My favorite color: Ecru

Lyla loves her changing table. Whether she's hungry, poopy, or tired, it never fails to calm her down. And whoever said that baby's diapers don't stink until they start eating solid food was lying.



Get in my mouth!


I am tanner than daddy!

'tis the season

Nothing gets me into the holiday spirit like the temperature dipping into the upper 60's. That and FM 93.7 which started playing "All Christmas music - All the time" two weeks before Thanksgiving. So after Thanksgiving dinner over at Grandma & Grandpa Kiehl's (Thanks Grandma Kiehl, delicious as usual! Next time I get my fair share of the turkey skin) we hung the requisite Florida Christmas lights on our home. These are not quite as nice as the lights my Grandpa Meengs used to put on their mobile home in Clearwater: a strand of colored lights wrapped around two shuffleboard sticks tied together end to end and fastened to the mailbox out front.
Those lights stretched to the stars. This year I passed again on buying the fake snow: it's some kind of wavy white plastic that you fasten to your roof just above the gutter. I'm not that desperate to re-enact a white Christmas.

Thanks for my outfit Auntie Tracy!

Grandma Kiehl and Lyla Thanksgiving Day

Thanksgiving Dinner

The after dinner nap (or was it during the Lions game?)

Vultures in the tree behind our house...circling Wolverine national title hopes?

Lyla vs. Pooh: The staring contest

Pooh and his beady little eyes eventually won out.


Lyla's first phys-ed class.


The o-face normally made when filling her diaper.


A peaceful picture.


A girl and her paci.

Grandma Neal's first visit

Yay! Grandma Neal visited last week and met Lyla for the first time. Thanks mom for everything and also for letting Stephanie and I get out of the house for the first time as just the two of us. We went to Kohl's and didn't really know what to talk about (besides our daughter) so we just did some power shopping instead! We love you!

Let's go Outback tonight

So the three of us went out to dinner for the first time...one of Stephanie's favorites: Outback. Lyla pretty much slept through dinner in her carseat. This was great for us, but who wants to sleep through a free steak dinner? She'll learn.

And then, the most poignant thing happened...a father was sitting across the aisle from us with his teenage daughter and they were just getting ready to pay when we sat down. After we got Lyla all unbuckled and settled in I just happened to look over when he was paying and noticed that he asked the waitress to add a gift card onto his bill. When they got up to leave, he walked over and asked if he could take a photo of us with our camera which was sitting on the table. He took our photo and then told us how touched he was with how little she was and what good parents we were going to be. Then he gave us the gift card he had just bought and said just to make sure she knows God. I was blown away by the kind words and generosity of this complete stranger...it reminded me of the commercial where one person does something nice for a stranger without expecting anything in return, then that person does the same for someone else, and so on. So needless to say, our first dinner out was a resounding success.

Halloween

Here's a photo of Lyla in her Halloween outfit with mom and the pumpkin. Lyla wanted to go as a Powerpuff girl but we felt she was a little young for that. This was the first Halloween that Stephanie and I have actually given out candy...two years ago we were on a cruise and last year we were hermits and turned out the lights. This year we gave out Reese's peanut butter cups. I'm always a little afraid of going to the door because there's always those couple kids who have costumes on which you can't really tell what they are. And you can't just say "oh, nice costume", you have to say "oh look, it's Spiderman" or "oh, what a pretty princess". So with the mystery costume, it always ends up being something awkward like "oh, it's Mickey Mouse with a lamb suit and curly elf shoes, how cute!"

We carved our pumpkin to look like Whisky's face. Can you see the resemblance?

Lyla photos now on Shutterfly.com

Okay already, here are some more photos of Lyla's first week!

http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=0BaOGTFw4ZMXQw&notag=1


Sometimes Shutterfly gets temperamental so let me know if it isn't working...