Long live the blog!

When I first started this blog I did it for myself, and some family and friends who lived out of town and wanted to follow along with the pregnancy of our first born. I tried for a brief time to continue updating the blog after she was born with how things were going and what we were up to, but let’s face it, having a newborn around was a bit of a time suck. 10 weeks after she was born I hopped on the “working mom” train and I've been there ever since, so between working, raising my family, buying and selling a new house and everything in between I haven’t been the best at blogging.

I recently decided I wanted to get back into it, but I needed to find a passion or something that I was good at to actually blog about. There are a bazillion mommy bloggers and besides the handful of friends and family who live out of state and care about what were up to, I didn't think I was clever enough to come up with blogs day after day about our life (not that we’re not exciting people) but honestly posting our daily routine is kinda boring when we all work 5 days a week.

I kept coming up short with blog ideas since I’m not really an expert at anything, so I decided to do something for myself again. I am trying to get back into a running routine. I set goals for myself every year for running and when I can’t stay committed to a routine I fall short, as so many people do. I've been saying I wanted to run a full marathon ever since I did my first half marathon 3 year ago. Having a baby in that time set me back a bit, but she will be 2 in September and its time to get back at it (before I find myself pregnant and full of excuses again).

So I've started (again) a new running routine. My New Year’s Resolution this year was to run 15 races in 2015, and so far I've done…. None! So I’m going to start my training, get signed up for a few races and the ultimate goal is to run the Niagara Falls Marathon in October (it’s the only marathon to cross 2 countries – starting in Buffalo, NY and finishing in Niagara Falls, Ontario Canada!) I am by no means a professional running expert, I will share my successes and failures of training, but this will all be my own personal opinion.

And because you’re always supposed to include pictures, I’ll leave with a picture from my second mother’s day. Sorry for the mean muggin’ on Little A, she’s usually always smiling, but I think the sun was in her eyes!

6 Month Photo Shoot

I am so lucky to have an amazing photographer in the family that I can call for a photo shoot whenever I want one! Enjoy my little Ada's 6 month photos!! I can't believe she's 6 months already! Where has the time gone??

Blue headband from CaliandMeBoutique - Navy TuTu from Target

St. Paddy's hair bow is from TuttaBellaBoutique

Navy headband is from CaliandMeBoutique

Our 2013 in Review

I know March is already almost over but I meant to do a nice post about our 2013 for the record book. Last year was filled with so much fun and excitement as well as some big life changes. As everyone jet sets into 2014, I wanted to take a minute to remember what an awesome year we had.

January-
The beginning of the year started out just like any other year! Drunk on New Years Eve followed by some fun nights out. Here is the picture we posted on Facebook wishing everyone a Happy New Year as well as my last crazy night out before we found out that life was about to change.

Happy 2013!

My last crazy night out

February- 
Technically we found out at the very end of January, but we told all our family on my 27th Birthday, February 3rd, that Baby Mags was expected in September/October. We also celebrated our last Valentine's Day alone and began our kitchen renovation!

March-
In March we traveled to South Beach in Miami for a Half Marathon. I didn't know when I signed up for this that I would be 8 weeks preggo, but we went down anyway with our friend Paul. Him and Dan completed the half with little to no training and I decided I would be better off to stick with the 5k since I was having very bad back pain at the beginning.

My shirt says Running for two, which is hard to read here!

April- 
In April we took our last vacation childless to La Romana, Dominican Republic. We went down with a few of my girlfriends from High School, and some guy friends of theirs who became our new friends too! We had an awesome trip, Dan came back 10 pounds lighter from some sort of stomach sickness and we took our announcement photos so we could make our big news "Facebook Official"

Our Facebook Post read: "Dan and I are excited to announce the new addition to our family! Baby Mags will be here in early October!"

May- 
In may we found out that our new little addition was a baby GIRL! We shared the news with a fun gender reveal party. I also went out and celebrated my sister's soon to be marriage at her Bachelorette Party!

  

June- 

June I ran my last 5k race of the summer with my girlfriends. We did the Color Me Rad 5k. I celebrated my best friends baby shower, who had her little boy just 5 weeks before me, and I went full steam ahead with decorating the nursery once we knew we were having a baby girl!  

July-

July was full of summer parties, hanging out with friends by the pool and my beautiful sister's wedding day!

August -

August we celebrated the soon to be arrival of Baby Ada with a beautiful shower hosted by our moms and sisters.  

 

Me with a bunch of my girlfriends

All the babies that were to come

September -

Of course the most exciting part of this whole year was welcoming little Ada Morgan into our life on September 22, 2013. She has changed our life in more ways then we ever could have imagined and cannot even remember what life was like before she was here!

October - 

I'll be honest October was a blur, I don't really even remember it happening this year. But we did host a baby Halloween at our house near the end of the month!

November - 

In November I donated my long hair to locks of Love, turns out babies pull hair, so I gave mine to a good cause. We also celebrated Ada's first Thanksgiving, along with lots of Football parties with all the other babies born this year and lots of playtime and snuggles with my angel before my maternity leave was over at the end of the month.

December -  

To close out the year we had a photo shoot with Dan's cousin while we went to go get our Christmas tree. We had lots of holiday parties which involved getting a baby sitter lots of times and celebrated Baby's First Christmas!

And that's what happened last year!! Its going to be a tough year to beat as so many wonderful things happened and we are so lucky to have such awesome friends and family to share all our adventures with. I look forward to watching this little beauty grow, but kinda wish time would slow down a bit, its amazing how fast a year goes now!

xoxo

-S

Almost 6 Months

Its hard to believe Ada is almost 6 months old.  I was just reading back on my post from when she was just one month and it was so amazing to read my thoughts during that time. Those first four weeks were definitely some of the most challenging times and its funny now because we feel like she's been with us forever. 6 months isn't that long but we really can't even remember what life was like before Ada was part of it. I wanted to try and go back a little and recall some special moments since that post!

 Meet Barrett, this is my girlfriends beautiful baby boy who was born just 5 weeks before Ada. This photo is from one of their first play dates together! They are going to be the best of friends, but Bear's mommy and Ada's daddy are cousins, so we will need to remind these two as they grow up that they are related to one another!!

Ada's first Halloween she was my little lady bug! She did such a great job playing the part too, just look at those little bug dimples!

She continues to absolutely love bath time, and I still swear by the fact that she sleeps better when she has a bath. She's been such a great sleeper, from 8 weeks right through Christmas we were getting a solid 10 hours a night, every single night. We back tracked a little over the holidays but I think we had her schedule all out of whack with all the holiday parties and house guests!

Little peanut is such a chill baby, she loves just hanging out on the couch with mom and dad after work, now that she's a little older she likes to lay by herself on the couch and not so much with one of us, she's snuggly but I think she likes her freedom too. After being held for too long baby girl just likes to stretch out and play on the floor or couch!

This girl LOVES football! Whenever we needed a distraction we put her in front of a football game! Lucky for us she was born during football season! We're hoping she doesn't have her Daddy's temper when it comes to the Bills losing. (She better learn that the Bills never win and she shouldn't get her hopes up!)

Finally below are some pictures from Ada's first Christmas! Even though she was still so little at Christmas, it was amazing to see her expressions for everything. She loved all the lights on the Christmas tree, and she was so amazed Christmas morning, we sat her in the Bumbo seat and opened presents with her, my favorite one is her expression when we opened her Elf on the Shelf (below). I also did my best to do a Christmas Photo shoot with her in her outfit. I did this a few weeks before Christmas with the intention of doing a Christmas card, and I captured some of her first great big smiles, the one below was one of my favorites, you can almost hear what a happy baby she is!