Brynleigh’s First Birthday

Brynleigh had her very first birthday last Friday!  We celebrated by having dinner at Papa Hainley’s house with Papa, Uncle David and Aunt Joelle, Dawson, and Aunt Claire.

Birthday Girl

Smiles!

Happy birthday!

Miss B opened her presents after she’d had her dinner but before the grown-ups ate.

Papa and Aunt Claire got Brynleigh her very own lawn mower!!

Brynleigh and her lawn mower.

Immediately after the lawn mower, Brynleigh started to fuss.  I didn’t even get pictures of Uncle David, Aunt Joelle, and Dawson’s gift – an awesome pink  Irving Fire Department onesie.  (Uncle David is going through firefighter school right now!  We are so proud of him!)

The thing is, I’m amazed she lasted as long as she did.  By the time I got her home from daycare that afternoon, she was running a fever.  We put her to bed right after presents; she didn’t even have a taste of her cake!

(Okay, actually, that is more due to the fact that we are mean parents who don’t want our child to have any fun.  There will be plenty of opportunities for her to eat junk food; we did not see the need to start now.  These are the kinds of decisions you get to make when you have your own baby!)

That being said, it was a delicious vanilla “funfetti” cake with funfetti icing – Ben baked it all by himself.  Thanks, Daddy, for making such a pretty cake for Miss Brynleigh’s big day!

Recent Videos

Here are several videos I took of Brynleigh over the weekend.  She cracks me up!

While she can’t walk yet, Brynleigh has recently discovered how much fun it can be to push objects around.  Most of the time she does this while crawling (with objects such as books), but occasionally, she stumbles onto a really fun walking aid.  Here she is pushing her little chair around the couch.

In this little video, you can see how well she gets herself around on all fours.  She’s also becoming adept at “cruising” – holding onto objects while walking around them.

This video is for her Grandmother (my mom), who sent this little activity table for Christmas and wanted to see some video of her in action.

And this last video is here purely for my own enjoyment.  Evidently my camera thought it needed to readjust the white balance (I think), so the color goes funny halfway through.  Thankfully, you’ll still get the idea.

What do you mean, “It’s February?!”

I’ve been composing a new post in my head for several weeks now, but I’ve just been too busy to write it down.  If only I got paid to blog!

Ben and I had a lovely first Christmas with Brynleigh!  We woke up Christmas morning, just the three of us, and spent the morning eating homemade cinnamon rolls, shooing Barkley away from the presents, and enjoying the quiet brought on by the snow – YES, SNOW! – that had fallen all day Christmas Eve.  It was, it seems, the first white Christmas our area has seen in 94 years.

The snow melted quickly on Christmas Day, so we had to snap a picture before it was gone!

Later that morning, Papa (my dad) arrived, along with my brother (David) and sister-in-law (Joelle) and my nephew (Dawson).  It was such fun to have them spend the day with us!  Joelle and I cooked Christmas dinner – I have to tell you, she made the most amazing Mexican corn (similar to this recipe, except I think she also added some chili powder and some of the juice from the jalapenos) in her Crock Pot – and we all gorged ourselves on too much food.  It was awesome.

Brynleigh in her Christmas pajamas

Shiny ornament!

Getting a closer look at the Little People farm from her Papa and Grammy Seifipour.

Even Barkley got into the spirit!

Brynleigh added a new word to her vocabulary on New Year’s Eve: “dog.”  A few days later, she added “duck.”  Now, EVERYTHING is either a dog or a duck – she definitely knows both words, but she pronounces them the same at this point.  When she says it while pointing at Barkley, she clearly means “dog,” but in the bathtub, while playing with her rubber duckies, we know it’s “duck.”  Regardless, it’s super cute!

The second weekend in January, Ben took a little overnight trip to Austin with our friend Joe.  He came home with some fresh vision for our family this year; we are really excited about making some changes soon.

Just a few days later, on the 14th, Ben left to spend a weekend in Washington, D.C. with his brother, Brian.  They were able to have some good “brother time” – seeing the sights, eating at fancy restaurants, and living the life I imagine many people live on Capitol Hill.  Seriously, I called him on the Saturday night he was there, and this is what he says to me: “I’m at a wine party right now.  Is this really important, or can we just talk through text?”  I couldn’t help but laugh!  I think he had a really fantastic weekend away, and I’m so glad he was able to go and spend time with Brian.  The two of them also trekked over to the Baltimore area to spend an afternoon with their grandmother.  Ben hadn’t seen her since our wedding day, seven and a half years ago!

Looking toward the National Mall from the Lincoln Memorial.

The Capitol Building

The Jefferson Memorial

Just another fancy house....

Back at home, I was really intimidated by the thought of spending three nights on my own with Brynleigh.  So, since it was a long weekend (MLK Day, I think), I called my mom and asked her if she’d like to come spend the weekend with me and Miss B.  She graciously obliged, and we had so much fun!  I haven’t felt that relaxed in…well, I  don’t really know how long.  Honestly, it was like breathing for the first time.  It was so nice to just be ME for a few days and not worry about entertaining anyone or accomplishing anything.

When Mom left, it was back to work.  WOW – were we busy!  My friend Angela recruited me to help her build an online English course for our district.  In the middle of January, we were informed that the State of Texas would like us to be finished with the course by January 31.  WHAT?!  We were only four units in to an eleven-unit course…and those four units had taken us about six months to complete.  However, the promise of a sizable bonus was enough to convince us to work REALLY HARD for the next two weeks to finish the course.  It was a LOT of work – keep in mind that it was separate from my regular job(s) – but we did manage to complete it, and a couple of days ahead of schedule at that!  Poor Ben had to put in some extra time with Brynleigh at home so that I could work, but it was only for a couple of weeks.  (And the larger paycheck should help, too!)

I have also been relieved of my Advanced Placement duties at school.  Quite frankly, the course required more prep time than I had to give, and it wasn’t fair to the students to have a teacher who could not devote the necessary time and attention that they need.  It also wasn’t good for me to be under all that pressure all the time.  I was in a constant cycle of personal and professional failure, and when I talked (yelled?) it over with my principals several months ago, we all agreed that I needed some relief.  The course is now in FANTASTIC hands, having been graciously taken over by a colleague at the beginning of the new semester.  Now I have a schedule full of all “regular” students – I’m thrilled.  I just love these kids.  They make the hard parts of my job worthwhile.

Our hearts have been captivated by the situation following the devastating earthquake in Haiti.  We made a donation to the American Red Cross, and encourage you to do whatever you can to help.  The disaster relief agencies say cash is best right now, unless you have some sort of specialized training and can go with an organization that has the resources to support you while you are there.  Ben and I both feel strongly about doing what we can to care for the widow and the orphan (both real and metaphorical), and one of our goals for the year is to give.  We’re not totally sure what that looks like yet, but we know that we need to do it.  We also watched the Hope for Haiti Now telethon (you couldn’t help watching it when it was on every channel) and discovered a love for Matt Morris and his music.  I read a couple of days afterward that the event raised some $57 million.  Amazing.  Beauty for ashes, indeed.

We are looking forward to the Winter Olympics (okay, that’s probably more me than Ben), Spring Break, and, of course, summer vacation.  We’re contemplating a trip to France in the summer/fall….  We’ll post details about that if/when it comes to fruition.

I have another couple of posts to write that I’m hoping to get to later today.  I want to tell you about Brynleigh’s first birthday – can you believe she’s one already?! – and I’m also going to share information from her check-up with the doctor yesterday afternoon.  I will also update this post with some pictures, as well as add pictures to the aforementioned forthcoming posts.  (Two big words in a row!)

I hope all is well and that 2010 has been good to you so far!

What’s in there?

Sometimes Brynleigh likes to inspect her food.

The One That Wasn’t

Disclaimer: serious post follows.

I was just upstairs putting Brynleigh to bed.  As we rocked in her rocking chair and she drifted off to sleep, I realized the importance of today’s date.

On December 15, 2007, we found out I was pregnant.

But it wasn’t meant to be.

There were complications, and at 6:45 in the morning three days after Christmas, an ultrasound confirmed what my heart had suspected from the beginning: the pregnancy wasn’t viable.  There was no embryo, let alone a heartbeat.  It was another five or six excruciatingly long days before I actually miscarried.  It was an awful feeling, waiting for the inevitable.

We went through a wide range of emotions in the days and months that followed.  Chief among them in the doctor’s office on that cold December morning was a crushing, overwhelming grief.

I felt so inadequate.
I felt like I’d let my husband down.
But underneath all of that, way deep down in a place that I didn’t want to articulate…I felt relieved.

The truth is, we weren’t ready.  We thought we were – or, rather, we wanted to think we were – but we weren’t.

In retrospect, we know that while we most certainly did want to have a baby, what we really wanted was to stop being pressured to have a baby.  It was easier to get pregnant than to try to convince people that the fact that we didn’t have kids yet was okay…and that was wrong of us.  We should have just waited until we were really and truly ready, no matter what other people thought or wanted or “knew” was right for us.

Sometimes I still struggle with guilt over feeling relieved.  It seems a terribly selfish, flippant way to feel, particularly when so many experience pregnancy loss so much more profoundly hurtful than ours.  I mean, let’s face it: at least we knew I could actually get pregnant, right?  (Though, I will be honest with you: this was a legitimate question, thanks to a hernia repair surgery I had when I was about six weeks old.)

In the days of reflection that followed the miscarriage, I realized, too, that in that deep-down dark part of myself, right next to relief, was this thought: If I get pregnant, my parents won’t get divorced.  They’ll have to stay together if I have a baby.

It’s the thought process of a six-year-old, isn’t it?  I’m still a little ashamed of myself for thinking it.  My parents’ mess (for lack of a better term) wasn’t mine to clean up, and having a baby certainly wasn’t going to make it all go away.  Admitting that to myself – and accepting it as truth – was one of the most difficult things about the whole process.

After the grief and the relief came anger.  Suddenly, everyone we knew was announcing a pregnancy.  We’d go to Target for groceries and I swear to you that every woman in the store was pregnant but me.  There were bellies in my face 24/7, all seeming to mock me and my inability to form a proper embryo.  It was maddening and unfair, and I can’t tell you how disgusted I was with these women for having what I couldn’t, and in recognizing this I was even more disgusted with myself for possessing such a rotten attitude.  It was envy, straight up, and it was ugly, and persistent, and it poisoned my soul.

But you know what?  It was also just a facade to keep me from falling apart.  Being angry meant I didn’t have to be sad anymore.

I don’t know how I got from that place to the place I find myself now.  I wonder if I’ve learned all the lessons I needed to learn from the experience.  Something tells me I haven’t.

Somewhere along the line Brynleigh came to be.  I was jealous for her from the beginning.  I think I’ve said this before: if I’d had things my way, I wouldn’t have told a soul I was pregnant.  It was my pregnancy – mine and Ben’s – and having experienced the loss of one made me that much more protective of the next.  I needed to keep her to myself for as long as possible; I did not want to share her.  I wanted to relish just the very idea of her and to savor it and turn it over in my mind without anyone else’s thoughts or feelings getting in the way.

Ben obliged me for as long as he could.  I could have gone on keeping it a secret until the day she was born, but being ever the practical one, Ben gently informed me that it was time to let others in on the news.  I can’t begrudge him that; his excitement was genuine, and it was good for him to be able to delight in it with friends and family.

As I watched my sweet baby sleep in my arms tonight, I thought back to the one that wasn’t, and I realized – again – just how truly blessed I am to share a life with the one who is.  On the day Brynleigh was born, my prayer was that I would be “in the moment” throughout the experience.  I’m humbled by the fact that I got what I hoped for, not just on her birthday, but on every day since.

She’s growing up.

But not too fast.

And not too slow.

Just.
Right.

So long, November!

Another Thanksgiving has passed. I just have three weeks of school until Christmas break! Next semester brings some changes…I’ll fill you in on those later.

Brynleigh had her nine-month checkup on November 13.  She was 17lbs, 1 oz – still a tiny girl!  I recently bought a bunch of size 9 months clothing, but it’s still too big for her.  I am hoping she’ll fit into them a little better by Christmas.  For now, though, her 6 months stuff fits just right!

Here are recent pictures of Miss Brynleigh, since I know that’s the real reason you’re here.

Here, Brynleigh models some booties that Ben's mom knitted for her before she was born.

Our happy girl on Thanksgiving Day. Look at that cute tooth!

Striking a silly pose.

I found these adorable bunny slippers at Carter's. I told Brynleigh, "I don't care if I get in trouble with Daddy when we get home. Whatever these cost, they are WORTH it." Turns out her dad thought so, too!

This is a video of Brynleigh making some silly sounds.  She’s too cute!

And this video shows how much Brynleigh likes to be tickled.  We took this one after dinner tonight.

That Awful Time of Year

It’s the week before Thanksgiving, and things are a little bit awful.

I know, I know: I’m supposed to be tapping into that grateful feeling.

In the big picture, I am deeply thankful for all that I have. My husband loves me (it is a challenge he rises up to meet every single day); our baby is gorgeous and lovely and so, so sweet; we have a big, soft doggy who likes nothing more than to cuddle up with us on the couch every night and watch television. We’re both employed and we can afford the cost of daycare.

But, on the surface, it’s an awful time of year.

My entire life perspective is skewed right now. This is because I’m a public school teacher and we’ve not had a day off since Labor Day. At this point, teachers and students are exhausted, crabby, and just plain tired of seeing each other every day. In short, it’s awful – and the mental, physical, and emotional toll that it exacts on all of us is a hefty one.

Next week will be restorative on so many levels. I have big plans for Monday: big plans to do nothing but rest! I will probably work on the laundry and catch up on some Law & Order. I might stay in my pajamas all day, just because I can. I will NOT be thinking about school.

Yes, next week is going to be good. Next week will make the awful parts worthwhile.

Busy B

Brynleigh is a very busy eight-month-old.

Here she is jumping in her Jumperoo – it is her favorite activity as of late, and now anytime we put her in her Exersaucer she tries to jump…and then fusses when she can’t.  I think the Exersaucer’s days are numbered!

Last night I consulted a parenting book from the American Academy of Pediatrics to see if I could find out what sorts of toys are appropriate for Brynleigh at this developmental stage.  One of the items on the list was “balls of all kinds.”  So, during our weekly shopping trip this morning, Ben and I purchased some cute little chime balls as well as a stacking toy (also on the list).  Here she is playing with the balls.  (P.S. Enjoy the hair bow for the 49 seconds it’s on screen…that’s as girly as we get in this house!)

Hope you all have a great week!

Two Bunnies!

Miss Brynleigh is really growing up! Watch as she goes after not one, but two bunnies.

October…fest

It has been awhile since my last post (January 29, hereby known as Brynleigh’s birthday), so I thought I would fill y’all in (okay, Sarah talked me into it).

I have been very busy with work – for those that don’t know, I used to be a manager for WaMu. My store was shut down at the end of February and I moved into another bank down the parking lot (Chase). We officially converted at the end of July which left me without a bank, or people, to manage. To keep it short, I am “training” now which involves driving all over DFW, mainly FW, helping other bankers out.  Boring, I know.

Outside of work, I have also been busy with our company and seeing it grow (hopefully someday I can do just this). Today gold hit an all-time high and that’s great news for my clients. You can learn more at www.newgoldira.com Tell your friends and family

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so instead of writing about Brynleigh – I have to get up early and drive 3 hours tomorrow – here are some recent pics..