Some friends got me these cute number stickers to help document Audrey’s first year. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very consistent about using them, and then past a certain age she would immediately try to rip it off her shirt, so this is as far as I got. They were cute while they lasted!
I don’t know about you, but I start getting family photo anxiety sometime around October every year. I know we need to get a Christmas-card worthy photo taken before it gets too cold and as our self-appointed family photographer, the pressure’s on. So imagine my delight when Liesl took a couple of photos of us at this cool installation art structure in Palo Alto and we got a keeper! Thanks again, Liesl!
Hope you all had a very Merry Christmas!
I’m a day late, but here’s a photo of my pretty baby in her Christmas dress on her first birthday. She is a sweet, sweet girl and has brought so much joy to our little family. Happy first birthday, my tiny girl.
Last month we took a road trip to California to visit our cute friend Liesl in Palo Alto. On the way there and back, we visited my cousin Thekla in Reno and went with her family to Lake Tahoe. Can I just say I’ve got the coolest bunch of O’Neill cousins ever? I wish we all lived in the same state like we did when we were kids. Elijah and his second cousin Adalei had so much fun together. If they weren’t related, I’d say Lola and Ava have some extra competition (besides each other)!
California was beautiful and Elijah and Lola and Ava had a blast together. Liesl’s husband Ryan has this awesome job at Pinterest, a wildly successful startup. I felt pretty cool visiting their office and getting a t-shirt. We spent a day in Monterey and visited the army base where we lived for a year. Our old military housing got bulldozed and replaced by these amazing craftsman homes. Definitely an upgrade for the lucky people who get to live there! We spent hours at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The kids loved it and I got some great photos. It’s way overpriced, but definitely worth going to once a decade or so!
We spent one evening in San Francisco. On the way up (during rush hour – not the best idea!) we got stuck in traffic and Elijah had to pee in a McDonalds cup. I was laughing so hard I was crying. Elijah would kill me if he knew I posted about that online! {Just a tip – if someone has to pee in the car, it’s best to use a cup with ice in it. It minimizes the splash factor and keeps it fresh so you don’t have to smell it until you can dispose of it. You’re welcome.} That night we wandered around on Pier 39 looking for someplace to eat for like an hour. Of course we wanted some authentic San Fran seafood. And of course we somehow ended up at Joe’s Crab Shack. It was actually really good. We all ate incredible amounts of crab legs in our awesome bibs.
All in all, the trip was a great success. We rented a car and thus avoided the road trip hassles we’ve experienced on past vacations. It was really good to see Liesl and Ryan and the girls again. Audrey was an angel in the car for the most part. She is such a good baby. So that’s the trip recap. Lots more photos here.
Here’s my favorite Halloween photo. In the name of keeping the blog alive. If you want to see more photos and more Harker fam, catch me on Facebook. My photos also usually make it to Flickr. Oh, and also Elijah turned six last week. And he is awesome. As are Jim and Audrey. The end.
How did we get here already?! Elijah had a great time today and told his dad tonight that he “can’t wait for tomorrow!” I got a little bit teary leaving him today, but I’m so proud of my brave, smart, beautiful, big little boy!
I am still woefully un-photogenic, but even I can get a lucky shot now and again. Thanks to Elijah for manning the camera remote and Audrey for letting me snuggle her in order to get a natural expression out of my camera-shy mug. And thanks to Liesl for the bangs. Which I love. A lot.
My brother Daniel and his wife Angela came over for dinner tonight and reminded me of a funny story from when we were in Mexico. They had the first babysitting shift with Elijah. We were relying on Skype to talk to him every night so that we didn’t have to pay the astronomical fees to call internationally. Unfortunately, the wireless connection at our resort was TERRIBLE, so the clarity of our conversations was pretty bad. We found out just how difficult it was to hear each other when we later heard about Elijah’s side of the conversation our first night away…
“Mom? Mom? I can’t understand you! Quit speaking Spanish!”
“Mom! I don’t understand Spanish!”
Finally, rolling his eyes in exasperation…
“Alri-i-ght… HOLA!”
I’ve had a couple of requests for an update on Audrey’s feeding situation, so here it is. My last post about it was written when she was just over two months old, and right now she’s 5 1/2 months. We started out supplementing with formula and she very quickly realized that bottle-feeding was a much more effective system and rejected breastfeeding altogether. She would scream anytime I tried, so I just started pumping every three hours instead and bottle-fed her breastmilk, supplementing with one or two bottles of formula a day. I tried Brewer’s Yeast (which tastes awful), Fenugreek (which made me smell like maple syrup), and Blessed Thistle to increase my milk supply and found that Fenugreek did help a little bit, but not dramatically. I was a dedicated milk machine on our trip to Mexico, even pumping on the airplane, but by the time I visited my sister in D.C. at the end of last month, I was thoroughly tired of the whole ordeal and got pretty lazy by the end of my trip, pumping only twice a day. Last week Jim finally talked me into quitting altogether and we are done with that exhausting chapter.
Audrey is a great eater now and finally has some chunk on her cute little thighs. I recently looked back at photos of her on her blessing day and was just sick about how scrawny and yellow and unhappy she looked. The happy baby I came home to the day my mom first fed her a bottle of formula was all the reassurance I needed that we were doing the right thing.
Need I say anything about this face?
