I had no intention of abandoning this blog, but sometimes life happens. What is important is that we are back, I will give you a few highlights from the past 6 weeks.

 Olivia’s first Valentines Day! This was not an easy photo to capture, she did not like the texture of the bear and she would wake up every time I laid her down, after many attempts we finally got it. She has grown so much since mid February as you will see in the follow photos.

Olivia was 4 months on February 18, here she is then and again at 5 months, time if flying by!

At the end of February we packed up and headed to TN for our good friend Nicole’s wedding. This was Olivia’s first hotel stay, she didn’t love it, I think she knew she was not at home and she tossed and turned a lot that night!

Of course we cannot make a trip to Tennessee without arraigning to see as many friends as possible, there were a lot more that did not make it into photos, after driving for 6 hours after a work day we weren’t thinking about photos.

Here is Olivia being held by one of her great-great-uncles, she has quite a few on my maternal grandmothers side. My grandma has 9 siblings, so I have a whole bunch of great aunts and uncles! You will notice in this photo that we are in a hospital waiting room. On Friday, March 3 Clay and I were at the church helping with a kids event when my mom called to let me know that my grandpa was going to be airlifted to Springfield because it was believed that he was having a heart attack. The plans changed a little and he ended up in Branson where we were told that it was not a heart attack, but fluid in his lungs causing chest pains. Well into the wee hours of the morning a few more diagnosis we added including possible cancer spots. It was decided that he would travel by ambulance on to Springfield, so we spent the night at a hotel and spent the next day in this waiting room. Our family was under the impression that the fluid on his lungs would be drained on Monday and that more tests would be done to determine if the spots were cancerous. All of this was going to take a toll on my grandpa, you will see in the following photos that he suffered from arthritis and at his heaviest only weight around 120 pounds. He was awake and knew what was going on around him and everything that the doctors were saying, we all took turns coming and going into his room in the ICU just counting the hours down until treatments were started and tests were ran. Even today we are still not completely sure what happened, but around 5 PM on that Saturday night without any notice or struggle he passed away. I am so thankful for the 29 years that I was able to have him in my life. He loved Olivia very much and he was so happy when we told our family that she was on the way.

This was 5 years ago on our wedding day

Buddies

Only a few days later was my mom’s birthday

Another first for Olivia was St. Patrick’s Day

She also started eating cereal with spoon

Here are a couple shots from time spent with Clay’s family over the last few weeks, her cousins lover her so much! In the second one you can see her hand holding onto Clay’s dad’s overall pocket while we were at dinner. All the feels!

One last first for now, this past weekend Olivia went to Silver Dollar City for the first time! It was Young Christian’s Weekend and we took some of our youth group.