We visited our friend’s Tammy and Ryan in Iowa, and had a great time cooking out and
relaxing in the country. We relaxed partly by shooting potatos at a sign in the yard
using Ryan’s homemade potato gun (handy for tossing t-shirts at church youth events). My
brother-in-law Hal is a potato gun sharp-shooter hitting the sign twice.

To get there, I rode my bike from Waverly (about 70 miles away) to Elgin
and enjoyed much of the northeastern Iowa rolling hills and valleys.

After dinner, we sat around and talked and watched Analise play with the cats.
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It’s Party Time! We’re getting ready for Analise’s first birthday party tomorrow.
Here’s a map, satelite photo, and a topographic map of the location. We’ll probably
hike the 100 yards up to the waterfall at some point during the party.

We’re all excited!

Cake Dilemmas. Kristine was trying to order a cake for Analise’s birthday party this weekend.
At first, she had succumbed to ordering from a wonderful place called Edgar’s bakery,
which has the best tasting cakes around. It’s a bit more expensive though, and
the round cake she had ordered was said to feed 12-16. She was going to make
cupcakes to supplement the cake needs. Then last night we celebrated Great-Grandma
Locke’s birthday with a tasty cake from the Publix grocery store bakery. So we decided
to go with a Public cake instead of the Edgar’s cake. But when she called to cancel the Edgar’s
cake, they had already started the cake and could not cancel the order. So now we have
two cakes, a free toddler mini-cake from Publix, and no cupcakes. Three cakes for a
very special birthday girl!

If you can’t make it to the party and want to see a video of our toddler giggling up
a storm playing with a cat at a friend’s house in Iowa on our vacation last week, then
read the next post!

Ok, just so you know where I’m at right now, I’ll share my TO DO list before the birthday party this weekend:

• Finish smocked birthday dress. This is the neverending project. People pay $50+ for these dresses, and I can now see why. Just when I think I’m close to being done, I’m not. AG.
• Scrapbook one page for each month of Analise. This was a high hope I had, but its not going to happen. Bummer, because it would be far more relaxing than working on this silly (but pretty!) dress.
• Make queso dip. Sat. am project in the slow cooker.
• Make fruit salad. I think my wonderful mother-in-law is going to take care of this (fingers-crossed!!).
• Make cupcakes (to supplement cake).
• Wrap birthday gifts. Thankfully, there are only 3.
• Pick up BBQ and beans at Jim Nick’s BBQ. (Sat. am) Mmm, makes me hungry already!
• Pick up birthday cake from Edgar’s bakery. (Sat. am) I had hoped to do it myself, but now I’m being realistic.
• Pray it’s not 90 degrees or storming during party time!
• Chase my busy little toddler around. To be done in between all above activities, leaving no time to catch my breath. She’s a busy girl!

Ok, so you probably won’t hear from me until after the party. But I’ll be back this weekend to post a fun recap of the event. It’s started small, but it’s growing to be quite the gathering! Wish y’all could join us!

Today is my sweet little girl’s 1st birthday! One year ago right now
(4pm), I was dozing in a drug-enduced stupor, while Brian wondered if we were ever going
to have this baby. I’d been in labor for 24 hours already, and Analise would finally
burst into the world at 10pm. I can’t believe how much she’s changed! Above is a
picture of Analise when she was born, and below is one of her now, one year later.

We just arrived home after 2 weeks of traveling and visiting.
I’ll chronicle it in another blog soon. Many blessings, y’all!

Unless you consider Iowa and Wisconsin the end of the earth:) (which we don’t!) We left Thursday for a family vacation, spent the weekend in Iowa with my sister and brother-in-law and arrived in my hometown of Shell Lake yesterday. We’ve got lots of funny anecdotes, pictures and some video, so I hope to pull together a blog in the next day or so. Check back soon!

I’ve spent the weekend trying to get a few projects finished. First off, I wanted to have the invitations for Analise’s birthday party printed at one of the photo kiosks around at any number of places. Attempt #1: At Walgreen’s, I realized that I’d created the invitation as 4.5″x6″ (instead of 4″x6″ for a normal photo size), thus the writing was being cut off. Attempt #2: Brian couldn’t find the image on the smartmedia card when using the kiosk at Sam’s Club. Attempt #3: After Brian places the order on the machine, the clerk tells him that the printer isn’t working, and MAYBE it’ll be fixed tomorrow. GRR. We had hoped to have these done to put in the mail early this wee. We’ll see if we can get them done tomorrow. *SIGH* Here’s a peek for y’all… not sure if you’re close enough to come, but you’re definitely invited!

I’ve also been working on a handmade dress for Analise’s 1st birthday. Down here in the South, smocked dresses are quite a fashion statement. They’re very beautiful and very expensive. A friend of mine taught a few of us how to make a smocked dress, so now that all the hand embroidery is done, I’m in the process of sewing mine together. (Let me just say: I don’t mind hand sewing at all. In fact, I enjoy cross-stitch, embroidery, crocheting, etc. But using a sewing machine stresses me out.) Anyway, I sewed one seam (2x to reinforce it), found the tension on my silly machine was off, and spent an hour ripping it out (without a seam ripper). I’m going to be so glad to finish this dress. It is a labor of love, and you’d better believe you’re going to see a picture of it on my beautiful girl when it’s done!

Hope your weekend was more productive than ours! By the way, Tropical Storm Arlene blew through last night with some rain and gusting. Check out the bit of damage it left in our neighborhood here at Weather Underground (picture by Brian).

Here’s a video Kristine took of Analise toddlin’ the other day. She’s seems to prefer walking to crawling now! I can’t believe how quickly she went from crawling to walking. She sure is growing up fast… Comment and tell me what you think of the little toddler!

Watch the Toddlin’ Analise video you may also download an mpg copy of the video (2 MB)

Now that Analise is walking, we figured it was time to find some good shoes for her (and she’s outgrown all the hand-me-downs I’d been given). Earlier this week we visited a kid’s shoe store found a cute pair of sandals we were debating about. But yesterday we thought we’d check out Stride Rite in the mall.

It all started when I got detoured by Bath & Body Works’ Clearance sale (going on through Sunday!). I sent Brian and Analise on to look at shoes briefly while I shopped a bit. When I joined them, Analise was toddling around the store in these shoes:

Cute… but not what I was imagining as the all-purpose shoe. I know it’s a woman thing, and men don’t quite understand it, but this hot pink shoe wasn’t going to match all her outfits. I had envisioned a nice, simple white sandal, maybe with a tiny bit of pink, like this:

Brian was pretty convinced that Analise was walking better in the pink shoes than she was in the sandals. After a lot of waffling, I gave in. I’ll just chalk it up to the first Daddy/Analise shopping trip. It is kind of sweet:) If anyone mentions her pink shoes when she’s wearing a red outfit, I’ll smile and tell them her daddy picked them out… I think they’ll understand!

The baby steps of the weekend are multiplying. Analise is taking tiny steps all over the den, on her own and when we’re encouraging her. Does this mean she’s a toddler? Is this the end of my baby girl? It’s kind of a sad feeling… it just hit me how fast she’s growing up into a sweet little girl. Just yesterday, she was a snuggly little baby, content to lay on her back under her gym, immobile. Today, she’s taking tiny steps all over the room, playing with everything she can find (though she’d most prefer to find the remote control, the cordless phone or the cell phone).

Funny conversation from this evening at our old church Lakeside, as I was attending a Women’s Missions meeting. One of the older ladies said, “I hear you’re expecting!” “Expecting? Expecting what? OH! EXPECTING! No, no, no… you must’ve heard wrong. Not expecting anything here.” *SIGH* My little leftover baby belly may lead one to believe that we’re expecting, but it didn’t do much for my self-esteem to hear that. And the only thing we’re expecting is a full night’s sleep one of these days…

So Analise has taken a few very tentative steps, with someone very near her encouraging and convincineg her she could do it. Just a minute ago, she was standing next to the laundry basket, and without any coaxing, took 3 tiny steps to her rocking chair. She’s mentally crossed over to believing that she can do it – and wants to do it! – and now I’m sure there’s going to be no stopping her!
Hehe… as Brian was looking over my shoulder and I was writing this, he gasped and looked over to her. She had walked along the edge of the laundry basket – holding on – and he thought she’d walked over to us.

Last night we watched the DVD documentary “Spellbound”, in honor of the National Spelling Bee completing this week. (Could you have spelled the winning word “appoggitura”?) Anyway, it was a fun movie, very suspenseful as it followed 8 contestants from their hometowns to Washington D.C. for the Bee. You wouldn’t think a spelling bee could be so captivating, but we had both picked our “favorite” to win. It was fun to root for them… and see if we could spell the words too:) Yes, we’re geeks.

Anyway, when it was down to the final two spellers, the announcer said, “And now it’s time to move onto the championship word subsection.” Brian very quickly says, “S-U-B-S-E-C-T-I-O-N… that was so easy!” Of course, the announcer had meant there would be subsection of championship words… not that that was the championship word. It was quite comical:) We give four thumbs up – two from each of us – to Spellbound!