Happy 10th Birthday my sweet little Amy Rose!

My sweet little firstborn Amy Rose turned TEN years old today! Ten years ago today, December 6th, 1999 at 1:06 pm my precious little Amy was born & my VERY much longed-for dream came true when I became a Mommy for the first time! My precious little newborn weighed 6 pounds even & was 19 1/2 inches long! She had light brown hair (which quickly turned blond!), beautiful little blue eyes, the adorable little Palmer button nose & cute little dimples! I still remember the emotions of the first time I held my Amy in my arms! I was a MOMMY!!!!!!!!!! In that very moment, my heart was full of such deep, sweet & fierce love for my new baby girl & gratitude to God for my precious little gift! I can hardly believe that my firstborn baby girl is a DECADE old & that I've already been a Mommy for a decade too! I am SO grateful!!!!!!!!!! As part of Amy's birthday gift, we went on a date on Friday night. As we walked around Target sipping our Starbucks, giggling & talking I was just amazed by the fact that I was spending time with my "young lady" & my little "companion"! It was such a sweet but emotional day for me! I kept thinking how tiny she used to be, how much she "needed" Mommy to do things for her & now she is growing into such a beautiful, amazing, godly, precious young lady who loves to do things for ME (& her Daddy & her 4 little sissies!)! Amy is an amazing help to Mommy! She is SO good & sweet & so nurturing to her 4 little sissies & she can & does do SO much to help me! I just can hardly believe how blessed I am to be my Amy's Mommy, to be her friend, to have her in my life everyday, to get to experience her cute & quirky little sense of humor, to enjoy her talent for art, her love of animals (especially dogs!), to see how sweetly & selflessly she loves her little sisters, to watch her grow in her relationship with God & to watch her growing everyday into an amazing young lady who glorifies God & blesses her Daddy & Mommy! Wow, this precious little girl is MINE! I love my sweet little girl SO much & I am SO grateful to God for my Amy! Happy 10th Birthday my Amy Rose! Daddy, Mommy & your 4 baby sissies love you with ALL of our hearts!

Every day life.......

Okay, I'm the kind of person who loves to share what's going on in our lives & I LOVE details..... giving AND getting them! : ) (I know sometimes it's all WAY to much for most people! Ha!) but somewhere along the way I started only posting on my blog when something really special happened in our lives! I have noticed that I go from one extreme to the other, I either share every.......single.......painstaking detail (which probably leaves you hoping that I'll just hurry up & get on with it already!) : ) OR I go for weeks on end without a peep! Well, I realized that it's okay & even FUN, to share just everyday stuff. So.......for the sake of our family & friends who actually follow our blog & want to know what's going on with us, I'm going to try to be more consistent with blogging about just plain ole everyday life! : ) Having a Hubby & 5 sweet little girlies 9 years old (very soon to be 10 years old!) & under including a newborn, a toddler & 3 schooling girls, we have PLENTY to talk about! Trust me.......there is NE-ver a dull moment around here (& that's just they way we LOVE it!) : ) (uh, I also just noticed how much I like to use all caps to show enthusiasm AND those little dots too! Ha!) While I will be trying to share more of our everyday life, I will try my very best (which will have to be super duper hard!) to give what my Hubby calls the "Reader's Digest" version! Which, in case you haven't noticed, I'm not very good at! : ) Hopefully I'll be blogging again very soon!

Our little Anibella's newborn photoshoot!

These are a few pictures from our precious little Anibella's newborn photoshoot taken by our very sweet & talented friend Molly! Anibella slept the entire time & she was SO sweet! Here is a taste of her amazing work!

Our sweet little Anibella's first week!

Here are some pictures of our sweet little Anibella's first week!

She is such a precious, content & lovable baby girl! As you can

see, our 4 big girls absolutely adore their new baby sissy! We

are all so in love with our sweet Anibella, she has truly

captured our hearts! We are amazed & so grateful to God

for our sweet new baby girl! There are a LOT of pictures

here! We have put them ALL on our blog because this is

how we share life, what's going on with us & our girlies &

what is the most important to us with our family who

we love, miss & don't get to share daily life with! Also,

we just REEEEEAAAALLLY love our sweet girlies & we

are just SO excited, happy & grateful to have our new

sweet precious baby Anibella! : ) Love you all!

Our sweet little Anibella Hope Palmer

Our precious little Anibella Hope was born today, October 28th! She weighs 6 pounds & 7 ounces & is 19 1/4 inches long. She is a tiny, petite, sweet & content little baby girl! We are already SO in love! Anibella was born at 11:19 in the morning! Hard contractions started at 3:15 am & after timing them for about an hour & a half, I woke my Hubby! I got to say those amazing, wonderful words he (AND our sweet girlies!) had been longing to hear & I had been longing to say.........."It's time......!" : ) YAY! Miss Gordon got to our house around 5 am to stay with our girlies & Daddy & I got into OB triage at the hospital at 6 am. When we got there I was already 5 cm, fully effaced & my water bag was ready to break "at any moment" the nurse said! After only 5 hours (of hard labor) & 1 & 1/2 pushes, our sweet baby Anibella entered our world & captured our hearts forever! It has been an amazing privilege & a sweet blessing to spend the day with our new sweet baby girl! God has been so kind & so good, beyond anything we could have ever asked or imagined! I will post more about Anibella's birth later but I wanted to share our sweet news with all of our family & friends who have been excitedly waiting to celebrate with us! I will post more pictures later but here are just a few from labor & delivery.

Our new baby girlie's nursery!

I love our new baby girls' nursery! It is such a sweet, feminine

& happy room! We actually didn't have to DO anything to it!

The only new thing is the adorable crib bedding which was a

gift from close friends! We did the painting, wall stickers,

dresser & rocker for our little Abby when she was born

almost 6 years ago & our little Ava has used the same nursery

& now our new baby girl will too! That is so sweet to me! I love

that the crib bedding matches so perfectly! It is such a huge

blessing that we didn't have to spend any money or do lots of

work! I love it! We can't wait for our sweet baby girl to arrive!

Our sweet little Ava Grace's 2nd Birthday!

Our sweet little Ava Grace, our littlest baby girl, turned 2 years old on August 10th! There are so many things I love about my sweet little Ava!!!!!!! She is a little sweetie pie & she is just so amazingly lovable! Ava has a gentle, sweet, happy & very funny personality! She LOVES kissing & loving on her sissies, Daddy & Mommy! If for some reason when she is trying to kiss us, she gets our cheek instead of our lips, she will use her cute little hands to turn our face, with all her might, so she can square up & give us a big, juicy one right on the lips! It is so cute & really funny too! When Ava tells us she loves us she doesn't just "kinda" love, she always says, "I love you MUCH, Mommy, I love you MUUUUCCCHHH!"! : ) She is very compassionate too! If one of her sissies are hurt or have received correction for something, she will run over, throw her little arms around them & comfort them with lots of lovin! Ava is very girly but also happens to be very tough! She LOVES "persons" (purses), "lick gloss", jewelry & doing our hair! That's right, she already tells her big sisters, "hold (s)till, I gonna put you haiw up Sissy...."! Ha! It cracks me up! It is so cute to watch our big girls let Ava "do" their hair! : ) When Ava falls down or hurts herself she might cry for a tiny bit & come to Mommy, Daddy or one of her big sissies for comfort & love but then she pops right back up & is back to playing! Ava also speaks very well (& a LOT! Hee hee!) for her age, which I'm sure has lots to do with having 3 big & very conversational big sissies! : ) The other day Ava came over to me & said, "Mommy.......I have a question.......is that a bug?"! She spoke so clearly that Daddy actually looked up from his laptop to ask, "Was that Ava & did she say........"? It was so funny! Another cute thing Ava does is that if anyone from our family is not in the room or where she at least knows where they are, she'll ask where they are! She'll say, "We're (she means WHERE but she says it like "WE'RE" : ) !) is........Mommy....." or whoever she's looking for! Last week Daddy watched all our girls for my OB appointment. All morning long Daddy said Ava kept saying, "We're's Mommy.......I give keeessss (kiss)!" then sure enough, the second I walked in the door she said, "there Mommy is, Ava give keeesss to Mommy!" Oh, how it melted this Mommy's heart! : ) Ava LOVES to "help" all of us do what ever it is that we're doing! She always says, "I help you Mommy, I help you", it's really sweet! Ava is becoming such a big girl but she still lets her big sisters "take care" of her & teach her to do things! One of my very favorite things is watching her cuddle with her big sissies, hear them giggling together & hear Ava say their names! I absolutely LOVE to see & hear Ava stand at the bottom of the stairs (waiting patiently at the gate) & calling her sisters names! Aaammyyy....... Aaassshhlleeyy....... Aaabbbyy ...... ~ SO precious! She loves her buddy girls so very much! : ) Ava also understands that Mommy is going to have a baby soon & that she will be a BIG SISSY!!!!!!! Ava loves to kiss Mommy's tummy, zerbit my tummy, call her baby sissy's name & talk about being a big girl! Some of the new things we are working on with Ava are potty training, sleeping in her big girl bunk bed & being passy-free! She is very interested in potty training & will tell us when she has to go.........Mommy getting her up the stairs & onto the potty in time is a whole other thing! : ) We're working on it but I have a feeling she is going to be very easy to potty train like her big sisters were......I hope! We have decided to move Ava to our big girl "bunk room" before her baby sissy arrives so that it is a happy & fun transition all about Ava being a big girl! So far she has taken her full 2 hour afternoon nap in her big girl bunk bed (on the bottom & with a safety rail, of course!) three days in a row now! After 2 weeks of doing well with her naps, we will move Ava into her big girl bed in her sissies' room totally! So far, when she wakes up Ava has called out to Mommy and/or her sissies & has waited patiently for us to come get her from her bed & hasn't tried to get out herself! That's the kind of sweet little girlie my Ava is & I'm SO very grateful to God for that! She has her moments of testing her Mommy & showing me my need for Jesus' patience & grace but she is such a sweet little girl! : ) Every night when our big girls are going to bed & I am taking Ava to her nursery, Ava happily runs into their room to hug & kiss & say "night night" to all of her "guulies"! : ) She pats on her bed & says, "Ava's big guul (girl) bed!" so I know she's excited & happy to be moving in with them! Ava still ADORES her passy! So, we're gonna be working on that soon! : ) On Ava's birthday we had a little birthday breakfast for her with just our girls & I after Daddy went to work. We have a tradition of singing "Happy Birthday" pretty much all day long for every meal so we did that all day for Ava & she loved it! That night we met Daddy at Red Robin for Ava's birthday dinner, it was so much fun! A few days later we had Ava's sweet little family dinner party at our home with just Daddy, our girlies & I! It was so sweet & SO much fun to see how happy Ava was! : ) Our little Ava Gracie is such a sweet & precious & lovable little girl! We are SO grateful to God for our little 2 year old & we thank Him everyday for her! Happy 2nd Birthday my sweet little Ava! Daddy, Mommy, Amy, Ashley, Abby & Baby Sissy A love you with ALL our hearts our yummy little baby girl! : )