Miscellaneous Thoughts..........

So, now i'm thinking that Emma may crawl after all. She would still MUCH rather stand and walk than crawl, but she seems to be trying a lot harder now. Poor thing, she just can't figure out that she has to move her hands. She has gotten really good at moving herself from a lying down position to sitting up though. Most times that we go in her room to get her from sleeping she is now sitting up. And as she plays on the rug in the den she is constantly moving from tummy to bottom, tummy to bottom. She tries SO HARD to go from sitting on her bottom to the crawling position, but she just can't seem to get her right leg out from under her. She tries and tries and tries some more, then inevitably ends up just flopping back onto her bottom. She can almost always get where she wants to go, but it's by rolling, or just randomly moving herself around, not by crawling. Maybe she will crawl, maybe she won't. I've read that it's perfectly fine for babies to skip crawling all together and go straight to walking.

With Chad leaving for Arizona and then us going on our cruise as soon as he gets back (and then he has his two weeks of drill immediately after :P) we are trying to get the house ready for Emma's big day! She turns 1 on April 26th. I know it seems early to be getting ready now, but with Chad being gone we really don't have much time. We have really been wanting a new deck since we moved in. The one we have had 2 (COUNT THEM 2) layers of green astro-turf carpet nailed to it when we moved in. Needless to say, we took it off immediately, only to find the burgundy splintering wood underneath (absolutely gorgeous ;-). Plus it is extremely small and we found out from our neighbors that when the houses were built in our neighborhood the builders set the deck posts on the ground, not in it, so it's probably not the safest thing in the world either. I decided that since you can't do very much at a 1 year old's birthday party that we will have a big cookout for family and friends. To do this we need a new deck (yay!). So Chad has made all the deck plans, ordered the supplies, and taken down 95% of the old deck. Tomorrow (Saturday) he and his dad are planning to build the new deck (or as much as they can). I did get my say in the planning though. I've been telling Chad for a couple of years that when we get our new deck I want no railing. Instead I want the steps to go down to the ground on all sides of the deck. I saw one like this in a magazine and it was beautiful. SO, that's what he's builing. Everyone keep your fingers crossed that it turns out well!

So Chad's big news that has him bursting at the seams is that he's finally ordered his new work/storage building for the backyard. The one he has is very small and metal, not wood. It was really all we could afford when we bought the house, so that's what he got. Now that we have a little (and I reiterate little) extra money he has ordered a custom building from a company in Gaffney. It's much bigger than the current building and it's wood, so he can store tools, etc. on the walls, which he couldn't do in the old building. We still haven't agreed on what we're doing with the old building, but if anyone's looking for one let us know! It's only about 3 years old and still in very good shape. You'll have to contact Chad for dimensions, etc. All I know is that I want it off the property ASAP! Our backyard is small enough as it is!

I guess that's all the yacking I have to do for now. Stay tuned..................