State Fair of TEXAS!

Hey y'all. This past Thursday, Heath, Ella and I got our Texas tradition on when we visited the great State Fair.

Before I get to that though, I am so appreciative and thankful for all of your Ella votes! Your response was amazing to me. You guys are just so sweet!! Thank you so much! The contest goes on through this Thursday, the 26th, so please keep voting if you would like.

The fair was amazing. It's a tradition for us to go each year. I always like to wait until the last week the fair is open in hopes that the weather is a little cooler, but this is Texas and that doesn't always happen. It ended up being a gorgeous fair day! The weather was perfect.



Big Tex! Sorry he's a little blocked.


First thing we did was go to the Little Hands on the Farm. It was this ridiculously cute fake farm where the kids go around and pretend to feed the pretend animals.












The dog show is an absolute must every year, especially now that we have a little girl who is so cutely obsessed with dogs!


"Whoa!"


"Yea!"


This was hilarious! All day Ella kept playing peek a boo with her stroller canopy. Well, while we were eating our turkey leg (which Ella LOVED), she kept pulling it down and all we would see was this little hand reach out and snatch the piece of turkey leg on her tray. She looked like a little gremlin!


Then she would pop the canopy up and yet "boo!" We were cracking up. This was possibly my favorite part of the day!




This was Ella eating her turkey leg last year! So I did a lot of reminiscing on how our day was last year at the fair with Ella! I just can't believe how big she is getting!


We also must always go see the bird show. It's amazing because if you sit right in the middle, front section, these HUGE birds fly inches above your head. It's incredible.


"Look at the bird!"


This was really cool! Heath got chosen out of the audience to be able to sit on the stage and take a picture while this GIGANTIC owl flew right towards him and literally landed 3 inches above his head. It was incredible.
It's hard to see the owl coming towards him in this picture, so I circled it.


I was so glad that when Heath got to take a close up picture of the owl, he also got a freeze frame picture of him with the Owl right in front of his face on the jumbo tron.


Mommy and Ella at the Bird Show this year.


Mommy and Ella at the Bird show last year!


This is going to be a tradition.
Heath and Ella at the Car Show 2007!


Heath and Ella at the Car Show 2006!


While Heath was day dreaming about owning a brand new Tahoe, Ella was running, running and running. I had so much fun just watching Ella so happily running around.


Miss Priss!




Love,

Is It Shameful? - Amended

So apparently the voting website made it to where you can vote as many times as you want in a day!! So y'all get out there and vote. hahaha. If you vote once, and then you try to vote again but the dots next to the pictures don't show up, you have to delete your cookies. That way the website will pop up as if you haven't visited it yet.

How to delete your cookies?
1. Open up your internet.
2. Click on Tools on the top of the page.
3. Click on Internet Options.
4. Click on Delete.
5. Click on Delete Cookies.

You should only have to do it once, no matter how many times you vote. After you delete your cookies, you might have to exit out of the internet and go back in for it to take affect. Thank you!!!!

Dear bloggers,

I recently entered this photo of my darling, beautiful daughter in a contest because I think she's the cutest thing ever created (besides all of your beautiful children of course) and because the prize for the cutest baby is a trip to Cancun!



So I am soliciting (begging) for your help in determining my vacationing fate by asking for you to please go to the below website and vote for Ella. You can only vote one time per day per email address. I would love it if you would each vote once a day every day this week. Thank you so much!!!!

http://www.1061kissfm.com/pages/contests/baby/vote_group_9.html

She is on the second row.

Love,

Thursday

Thursday was a very fun day for me and Ella. We had two different playgroup times. The first was that morning with Jackson, Ava and Tobey.

Our church has this great playroom for the babies. It is full of climbing toys, slides and play houses. It's awesome. Here are some fabulous pictures.

The Girls! Ava and Ella!




Jackson so cute on the slide.


Jackson and Ella playing with the cars.


Our church's Bye Bye Buggy is one of the cutest things I have ever seen!!


In action!


I'm telling y'all, Ella is going to be a track star.


Ella loves to play chase with Jackson!


Thursday night, Ella and I went over to Melissa and Joshua's apartment for a pumpkin decorating party their apartments were having.



One word, obsessed!


Static? Maybe just a little.


Ella had SO much fun painting her pumpkin her two favorite colors, pink and purple.


A work of art!


Please take a mental note of this shirt. It's my favorite of all she has and it now sadly has paint splattered on it and will no longer be able to be worn. It's from Target, so if anyone sees this shirt (size 18 mths) please buy it and I will pay you back. I have learned my lesson. Motherhood is a constant reminder to me that I don't know everything, or really much of anything. :-)



Me & Ella, Joshua & Melissa, Laney & Kristin!!


The finished products. We even made a Go Cowboys pumpkin for Heath!

WOW!

My dad's birthday party last week!

This and That!

First, let me say that y'all totally cracked me up with your comments about how that last picture of Ella (in the previous post) looks like she's strutting down the runway/trying out for America's Next Top Model, which by the way is one of my favorite shows! I never even thought about that and now every time I look at that picture I can't stop laughing. So thank you!

Second, y'all brought some interesting thoughts to the subject of doctors/medicine. I really appreciate all of the wisdom and advice! You guys are amazing!

Third, roofers came to our house yesterday while my husband and I were at work to put a new roof on due to hail damage from some monster storms Texas had back in June. If I was home while they were here I would DEFINITELY, without a doubt would have noticed this, but since I was not home, it was unavoidable. When the roofers, that I am trying to think nice thoughts about at this moment, removed our satellite dish from our roof, upon finishing the roof they bolted the dish down facing the WRONG DIRECTION! Every satellite dish on our street faces SOUTH. They are clearly visible. But ours now faces NORTH. Which means, until they get back out here to fix their mistake, we have no television. Does that make anybody else feel a little panicked? Thankful (not really) for my t.v. addiction, I have plenty of shows saved in my TIVO that I can finally catch up on while we are no longer able to watch/record new shows. The worst part is, THE OFFICE COMES ON TONIGHT!! THE OFFICE. I did jump on nbc.com earlier to make sure I could watch the episode online, but that still means I have to wait until they post it on their website and that could be like 2 or 3 days. What am I to do? Sunni and Amanda, if I didn't have a baby to feed, bathe and put to bed tonight I would be banging down one of y'alls doors!

Forth, my church's annual Women's retreat is this weekend. I am the assistant to our Women's Minister which means this retreat has been as much of me these past few weeks as air and food. Part of me will be happy when it's over, but it is going to be a TON of fun! There are 200 hundred ladies going and we're just going to have so much fun! The funny part is, the retreat committee asked me to be the photographer for the weekend. It's funny because the only reason I was asked was because I now own a fancy schmancy camera. But looks are deceiving because I still don't know anything about it except how to point, focus and shoot. I also was asked to be the photographer for our upcoming Father/Daughter Brunch. Haha. I wonder if I can fool them all into thinking I actually know what I am doing.

That's about it for now. I hope y'all have a great weekend. I'm sure I'll have some good stories from this weekend. Anytime a group of girlfriends get to stay together for a weekend at a retreat center there's bound to be some good stories.

I should go. I have some reading to catch up on....the manual to the Canon Rebel.

What are we to do?

Thank you guys so much for your sweet encouraging words about my Bible study and for your patience with my lack of blog posts.

This morning I was watching Good Morning America and heard this news report on cold and cough medicines for babies and children. I'm sure most of y'all saw this and there's been an article circling the internet.

They were interviewing a specialist that basically said a couple of things that kind of got my blood boiling a little bit.

He said:
1. There has been NO studies done on babies or children with cough medicine. He said that they took their studies from adult men and just modified it basically guessing what dosage to give our children. Which is why on medicine bottle instructions there is not a dosage amount for children under 2. It says consult your physician. I don't believe that studies or testing should be done on babies or children, but I would like to know how exactly they come to the conclusion of the dosage they suggest.

2. He said that when you ask your pediatrician if I can give my baby cough medicine/how much I can give them, they have almost zero information on this, so are just giving us an amount based on nothing really.

I know that we are supposed to fully trust our doctors and I don't know what we would do without them. Especially in an emergency situation like Ella was in several months ago when she was so dehydrated from a stomach bug and needed an IV.

But what about the medicines we are giving them that have our pediatricians approval. Are they really just guessing? Apparently something happened to a child as a result of taking a particular cough/cold medicine. I didn't hear that part. Do y'all know?

So my question is, what are we to do? If we can't trust our pediatricians (which obviously most we can), where do we turn? I really do LOVE LOVE LOVE our pediatrician! But how do we know they have the correct information? And if we aren't supposed to give them cough/cold over the counter medicine, what is our alternative? The news this morning put doubt and a little fear in me, but didn't help in any way remedy the situation. I wish when they reported something of this severity, they would follow it up with some guidance.

Anyway, I'm officially off my soap box.

And so this isn't a totally negative post, here are some sweet pictures from this weekend we spent in Waco with Heath's mom and sisters!