Sheep Parade.

If you guys live in Cedar and haven't been to the Sheep Parade, you are missing out!

My mom is the chairman of the parade and it is awesome! Her and her team always do such a great job!

Our family always does a float. We really are so proud of our livestock heritage!

"4 generations carrying on the family legacy"

We tried to put Addie on a horse this year. She really liked it for the first 10 minutes or so and then she was done.

So then we sat on the back of the cow camp.

She loved that for about 10 minutes too. She was waving and saying hi to everyone on the street.

And then she was done.

So I put her in the truck with Cabe. She did good there for the rest of the parade.

She did try to bail when she saw my mom, and when she saw the sheep. But her and Cabe were quite the team.

Afterwards there is a whole lot of fun going on out at the Diamond Z Arena.

Seriously, I know I sound like a broken record, but if you haven't been.... go!

We got Addie a balloon and a ride on the train (actually two rides on the train)... you would have thought she had died and gone to heaven.

The Livestock and Heritage Festival is always one of the funnest weekends of the year.

Can't wait till next year!

18 Months.

Addie Pants hit her 18 month mark last friday. I took her to the doctor today...

18 Month Stats:

Weight: 20.10 pounds
5th percentile

Height: 31.25 inches
52nd percentile

Head: 19 inches
90th percentile

In some ways I am loving this phase, and in other ways I'm not.

She is constantly learning new things, it is so fun watching her figure things out and her version of all the new words she is learning.

BUT she is also starting to throw fits. Lots and lots of fits. Definitely not my favorite.

Anyways, here is what she is up to lately....

• She is turning into a little mom. She loves playing with dolls, and puts blankets on everything and tells it "night night". She couldn't get enough of my cousins new baby. She wanted to rock him and kiss him and give him his binky the whole time we were there.
• She still doesn't eat much, but loves feeding other people or animals. Especially the animals (they are usually much more willing to eat whatever it is that she is giving them)
• She LOVES her crib. We can barely spend the night anywhere else because sucks at sleeping if she isn't in her crib.
• She is down to one nap a day, it is usually about 3 hours long.
• She has started wearing 18-24 month clothes, but most of them are too big. But her 12-18 month stuff is too small. Not sure what to do about it, except just let her clothes sag off of her for a while.
• Her favorite words right now are "stuck", "grammie", any kind of animal sound, "oh no, what di da do?" (What did you do?), "it's cold", "it's hot" (then she blows on whatever it is to cool it off), "here ya go",  "its cute", "it's pretty", and my personal favorite... "ew, kuh kuh"
• She knows where her belly button, nose, eyes, mouth, and tongue are. But if you ask her at the dinner table she isn't satisfied until she has touched everyones nose at the table.. no matter how far they have to lean for her to do it.
• She has everyone wrapped around her little finger and we sure do love her!

I took her out to take some pictures yesterday. Ray usually come with me. He is an expert at making her smile, but since he isn't here at the moment I decided to give it a shot myself. Didn't really work.

She either wanted to squat like I was...

Or she was busy looking at the leaves on the ground...

Or at something else off in the distance...

Or right up in my face trying to grab the camera...

Or just definitely NOT smiling...

So, I called my mom in for reinforcement. But all she did was say it was too cold, picked Addie up, at which point Addie did finally say "cheese", and we decided to go home.

So not the best photoshoot ever. But I'm still pretty sure that I have the cutest baby EVER!

And no, I'm not biased at all :)

Crystal Gather.

It is that time of year again, folks!

It's fall. My absolute favorite time of year, and time to bring the cows off of the mountain.

It was so fun having Addie there this year. She LOVED it! She couldn't get enough of the cows and horses, and even though it was a little chilly and she had to spend most of her time in the truck/cabin, she was a pretty darn good little cowgirl!

(Oh, and she has officially figured out that cows are actually called cows, not "moo's". Now we just need to work on horses, she thinks they are cows too)

Reading a book to Tess, who seems extremely interested.

She was totally content as long as she could at least hold the rope.

Tennessee.

So, basically, I have THE coolest mom ever.

A few weeks back she saw a thing for the Bella Rustica on Pinterest and decided that she really wanted to go. The cool part is that she wanted me to go with her (and Addie, too). Wahoo! 

So we booked our tickets and headed out to Tennessee for a weekend.

We saw a ton of cool things, had a lot of laughs, and freaked ourselves out pretty bad a couple of nights while driving Addie around trying to get her to fall asleep. Yeah, we're cool like that. We also spent countless hours chasing Addie while she was pushing the stoller. She's obsessed.

Anyways, thanks for the trip, mom! So glad we got to go!

We stayed at the Opryland Hotel. Which is like the hotel of hotels. It is HUGE.

We literally had to find a map and ask for directions just to find our room.

Addie loved it though. She especially loved sharing her binky with the fish.

We aslo attempted to go see Mark Wills and Restless Heart at the Grand Ol Opry.
However, Addie was "singing" a little too loud so we listened to most of it out in the lobby.
It was still really cool, though.

Our attempt at getting a picture together....

The next day we headed out to the Bella Rustica.
They had some really neat stuff there. It is just too bad we couldn't fit it all home on the plane with us.
But we did get some really fun ideas.

The last day we decided to eat at the aquarium for little miss Addie pants.
She couldn't get enough of the fish. We had to pry her away when it was time to go.

Addie did so good on the planes. She slept almost the whole time.

This was my second time flying with her and it was so much easier having another person there with me. Thanks again mom!