High Five for Friday

This week I'm linking up with Lauren at From My Grey Desk for my top five highlights of the week. This week was amazing! We went on a little weekend spring break trip to Seattle and had a blast!

1. We went to the Pike Place Market. It was aa close to a Bachelor style date as we will probably ever get.
2. The bathtub in our hotel room was amazing!
3. Happy hour and Jenga in the hotel bar.
4. I finally made it to the motherland! The original Starbucks!
5. We got to come home to our sweet little lady.

Goals for 2013

I feel like every year at this time I set the same goal/resolution. To loose weight. While I'm still on the journey to loose a little more weight so I can fit back into a couple more pairs of pre-pregnany jeans, I want to set some other goals for the year.

The only goal that I really have in mind for myself right now, is one that I really want to do my best to stick to. The dreaded b word. Dun dun dun...the budget. Try as I might for the past couple months it just doesn't always work out. The area that we struggle with the most are groceries and eating out. I'm still tweaking a system to get things to work for me. I did great in November and ok in December. With the start of a new year and new month right around the corner, I'm determined to make this work!

I joined a gym, yay! My health insurance will pay for $20 of it each month as long as I go 12 times a month. That's about 3 times a week, which I'm pretty sure I can do! Since this goes with my other goal of sticking to the budget, I'm hoping I'll be extra motivated. I start tomorrow!

Here to a great 2013!

We Have a Walker!

The day finally happened! On December 19th, Penny walked! We were hoping it would happen soon, we were just waiting for that moment when it finally happened. Penny has been doing physical therapy for the past 6 months once a week. It's hard to really know how much it helps, but she started crawling soon after she started, then began pulling up, cruising, standing up in the middle of the room, and now walking! She is on her own schedule and does things only when she is ready and feels like it for sure! Even now that she has walked she won't do it every day and we can't make her. If we try to hold her up to get her to walk and she doesn't want to, there is nothing we can do to make her! She's one stubborn lady for sure! We meet and recreated her goals a couple days ago. She surpassed her previous physical therapy goals, which is awesome! In the next six months, her goal is to walk independently over a variety of surfaces. With a little hard work and determination I am very confidant she can do it! Even though her gross motor development in below normal, I see that she is making progress and meeting milestones, just at here own pace. I'm not as worried as I was six months ago! And now, a couple videos of her first walk!

Baby Sign Language

We have done a little bit of baby sign language with Penny and they teach it to her at school. I was kind of unsure about it at first, but it really works! When she was still taking a bottle, she would do the sign for milk. Now that she's older, she uses it a lot when she eats. The two we use the most are "more" and "all done". It makes feeding her a lot easier! She also knows "cracker" and we are working on a few more.

More!

All done!

Penny's Birthday Party

A child's birthday party is a funny thing. I spent months and months planning Penny's first birthday party and hours putting it all together. When look back at the pictures it's nice to see, but it doesn't look like it would have taken so many hours. And she won't even remember it. :) At least she can look back on the awesome pictures!

We had the wonderful privilege to have Heather Lily from Heather Lily Photography, come and shoot Penny's party. She was amazing and it was nice to not have to worry about one of us missing something while being behind a camera. The shots came out amazing!

So here's t he party in a nutshell! The photo's are in random order,  ran out of patience trying sort them. 

 I made this wreath to hang on our door every year for her birthday.

Balloons to look like a caterpillar

More caterpillar balloons and the keepsake book we had guest sign

Most of the food had little signs that went with the story

Cake close up

Caterpillars made from laterns

Her cake, it was from Walmart and turned out awesome!

The main table

She cried the whole time we sang to her, it was kind of cute

She didn't get into the smash cake too much

Opening present after a nice bath

She was one tired little lady at the end of the day