We're Still Here!

Hi guys. I wanted to do another quick post to give you a bit of an update. Nothing out of the ordinary (at least not for us) has been happening. I'm right in the middle of seniors/wedding season, and I'm totally swamped like I usually am this time of year. We have a wedding every Saturday this month, and one on a Sunday, and then three of the four Saturdays in October. After that, we'll have our break and I'll have more time to chat.

Mike has started his student teaching and he likes it so far. Only a few months to go and he graduates! Yesterday he told me he might want to walk in graduation, which was something he wasn't going to do before. I'm hoping he does. I'm so proud of him!

Harlie is growing growing growing and she's so close to walking. I'm not pushing the issue, because she's hard enough to chase around now. But it is kind of exciting to see her hit all of these milestones. We went to the county fair the other day and she loved all of the animals - especially the roosters.

I'll try to get some more photos up, but I'm sure we'll have new ones that I find more exciting by the time I get to write again. The scrap page above is a template by MandaGirl and the papers are all from Summer's limeade kit. Both of these girls have amazing freebies on their blogs if any of you are getting into the digi-scrapping.

That's all for now. Hope you all are having as good a life as I am!

Quick Update - 9 months

Hey guys. I don't have much time to write, but I wanted to let you all know about Harlie's appointment this morning. She went in (a little late) for her 9-month. She has two ear infections that we never knew about because she never acted any different, so we will have to keep an eye on her ears from now on. Her stats are:

Height: 29.2 in (91%)

Weight: 19lb 3oz (53%)

Head: 17.72 in (75%)

Still tall with a big head, but her weight keeps going down in comparison. She's my healthy girl (except for the ears)!

By the way, the photo is from Vacation Bible School last week.

More to come when I have time!

Like a Weed!

Our little gal is growing so so fast. I can't believe she's nine months old already! This past week we had a visit from my cousins Trish and Brad and Trish's little girl Dakota (who will be one year on the 5th of this month). The girls met for the first time at Thanksgiving when Harlie was one-month, and Dakota was 4 months. Things were a tad different this time! They loved each other right away and were so sweet together... most of the time. Anyway the visit was so Trish, Brad, and Dakota could attend our cousin John and his new wife Alesia's wedding reception (Mike and I had a wedding to photograph and couldn't make it), but we decided to celebrate little Kota-Da's birthday while we were at it. I'll explain more with the photos I post. Love you all!


Brad thought it would be fun to mess with my camera. I think this photo he took of Harlie looks like those photos you see of puppies where their heads look humungous. So funny!

Here's Brad playing with my little nugget.

Dakota looking ADORABLE for her photo shoot.

























Here's a random shot of Harlie from a few weeks ago.


























Harlie and Kota-Da playing together for the first time.

























Dakota and Harlie. They look the same size! Either Dakota is small or my Harlie is quite large...


























Here's Nugget playing in her pool-float, except she's not yet in the pool...


























Dakota before she gobbled her Birthday cake.

On the Move

First, I want to tell you all to make sure you look past this post when you're done. I have multiple new posts below. Way too much to squeeze into one. These are just my two favorite photos from the last shoot we did in Wisconsin. Harlie now has six teeth, she can sit up pretty well, and she's on the move. She's just crawling as of right now, but she can pull herself to a stand pretty easily so I expect cruising to come soon. I'm not sure how much she weighs right now or how long she is, but I think she still looks pretty tall and when we did our at-home weighing, she was about 18-20 pounds. She's such a blast and still so good! Anyway, make sure you look below. It's good to be home and back in the groove. Senior portraits are kicking off tomorrow, so don't expect to hear too much from me the next couple of months. I don't see an end in sight!

Lake Michigan

Aunt Patty took Aunt Bonnie and me to the lake one day for photos. The other ladies (Mom and Gram) had gone shopping with her the day before for shoes, so this was our special treat. Much better than footwear in my opinion! These need no explaining. They're just fun shots.

Wisconsin

I'm going to just leave the photos in a mess again. It would take forever to arrange them. These are from our trip to Wisconsin. Harlie and I basically came home from Creation, unpacked and repacked and left the next day. She did great on the trip out. We drove, but split it up so we only spent about 6 hours in the car each time. She was a trooper. We had a great time - big surprise! The photos are of random things throughout our trip, most are self-explanatory. The one of Aunt Patty with her arms out is her making fun of Harlie doing the same thing all the time. The ladies made Uncle Ned birthday cupcakes (from a box, which is unheard of in the Novsam house). Harlie of course loved the dog (Kirby) and she was obsessed with him most of the time there. She is loving bath time even more now that we let her in the big tub. Oh and please look at the way Uncle Ned sits with his legs crossed. I don't know how he can even bend that way - I tried it and fell over!

Creation

Okay, so Creation was everything I wanted it to be. Of course the music was great and the bands put on such great shows. And once again, the group of kids we took was GREAT. We are so blessed to have such a good youth group. But what I didn't expect was how perfect they all were with Harlie. I never ever had to worry about where my kid was or who was watching her while I was cooking, etc. They all worked together to take care of her and it was so so sweet. I can't say enough how great it was and how much I appreciate them. And speaking of Harlie, she was a little angel! Every night during evening worship (around 7:00 or 8:00) she fell asleep in her stroller (usually with little struggle) and she slept through all of the evening concerts. And some of those concerts can get LOUD. Christian music is definitely not always soft and frilly. And she even slept through Skillet and TobyMac! (By the way, if you haven't heard of these bands, check them out - they are awesome. I can give you a very long list of good Christian bands if you want.) Anyway after the concerts we'd wheel her back to the car and load her up (around midnight) and she'd wake up a bit until we started moving. She'd sleep on the way back to the camper and we'd put her to bed until around 6:00 when we woke up and headed back to Creation. She was such a trooper. Enjoy the photos!

To explain the photos a little (I'm not going to try to put a line beneath each one) - the band is David Crowder, the kids are head-banging and goofy dancing in two of the photos, they found a baby bird and fed it the first day there, everyone shaved around the campsite - so funny to watch, Harlie loved hanging out in the baby carrier while her daddy walked her everywhere, the group photos don't include everyone that went with us - just the ones I could get in one place, and the photos of all of the people at the festival - that's really just a small portion of the people that were there. I think there were about 100,000 in attendance.