Madelynn's 2nd Birthday

I can't believe our baby girl is two! She is an absolute joy to have in our little family. We feel like we definitely got spoiled by having her as our first child. She is such a cute, sweet, funny, spunky little girl. She cracks us up with so many of the things she does and says. She really does keep us entertained. She is also an absolute sweetheart. She loves to cuddle and give hugs and kisses. She also really likes to sit on your lap while reading books or watching a movie. But she is also a very energetic little person and loves to dance and spin and run and run and run. She also really likes to have daddy swing her around and hold her upside down and help her climb on the ceiling. Her daddy is her best friend and favorite person to play with and her mommy is her cuddle buddy and safe place to be. She loves animals, especially kitties, doggies and monkeys. She really likes to make animal noises as well. She also likes to hide under blankets like they are a tent. She will hold the blanket up and tell us to come in. It is always fun to have the whole family hanging out under a blanket tent. Madelynn loves it when we sing to her and has just recently started to try to sing the songs herself. She is also picking up language fast. I think my very favorite things that she says right now are, "Mommy, I hold you!", "I tried it, I like it", "come on!", "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Where are you?" and any time she randomly busts out the animal noises. Just today we were shopping and she decided that she should make monkey noises to entertain herself. They are pretty funny. We love our little Madelynn!

Since her birthday is on Halloween we decided to throw a little Halloween/birthday party with some of our friends who have kids that Madelynn plays with. We played a few little games, let the kids play with toys and had dinner and birthday cake. After the party we went trick or treating with our friends the Lovelands. We only went to about a dozen houses, but for a 1 1/2 year old and two 2 year olds it was perfect. The girls were so excited! They would giggle and squeal and try to run from house to house. They were not very good at saying trick or treat yet, but when they tried it was the cutest thing ever. The three little girls together were super adorable. There was more than one house where someone inside was summoned to see the cute little girls. Once we were done trick or treating we opened presents and skyped with both sets of grandparents and let Madelynn eat way too much candy out of her pumpkin (pronounced "bumbkeen", so cute!). It was a wonderful birthday and we want to say thank you to everyone who helped us celebrate!

McKay Turned 30!

October is birthday month in our house and we started off with McKay's 30th birthday. I felt like turning 30 is a big deal and kept proposing different ways that we could celebrate, like having people over for dinner and then birthday cake, having people come over for a game night, just having a couple of McKay's guy friends over for an old school video game night.... he shot them all down pretty quickly. Anyone who knows McKay knows that he would much rather avoid social interactions, especially social interactions with large groups of people, so we had a low key family birthday. We started out by going over to the school and having lunch with McKay on campus during his lunch break. It was really cold, but Madelynn loved cuddling up inside daddy's jacket while we walked to lunch. That evening we went to our favorite Indian restaurant for dinner then came home and had cake and presents and skyped with his family and talked on the phone with mine. My dad had a fun time teasing him about becoming an old man, I think his sisters might have a little bit too. It was the perfect small family celebration. Happy Birthday McKay you old man! We love you!

Kaimii's Visit

One of our good friends, who happens to have known McKay since High School, and was our neighbor for about a year before we moved to Wisconsin came out and spent a long weekend with us at the beginning of October. I was really worried about the timing of her visit because I was still feeling super nasty with my pregnancy and throwing up all the time. Luckily I was able to keep some of that at bay while she was staying with us. We had a lot of fun just having her hang out at our house and I enjoyed all of the girl talk, especially since I have been missing out on pretty much any of that for the last 3 months. We had a pretty relaxed weekend with her, but some of the highlights were carving pumpkins, going to the farmers market, visiting the capitol, driving around farm country to look at the fall colors, and eating some really yummy ice cream downtown. Luckily for all of us, Madelynn has known Kaimii since the day she was born, literally. Kaimii came and saw her in the hospital. And since we lived in the same apartment complex when Madelynn was born Kaimii spent lots of time with her when she was little and was even one of her first and most regular babysitters. Madelynn has always liked Kaimii and even though she hadn't seen her since May, this visit was no exception. Madelynn decided that she would much rather play with and spend time with Kaimii than with mommy, and even started to call her mommy. We had to pay attention to which "mommy" she was calling. I am so grateful for good friends and easy friendships. Thanks for visiting Kaimii, we had a blast!

M.I.A. With Good Reason

So, we haven't posted anything in a long time because we haven't really been doing much around here for the last few months. The one thing we have been doing is baking a baby! Which has turned Lindsay into a vomit monster who doesn't really like to move or eat or do anything really. That is slowly starting to ease up and go away, but it has meant that the months of August and September and most of October have been pretty uneventful. Madelynn has had a hard time adjusting to a slower pace of life with a couch potato mommy and a busy grad student daddy, but she is still doing pretty well and is absolutely adorable. However, everything else aside, we are very excited to be welcoming Baby Young the second sometime around April 6th.

This picture is a month old, but you get the idea. It's a baby!

Family Picture Outtakes

So while we got a number of family pictures that we liked, we also got some super awkward photos. Because our photographer was awkward and quiet and dull Madelynn would not smile. The only thing the photographer tried to do to make her smile was hold a flower in front of her face and then pull it away. Madelynn looked at her, but looked at her like she was a weirdo, not like she was funny or nice or enjoyable or anything that would make you smile. Because of that we got some seriously awkward faces from Madelynn. Our photographer also didn't quite seem to understand that large gaps between people in photos does not look nice and that awkwardly placed chairs and straight legs do not look nice either. I hesitate to share these horrible photos of us, but they are just to amazingly awkward and bad to keep to myself. Enjoy our reject photos.

We call this one the creeper with an awkward chair in the way

Creeper the second

This one is called baby does not want to look at the boring  photographer and is done with this whole picture thing.

This one has a big gap and a baby face that looks like she smelled something stinky and she is bored.

This is one of the most awkwardly posed photos ever.... We could feel how awkward it would look  while sitting there. Big gap between us? Check. Awkwardly straight legs? Check. Baby who is staring down the photographer? Check. Super awkward triple hand hold? Check and check.

Oh the faces. None of us were ready for this shot.

Family Pictures 2013

So we have been talking about having family pictures taken for over a year. We are slackers. The last time we had family pictures taken Madelynn was like 2 months old, now she is 20 months old. So I really wanted some cute family pictures but since I moved away from my go to photographers I didn't know what to do. I looked around on the interned to find someone affordable, but the cheapest I found was $150 and that did not include any prints or the images on a disc either. So.....we went to a studio called Portrait Innovations. I become a rage monster when thinking about family pictures. I want our pictures to turn out a certain way and I want our outfits to be perfect and my hair and makeup to be perfect and not have any zits at the time and I want to be 20 lbs lighter. What I really want is for the photographer to make my face and hair look flawless and my body to look skinny. When I realize the camera doesn't do that and that only Photoshop does I get slightly depressed and then decide not to take pictures. So this time when we decided we were for sure going to do it, I booked the appointment so there was no turning back. Then I became a crazy person trying to plan coordinating outfits for the photos. I was basing my color theme off of one of Madelynn's beautiful dresses that we absolutely love. I was going to pull the colors peach and cream out of the dress. I had mine and Madelynn's outfits down, but couldn't find a shirt for McKay that coordinated. So I being the family picture rage monster that I am, made McKay go to multiple stores with my trying to find a shirt that would match that would fit in our budget of about zero dollars. We are in grad school and don't really have money to buy a cream or peach shirt just because I want one for a 30 minute photo session, so I got cranky, we stopped shopping and went home and I sulked on the couch for a little bit. Then I was looking at pictures that we already have up on the wall and saw one that we were all wearing our Wisconsin garb and decided that would be perfect. We also put on come tan and white for good measure. These are not my favorite pictures of us in the whole entire world since our photographer was really timid and boring and could not make Madelynn smile to save her life, and the camera did not magically make me look flawless and skinny, but they caught enough photos that I like to make it worth our while. Here are the ones that we like.