Journey to and Through Motherhood: 1Y33W: Lily in the Leaves (10/11/10

My mom called on Monday night to inform me that my grandmother fell at the mall and broke her hip. They did surgery on Tuesday and performed a partial hip replacement since she broke the head of her femur. I felt so bad for her. She was in a lot of pain and was very upset about the whole ordeal, especially because her independence means everything to her. I worried about her making it through surgery and recovery, especially at her age, but she is one tough cookie. I felt guilty that I was unable to make it up to visit her before we left on our vacation but we were just too busy.

This week was mostly spent packing for our Houston trip. I got everything ready on Monday and Tuesday. Paul packed up the truck on Wednesday night and we loaded in the last minute items after getting ready on Thursday morning. We took the truck fully-packed to work with us. We got out of work a few hours early, picked up Lily, and hit the road. The details of the rest of the week and our vacation will be included on my next post.

Lily is in a good bedtime routine now which I fear will go out the window on our vacation. She is already a difficult sleeper which gets even worse when she is out of her routine. She is still not always sleeping through the night but usually cries for her “binkie” and goes right back to sleep when I give it back to her as it frequently falls out of her mouth and out of the crib when she is asleep. I always read Lily a bedtime story in the rocking chair and her hands-down favorite right now is Dr Seuss’s ABC book. She insists upon that book every night and won’t accept anything else. She anticipates and recites part of it and, therefore, now knows her ABCs up to G. When Paul misread one of her favorite parts as “glasses” instead of “goo-goo goggles”, she was quick to correct him which was absolutely adorable. Now she recites part of that page over and over again because it makes us laugh, “ABCDEFG…. Goo goo goggles”.

Much like Lily loved to tell us about her train ride at Crossroads Village (which she still talks about, by the way), she was very much into telling us over and over again this week about all of the fun she had at the Davison Pumpkin Fest last weekend. She talked about her ride on the “baby train” as well as her hayride on the “track-TOUR”. I must get a video of her saying that word because it is just too cute!

The fall colors were near peak this week and I feared that we would miss them while we are in Houston so we took some time on Tuesday and Thursday to get pictures of Lily in the leaves. That was pretty much all of the pictures I took this week but there were 120 of them. Don’t worry, I narrowed them down considerably before posting.

Our first photo stop on Tuesday was a church yard right by Lily's daycare with enormous maples and excellent light. Here is Lily looking very serious:

She greatly enjoyed running through the leaves:

My happy little sweetheart:

This is Paul's favorite. I love the light:

We then drove to the Nichols Arboretum looking for another good photo spot. The best place we could find was the Forest Hill Cemetery which was quite beautiful. Lily loved running around and throwing leaves in the air:

Suddenly Lily was playing with a football. It took us a minute to figure out where she got it until we went around to the front of this headstone and found that it belonged to Bo:

Throwing more leaves:

Then Lily decided to start gathering acorns:

I thought it would be cute to get Lily's picture sitting on this urn but instead it looks like she is trying to go to the bathroom. LOL:

It was hard to get her picture at all because she wouldn't stop running through the leaves and kicking them in the air:

Riding on Paul's shoulders:

Lily loves her daddy:

Happily chilling on a bench:

Lily and I:

Picking leaves:

And gathering acorns and nuts again:

I really liked how the pictures turned out at the church by Lily's daycare so we returned to take more pictures on Thursday before leaving for Houston. I absolutely love this one: