Pumpkin Carving

 Lillian's first time carving pumpkins. 

I hate the pumpkin guts and Lillian kept reaching for it but I knew it would just be a big mess. She did get some to her mouth once.

Found this idea of using a drill on pinterest and it was way easier than those little carving sets.

Our Pumpkins! (thanks to Daddy's hard work)

Halloween Play date

Lillian and I got together with a couple of our friends for a Halloween play group today. The kids wore their costumes/Halloween outfits. It was a gorgeous day outside so we played then read a story about pumpkins and got to decorate pumpkins with silly face stickers(cute easy no mess idea).

"Wendy" from Peter Pan mowing the yard. Her little sister Cohen (below) is dressing up as Tinkerbell for Halloween but wanted to be a cheerleader for today. 

Cohen and Lillian, Cohen is about a week older than Lillian

Everyone loves to play with a ball

Sweet Mommy friends

"Princess Auroa" and her mommy decorating their pumpkin

Lillian size pumpkin

Lillian's 32nd Week/7 Months

32 Weeks Old!

Nursing/Feeding: Compared to last week Lillian did not nurse as long this week. She seemed more content though. She had a cold this week and I think that's why she didn't seem to eat as much. She may not have nursed as much but she did great with solids. She tried hummus for the first time but was not a big fan. I think it has too much garlic but she ate some of it, and made a nice big mess.

We also made some homemade yogurt bites but we think they were too cold for her so we just melted them back down and fed her the yogurt with a spoon. She also ate oatmeal for the first time also with a spoon. Using a spoon goes against the BLW method we are trying but it has allowed us to feed her more easily without making a huge mess where she would need a bath every meal. She still feeds herself actual solid foods that are not "liquidy".

Sleeping: Lillian slept awesome this week especially considering she had a cold. If she woke up in the middle of the night she fell right back to sleep so I didn't have to get up.

7 Months old on 10/19

Other Happenings:
- Lillian started crawling more this week.
- She is also trying out new exercises, here is a video of her trying a plank
- She also learned to shake her head No. Its pretty funny and even when i shake my head yes she shakes hers No. Here is a video.
- Lillian still loves bath time and actually plays with her rubber duckie now

- We started independent playtime this week. I put her in her pack in play in the guest room so I could keep an eye on her but where she wouldn't be able to see me. I started with just 10 minutes to see how she would do and she did great for 7 minutes then started fussing. She had fallen over to her back and couldn't roll back over with the toys in the way. Every other time we did it she did great! She does it twice a day and I am going to try and bump it up to 15 minutes this week. 

This is what we do when we get to church too early, take pictures!

I told Lillian not to touch the door and this is how she responds

Halloween Costume & Funfest

My mom and sister had bought Lillian this cute little orange tutu and leggings for Lillian in Atlanta at the Mart. I figured every baby needs to be a little pumpkin for Halloween at some point so this would be Lillian's year and use the tutu. All I needed was a orange onesie and I planned on appliqueing a jack-o-lantern face on the front. Simple yet super cute. Well I went everywhere (babies r us, Target, Walmart, carters, hobby lobby, gap, old navy, Joanns...) looking for a blank orange onesie and could not find one. I happened to find the Rit dye at Michaels

 and figured I would try it out since I already had a white onesie at home. It was very easy, directions are on the bottle but all you do is add some dye to water (we did it in the kitchen sink so it wouldn't stain the sink) and add the onesie and stir for 30-60min. I used a wood skewer so it wouldn't dye my hands. Since I was only doing one shirt I used maybe a 1/4 of the bottle and filled the sink about halfway full of water and stirred for only 30 minutes because it was already looking dark orange.

You then rinse the shirt until the water is clear and then throw it in the washer. I was very pleased with how it turned out. I forgot to take a picture before I appliqued it but here are a couple pictures of our little pumpkin.

Our church had a huge fall festival yesterday. They had tons of games, bouncey houses, food trucks, hay rides and trunk or treat. It is a great community outreach and they expected about 600 kids to attend. Lillian is a little too small to enjoy any of it but we did go on a hay ride and took lots of pictures.

Picture with our cousin Cherry

I let Lillian feel the hay and of course it headed straight towards her mouth.

Captain America was playing peek a boo with Lillian on the hay ride.

Lillian's 31st Week

31 Weeks Old!

Nursing/Eating/Sleeping: I thought she has been eating great and we are trying more and more foods but this week has me questioning if she is getting enough food. I think the milk is digesting too quickly because she woke up multiple times this week during the night. I can usually tell when she wakes up hungry versus getting woken up. It was random times every night she woke up and she would go the same amount of time between waking up before she fell back asleep and woke up again. I ended up feeding her during the middle of the night and she would then sleep great until morning. May be another growth spurt but I feel like she just went through one. At the rate her growth spurts are going she'll look like a 4 year old by the time she is one. Her naps have been fine and she first falls asleep at night great. Sunday night was the worst night. She went right down at 7:30pm then woke up at about 10:30. We didn't do anything then she woke up again at 11:20pm so I went ahead and fed her. She seemed to be very hungry because she chowed down. She went back to sleep until about 12:50, I flipped her back onto her back from her stomach and she fell back asleep then she woke up 3 more times before 5:20am, no clue why. We had her room warm but not too warm, she was fed, no poopy diaper. The only thing I could think of was maybe she was in pain  from teething so at some point in the night I gave her some Tylenol. Hopefully we will figure out soon what the problem is so we can all get some good sleep.

Other Happenings:
- Lillian is starting to scoot/army crawl forward instead of backwards. I had the video recorder on her for about 10 minutes trying to catch something and eventually you could see her army crawl about a foot or two forward and that was it.
- I gave her some of those Gerber puffs and she can somewhat grab at it with her pinchers
- She seems more interested when I read books to her now.
- It has been colder her lately at night and early morning. We have a small heater in her room and then the ceiling fan on low. I have no way of knowing if she is too hot or too cold. When i go to get her up in the mornings the only thing on her that is cold is her hands and feet so I guess she is fine. We had a play date Monday morning and I thought it was freezing out so I got Lillian bundled up in what warm clothes we have
and walked out the door to an actually warm nice day and the sun was hot so I stripped her down to something more cooler but didn't she look so cute in her jacket and boots!

- Aunt Nina came down for the reunion so we finally got to see her again

-Kevin has been thinking about getting a new lens for our camera, one that takes better pictures inside. That combined with taking pictures at our  family reunion got him interested in more photography tips and editing so yesterday he took a couple pictures of Lillian and they are obviously adorable.

This was the outfit Gammy got Lillian. It was perfect for the weather we have been having. 

Sweet Smiles

Heffington Family Reunion

This past Saturday we had a Heffington Family reunion to celebrate my Uncle Doug's 80th Birthday. Growing up I always remember going to the annual family reunion. It was always in October to Celebrate my Granny's (my Dads's mom) birthday. Granny past away about 3 or 4 years ago, so we hadn't really kept up with the reunions well. We had lots of cousins get married within those years so that kind of replaced the reunions. I was excited that we were actually having a reunion this year and it would be here in Huntsville so no traveling for us!

My Dad's family is pretty big, most are when you start including grand-kids and great grand-kids but we legit at least can recognize everyone because we always got together through the years. Here is a quick break down of the family. Granny and PawPaw had 6 children. My Dad being the youngest and his brother Doug being the oldest. There is about 21 years between them. Those 6 children married and had a total of 24 children (the grand-kids). And of those grand-kids that are married and have children there are at least 50 great grand-kids, Lillian is the youngest at this point and the oldest is 29. Unfortunately not everyone could attend the reunion this year but there was a pretty good amount who did, about 60 people.

Going off on a tangent here but because we have so many cousins at different ages we have learned the technical relationships so I thought I would explain. Your parent's siblings are your aunts and uncles. Their kids are your cousins, no matter the age. My oldest cousin is in his late 50's which is older than my mom. When cousins have kids they are considered 2nd cousins. So my 50 something year old cousin has a son, I am his 1st cousin once removed but Lillian is his 2nd cousin. I know we are weird that it even matters but the majority of my "cousins" around my age are actually my cousin's children. It was always weird growing up because they would be calling their grandparents; Papa or Nana etc. and I called them aunt and uncle.  

We don't really do anything special for the reunions. It is pretty much a 9am-4pm deal and we have food all day long and sit around and talk. We do play are traditional game of "take a hike" (some people call it fruit basket turn over). There is usually a football game or two on in a separate room and sometimes we play a card game called pounce (nerdtz). We are pretty hard core about this game and if you don't have a partner who knows what they are doing you get left in the dust!

Here are a couple of the pictures we took this weekend:

Our immediate family and spouses

The Grandkids with the 6 Heffington siblings

The great-grandkids

The 6 siblings with their spouses

The 6 Heffington siblings

Sweet Lillian- (thanks to my awesome "1st cousin once removed", Amy, who made these adorable pants for Lillian)

Lillian's 2nd cousin Sarah-Kate who is just about 3 weeks older than Lillian. The were super cute to watch interact with each other. 

And here is a picture of the AMAZING Christian couple that started it all!