Lilybeth Dooley

Last Friday mommy, daddy and maaamaaa (as she lovingly calls Grandma) ventured to the far away land known as the Texas State Fair.  You have to understand that Everyone goes to the fair in Dallas.  It’s part of their culture and way of life down here.  It’s crazy!  Their big thing to do is eat assorted fried foods including corn dogs, Twinkies, tornado fries, funnel cakes, and coke.  Yep, fried coke.  Lily really enjoyed her corn dog.  I think it was her favorite part of the fair.

Up to this point, Lily has been entertained and has loved her books about cows, ducks, pigs, sheep, goats and horses. This was her first encounter with said animals, and she was not very impressed.  She was actually really scared of the cows, pigs and creepy beedy eyed goats.  She did met a donkey, and thought he was ok.   Her word for horse right now is whore, so it was pretty funny to her her keep repeating that when she saw a horse.

She was totally overstimulated by the end of our trip, and so mommy decided it would be a good idea to go to the pumpkin patch.  (dumb dumb dumb)  She was miserable and cranky.  This place is over an hour away from our house, so I thought that since we were already downtown, we may as well go.  She kinda liked the pumpkins, but it wasn’t a very good fall like experience.  It was like 98 degrees outside, and totally hot.  So we pretty much rode the tractor ride, got the pumpkin, took photos and left.  I’m hoping to go another time when Lily is up to it.  Oh well.  Can’t win them all.  I was just really happy to have the day off from work to spend with the family.  That was a true blessing.

So Lilybeth’s website got really messed up and I wasn’t able to post photos or write anything on it.  Some jerk thought it would be funny to hack into the site and screw it up.  We couldn’t save the photos, so I’m starting over.  Grr.  I don’t understand why anyone would want to ruin a site like this.  Like it’s hurting anyone. All I wanted to do was share photos and stories about my daughter.

Sorry I’m not very consistant about posting on Lily’s blog.  After I get off work, I don’t spend much time on the computer.  I have some new photos to add, so I’ll do that a little later today. 

So our world has been relativly normal lately.  Go to work, come home, cook dinner, play with Lilybeth, go to sleep.  It’s actually really, really nice to have some sence of normalcy in our life again.   

She’s growing so fast!  Her speech improves every day.  I think by Christmas she will be talking in complete sentences!  She does a lot of two words together right now.   She loves to say bye-bye really loud when we get ready to leave.  She goes around the house screaming it, until I tell her no.   Unfortunatly for mommy, we pretty much have to correct her or disapline her every day.  She’s very willful, but so loving!  I can’t wait to see what she is going to accomplish in her life! 

Work is going really well for both Kevin and I.  Kevin’s got new challenges daily, and gets to enjoy what he does on a regular basis.  I’m loving my job too.  It makes it a lot easier leaving Lily (with a sitter that I love!) when God seems to confirm over and over that I’m doing what He wants me to be doing.  I love the logistics and travel stuff for all our mission trips.  It’s exciting, and the best part is all of the stories I hear when people come back from their trips about how God moved.  It’s amazing to be a part of!

We’re thinking about painting the inside of our house, and we’re going to start in the living room.  Any suggestions?  I’m thinking baby blue, lol!  Only a few will understand. 

Lilybeth is now 13 months, 2 weeks old, and she’s amazing!  Everything she does we just sit in awe over.  She has this tent that grandma bought her and it’s by far her favorite toy.  She knocks it over quite frequently and she wants us to pick it up.  So sometimes after picking it up for the 20th time, we hide it, and she goes around the house looking for it.

She can now say several words: mama, dada, dog, hi,  go car, eye (which is her favorite), baba, and she’s really close to saying grandma, juice, no, and more.   She still hates getting her diaper changed, but is doing better.  She doesn’t fight me quite as much when I change her.   She now only has 3 bottles a day of whole milk.  No more $25.00 a can formula!  Whoo-hoo!  Her favorite foods are definatly pizza and cheese.  Lily is now getting told no on a daily basis, and she has been smacked on the hand a few times.  She LOVES to help mama cook in the kitchen.  She gets to sit on the floor with her pot and stir the inch of water mommy puts in it.  Funny story – the other day I was cooking dinner and Lily was playing on the floor as usual.  She got really quite and I looked over at her sticking her fingers up the dogs butt.  Great right?  Harley really enjoyed it.  Gross!  I promptly washed and disinfected her hands, but I just couldn’t get over that.  Ewe!

Anyway, I just wanted to give you an update on what’s been going on with Little Bit.  Which is apperantly her nick name since it seems everyone around her has called her that at different times.  (grandma, daddy, me and even the people who watch her during church).  It just fits.

Sorry I haven’t written on here for a while.  The last month has been really challenging for my family.  I haven’t spoken to my brother since Kevin’s dad passed because the woman he is with is…well to put it nicely, evil.  I won’t go into it, but my parents did not watch Lilybeth after the service like they were supposed to, and they didn’t come to their only grandkid’s first birthday party because of this evil person.  I’m really trying to get through this, but I’m really hurting right now.  Please pray that my brother and I can reconnect and that God will get a hold of both of them. 

My little baby is now 1 year old!  The 12th is her official birthday.  I can’t believe it’s been an entire year.  It goes by so quickly.  She is such an amazing little girl.  Everything she does is brilliant in my eyes.

Here’s a list of just some of the awesome things she’s doing right now…she is now walking (almost running at times), and is really in to conversational gibberish.    She really wants too have a conversation with us.  She loves playing with daddys remote, hugging Harley dog, playing with her little magnetic alphabet pieces on the frig that sing the alphabet, rocking in her chair, and eating cheese.  She tries to sing with the alphabet song and loves music.  She doesn’t like to have mommy feed her a bottle anymore, to be restrained, the word “no”, or having her teeth come in.   Other than that, she’s a pretty happy kid.

Lilybeth is very strong willed and already very opinionated.  She has a natural happy go lucky and loving personality, but she will let you know how she feels about things if she’s upset.  All I can say is God please protect and watch over my little girl!  She’s a true blessing.  I cannot wait to see who she becomes.

Thank you God for our little girl!

Yesterday was Lilybeth’s big day! She walked from papa to daddy all by herself, and then from daddy to mommy and grandma. She was so proud of herself! Her first big steps were spent taking the remote to daddy! Everyone cheered for her. I think that surprised her. She loves to have an audience and she totally loved all of us praising her for walking.

Today was a special day too. Grandma and papa got to keep her today for a few hours. It was the first time in a while they have kept her because of how bad dad has felt lately. She apperantly spent the majority of the day walking all over the house with grandma. I came home early from work and she was still going strong! We walked around together for a while and when daddy got home it was his turn.

I can’t believe how big and independent she is getting. The only time I get to hold her like I did when she was really small is at night when she’s about to go to bed. I sit with her in our rocker and rock her as she drinks a bottle. Tonight it started out that way, but she decided she would literately push mommy away and sit on the floor and drink her bottle instead. Mommy almost cried. She’s wanting to be so independent already. Sigh. I know this is only the beginning of a new season filled with tons of things to discover and lots of amazing memories. I just don’t know if I’m ready.

Lily will turn 1 on June 12. So tonight I tried out a new cake recipe to see how it does for the caterpillar cake I decided to make for her party. Well see how everyone likes it.

So any day now our little girl is going to take off running!  She is so close!  So far she’s taken 3 steps in a row trying to get to the dog.  Her vocabulary now includes her first sentence…Hi Da!  She likes saying more, cat, dog, yeah yeah yeah yeah, and of course mama, dada, papa.

I can’t believe how fast she is growing up.  It’s wonderful!  I can’t wait to see what she does next!

Lilybeth can now say 6 words…well kind of.  She says ma ma and da very clearly, she calls the dog ghuh, she whispers cat since she and grandma have to sneak up on the cat, she really tries hard to say bottle, it comes out as baba.  She screams hi at you as you leave the room.  It’s like the best sound in the entire world to hear her laugh out loud.  I love every minute of it!

She can now stand on her own for 5 entire minutes until she realizes that she’s standing, and then promptly falls over!  She cruises the furinture, crawls everywhere!  It’s awesome!

She gets excited when mommy, daddy, the dog or grandma come in the room.  New today, she loves eating fig newtons, and is severly allergic to milk.  Yesterday, she discovered she can scream for long periods of time.  That was cute for the first minute or so.  On a daily basis things change with her.  I love to watch her explore her very small world, and I can’t wait to expose her to new stuff every day.  She’s totally advanced for her age.  Well, I have to brag, she’s my kid!  I love her!     She does have a little of our devious side to her.  When you tell her no, she stops, looks at you, smiles and waves, says hi and then proceeds to go back to her business of getting in trouble.  She’s great!  I love this kid!

So Lily is now mobile! She can crawl! Our life as we know it will never be the same! Gone are the days that we can just put her somewhere (safe) and walk away really quick to go to the bathroom, or check on dinner. She followed grandma all the way to the back door from the living room today.

This has been a really trying week. Lily has been really sick. She has a really bad ear infection, on top of a cold, and the doctor giving her an antibiotic that made her throw up several times and dehydrate her. Poor baby. It really freaked me out when she threw up because she was already having a hard time breathing and that made it worse. Anyway, now she is on a different antibiotic that doesn’t make her sick, and she seems to be doing a lot better today.

I also started my new job this last week. So 3 of the 5 days this week I’ve gotten on average 3 hours of sleep per night, and Kevin maybe averaged about 5. Coffee works along with the motivation to do well at a new job I’m really excited about. Lily also got to go hang out with her Aunt Cindy and Uncle Jimmy for a while this week. She did a lot better than I thought she was going to do. She even took an hour nap! Way to go Aunt Cindy and Uncle Jimmy!!!!!

Grandma and Papa unfortunatley caught Lily’s cold and are both sick. Please pray for them. This week has been pretty hard on them for many reasons. Kevin’s dad has to go back to the doctor asap because of some blood work that came back bad.