Gotta Have Faith and Daniel: September 2013

Well here we are...yet another month between posts. Even with the best intentions I can barely manage to post something once a month. Life just moves too fast and despite trying so hard to not over commit ourselves the lists just get longer and longer and the calendar gets fuller and fuller. I just told my sister tonight that life would be so much easier if moms got a pass on needing sleep. Oh well! As long as we're loving life and spending time together as a family as much as possible - that's all that matters.

Now - what you're really here to read about is sweet, hilarious, crazy Faith! We have so much to tell you. She is going to be 21 months old in a few weeks and that is just way to close to being two for my liking. The last time we posted we were days aways from Erica and Bobby's wedding and Faith's flower girl debut. In a nutshell, the wedding was beautiful and absolutely perfect. Faith did an awesome job. She and Connor walked down the aisle together (along with the other flower girl) and while it took a little while, they made it the whole way down carrying their respective basket and pillow. Faith even threw a few petals at the very end and for good measure Connor threw the pillow too. It was adorable. I'm sure we'll eventually have tons of pictures and a video, but we were all so overwhelmed by the chaos of the whole thing that neither Randy or I thought to have someone take an iPhone video for us. Duh! There are a few pictures of the day below - mostly thanks to my cousin Craig (thank you!) since I literally took 4 pictures all day.

So...what else have we been up to? We've mainly been trying to get back into the swing of things after a busy summer. Randy is back in school with a new crew of crazy middle schoolers. We have been to one Penn State football game so far and are heading to another one this weekend. By next year we should be able to take Faith with us. This year it provides her with great opportunities for sleepovers at her grandparents houses. The highlight of the month was spending some time at the beach with some great "old" friends. They are not old (at least I hope not because they are my age), but I say old because I've known them since I was in elementary school. We had bourbon, time on the beach, lots of beer, hardshell crabs and lots of baby time. One of them has a 6 month old who is Faith's new BFF, Nico. Faith introduced him to lots of open mouth kissing (shhh don't tell Randy). Oh and Faith learned how to "wave to her fans" while wearing her sunglasses. I'll try to post a video soon. It was a grand three days, but as always our time together was way too short!

And probably our most exciting news of all is that we finally have our house back together post floods from last October and January. I never thought I would appreciate our laminate flooring or toe kicks under our kitchen cabinets this much! First world problems, I know, but it's the little things people! Now we can keep working on fixing this place up so we can hopefully move on to bigger and better in the next 6 months or so.

Faith is still going to daycare 2-3 days a week (which is amazing for her and for Jess). We have officially entered what we have decided is the testing phase. You can see the wheels turning inside Faith's head all day long - every new experience, thought, and decision. And most the time she is pushing things as far as she possibly can - testing us at every turn to see what we will do and how we will react. It's difficult and exhausting to say the least, but more importantly it's such an amazing thing to watch - her personality is developing right before our eyes. We try really hard to just take it one moment at a time and not over think any situation - just trust our guts and take deep breaths before reacting. I make it sound so easy - lord I wish it was that easy. Anyway, the best way to sum up the life of Faith at this moment in time is this: Faith does not do anything Faith doesn't want to do.

In no particular order here is peek inside the Life of Faith:

With some help from our wonderful Occupational Therapist and Teacher from Montgomery County Infants & Toddlers, Faith is slowly starting to talk. Her new words are mine, car, go, one and duck. We are certain she can talk and is just choosing not to, but she definitely still has trouble with the final consonant in most words. For example, when you ask her how old she is she now says "one" and puts up her finger. Although she can't pronounce the n so it sounds more like "whaa".
Her toddler "split personality" ways are setting in. For example she can be throwing her chair across the room one minute and then 30 seconds later she wants to sit on your lap and snuggle while you read her a book. No one told me whiplash is a part of parenting. Another example is trying to read her mind. You ask her if she would like a snack and she gets sooooo excited. Then 30 seconds later she is throwing a full on temper tantrum because you gave her the "wrong" snack.
She loves going to daycare or "school" as we call it. And while it's nice to have some days free again (it's unreal what I can accomplish in those 6-7 hours) it doesn't come without sacrifice. In this case the sacrifice is sanity for the first hour she's home. We literally call her Hurricane Faith. Something about school makes her VERY hyper and she comes home acting like a hurricane (and our house looks like one hit it).
She LOVES being outside and will beg to play outside almost every 5 minutes. We do spend lots of time outside - especially now that fall has arrived. A few days ago after dinner I said we can either watch one of your movies or go outside. She immediately pointed outside which made her mama and daddy quite proud.
Mommy & Faith are back to weekly Music Together classes. We had our first one today. Faith literally kept the beat with her body the entire class. I wish I could have video taped it. This girl's got rhythm.
She is obsessed with sweeping and cleaning the floors using our dustpan and brush. She even gets them out of the closer herself at random times and starts sweeping!
She is obsessed with washing her hands - although I secretly think it's just that she loves playing in the water. Whatever works is fine with me as we enter flu season.
She is obsessed with helping to feed our cat Joey. She gets so excited she will start jumping up and down. If I put her in her booster seat for breakfast before Joey is fed - she will freak out and demand to get down so she can help before she'll eat her breakfast. Like I said Faith doesn't do ANYTHING Faith doesn't want to do.

And just for fun - I'll give you a little flashback to one year ago. Last weekend, on September 14th we celebrated the one year anniversary of Forever Faith Day. I cannot believe how much she's grown in one year.

And as always, here are tons of pictures of many of the events we mentioned above. Enjoy! And please enjoy this amazing fall weather. It's our absolute most favorite time of year. Cool weather, football, visits to the pumpkin patch, apple picking and Halloween! We think you're going to love Faith's costume this year. I just hope that I can manage to write a post between now and Halloween!

Much Love,

The Groves