Festive Fun!

What do you know, another month has past with just one post. Sorry, no excuses, just a little burnt out on the blogging. With the holidays coming up I am sure things will start to pick up a little. We have been busy having a lot of fun though. Last week we went to the pumpkin patch. Ava loved the hay and was grabbing for it like crazy. I can't believe how much more fun Ava makes everything!

Her favorite part was definitely the petting zoo. She was dying! There was a camel that would stretch its neck out as far as possible and sniff at you trying to get food. Ava thought it was so funny. She is such an animal lover, which I just love.

I have also been busy making Ava's Halloween costume. She is going to be a witch this year. (Pictures to come). I also decided to make Ava a Halloween pillowcase dress, thanks for the idea Ruby! I am hooked. It was so easy to make and turned out so cute. I may have to make her one for every holiday. I already have the Christmas fabric!

I love this time of year and making the most out of every holiday. Tomorrow we will be having fun at a neighborhood get together on our street. We still need to make and decorate sugar cookies (my favorite tradition), carve pumpkins, hopefully make it to another pumpkin patch to enjoy their petting zoo, and of course, enjoy a little Trick or treating.

Gotta love holidays!

Hello....Is it me your looking for?

Hi, Do you remember us? We haven't been around for a few weeks, but we are back and ready to blog!

Sorry about the lack of posts in the last month, it has been a weird month and I have felt super busy. I've hardly been able to find the time to sleep let alone blog. Oh, who am I kidding, any of you who know me know that I never go without my sleep. We haven't had a lot of exciting events going on in our lives, but to get my mom off my case, I managed to scrounge up a few little tidbits. The excitement is in the two previous posts, but to end this post, I leave you with a little eye candy...

I like to Move It, Move It!

This little girl gets around...the house that is! She has become a really mover and shaker and she is all over the place. This is her coming to get me after her nap.
But first she needed to make a pit stop to see if anyone was at the front door...

Nope.

But what about the living room...Nope.
It sure has been fun watching her move, something that had been a very hard thing to imagine just a few short weeks ago. We sure love this little girl!
This is video from a couple of weeks ago, she still has the same crawling technique, just a little faster.

I'd like to thank the Academy...

I never win anything... no really, I think the last time I "won" something was when Josh and I were first married. We went and sat through a three hour TrendWest time share presentation...death trap... all so we could win a little mini vaca. We sat through the whole thing and endured being passed around to and accosted by multiple "timeshare professionals" only to find out you had to be 21 to cash in on the big trip, I was 19.

I left with a consolation Butterfinger.

So, you can imagine my surprise when my name popped up as the winner of Jessica's Pay It Forward Giveaway. I was so excited! Talk about hitting the jackpot, she was giving away some dang cute stuff. I have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of this package since I found out I had won...and today it came!

and all of this was inside!
I love it all, but this was definitely my favorite. It is a homemade book that Ava is still too young for, but I am excited to have it and make one that I can begin using now, and then I will have this one for when she starts school.
Each year you can fill in the info and then use the pocket that it is glued to to save special things from that year. Isn't that a cute idea?! Great Christmas gift idea...
Thanks so much Jess, I am looking forward to paying it forward now.

Stay tuned to see what I will be giving away.

Now that I have hit a lucky streak, maybe I will have a chance at winning one of Mindi's superfantastic blog giveaways. This one just ended, but I am sure another one is just around the corner. If you've never read her blog, just reading it will make you feel like you have hit the jackpot. Check it out, just don't compete with me on the giveaways...now that I am on a roll, you won't even have a chance.

Um...Since when did she decided doing this was okay?

So when did feeding herself become okay? Um... I guess last night, because from the looks of it you would never have guessed that even at dinner that night, she was not okay with it.

Wow, what a big day for us, not only because Ava fed herself crackers, but also because during her therapy this morning, she decided to crawl for the first time. We were on the wood floor, she was wearing silky pj's, and she was moving her body with only her hands, but it was a crawl! I have video of it but I took it with our actual video camera and I don't know how to get it off of it and onto the computer so I will take more today with our regular camera. Our goal we had set with the therapist was to have her doing some sort of a crawl by the end of summer and it just didn't look like it was going to happen, but Ava pulled through. The therapist and I both just sat there with tears in our eyes, we were so excited. We couldn't have asked for a better day.

P.S. To all you haters who say I blog too much about Ava, get over it. I can't think of anything else better to blog/brag about because this little girl makes my world go round!

Labor Day Fun at Schafer Butte

Josh and I wanted to do something fun on Labor Day, we decided to take a drive up to one of our favorite places, beautiful McCall, Idaho, however, our friends convinced us that McCall was going to be way too cold and to go with them up to Schafer Butte for a picnic and a hike. Upon arriving the thermometer on our dashboard announced it was 47 degrees and it may or may not has snowed a little while we were there. Good thing we packed jackets... wished we would have packed parkas.

We quickly ate our delicious picnic and headed off for our hike.
Ava was such a trooper and didn't seem to mind the windy cold, she loved her oreo/booger dessert.
Ava loved riding on dad's back. She was so happy as long as we were moving and mom wasn't wiping her nose, which happened all too often.
Family photo- aren't we cute. Ava had been crying so that look on my face was the remnants of me trying to get her to smile. Perfect timing on the picture Joe.
The hike was beautiful and the weather warmed up a little and it was the perfect hiking temperature. We all looked a little battered by the end but it was fun to spend some time in the great outdoors.

Not exciting enough of a trip...

Well...

As we were loading up to leave, an older man approached us asking if we had seen his 63 year old wife. She had left him on the side of the road to hike back up to the car because their hike ended up being longer than they thought and he had just had knee surgery. He got a ride up and along the way they never passed her and she wasn't at the car when they got there. She finally showed up nearly two hours later, and only after a call to the search and rescue. She had decided to take trails to make the walk shorter rather than the road and had a hard time finding her way back. The poor old man was a wreck as he waited helplessly and it was so sweet to watch him embrace her as she came off the trail.

What would a McDaniel family adventure be without a little bit of...adventure. That's just the way we roll.

Deep Thoughts by Lindsie McDaniel...

It's been an emotional week in the McDaniel household this week. We've had some real highs and some real lows this week and truthfully, I am exhausted. We were able to spend an unexpected day together as a family on Monday as we made the last minute decision to head down to Twin Falls for the temple open house. It was amazing! After we went to Shoshone Falls which was incredible! I felt so blessed that day as I spent an unexpected day with Josh and Ava I am so lucky to have an amazing family! We've also had some unexpected lemons thrown our way and yesterday morning was the peak of feeling down. I was having a really hard time getting started for the day and was struggling to keep it all together. It just feels like sometimes when you finally feel like you are getting really good at juggling all those responsibilities, the littlest setback can bring you right back down to reality. Anyway, I was feeding Ava yesterday morning and really going through a mental battle of whether or not I was going to drop the ball and ditch out on all responsibilities for the day or just pick myself up and deal, when I looked over at the table next to me and noticed a plaque that has sat on that table for the entire two years we have been in this house and we even had it in our old house before we moved.
and for the first time in...who knows how long... I started to read it.
I must have loved the saying on this plaque when I bought it, otherwise, I'm sure I wouldn't have purchased it. I sit next to it three times a day as I feed Ava and I dust it at least once a week, but as I read it yesterday morning, I didn't recognize what it said, it had been so long, it was like I was reading it for the first time...so sad, especially when I needed to hear it so much.

Just in case you can't read it:

Family

Is a circle of love and strength.

With every birth and every union the circle grows.
Every joy shared adds more love,

Every crisis faced together makes the circle stronger.

This was the epitome of my week. I have felt amazing joy this week, but amazing stress and sadness. I so easily cling to my family when facing joy, but when facing a "crisis" ( I don't think I would take it that far, but you get the picture) I tend to let it weaken us rather than make us stronger. I am thankful that I have such an amazing family, and an amazing husband to lean on. I know that we can make it through anything.

I'm proud to say that I did pull it together yesterday, accomplishing all that I had set out to and it ended up being a really good day.