stress for me).

At one point a few weeks ago Matt had told me that I could go with “my” name for baby girl since I was the mom/pregnant one and all. Then he added that he would be disappointed “to see the letters go up on the wall.” That’s when my heart just broke! I wanted the naming to be a happy decision for both of us.

So we moved onto another strategy of going back to the drawing board and trying to think of another name, a third option, that we could both compromise on and be happy with. We spent hours pouring over names on the internet. We even went on a date to the bookstore one night and sat and read through baby name books. The problem was the more we looked at other names, the more we kept coming back to our original two names.

Somewhere along the way last week I was thinking about names and for some reason my mind started to look at things a little differently. I still loved both names, but for some reason I was feeling more and more drawn to the name that was Matt’s top choice…it just seemed to “fit.” I didn’t say anything to him because I wanted to give myself some time to think it through in my head, and I didn’t want him to be disappointed if I changed my mind.

By last Friday I had 99% sure made up my mind. I called my parents who were on their way for a visit to see us and had them stop by the store where we bought the letters for Kaelyn’s nursery and pick up the appropriate letters for the new nursery. Once I saw the letters I knew for sure that I was 100% happy with my decision. So on Saturday morning while Matt went out for a jog we quickly hung up baby girl’s new name in her room.

When Matt came back this is what he found:


Evie

At first he said “did you buy other letters?” thinking I had bought letters for all the names we were considering just to see how they looked. :) I told him that, no, I had only gotten those. He kept asking me if I was sure and I said definitely. Then he sat down for a while and just kind of stared at the wall -I think he was in a bit of shock (a good shock). :)

So that’s our naming story. It was stressful for a while, but I think it ended up being pretty special for both of us which I was extremely happy about. Now we have been having fun calling baby girl by her real name: Evie Wren Miller

We can’t wait to meet you very soon little Evie!

(p.s. We’ve had the middle name picked out since the beginning – that was the easy part for us.)

Leigh Ann @ 10:20 am
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Links for 2009-04-20 to 2009-04-26

Posted on Monday 27 April 2009

Fantasy Football Hub 2009
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Auto Repair Price Estimates | Auto Shop and Mechanic Ratings : RepairPal
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Matt @ 4:00 am
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Business

Posted on Monday 20 April 2009

Seeing that Kaelyn is only 19 months old we haven’t really started doing anything proactive in terms of potty training yet. I just didn’t think she was exhibiting all of the signs yet of “being ready.” She does have a little pink potty chair and a couple of books about going to the potty but that is all. A couple of times I noticed her doing a little “dance” and so I’d sit her on the potty and she went pee-pee. Those times were random and she didn’t say anything about needing to go…I just guessed she needed to by her little dance.

BUT as of yesterday everything seems to be quickly changing! I don’t know if two times is enough to say something is happening or if it’s just a coincidence so I guess the coming days will have to tell, but here’s the story…

Yesterday Matt noticed Kaelyn sort of holding herself and she told him “business.” He wondered if she needed to potty so he put her on her little potty and sure enough she went #2!! We were so excited and made quite a big deal about it. Then we thoroughly laughed at the fact that she called it “business.” I think sometimes when we know she is going #2 in her diaper we will make some comment about her “doing her business.” I guess she has picked that up and recorded it in her little brain somewhere along the way. It is amazing what kids learn!!

So this morning she was sitting in her highchair eating breakfast and she says again “business.” So I put her on her potty chair and she did it again!! I couldn’t believe it!

Sorry if you didn’t really want to know about Kaelyn’s bathroom habits, but I just had to share and write this down as a memory for myself. I’m so proud of my big girl!!

Leigh Ann @ 9:56 am
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Links for 2009-04-13 to 2009-04-19

Posted on Monday 20 April 2009

10 Youtube URL Tricks You Should Know About | MakeUseOf.com
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Matt @ 4:00 am
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New Pictures

Posted on Thursday 16 April 2009

We added some new pictures tonight…

Easter 2009
April 2009
March 2009

Also created a new album for baby #2 which includes weekly shots of my belly. You can compare baby girl #2 belly shots to my belly shots with Kaelyn if you are really bored. :)

2009_04_Easter_019.JPG
Leigh Ann @ 10:12 pm
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Overdue Updates

Posted on Monday 13 April 2009

I really should try to do a better job updating our blog here. There are so many impressive and funny things that Kaelyn does and I should share them with our loyal readers as well as have it be a little record book for my own memory (which is notoriously horrible).

Kaelyn is now 19 months old and baby girl #2 is 32 weeks developed in my belly. We still have not decided on a name for baby girl. I’m not sure what we are going to do or how we are going to make that decision, but we are SO ready to just decide! At the moment it is still between Lila or Evie.

Kaelyn is really talking up a storm these days. She knows all her ABCs like I mentioned before and recognizes all of her numbers from zero to ten. She is just starting to count on her own as well. For example I was counting her toes this morning “1, 2, 3, 4, 5″ and then she adds in “6, 7, 9, 10.” Nevermind the missing number 8. :)

It seems she can say pretty much anything she wants and will repeat everything you say (watch out!). She is stringing together two and three word phrases as well. It is so fun to hear what her little mind is thinking about and also helpful to know when she wants something. Here’s a cute example…the other night Matt heard Kaelyn saying something in her bed and he went in to check on her and she was wrestling around saying “leg stuck, leg stuck!” Apparently her leg was wrapped up in her covers and she couldn’t get it out.

Kaelyn LOVES to be outside and enjoyed several egg hunts over the past few weeks. We spend lots of time at the playground these days where she is getting more and more brave every time we go. She is also a dancer. We go to a music time at a local coffee shop each week and she will stand right up at the front and just dance and dance the entire time and do all the motions to the songs. If I turn a CD on at home she will dance for the entire length of the CD.

Kaelyn is such a fun and loving girl. She is really sensitive and cares deeply for others. I think she is going to be an amazing big sister! Just this morning we were at library story time where we just moved up to the next age level and I wasn’t sure how she would like it. It is longer than the baby story time and has activities that require more focus. She just listened and listened, and I was impressed that she focused for that long. One of the things they did was a puppet show. The puppet show was about this rabbit who had her kite stuck in a tree. All these other animals came along to try to help the rabbit get the kite down but none of them could help. Kaelyn was so sensitive. She literally started crying every time the animal would leave without helping get the kite! Finally a wind came along (all the kids blew) and the kite was rescued.

Okay, I’m sure I could keep going and going and thinking of more stories to share, but I didn’t intend to write a book here. :) I will hopefully do better (at least for the next 8 weeks) on sharing the updates.

Leigh Ann @ 4:10 pm
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Links for 2009-04-06 to 2009-04-12

Posted on Monday 13 April 2009

Let me google that for you
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Matt @ 4:00 am
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ABCs

Posted on Monday 16 March 2009

Kaelyn may have been a “late” walker, but she sure hasn’t wasted anytime learning her alphabet. She’s been doing this for a few weeks now. She can also do her numbers from 0-9. We’ll get a video of that soon.

Without further ado, here is Kaelyn Rose at 18 months saying all the letters of the alphabet with her flashcards:



Leigh Ann @ 2:47 pm
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Links for 2009-03-09 to 2009-03-15

Posted on Monday 16 March 2009

Raleigh Restaurants, Dentists, Bars, Beauty Salons, Doctors
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TopTenREVIEWS Expert Product Reviews
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US Real Median Income 2000-2007

Matt @ 3:00 am
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Moving On Up

Posted on Saturday 7 March 2009

2009_02_KaelynsNewRoom_005.JPG

With the inevitable arrival of a baby to be named later in June, we decided it would be good to go ahead and convert Kaelyn’s room to a “big girl” room so it’s one less adjustment when the baby arrives. So, we trekked to the new IKEA in Charlotte, got the goods, and then Leigh Ann’s parents came for a week to help us move and paint. I actually didn’t have to do much since I was working :) .

2009_02_KaelynsOldRoom_013.JPG

First, we converted our guest room and office into one room. Then, painted the old office purple and moved all Kaelyn’s little people furniture in. Finally, we had an IKEA construction bonanza to furnish Kaelyn’s room. Here’s an album of her last day in her old room and one of her new room. Also, there’s one of the painting of the new nursery, but I don’t think we have any pics of the finished product for this or the office/guest room yet.

Also, we got our 2nd snow day of the year this past week. This one was a bit more fun because Kaelyn is walking now. Though, you kind of run out of things to do with an 18-month-old after about 15 minutes.

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Matt @ 4:25 pm
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