Bad Fall...

Last Thursday we had major drama in the Eads' household. I think most of you know I am not a freak out, over paranoid Momma. I am laid back and don't hover. If she falls? So be it. She is a kid! That is how they roll. But then I turned around for a second....

BOOM!

I look back and she has tripped in our child danger zone of a garage and face planted directly into the wooden stair. I swooped her up as the howls started. I checked her mouth and nose for blood first since I had no idea how she had hit and didn't see anything. As I am rocking her and moving her hair to give her kisses I see it....

Her head directly between her eyebrows is BLACK! I mean black. I dialed Michael and immediatetly start panicing. She is screaming bloody murder and I am convinced her IQ just dropped significantly. "Should I take her to the ER? Do you remember Natasha Richardson? OMG I killed our child!" By the end of the phone call I am hysterical. But I calm down long enough to take a pic with my phone and text it to him. Yeah she is still screaming. He said get her a cookie and see if she stops crying....

Yeah that totally worked. I still felt awful but within a half hour she was walking around like nothing happened. Unfortunalty the lasting imprint of the fall did last. Within an hour it looked a lot better!

These pictures are from the day after. You can see she has a shiner, but it doesn't compare to the blackness that preceded it. I swear it was so worse.


I swear kids are little Wolverines with amazing healing powers.

But as you can see...she was fine. Just a minor Mommy freak out.

Here are a few shots of us reading yesterday. I have never really sat her in the glider alone but she loved it.

Of course Elmo had to get a kiss after the story was finished. What is so screwed up is Elmo gets more kisses than Momma!

Then we all know that today is opening football day for College football. But more importantly NCSU Football. The ladies of the house had to sport the Red and White!

She looks a little sleepy huh? She had just woke up.

I remember the good old days when she would look at the camera and smile...:sigh:

Read more...

Flawed Life: Why I am Happy...FOR MYSELF!

Now that my friends have all come out of the closet about their pregnancies I can be shameless and tell you all why I am so freaking happy that someone else is joining my pain. And by pain I of course mean the wonderfully, fabulous, roller coaster of parenthood. I was so happy I almost wrecked and killed us the car when she told me. This probably makes me a horrible person.... but I am honest if nothing else.

Michael and I married young by my standards. I never thought I would want to be married as young as I did. But alas I wanted it more than anything and we tied that knot when I was a baby of 23. I surely never thought I wanted to have a baby when I was 26. Seriously? But alas this is just another sign of my impatience. I was exuberantly happy when we found out about Lily and then decided hey lets pop out all the babies before 30! Ha!

Yet there are things I felt I gave up for the sake of starting a family. Like my life. No really. I feel like I neglect my friends and forget to call my parents. Social Life? Hah! Don't get me wrong our friends are crazy about Lily and try so hard. Our dear Alden's graciously accepted when we asked them to be Lily's Godparents. Although we have yet to get her baptized as Meg so often reminds me! I know they all love her....but....people just don't understand! Or maybe they do which is why I feel left out so much. Why would you invite the baby couple to a wine festival or to the concert in the middle of the week? I wouldn't! Well I would but then I would laugh and say SUCKER and hang up immediatly! But our friends are way nicer than I am. We try to not let the family life hold us back. We busted the Pack and Play out at the Bauer's last year for New Years. Then Michael chased Dave around for 30 minutes trying to steal the noise maker and hide it. All the while feeling guilty that we were the old people being party poopers about the horns because she was sleeping. We finally gave in and let her join the party and the Bauer's have yet to find that noise maker! So we try but....

There is a lot of stuff we can't do because we have a one year old. We were some of the first to have a baby so no one feels our pain. We don't have a lot of babysitters and the nights we do need a babysitter it is to hang out with the people that are the sitters! See the dilemma? All of our friends can still go to smokey bars and not eat dinner until nine o'clock and have parties that go on until midnight...okay 2AM....okay 4AM. They can tailgate starting at 10AM and stumble home to pass out. Or better go visit our other friends and do stuff we just can't! They fit into vehicles and don't have to ride by themselves, and they can hang out and just talk without making sure their child doesn't electrocute themselves. Us? No way! We need to be eating dinner at the latest by seven. By seven we have already dealt with two baby meltdowns because we should have ate at six, and have been giving her cookies to make her stop screaming in the res truant while we wait. We have had to take two trips to the bathroom to change a diaper, wipe up the puke because she ate to many cookies and then go immediately home and get her to bed before she gets her second wind and we are up all night while she just screams. And we have a good child! We have so much stuff in our SUV that it is a struggle to get our own brother in and to our parents house for a weekend let alone letting a couple ride with us. But would I change it? No freaking way. I love every minute of it...okay 99% of every minute. I leave the 1% for the self doubt. Minus the doubt, life with Lily is awesome. I of course grab onto to every free moment of time to squeeze in the long ago pleasures....like a haircut.

So why I am I insanely happy for myself? Because I feel a change! I see family activities like putt putt, BBQs, picnics, laser tag, trick or treating, holiday parties that start before 10PM, all of these in our near future. I see people going through the same things Michael and I have been through in the last year and being able to offer some help where we had none. Not for lack of trying...but nobody knew! My poor sister had so many phone calls from afar just asking WTF?! is this "thing" I am seeing. (My niece is a month older than Lily so at least we learned together!) I see myself getting to hold little babies and remember what it was like because it feels like ions ago. I see baby showers, and belly rubbing (only if you ask first!), and shopping for all the cute stuff. I see babysitting and friendships blooming. I see Lily being a little ring leader and sitting around playing school or house, and of course being the teacher or Mommy because "I'm older!" I see future Sunday dinners, and prom dates, and high school sports games. It is going to be freaking fabulous! And it all will be here before you know it.

Why am I insanely happy for them? Because they get the feeling that at the end of day skipping dinner, the early tailgate, the late party...it is all okay. Hopefully I can help them see that. Maybe they don't get it immediately. Heck I still struggle with realizing it today. Maybe it takes a year. But it is okay and it's worth it. Not easy...but worth it. We all doubt at times (like in the middle of a mall melt down) and we all get scared (sometimes on a daily basis) but we figure it out. That is the best part. Everyday is a miracle. They get to ride down the road and hear a song that reminds them of the child running around at home and it will bring tears to their eyes. They get to call and talk about all the firsts whether it be the smile, the step, the roll over and that feeling that you might quite possibly have the smartest child in the whole world. Or in the middle of the night when you are rocking the baby and they look up at you and give you a smile that makes your heart and chest feel like it will burst right there. Now they can feel that joy. Joy is the perfect word for it. Because there is nothing like it. Nothing. Everyday is different and everyday is something new.

A change is coming. A change for the better. We all grow up a little more with each passing day. We miss the old days but we look forward to the new days. Now we won't be the cool young couples, we will be the cool parents. And we all know how it rocked to have the cool mom on the block.....and we all know Raleigh Mom's are going to Rock!

Congrats Brookie!


Disclaimer: Other area Mommy's to be rock too (Melissa, Michelle, and Jen)...Just not as much as Raleigh! Haha! You are more than welcome to move to Raleigh to increase your coolness at any time.

Read more...

EADSFEST 2009

Once again our team pulled off the victory! It was a two point win! I swear it is not rigged we are just superior in every possible way. No really we are. Look above...we don't even look that bad and there was a handful of people that couldn't even make it to the end and we are still going strong!

This year went great and only enforces the fact we will be planning this again next year. Start training for the Third Annual Eadsfest 2010!

Michael and I enjoying our awesomeness.

It was a rough start. Or team actually lost the first round of every event. I should mention I was usually involved in that round. But I was 1-1 in all round events! I just had to get my groove. During BeerBall the DrunkenBauers destroyed us. No really...Scott and Tara are brutal. I mean check on the usual outfits. They meant business about not getting last place like 2008!

Meg and I during a breather!

It was HOT!!!

Craig and Brent....I think Brent was trying to get some of our Mojo!

My boys!

Our awesome refs. We were lucky this year to have such a great team of refs. They made the event possible, took a little abuse and didn't complain once. I guess I should be thanking most of their husbands since most of them were preggers! Well Kev is underage...and Tanya and Meg thought their service were better used as refs. Although Meg saved a team and stepped in for an event as needed for people that couldn't finish the events. They were DQ'd but still she is official the "party starter" or should it be finisher?

I have to admit that next year we have made the decision to scale it back. We are getting to old for this at full force. We have some discussions about how to do this, but right now it is looking like we are cutting an event and scaling back the rounds. Nothing is final but we had quite a few people not make it to the end this year. Just proves we are not as young as we like to think!

At the end of the day we ended up with no drama, a broken baby gate, a bush with Tommy's body imprint in it, and another championship! A day well spent! See ya next year.

All pictures courtesy of Meg! Yeah she was sober enough to take them....us not so much. More coming next week from Tanya!

Read more...

Yes I was the embarrassed Mom....

So you know those parents you see in the store and the Mom's face is bright red because her child has thrown himself into the middle of the Walmart aisle over the toy you won't buy? Yeah that was totally me. Except we were in Stride Rite and I wouldn't let her get the pink shoes she spotted. She continued to scream in Gymboree, and into the book store before I finally gave up, apologized profusley to the cashier and ran out of the store at lightening speed with my tail tucked between my legs. Luckily it was dead on a Tuesday night so my embarrassment was contained to the workers of the three stores.

How can we be hitting the terrible twos already? Tantrums, fits, screaming, oh my!

Of course once when we got to McDonalds and started playing on the slide she was all smiles....

Read more...

New Words

Lily has been picking up a few new words in the past week. She said "Big Bird" yesterday and then "Bubble" last week. I believe she was repeating "bath" last night as well. I am seeing a trend of B words!

We tried to go through the Sesame Book and name characters and she tried to say "Oscar" and "Cookie" but it was more "SCCAAA" and "Tootie" which was quite funny.

Also in the past week she has started to understand a sense of self. She can now point to her own nose and mouth as before it was just ours getting stabbed. Children usually master an understanding of themselves by 18 months so we are right on target.

We had a busy weekend and I am struggling to keep up now. Eadsfest was Saturday and then Kenny Chesney on Sunday so I pretty much laid down for bed about nine last night. I also dropped my point and shoot camera in the toilet at Kenny which is my only digital video. It is really my own fault. They were telling people they couldn't take their cameras so I stuck mine in the back of my pants. If I just would have followed the rules when I rushed the bathroom when we got in the concert (camera still in pants) I would not have had a dripping toilet water filled camera....aka a dead camera. I did hate that camera so it really is best. But now I am wondering if I should just get a digital camcorder or a new point and shoot. So I am up in the air. My Nikon is still okay but now no videos of Lily. RIP Sony Cybershot...a poor victim on the concert gods......

Read more...