babies, pick up your mallets.

magz & daddy lending MORE musicality to the arcade fire (the band playing in the background). our Christmas gifts to her were the xylophone, some fun maracas, and the pink radio/iphone dock up in the corner of the screen.

surfacing

it's mid-holiday, and I'm fluctuating between wanting to rest and do nothing, working, and wanting to do EVERYTHING that needs to be done in my little world. I feel tired in my bones a little, as B2 would say. I'm normally not much of a resolution-maker, but am definitely considering how to enact some changes in the new year. woo-hoo, we get a new year! 2010 was a wonderful year in so many ways; it also brought it's share of challenges. was that the correct use of a semi-colon? anyway, I definitely feel older after having lived through this year, and stretched both physically and emotionally. I'm looking forward to a new year to do some things better, the most important being to give God more space in my day, my week, my year. more space, more heed, more reliance. more Effort.

here are some photos from this month, starting with the 6 month ones with little Raggedy Ann:

a few shots of christmas at the ranch!

and christmas at Grammy & Opa's:

she's growing so much. we're sitting up (she still needs a bit of help and tends to eventually lean too far and topple over) and can get up on all fours and rock back and forth (video to come!). crawling is in our near future. she's been on rice cereal, and now that we're back from holiday travel we'll be jumping into our introduction to other foods with both feet. Magz got a couple of sippy cups for Christmas and immediately knew what to do with it. I haven't put anything in it yet, but it's fun that she knows what it's for. she's also doing a little waving thing with her hand - mostly her left hand at this point - and she'll talk and shriek and babble to us a lot (she's gotten some consonants... mostly M and B). she's such a sweet, mostly good-natured girl and I feel so thankful and blessed to be her mama.

happy tuesday afternoon, everybody.

-m.y.

half a year

margaret ann is officially six months old today! un... real.

and it's been forever since I blogged! so much to say. so little energy to say it. it seems like we've been going full throttle since Thanksgiving, and my dance card is still pretty full up until we leave for our Christmas trip to Hico next week. hurray for the blessing of work, and quiet prayers for the energy and grace to handle it all.

we'll try to take some good photos tomorrow after our six month trip to the doctor and try to chronicle some of the cool things baby girl is up to these days, but here are a few choice digital nuggets of late... she's currently so flipping squeezable, and we're all about the oral fixation (especially when it comes to mr. elephant's trunk, though anything will do, really):

behold my homemade christmas craft, the felt wreath. :)

more blogging will happen, I promise. for now, I'll take 10 hours of uninterrupted sleep in my stocking, Santa. Santa? Santa! It's not polite to laugh like that, you jerk!

-m.y.

p.s. I heard this from a friend Saturday night and thought it was so good... I'm paraphrasing, but it went something like this; 'regarding willpower, I think it's about getting grounded in Another Way enough that the utter lack of willpower doesn't matter.' I really identify with that, and wish to even more.