J's First Year - Part 1

So with Jaycelyn's 2nd birthday quickly approaching, my goal to have the blog "caught up" is becoming a major rush. So I am going to attempt to share J's first two years before her birthday next month. Who thinks I can do it?

Well I'm kind of off to a good start... I have written about her birth! And trying to remember all that followed only reminds me more and more why I wanted to start this blog. And pictures help, but considering that our little princes broke our external hard drive with all of our pictures files, that is proving quite difficult as well. We were able to have most of the files recovered, but now there are no dates and they are in no kind of order. So not to self (and all of you) make sure you back up all of your photos!

Jaycelyn's first photo shoot of many, many more!

First family portrait by Scott Baxley

Jaycelyn was an excellent newborn baby. In fact our most difficult challenge in the first few weeks was getting her to wake up to eat. She would go hours without waking. And I'll never know why those crazy nurses at the hospital tell you to wake your child to eat every three hours in the middle of the night to eat. I remember actually setting an alarm to wake up to desperately try to wake J up for a feeding. That lasted all of like two nights. We let her sleep and she has pretty much slept through the night since the beginning. I contribute this a great deal to co-sleeping. Best decision we've every made in a half comatose state. 

Our little sleeping beauty!

Her first big adventure (as with most newborns) was bath time. I have never seen a newborn ENJOY (you read that right) a first bath. But J loved it. She only cried a little the first time I put water over her head. Other than that, she just hung out.

We discovered cloth diapers when J was almost 10 weeks old. The third best parenting decision we every made (one being breastfeeding, two being co-sleeping). You can read all about why we cloth diaper on my HootyCutie blog.

J's very first cloth diaper!

And to wrap up the first 3 1/2 months of J's life... FSU football!

First 4 games... she stayed home

First game she attended!

And that brings us to December... I'll share her first Christmas in the next post. Stay tuned...

4th of July 2012

What a great holiday. Time to spend with family and celebrate this wonderful country we live in. We had a great day. We spend most of the morning just hanging out (which for us is an ideal deal... boring I know). Then we all got cleaned up and dressed and headed out to dinner and then to the fireworks show.

The only decent pic of J and I
watching the fireworks

I have always loved to go see fireworks for as long as I can remember, so I was very excited to be able to share that experience with J. And she LOVED it! She was pointing and saying "pretty" (along with other words that I have no idea what they were). She watched the entire show start to finish and was very confused about why there were no more at the end of the show. 

The only bad part to the whole day is that we waited in line for a snow cone for J and they gave out the last one to the person in front of us... REALLY?! Luckily she was not aware of the situation so we did not have to deal with a melt down. 

It was past bed time when we arrived home so J went down easily and I was able to play with some of my new Photoshop actions. I am really beginning to actually enjoy Photoshop. You can do almost anything! Here are some pictures I did for fun: