Winter is sure going to seem boring ...

We have a beautiful fall weather morning here. Natalie and I enjoyed playing out in the yard early this morning while the grass was still all wet.

The big plan for today is to go for a walk to enjoy this wonderful weather! Maybe we should attempt the park again, too. The last time we went, all the equipment was too hot for Natalie to even try to use, but that probably won't be the case today.

This week has been a bit busy. There was the crazy Monday evening. Tuesday was story time in the morning. Yesterday, we visited a friend, then ran three errands including driving 30 minutes round trip to donate our just-in-case cans of formula to charity.

Here's the up coming schedule:
Today - walk and maybe the park, enjoy Project Runway at 9
Tomorrow - Walmart to pic up professional pictures and do some shopping
Saturday - Wedding! Its on an island, so that means some extra travel and packing
Sunday - See Mike's mom at her place for the last time before she moves to TX :(
Next Thursday - Maybe Mike's hike so he will be done ALL day, home visitor (already!?)
Friday - Maybe Mike's hike if not Thursday
Sunday - Baby Shower! 2 1/2 hours away in NH. Looks like Natalie and I will be going alone! and staying over my parents for the night.
Monday - spend good portion of the day at my parents before driving back up to ME

By the time all that craziness is over, its the 25th! That is prime back to school time. Its a little sad that I saw so little of my teacher friend this summer, but in our defense, she was away two weeks for a course and has been doing a lot of camping, too. Now that she lives SO close, I feel like seeing her will be easier. And, even though Natalie is a handful, it is more fun to take her places for her to see people and explore versus last winter when she needed to be carried around and I had to constantly worry about where I would nurse her.

Its crazy to think that Natalie's birthday is only 7 weeks away! And, her birthday party is 7 1/2 weeks away! This party will be the first time we've had company other than just my teacher friend stopping by or Mike's mother in almost a year, and its been even longer since we've had anything that I really prepared for.

With this coolness in the house, every once and a while I get a little nostalgic whiff of how the house smelled or felt when we first brought Natalie home. Its so crazy how that sort of thing happens. I'll be sitting nursing her in her room (which is back to being where we do all her nursing), and I try to remember who this room felt before she was born. It seemed so strange then with it freshly painted and the crib and changing table in place. Now, I spend so much of my time in there, and in the beginning, I spent almost all my time in there because I stayed in her room while she was sleeping. I can remember first being home from the hospital and uploading pictures to FB while she slept back when this lap top was only a couple weeks old. In fact, I used to keep this lap top on top of her dresser so that I could go on line while I was rocking her in the baby sling!

Most things with Natalie are very different from when she first came home expect for nursing and changing her diaper in her room and watching her sleep in her bed. Pretty much everything else is different from the arrangement of our living room furniture and where her toys are to how we handle her during meals to how we spend our time both when she is awake and asleep. Even something like taking walks, which we I tried to do a lot before it got cold, are different because she stays awake now and we use a different stroller. Even back in the spring when we restarted walks, I could count on her to sleep in the stroller. Now, I want her to sleep in her bed and us to go out when she is awake! And story time, too, is totally different. We went for the first time when she was three weeks old and have only not gone maybe ten times since then. But in the beginning, she stayed in my arms in the back. Now we get down on the floor and she crawls around or I keep her in my lap or on a chair next to me so I don't have to chase her and stop her from crawling up other kids.

The time does go extremely fast. I've been reading Firefly Lane, which generally has been just an okay book, but the one thing that has been interesting to me was the character with children's reflections on her kids growing up.