Christmas 2012

Christmas Eve

These are from Christmas Day.  We were all in our Christmas pjs until Addie spit up all over hers; her outfit in the picture with Andy was the second or third of the day.

Andy built her a cabin with her Lincoln logs from Santa.  It might be a while before she can play with them, but Andy sure had a good time making the cabin for her to knock down.  However the cabin was too sound structurally...surprise...

Fun pictures

3 months old

many times I saw this - sometimes she was awake, others not

2 months - played hard

first family photo

coming home from the hospital

2 weeks - kisses

2 weeks - sweet sleep

content on Daddy's shoulder

Pictures for Grandparents

This was our present to the grandparents.  I thought that they would have fun trying to figure out which features she gets from each of us.

Andy - 2 yrs old

Mary - 3 yrs old

Adele - 2.5 months old

"New Year's Eve" dance

 These are pictures from our anniversary celebration.

Cicada Club

us in an old telephone booth at the club

2013 New Year's letter

As usual, you can tell who wrote what part of the letter:

Mary - all of the basics and details

Andy - funny little quips, intro, and conclusion.

I can't tell a story to save my life so I tend to leave the story telling to Andy, but he's been a little busy so I tried to cut down the amount he had to do.  But if I'd sent the letter with only what I had written, it would have been incredibly dry and boring.  It is so much better with his extra bits; hopefully y'all enjoy them as much as I did.

Hi all,

2012, like 2011, flew by. Last year, we moved to California and bought a house.  Much of this year revolved around renovating the house and having a baby.  As it has been noted before, the more you have going on in life, the quicker the year seems to pass.  Thank God for video-chats on Skype & FaceTime so that we can keep up with everyone we know spread throughout the nation.

We’ve made a lot of changes to the house this year – some planned, others not.  We started the year shivering in a few rooms that were closed up by plastic and curtains as Andy tore up a majority of the tile floor in our house.  This was in preparation for the new flooring to be installed throughout the house in March. About one month later, we had a cracked pipe in our upstairs bathroom that required a new shower and essentially a new kitchen.  We’ve painted almost all of the interior and can park our vehicles in the garage because the garage doors now work...woo hoo!  We ended the year toasty warm with a new pellet stove.

The big news of the year is that we had a baby.  We found out we were pregnant in February.  While Andy was excited, Mary promptly freaked out.  Thankfully, there weren’t any problems with the pregnancy or Mary’s pre-existing conditions for most of the pregnancy.  We enjoyed our Babymoon in Carmel at the end of July. Then we got busy putting the house back together from the kitchen and bathroom renovations and setting up furniture for when the baby was born.  Caroline Adele Walker was born on October 4^th at 5:41pm; she weighed 7 lbs 14 oz and was 19 inches long.  We call her Adele or Addie.  No, she is not named after Adele the singer; Caroline, Adele, and Addie are all family names.  We look forward to sharing pictures and stories with her of the women after whom she is named.  Addie has grown lots in her three months of life.  She is now about 13 lbs and loves smiling and making noises at us.  Her favorite place to play is on her mat/gym with a whale, an octopus, and a giraffe that hang above her.  She bats at them and kicks the whole structure so that they move all around. 

Addie met her Auntie Meg (Mary’s sister) at the beginning of November; Meg gave us lots of information about dairy-free dieting so that Addie wouldn’t have as many issues with keeping her food down, gas, and an unhappy bottom.  Both sets of grandparents were able to come out to California to meet Adele.  It was a very special time for everyone to be able to interact with her.  Logan and Cici (Andy’s sister) got to meet the baby in utero about a month before she was born, since they stopped by while out west for a wedding.

We are very pleased that our dog, Bandit, doesn’t seem to have any problems with Addie.  Sometimes he wants to sniff her; I imagine that is usually when he happens to walk by and she has a dirty diaper.  Now that she is more vocal, he occasionally cocks his head at her trying to figure out what all of the noise is about.

Andy has many hilarious stories of middle of the night feedings or diaper changes.  One involves him mistaking a pillow for the baby at 2am, and trying in earnest to change itsdiaper.  Another time, he brought the baby to bed mid-diaper change… with no diaper on!!!  Suffice it to say that she messed in our sheets a bit…but it was nothing that couldn’t be washed out.

Mary’s mother, Charlotte LeAnn Rodgers, passed away on October 16^th. It was a blessing for her to be released from the pain and confusion related to Alzheimer’s disease. She donated her body to science for further research of the disease andtreatments she underwent while alive.  We think that LeAnn was able to have at least one moment when she comprehended that Addie had been born before she died.

Andy has continued to enjoy his work here in California.  We really appreciate the flexibility that the company allows him. When Addie was born, he was able to take two full weeks off and work two additional weeks at only half-time.  He has continued to make progress on his Master’s degree.  He is enrolling in his last class this Spring; then, he has to write his thesis.

We are anxiously awaiting several new babies in 2013.  Both of our sisters are pregnant so by the end of April, we will have eight nieces and nephews.  We plan to make at least one trip back to Texas this year.  Hopefully, we will make more progress on the house so that it is safer for Addie when she is crawling, running all around, and making a general mess of things.  Andy should be close to finishing his thesis up by the end of the year... then he’ll have even more time to chase the baby around.  Maybe, we’ll even manage to hang pictures on our walls (we’ve been that busy around here). 

We hope this year is one of happiness and hope for you.  Feel free to visit Mary’s blog for more stories & pictures about our family antics throughout the year at http://windowtothewalkers.blogspot.com/.

Best Wishes for you & yours in 2013,

Andy, Mary, & AddieWalker

PS

Here are some general lessons we learned in 2012.  We’d love to know if these lessons mean anything to you (good, bad, or indifferent):

1.    Ask for responsibility and it shall begranted.  People are looking for others to do work for them.

2.    Always handle the “safe side” of a used diaper.  Handling the “business side” has consequences.

3.    Get more sleep. You’ll be a happier camper for it.

4.    The clean diaper goes on before you hand the baby off.

5.    Deodorant goes on before the Baby Björn or any other baby carrier.

6.    Call the Employee Service Center to report a birth and get your health insurance changed. Don’t try to use an automated/online system.  The Internet doesn’t know how to have a baby.

2013 Goals

We hope to get more done on the house in 2013.  Addie will continue to grow; we need to make sure that the house will be safe for her as she learns to crawl and walk and get into more stuff around the house.  Of course time is somewhat limited due to Addie needing time and interaction and Andy continuing to work on his degree.  He will be taking his last class in the Spring semester and then finishing up his research and writing his thesis; we think he will defend his thesis at the end of the 2014 Spring semester.  So between these two time demanding activities, we hope to get the following things done:

1. Fix stairs (not handrail)
2. Install baseboards
3. Make downstairs bookcases built-ins
4. Paint Guest Bedroom and Powder Room
5. Sand and paint porch railing
6. Replace French doors
7. Finish baby proofing the house
8. Finish Adele's room
9. Hang curtains downstairs
10. Fix thresholds at all of the doors; they have drafts

I'm sure that we will add many more things to the list throughout the year, but these are the major things that we will try to tackle.  Some of these will probably even get put off to the following year as tends to happen.  There are plenty of times that we hope to do something but later decide that it doesn't bother us enough currently to warrant getting done because some other things is driving us bonkers.  Whatever, all progress is good!

Meeting Auntie Meg

This picture is from my sister's visit with us at the beginning of November.  She was able to give us suggestions of how to help Adele be a happier baby...use a pacifier for gas, dairy free diet for me, use a blanket for a burp cloth to catch all of the throw up so that you don't get covered with it, etc.  Since her stay overlapped with my birthday, I had special meals on my birthday; it was awesome!  Blueberry pancakes and bacon for breakfast...I don't remember what lunch was now...yummy steaks for dinner...strawberry shortcake for dessert...  Thanks for coming to visit!!!

3 Months Old

While I think the above is a great picture, below is one of her smiling.  She is really difficult to catch smiling in a picture.  She becomes too interested in the camera or her reflection on the backside of my iPod.  This isn't one of her really big smiles, but it is proof that the child is happy and can smile.

The pictures were taking after a feeding.  We started in the red shirt; then she threw up so we went to the purple shirt.

Celebrating our 7 year anniversary

We left Addie at home with Andy's parents to go dancing in LA at the Cicada Club.  It worked perfectly that they were having their dance on Dec. 30 so that we didn't have to drive on New Year's Eve; the dance even finished at 10:30 so we were able to be home at a reasonable time.

This was Addie's first attempt at bottle feeding, and it didn't start so well.  We tried it out the night before and the day of to make sure that she would eat.  She basically screamed the whole time and wasn't happy with the different things that we tried.  We sure were glad that Mary Beth knew several ways to try to make Addie eat, but none were overly successful.  Thankfully, Mary Beth called Cici who gave us more suggestions.  Finally, once the milk and bottle nipple were warm enough, the little girl was content to gulp down lots of milk.  GO TEAM!

We even had snow that day which made me nervous about the roads coming home late at night.  But it stopped snowing and the baby ate while we got ready and ate our dinner at home.  We jumped in the car, got to LA, and walked into a beautiful Art Deco building.  We had a nice time although the two dance floors were small and there were a lot of people.  We missed the large dance floors of DFW where there was room to be crazier on the dance floor (okay, Andy wants to be crazy; I want to have fun without drawing attention to ourselves).  It is hard to do much when you are hemmed in on all sides.  We really loved the dress code for the event though.  We were on the lower end of dressiness.  There were lots of tuxes and evening gowns; some people even came in full vintage clothing (including hats!!  I love a lovely lady's hat.)  You know that we were thinking we totally could have dressed up more.  We both love to get all gussied up, but we tone it down and still wind up being slightly overdressed most of the time.  Now we know that we can pull out all of the stops at the Cicada Club.  Hopefully we can find more places where that is the case.

Thanks Jimmy and Mary Beth (Jimbo and Marme) for watching Addie on our first night out!