Chasing Moonlight and Roses

I absolutely love looking back at Christmas pictures that we've taken with Tony's family throughout the years... so without further ado...














And I am SO excited to see everyone this year and to add pictures from Christmas 2012 to these wonderful memories above!

Here is our Christmas Card from this year - ordered from cardstore.com and they were fabulous to work with as usual.  I super duper highly recommend them because their prices are fantastic, the website is very user-friendly and easy to navigate, and they really do offer some great stuff.  This will probably be my last entry for a while since we'll be out of town, so have a Merry Christmas, everybody, and enjoy all the people who mean most to you.  See you later 2012 - very excited for 2013 and looking forward to all the great memories to be made next year!

Alright, so, there have been a TON of changes this past month!

We've got a big, bad CRAWLER on our hands!  And I'm talking, belly OFF the floor kinda crawling.  One day last week she just decided that she was gonna get a move on and the rest was history.




In addition to your 4 beautiful bottom teeth, you will be getting both top teeth in no time, it seems.  One of your top teeth has cut through all the way and the other is not far behind.  Hopefully this won't be too painful of an experience for you - so far you are totally handling it like the champ that you are!



Child of mine, you have some SMELLY feet!!!!!  Looks like we're going to have to up the amount of baths you have a week!



Your favorite words are "baby" and "dada" and you sure do wear them out!  Sometimes you get too excited and put both words together by saying "bay-da" - very cute!  "Mama" isn't on your radar these days... when and if you do say it, you are often sho…

I just can't even handle what happened today.

That is a lie.  I can handle what happened today because you know what?  The people directly effected by the shootings today in Connecticut had to handle it... and if they could do it, then I certainly can as well.  But what I cannot do is wrap my mind around all the details.  I can not accept that there is this much evil dwelling very directly in our midst; someone so tortured that they would take lives of the youngest school-aged children as well as adults who are doing wonderful things for our community and for the next generation.  Someone who would kill their own mother; shoot her in the face at point-blank range.  Someone so filled with hopelessness that they would then take their own life, just at twenty years of age.

After learning this was such a horrific shooting at an elementary school, I immediately reflected back on my experience in elementary school and those were easily some of the best days of my young life.  I had such…

So after reading Megan's (fabulous blogging mama to one heavenly angel and her twin earthly angels) post about how she documented both of her pregnancies, I decided to put together a collage of a bunch of my belly pictures and ultrasounds and various pre-Presley pictures... all leading up to one of our most recent pictures of me and her at 9 months post partum.



After having a painful, drawn-out birthing experience, becoming a new mom, and going through the newborn phase - I swore to Tony we were not having any more kids.  I never would have imagined the joy I could have and how complete our family feels now that Presley is here in our family.  I think I could go through it all again in the future, but we are truly happy with life right now.  Who knows how we will feel down the road from now.  If another pregnancy and baby is in the cards for our future that's wonderful but if it it is just the three of us from here on out then I would be just as ecstatic.

And Presley, if you d…