This is why I don't do New Years Resolutions!

Well, it hasn't taken me very long to fail at my resolution of making at least one blog post a month. But what I say to that is, oh well! Just check out this adorable face below and you'll know why I've been slightly preoccupied. If I were to write up more blog posts that would mean I'd have to temporarily stop kissing those wonderful cheeks! That is a tough thing for me to resist these days. I am so in love with my baby boy and it must show because as I sat in the waiting room for his check up today, a man across from me said, "You are in love, aren't you?" My response could only be, "Yes I am" with a big smile on my face.

I'm very thankful to report another great doctor's visit. I was holding Brenden in just his diaper as our doctor came in the room. He took a long look at this babe, shook his head and said, "He isn't tiny!" No, he isn't that! I absolutely love having a big baby and I'm not sure why but whenever people comment about how huge he is it just makes me smile. He has faithfully gained one pound a week since he was born and is now comfortably fitting into size 6 month clothes! The details are 15 lbs 9 oz and 24 inches long at 2 months.

Hopefully no one thinks I am neglecting my big girl, but even if I tried this rambunctious one will not be ignored! She is keeping us on our toes every day and will make me go from cracking up at her to wanting to pull my hair out all within a few minutes time. Speaking of hair, can someone give me any kind of suggestion of how to control her crazy head of hair?? She is usually great at letting me tie it back in pony tails but I'm just not skilled enough to do anything else. I may be using this picture as the "before" look very shortly. I'm just not sure what the "after" picture will look like yet. Stay tuned.

Brenden has come to make us the Fringer Family of 4!

This birth experience with Brenden was so different than how the events took place when Sierra was born. With her, my contractions started 9 days early, earlier than what I was ready for since I didn't yet know what to expect with the pain of contractions. With Brenden my water broke in the early hours of Monday the 22nd. Since I had expected contractions to start immediately afterward and I felt nothing, again I didn't really know what was happening. A few hours later I called my doctor just to let her know that I had no idea what was going on so she asked if I could come in to the office right away. Within a few minutes of seeing her, she sent me right over to the hospital to check in telling me that I should be having my baby sometime that day! We were very excited and she said that it was so nice having good news like that first thing on a Monday morning.

We were wrong to be so excited. My contractions never started even with the IV meds they gave me to kickstart things. So after a full day of waiting on Monday, the doctor decided to take me off of the meds to try to give me a good night sleep and then try again in the morning. I was very thankful for that because I was hungry! So I got a small late night dinner, a sleeping pill (also thankful for that) and then a lite breakfast in the morning before getting the ball rolling. After a morning of meds my body finally decided to take over and Brenden was born at 1:20 in the afternoon! It was a long process but a fairly pain-free one. Here is a pic of how I spent a portion of my first day in the hospital.




Sierra had a great time having 3 nights of sleepovers with friends. She was in great hands and we knew she'd be having the time of her life. A few hours after Brenden joined us she came to spend a little while with us in the room. She was very excited to meet him and it was so cute to watch her with him.



And here he is as we prepared to head home after being in the hospital for over 3 days!

Yes, I was happy to leave too :)

All kinds of new things!

Where to start? There is the obvious new addition to our family, Brenden Allen Fringer! But since he is the newest change I'll save him for later.

First, we have been very happy with Sierra as she has fully embraced her big girl bed. We have had our share of issues but overall I've been impressed with how she is dealing with the obvious freedom that a toddler bed could give her. Nap time has been the hardest challenge since she isn't usually tired enough to stay in bed when there are so many books to look at on her shelf. But if sleep doesn't happen I am trying to get two hours of 'room time' for her. Here is a picture of her the first night in the big girl bed.

Next was the fun we had with getting Sierra ready for her baby brother. It was very cute to hear her take on what would happen. She often said "when baby brother comes out, he's gonna drink hims milk, and sleep in hims crib, and play with hims toys!" Then right at the end she started telling us that Baby Brother was in her tummy which was just too cute. Here she is proudly displaying her baby tummy.

Next I'm so happy to report that Sierra has gone pee-pee on the potty before bedtime the past two nights! I'm very excited about that because for several months she hasn't had much of an interest in sitting on the potty. When I've asked she's very politely said, "no thank you". So last night her Mommom asked her if she wanted to sit on the potty and she said yes. Then tonight she asked to go sit all on her own! Yeah, let's hope it continues!

And finally, for some cute pictures of Brenden, please see the next post.

Happy 1/2 Birthday Sierra

Just a short post marking the 1/2 birthday for my little girl, mostly because I also need to mark the special occasion that she actually smiled for the camera!! That in itself is a reason for me to be excited because it rarely happens. She hasn't yet caught the 'little supermodel' bug and turned into a pose queen whenever she sees the camera. Usually I get a "cheese" as she turns away to continue whatever activity she has going on.

Anyway, here she is getting her height recorded on our growth chart for 2 1/2 years old!

37 inches for anyone who cares for the details

Sierra's favorites February edition

1. All the letters of the alphabet!! This school year Sierra started attending the 2 year old class at Nashua Child Learning Center at our church on Mondays and Wednesdays. For a while I struggled with the idea of sending my only child to school/day care when I am a stay at home mom, but Rob and I had some very good reasons for deciding to give it a shot. I am so glad we did! She loves going and has given us so many surprises over what she is learning. Before Christmas she shocked us by correctly naming the magnet letters that she has always enjoyed playing with. So I started asking her what letter is this? over and over and she knew them! Her very favorite thing to do now is pick out letters for us which is why I bought this cute little alphabet cookie cutter set. Here is a video of her first go at making cookies...

2.4.10 alphabet cookies from Vanessa Fringer on Vimeo.

2. The Little Einsteins. I have to admit that I like them a lot too :) For those of you without toddlers these are cartoons on the Disney Channel and they teach classical music and art in adventure settings. I got 3 DVDs for her to watch on our car ride to PA last month and she ONLY wanted to watch those 3 even though we had several other options with us. By the end of our vacation she had the opening song and much of the dialogue from several episodes memorized. I need to get a video of her singing that because it is super cute.

3. Balloons! I have no idea why since we never have balloons but she just LOVES balloons. Luckily we got one from our friend Jill after Chase's birthday party and she was in heaven! She just holds it by the string, nothing too exciting from my standpoint but it was the greatest gift to her.

4. Singing and Dancing

5. Being a princess. This is a new found favorite that we discovered while visiting friends in PA. We have no dress up clothes for her right now so when she got to share her friends clothes you could see in her face how absolutely beautiful she felt.

6. Chocolate pudding. Ok, anything chocolate, and yes she did get that from me. I do limit her chocolate intake but it is just so cute when she looks at me and asks to have "chloclate pudding".

New Start for 2010

I am one day shy of it being a whole YEAR since I last made a blog post. Wow, what happened to Vanessa the blogger?? Back in December I decided that my new years resolution would be making at least one blog post each month in 2010. Obviously that didn't happen but here is my fresh start just a few days into February. I'm not even going to try to make a 'catch-up' post for the majority of 2009 so if anyone needs to be filled in on any details you can feel free to email me. Ok, one minor detail to catch everyone up on...I'm currently 7 months pregnant with a little boy!

We've had an eventful start to this year that is worthy of sharing. After years of putting it off due to marriage, buying a house, having a baby, buying our second house, selling our first house (after we bought the second...that was a scary few months!) Rob has finally been able to get started on his Doctoral Program. I'm very proud of him for starting this long and hard endeavor. The first step in officially starting was to take a two week trip out to Kansas City for meetings with his advisor and lots of reading/research. So on January 14th the three of us drove down to my parents house in PA and a day later he flew off and left Sierra and I with two weeks to spend visiting with family and friends. I was in heaven! We had a great time bouncing back and forth between my parents house and my brother Andy's house, a little over an hour away. I was very proud of how well Sierra adjusted to so much change, several different sleeping arrangements, and many different play dates. She loved all of her 'new friends' (mostly all the new toys to play with is my guess). We had a great time with her cousins too. I could tell she was very comfortable with them because Kathy and I had our hands full breaking up toddler fights. Many times we were trying hard not to laugh at all of the drama the three kids were causing.

I had such a great time with my family and the many close friends living in the Ephrata/Lititz area. I wish the distance between New Hampshire and Pennsylvania wasn't so far!

We've been back home for one week now and with just under 2 months until our baby is due, we've got some work around the house to do! Rob just about finished up our bathroom renovation project today by adding the shelving for the linen closet. Then the other big things to do are repainting the dining room (upon my request...I'm just a little tired of the current color), a small painting job in the nursery, moving some furniture around to set up Sierra's new toddler bed and putting the bassinet and other various baby furniture in our room for the time being. Sierra gets a few more months of having her own room and then comes the fun part of transitioning the baby boy into that room as well. I hope she learns to sleep through crying quickly!

That is long enough for now I suppose. But here are two very amusing pictures of Sierra from today. She started asking me to give her pony tails and then kept handing me elastics so I just kept going! She loved it and didn't even want me to take them out for nap time. Rob and I were enjoying her new look all day :)

Two Month Recap

It is time to get everyone caught up with the Fringer Family. There hasn't been much going on up here in NH but here is at least a few pictures of Sierra to catch you up on how big she is getting.
Christmas: We spent Christmas in Pennsylvania with my family and had a very nice visit. Immediately after Christmas day several of us discovered how bad we were with taking pictures this year and we have no idea why. Rob did a great job of videoing everyone opening presents but there were not many snap shots taken. Sierra was given a baby doll and stroller which she fell in love with and wasn't interested in opening any other presents (not even the soccer ball that I tried to prove was much more fun than a baby doll). It was a great day but long for us as we drove over night from NH and arrived around 7am. A few days after Christmas we had to say bye-bye to Rob since he needed to be back in NH for work and Sierra and I got to stay in PA through New Years Day. We spent several days with Andy, Kathy, Austin and Brayden. Sierra is still working on 'playing nice' with her cousin Austin. He was great and wanted to play with her while she preferred to scream whenever he was near. I did manage to get a nice picture of the cousins taking a yogurt break together.
Finally New Years Eve came and I was able to get out on my own to spend some time with my aunts, cousins and PopPop (I have no pictures of that event either). Sierra spent New Years Eve with her grandparents and provided some entertainment for their friends from church. But I think by this point in the vacation she was ready to get back to her familiar surroundings back home. Here is my favorite picture from her celebrations...
That brings us to January. The only really remarkable thing is the amount of snow we got this month. Each week we were getting more and that usually meant another 8-10 inches. so this was the typical view out our living room window...
And that also meant...
ICE! Unfortunately because of this ice we have had numerous leaks into our kitchen and one night Rob was even on the kitchen roof pounding away at a foot of ice at 1 in the morning! The good news is that my handy husband can take care of these issues but at some point during the warmer months we will be dishing out some money for re-shingling the roof and redoing the ceiling in the kitchen.

In further Sierra news, she's definitely growing! I could tell by the fact that her one pair of pants can no longer cover her bum each time she bends over. It was pretty funny watching her walk around with the waist of her pants sitting below her bum.
A few other day to day pictures: this is what our mornings look like
Acting a little crazy throughout the day:
And finally Sierra had her first attempt at dress up the other day. I was trying to get her dressed for the day but she was more interested in her basket of hats and mittens. She had me put TWO of her hats on her plus one pair of mittens and then ran away from me when I tried to get pants and a long sleeve shirt on. So I took a picture:

Happy Baby Shower Fran!

Do not be alarmed, baby and Vanessa are not in the same sentence anywhere in this blog post. This is a post about my wonderful friend Fran's baby coming in February so please no one be confused. Two weekends ago many of my close friends from college took over Fran's house for a great time celebrating Fran and Jason becoming first time parents. Eryn, Carson and I drove down to PA from NH, Beth came from VA, Jessica came from Pittsburgh and lucky Jill had the shortest drive from Ephrata. Eryn and I actually won prizes at the shower for driving the farthest. I was pretty proud:) Even though I almost threw my gps out the window for nearly failing us within the last 1/2 hour of our trip at midnight, but it all ended alright. Here are some pictures from the shower compliments of Bethany Lyle, official photographer:

A shot of the hysterical competition of who could dress the baby the fastest. Jay seriously needs help learning how to dress babies blindfolded. Who does this on a regular basis & can teach him?

Fran's sister Nathalie put together one of the nicest showers I've been to and everyone had a great time. And Fran was very gracious to host 5 extra girls plus one seriously cute 6 month old boy for a few nights. It was hours of laughter, fun stories and great memories. I love all these girls!
By Sunday evening it was just Eryn and I left at Fran's house and I actually wanted to try my hand at scrapbooking for the first time. This is pretty intimidating stuff for me since I completely lack any sense of creativity AND my friends could be professional scrapbookers (scrappers?). I'm sure there is such a thing, right? They all have amazing talent and I usually just sit there with my mouth hanging open looking through their books. Anyway, I'm determined to put something together for Sierra so I took this opportunity for Eryn and Fran to walk me through the process. Eryn basically did all the work because I made her, Fran pretty much has her own store of supplies that she opened up to me, and I did a fabulous job of gluing things to the page. Wha-la! Here are my first two scrapbook pages!
Maybe by next spring I'll have another page completed. At this rate I'll have Sierra's book done by the time she gets married.

Ice Anyone?

For those of you who don't necessarily follow the news from the Northeast part of the US, parts of New England are still trying to cope with days of power outages. Here is the little story of the Fringer family dealings over the weekend...
Friday morning around 1am Rob and I awoke to a BOOM and then flashing blue lights outside our window. I didn't know what was going on and was very confused in my sleepy state until Rob told me it was just our power going out and a cop car outside (possibly moving a fallen branch). Ok, I realized it would be a cold night but just snuggled under the covers and went back to sleep. Sleep did take a little while since I kept hearing crashes of branches falling outside but luckily nothing came near to damaging our house. When I woke again at the normal rising time we realized that the power would probably be out for a while once we looked outside at the massive covering of ice everywhere. It amazes me how something that looks so pretty can be so destructive. Here is what our property looked like.

So much for my beautiful, tall lilac tree
And another tree down

We were able to spend the night with some friends who were lucky enough not to have lost power and we had a nice time with them on Friday. Saturday Rob and Steve (our youth pastor) were all over the place assessing the situation at church, checking out our place and just trying to be of help to anyone who needed it. I was so surprised and felt so blessed that our power came back around noon on Saturday. So we had it pretty easy compared to most of the people in the greater Nashua area. Our only lasting effect was that our cable tv and internet didn't come back on until Tuesday night which wasn't so bad since I could probably do with less of both of those. As for the rest of our community, we are still hearing of people from church who even today (Wednesday) do not have power and may not until after Christmas since there seems to be a shortage of replacement transformers for the power lines. But it was a blessing to see so many people at church on Sunday even though we had to keep all of our coats on, and there were so many people offerering spare heaters, spare beds and anything else they could think of to people who had a need. I believe that the number was around 400,000 people who were affected by this ice storm and lost their power for a few days. Wow!

HI

Hi everyone! I wanted to share Sierra's first word with you, so HI! So far this is all she is saying clearly but she does like to talk quite a bit in her own language.
I haven't made a post in a while but you haven't missed much either. It has been a pretty relaxing October and November. Sierra took her first steps back on September 13th and then took another month to really get going with it but she is a pro now. It is so cute to see her walking all over the place.
At the end of October we experienced Sierra's first flight out to California to visit Grandma and Grandpa Fringer, cousins, aunt and uncle. I knew ahead of time that considering how very active she is, a 6 hour flight would be pretty interesting. And that's just what it was. I can't say that the first flight was horrible, although it really felt like it at the time. I know that she could have behaved much worse but I don't even want to imagine what that would be like. There were fits of screaming, attempts to escape our little row of seats, and sadly, tears shed by me (Vanessa that is, Rob managed to get through the flight without crying. At least one of us did.) Finally we made it to CA without any angry looks from our neighboring passengers. Sierra was a wonderful house guest for her grandparents and we all enjoyed the visit very much. Below is a picture of Sierra in the opposite attire needed for the beautiful weather out there, but modeling her new winter coat that we definitely needed once we got back home to New Hampshire. It has seen a lot of use the past few days when the temps haven't reached any higher than the mid-30s.
We don't have any snow yet but I'll be sure to take a picture of the first snowfall. Hopefully we'll get some snowboots for Sierra before that happens so I can get some pictures of her in the first snowfall.

Heat for the winter

As some of you know, a year and a half ago Rob and I bought an OLD New England house. That means lots of charm and character right? Last winter we found out that it meant expensive oil heat that barely made us feel warm. So, in preparation for our next New Hampshire winter we got a wood pellet stove for our living room! Hopefully over the next few months we'll be feeling much more warmth for a smaller price. I'll be sure to let you know how it works out for us. I already love the wood stove smell! Check out the pictures of Rob's beautiful tiling job.

Just some random pictures

On Saturday Sierra got a magnetic letter board at a yard sale. Already 1/2 of the pieces are missing :)

August

August was a busy month for us and I should have been writing blog posts as we went along but as you know if you've been faithfully clicking on our link that has not happened. I apologize to our friends and family for not filling you in and for now giving you a very abbreviated post of the past month but I will at least attach a picture with my brief descriptions. Here we go...



It started out with my 7th and possibly last appearance as a bridesmaid. My good friend and former roommate Kristy married Andrew Walker on 8/3 and it was a great day. God cleared away the thunder storm just long enough for us to hold the outdoor ceremony and then as soon as the guests returned to the building for the reception the clouds let loose and it rained again. The timing was all His.






Next we took our first family vacation as the three of us to a place in upstate NY called Camp of the Woods. We went with a few families from our church and had a great time. We also got to celebrate Sierra's first birthday there. We have great video her enjoying her slice of birthday cake that I hope to upload to our dropshots.com website soon. The camp is a fantastic place for a family vacation and we hope to return someday when Sierra and any future children can participate in the many activities offered. Unfortunately that week was the last of what seemed like a month of rainy, dreary weather in the Northeast so we didn't get in as many beach activities (lounging in the sun for me) we hoped for but we still had a great time there with our friends.


Following our vacation we had a great visit with my family at our first Baillie Family Reunion in Mass. (That is my mom's side of the family for anyone who doesn't know, and where Sierra's middle name comes from.) My family drove up from PA and stayed a few days with us in NH. We entertained ourselves at our house by cooking meals together, eating more birthday cake for both Sierra and Austin (2), watching the end of the Olympics, holding some rather competitive contests at Mario Kart and bowling on Andy's Wii, and trying to teach Sierra how to share her toys with Austin. That last one is going to need some more work. It was so nice to have them here!

That wraps up August. Now it is the 5th of September and I have officially started my new 'at home' job. Trying to figure out how much work I can get done during Sierra's naps is challenging right now but we'll get the hang of it soon.
Thanks for the patience and I'll try to get some more posts soon.

The heat drove me into the lake

Some important information before you look at the pictures below is that for many years now I've been strictly a pool swimmer. At the risk of sounding very girly, lakes hold no appeal for me other than sitting in a boat on top of one or doing a bit of kneeboarding when I'm feeling adventurous. I don't like seeing fish swimming around me, the water is very dirty, and I hate it when the lake bottom feels mushy under my feet. After the backyard splash pool trial (see previous post) I knew that if I wanted Sierra to experience swimming (if you call it that at 11 months) I'd have to venture into the lake at Joe and Heidi's house. So we drove over today and without thinking about it too much I went right in and we had a great time. We floated around for quite a while and she had so much fun in the water and playing in the wet sand. I'm pretty proud of myself for overcoming my minor disgust for my daughters enjoyment. Oh and even though she didn't smile for the camera she really did have a good time.

Resisting the temptation to put her fingers in her mouth

'jumping' off the dock like the other kids

Fun in the Sun

Sierra finally had the chance to splash around in her baby pool a few days ago. To my surprise she wasn't as much of a fan of it as I expected. She loves splashing in the tub but outside the grass has much more appeal than the water. Since my soccer days I haven't been a 'play in the grass and dirt' person so I wasn't crazy about Sierra's preferred activities on this day. I will try hard to get used to the fact that kids like to get dirty though and let her have some fun. I could only stand it long enough to take some pictures on this occasion but next time I'll try to indulge her a little more. She also hardly sits still long enough for me to snap the picture which is why I haven't posted to this blog in a while (for those of you requesting an update). It's tough to get a good shot of this little one who is constantly on the move.