so much for writing more often! oh well, i do what i can. well, jason and i are qualified for a home loan and we're going up by his dad's house (about 3 hours from us) to look at houses in the area. and if that goes well we'll get jobs up there and be all moved by around october or november! yay i'm so thrilled to be out of the crummy apartment we're in now, it's got so many problems that just seem to get worse by the minute. i found mold in the kitchen ceiling the other day...ew! well gracie is doing very well, she's started to figure out how to crawl a little bit. it's too funny to watch her, she gets her rear end all up in the air, then her front, but almost every time she tries to move her hands to go somewhere she ends up doing a nosedive into the carpet. she gets stronger by the day though, and if she can't scooch to where she wants to go, she just rolls. still no teeth but i'm still nursing so i can easily deal with that! she's eating about 2 jars of baby food per day now, one fruity thing for breakfast and then some sort of meat/veggies thing for supper. she's started waking up again at night which is kind of a bother. i've got to admit that i've just been lazy with getting her back into her crib at night, i just let her sleep with me...hopefully this won't come back to bite me later on, but i'm sure it will and i will just have to deal with it then i guess. my cat bit gracie in the face a few days ago...so yeah now the cat's gotta go, which is kind of sad cuz she's a really good cat. and she was doing so well with the baby, but one day she just up and bit her for no reason, gracie wasn't messing with her at all!!!  i looked at pics of gracie when we were still in the hospital after the birth today, my how she's grown! it's funny but i can't believe she was that small just 8 months ago!

well it's mid july now and gracie's doing great with solid foods...introduced veggies a few weeks ago. she seems to prefer sweet potatoes to just about anything so far, but we'll keep adding to her little menu as time goes on. she'll be going on a sleepover this weekend at her great aunt's house, so that should be pretty fun for her, lots of kids to play with!! our cat has finally decided that 'this baby thing' is going to stick around for a while and that she is okay. only took six and a half months, but now the two of them play together all the time, it's so funny to watch! and the cat is so patient with gracie, which surprised me because she's not the world's nicest cat to begin with, so i was very cautious about the two of them interacting at first, but now gracie has a little shadow almost all the time. we still haven't gotten financing for the house in order. i got a phone number from my sister for a lady that does mortgages and that sort of thing, but it turned out to be the wrong number!! oh well, i'll keep trying until i get somewhere. we went on a family camping trip a few weeks ago, and gracie loved every little minute of it. it was during the fourth of july, so we had fireworks, and gracie and i watched them together. she seemed to like them a lot, noise and all...she even fell asleep during the grand finale! she loves sleeping in the tent, swimming in the lake with daddy was a good time too, and she even went fishing with us(i had her in a baby bjorn while i fished, she tried to 'help' me hold the few fish i was able to catch. well, that about brings us up to speed with our crazy life so far. as always, i'll try to write more often!

it's been a while since i've been on here and put anything in, and so much has happened so i guess i'll try to be brief-ish. we've been up to jason's dad's a few times now, and are looking around at places to buy and that sort of thing...found a few, now we just need to get financing in order...gracie is 6 months old now and is doing so well!! her personality has really come through these last few months and boy is she a sweet happy baby(90% of the time)! she can roll over from both tummy to back and vice-versa, she can sit up with a tiny bit of help, and she tries to scoot around on the floor a little bit now. we're feeding her solid food for one meal a day now, just cereal, then veggies..yay.

so the sports show was kinda dull this year. we took my younger brother matthew(10) and he had a pretty good time. he shot a paintball gun for the first time and did pretty well with hitting the targets. then we went home and jason went to his weekend job(bouncing at a bar) and i took matthew home and hung out with my family for a while with gracie. my mom kept trying to get a picture of her smiling, but every time she'd try to take a picture the red eye reduction light would go on and gracie was so mesmerized by that that she'd stop smiling and stare at the light! i think she's settling in to her night time routine really well now. she almost seems to know when it's time for pajamas, and then after i put them on her we play quietly for a little while, she eats a good meal, and then she drifts off to sleep. she didn't even move tonight when i put her in the crib. plus i'm getting better at not picking her up everytime she makes a noise, instead i hum her bedtime song and if that doesn't quiet her down, then i go check out what the fuss is. i'm so proud of her! such a good baby...now if it would just stay warm enough to go outside more!!

ha i just looked at the last time i was able to add an entry, then i read my old entries and they almost all say how i am going to write more frequently...that's funny. Well, the memorial service for jason's stepdad(cecil) went pretty well. i only cried once when i saw a picture of cecil holding gracie, and then a little bit when i went up to the coffin to say goodbye...pretty good for me. Gracie has decided that she's going to start teething now...i think...she's drooling all the time and she's found that my thumb is the best thing in the world to chew on(for hours at  a time). i've been trying to get her to use teething toys but we haven't found any that we like as much as my thumb. She's also sleeping in her crib now instead of with me, which is pretty neat. it took me a while to get up the nerve to put her in there again. the other times i tried she screamed right away, but this time she just looked at me and went right to sleep. she slept through the night in there too! Jason and i are going to an outdoor sports show this weekend and gracie will be at my mom's house for the day. i'm pretty excited about it. i love my daughter to pieces but sometimes it's nice to get away for a while. well, she's gonna wake up from her nap soon so i've gotta go back to being mom!

well, gracie's 3 months old on monday. we went through all her clothes and tried new ones on...she outgrew so much of her newborn stuff already! we kept a couple of things for memories, and the rest will go to friends or other people who need them. she can sit up all by herself for a short time now, she smiles and laughs all the time, she can grab for things and hold them more and more each day. it's just so awe inspiring to watch her grow!

she's got something wrong with her left eye though, it's got lots of runny discharge like she has something in there. we'll go to doctor sunday if it isn't better by then.

her grandpa's funeral is tomorrow. she'll be at my mom's while jason and i are at it. nothing too fancy, just a visitation and people speaking, then a party, cuz that's what he wanted.

well i'll start with the good. we went to grandma's house on saturday for a birthday party for jason and his stepdad, who share a birthday. that was really fun, gracie got to play with her cousins and aunts and uncles and she had a good time. and it was nice to get out of the house and do something as a family.  then on sunday she met her only cousin on my side who is about nine months old, that was pretty funny to watch her reaction to another baby.

and now the not so good....her grandpa passed away on monday afternoon. he had been suffering from lou gerhigs disease, which basically eats away at your muscles till there's nothing left and there isn't much you can do for it, for about a year now and we knew it was coming eventually, just didn't think it would be this sudden. he seemed fine on saturday, but that's part of life i suppose. it's really sad to me that she won't get to grow up with her grandpa as most kids do, but i know he'll be watching her from heaven.

gracie and i went shopping together on tuesday, pretty fun event all in all. went to my sister's work which is a beauty supply store/salon. i picked up some much needed new makeup and a hair dryer. then we went to babies r us so i could feed her quickly(they have a room for breastfeeding mothers to feed babies..how cool is that!) and i ended up buying a new baby carrier which is way easier to use than the baby bjorn i picked up at a rummage sale when i was still pregnant. and then we walked around kmart for a while and she fell asleep in her carrier(aww). she was awesome for the whole trip except when i slowed the car down to stop...didn't seem too thrilled with that.

on friday gracie had a doctor's appt. she's 13.10 lbs and 23 1/4 inches long. her doctor says she's doing great and to keep up the good work. then gracie had her first shots since leaving the hospital...she only cried for a few minutes after they were all done. pretty good i think! so today she's pretty sluggish and not wanting to eat much which the doctor said is normal and she'll be fine and back to her cheery self in a few days.

jason went ice fishing for a while on friday after we got home from the doctor, and he caught a pretty big crappie and a perch, brought them home and put them in the kitchen sink...they're still alive and swimming around in the sink...pretty funny. well, we're bracing for a really bad blizzard around here, they say we could get around two feet of snow with east winds of 20-40mph where we are(waukesha, wi...which is just outside of milwaukee.) so i'm gonna hunker down with my baby and wait out the storm. stay safe all.

well, it happened, she spent the night at jason's mom's house....and she was really good!! she didn't scream the whole time, she ate just fine(after she got used to the people and the new surroundings), she played with her 6 year old cousin nyanna, yup everything went just fine. oh that's such a relief!! all those silly worries i had were for nothing. and i didn't miss her to the point of crying, which i thought i would. i was just so happy to have some alone time with jason that i really didn't think about her all that much. i hope that doesn't sound too selfish or anything, but that's how it was. we had a blast on saturday night, went out with my sister and her boyfriend to a japanese hibachi restaurant and then we went to our favorite bar. we both got a bit drunk and ended up singing karaoke, but it was all fun, a night i won't soon forget. and the next day we had our ice fishing competition, i didn't fish, i just hung out on the ice for a while(they weren't catching anything anyway), and after a few hours i went to the bar that hosts the competition and had lunch and bid on a few things in the silent auction they had. i won a photography session for the three of us in our home or the setting we choose. pretty cool because i've been wanting a family picture for a while now and now we can get a pretty nice one! and while jason was fishing his sister called and asked if they could keep gracie for a few extra hours while they took their two kids to a kid themed restaurant...wow! so i said yeah, after i finally believed that they really wanted to take her there, and they dropped her off in the nick of time, i was just starting to really miss her. so i guess that we both can survive a night apart once in a while, and there will be more in the future.  oh yeah, one more quick story to add...this is pretty funny i think... jason was watching her while i was at work on friday and he had his face real close to hers, and she stuck one of her fingers up his nose so far that he got a small bloody nose! sorry if that's not funny to some people, but it made me laugh.

whew! we made it through the first week of mom working...and gracie didn't fuss!! she and jason do quite well together when i'm not home, which is a big burden off my shoulders. it's just so nice to know that those two are finally bonding! work itself is the same old b.s. it always was, but at least i'm getting out of the house and making myself some spending money, now if only it would warm up around here so gracie and i could go places. she goes on her first overnight at jason's mom's this saturday...i have to admit i'm a little nervous about it. gracie hasn't really been around her much since she was born, so there's the whole she could scream the entire time like she did when we took her to my mom's for a few hours....jason's mom never breastfed, and i'm breastfeeding gracie, so i have to tell her how to heat the bottles and to use the milk in order of the date i pumped it on. and jason's mom smokes inside the house(jason and i smoke too, but only outside) and i really don't want her exposed to that cuz my brother's kid's mom smokes around her son and that poor kid has been on an inhaler since he was two weeks old!! other than all that i'm okay with it, jason and i need the time to ourselves. we haven't been...uh...romantic...since she was born and we're both getting kind of rowdy about it. that and we've already planned an evening out with friends and we have an ice fishing jamboree on sunday so i guess i'd better suck it up and realize that everything will be okay! i suppose when i really think about it i'm pretty jazzed about a day with just jason. don't get me wrong, i absolutely love being a mom and all that, but our lives have been turned upside down since she came into this world which is expected but i guess i never realized how much things really change when a baby comes along...silly me. so we'll have our night out and i'll try not to think about all the what ifs that are running through my head(yeah right)...okay i'll try not to call jason's mom every hour to make sure she's okay. hey on a totally other topic i finally figured out how to put a picture of gracie on my avatar...go me! i'm not the most computer savvy person to say the least, so that's a pretty big accomplishment for me. it's my favorite picture of her that we have on here so far and i'm sure i'll update it a lot.  we gave her some baby gas relief medicine today and she hates it, but it helps a lot. she cried really loud when i gave it to her but it's a new taste and she'll get used to it and once she figures out that that gross stuff mommy puts in her mouth makes her tummy feel better she'll be alright. wow this is getting really long! i really need to get on here more and say a little every day instead of writing a novel every week! i'll get better!