.life in an instagram.

I woke this morning and realized the month of April is half over! How is that even possible? I swear it was just Christmas and Nyah and I were flying to my parents for a visit. I feel a little guilty for not keeping up on our blog. So many major milestones have happened and I didn't write about any of them or post any pictures! I would like to think it's because I have been present in every single second of every moment but that is still a work in progress. Thankfully, I usually have my i phone pretty handy and get some decent (term used loosely!) photos. Here is a quick review of our life in an instagram. (I'm happy to say in the super important moments, like Nyah taking her first steps at 16 months and one day old I was too busy living in the moment to search for a camera but I will always cherish ever single one of her firsts even if they aren't in the blog).

``

 

Nyah had her first dentist appointment. I took her to see Dr. Tang at Just for Kidz. In all honesty, the appointment was less than 5 minutes! She played with a giant stuffed dog with HUGE teeth and a giant toothbrush with the hygienist then the Dentist came in. We layed Nyah down and the Dentist pryed her mouth open and used the round mirror to take a look at her teeth and that was it! $75 dollars later and we were done! Thank goodness for insurance!

 

 

Miss. Nyah extremely happy with her toy chest pick!



 

Now that Nyah is walking we have been going to a lot of stay and play at the local community center. There are always lots of kids and toys to play with but she always gravitated to these cars. Jay and I thought it would be fun for her to have one of her own. This car has already brought hours and hours of enjoyment. Even on rainy days we bring it up into the living room and she has a great time getting in and out of the door. Her favorite is when we pretend we are going to crash into the dog. It always guarantees lots of giggles!

We also cruise the neighborhood in her ride. This was one of the very first nice days of Spring. There is no better way to start Spring than with your favorite little girl and the first frappe of the year!



 

Unfortunately, my girl came down with a nasty flu bug.... again! For 2 days she was feeling under the weather throwing up. I'm thankful that this time around Jay and I managed to avoid catching it!

 

My sickie snuggling with her dog.

 

This year Easter was so fun! We meet up with our mom and baby group for Nyah's first Easter egg hunt. We were in charge of bringing the eggs so I filled coloured plastic eggs with macaroni noodles for an awesome sound when shaken for the kiddos and I did some with chocolates for the mamas. I was so impressed that Nyah totally got the concept of picking up the eggs and putting them in her bucket. We had such a great time hunting, doing crafts and enjoying snacks afterwards with our friends. Easter is definitely one of my favorite holidays.

 

 

Stopping to pose mid hunt!

 

 

And just for fun a photo of our new puppy! Haha! This kids loves to dump out the dogs food and play with it. She could spend hours picking it all up, dumping it out and dragging the dish across the tile to create the most annoying LOUD noise!

 

Well I feel a little better now that this post is done and I've let go of the guilt about not blogging about Christmas, Nyah's first steps, etc... Now hopefully the hubs will hurry up and load my new photo shop elements 2 so I can get back to taking photos and keeping our blog up to date. Happy Weekend!

.heart day.



 

I love Valentines Day! Seriously what is not to love... Chocolates, spending time with the ones you love most in the world, hearts.... I mean really... I am the girl who at 14 got a tattoo of a red heart with a yellow flame shooting out of it.... biggest mistake EVER!.... Haha!.... Thank goodness for the art of tattoo cover ups!

 



 

Since I am only working 2 days a week and really trying to stick to a budget I decided the theme for this years Valentines Day was going to be homemade. Nyah and I made a jar of the top 14 reasons we love daddy.... Check out the reason on the top right.... You clean our bums when they are dirty... ok maybe not mommys.... but you will have to when she is really old.... Lucky you babe!

 

 

And you cant have Valentines Day without homemade cupcakes!

 

 

My sweet Valentine and her new dolly! Sorry the pictures are so low quality, I took them on my phone.

 

 

Nyahs gift for Daddy was these cute photos. Let me just say it is not easy to photograph a busy toddler. Kudos to the professionals! I don't know how you do it. I worked up a sweat and barely got anything usable!

 

 

This was the best I could come up with. I was hoping she would hold the I love Dad sign... fat chance.... And I was hoping to catch her pretty smile.... no way.... At least in this one she is not eating the sign and sat still for .5 seconds! 

 

All in all our Valentines Day was pretty awesome. We spent the afternoon with our Mom & Baby group. I love this group.... All the babies are the same age as Nyah and it has been so amazing watching them all grow up together. We feel so lucky to have these super awesome friends in our lives. And we ended the day with a lovely dinner with daddy. BBQ steaks and twice baked potatoes. Yumma!

 

I don't really need Valentines Day to remind me to love my loves.... cause everyday my heart is overflowing with love for my little family. xo



.no pics...just words.

It's been 2 months since Nyah's surgery and tomorrow we have another follow up appointment. She's had to wear a small bandage since the surgery and I'm pretty sure tomorrow she will get it off for good. After looking at her sweet face for 2 months with an ugly bandage on it you'd think I'd be excited to see it come off. But the truth is I have mixed emotions. While laying in bed with her tonight as she fell asleep, I thought about the scar. Many people have said stuff to me to try and make me feel better about it... "scars add character", "It will get smaller as she gets bigger" or my favorite... "She'll be able to use make up". There are no words to make me feel better about it. I remember what it was like growing up. It's hard and kids are cruel. I've felt it myself and seen it first hand.

In elementary school, I had really bad skin (Ughhh... and I still suffer with pimples in my 30's!!) and I can remember girls whispering about me behind my back. I remember getting an invitation to a girl's bat mitzvah and being so excited to take it home and ask my parents if I could go only to overhear the birthday girl say that the only reason I got invited was cause her mom made her invite the whole class. Being in grade 7, this was devastating! I never told my parents about the invitation. I just tried to pretend like it never happened. My pimples being the subject of gossip made me so self conscious.

I never want her to feel the way I did. I never want her to feel not good enough or not pretty enough.

And so I face tomorrow with mixed emotions. When the bandage comes off, the scar comes out for the world to see.

Take this as your warning world.... Be kind to my daughter... She is beautiful. Scar or not... And in case you want to challenge this fact you should know that her mama is pretty tough and will kick your ass if you hurt her.

.my worst fear.

When Nyah was just a few days old, I found a lump above her left eye. I remember running my fingers over it again and again trying to convince myself it was nothing. Kissing it, wishing it away. In my heart, I knew it was something so I made an appointment to see our doctor. Jay and I didn't tell many people about the lump, I think out of fear that if we talked about it then it might be serious. While I was pregnant, I was so worried about her having a big birth mark or something on her face so for me this felt like my worst fear. At the time, our doctor was unable to give us any help as he wasn't sure what it could be. He referred us to a paediatrician who would call us to make an appointment. I can't remember exactly how long this took but the wait felt like forever. The paediatrician turned out to be a girl I graduated high school with. Unfortunately when we went to see her, she couldn't say for sure what this lump was and recommended we go for an ultrasound at BC Children's Hospital. I prayed every night to god, to the universe... to anyone "out there" listening that it would go away or turn out to be nothing. The technician at the ultrasound was very kind and extremely understanding. She explained to us that it looked to be a dermoid cyst. My immediate thought as a mother was oh my god.... cyst?!.... cancer?..... I think the technician could see the worry on my face because she followed up with that most dermoid cyst were benign. Even with this piece of information, my mind was already in overdrive with worry. She said our doctor would follow up with us once she received the images. On the car ride home, I researched dermoid cysts on my iphone.  I found the following definition on wiki.... "A dermoid cyst is a cystic teratoma that contains developmentally mature skin complete with hair follicles and sweat glands, sometimes clumps of long hair, and often pockets of sebum, blood, fat, bone, nails, teeth, eyes, cartilage, and thyroid tissue." I think this definition may have freaked me out even more!

A couple days later the paediatrician called us and said she received the images and said she also thought it was cyst but that she didn't have much experience dealing with them and was going to refer us to a plastic surgeon cause it may need to come out. The thought of my little baby having to have surgery terrified me. On our visit with the plastic surgeon, he confirmed it was a cyst and that it should come out. He said that it could grow larger and cause serious problems later on in life, maybe even becoming cancerous. Because she was so young, he wanted to hold off on the surgery. They typically like to wait until the child is over a year old if it's not urgent and said his office would be in contact with us closer to her first birthday.

That night (and a lot of other nights) I cried myself to sleep. I knew that I should have been so thankful because she was healthy and it could have be way worse but I was still worried. No mother ever wants to see anything happen to their baby and this was scary. Everyday I checked the lump to see if it changed or went away. After a couple months, it felt smaller! A few times, I couldn't feel it anymore! I was so happy that maybe it was going to go away on it's own. I called the surgeons office and made an appointment. I guess you could say that I wished and hoped and convinced myself it was gone cause when the surgeon checked her it was still there. That day we got our date for surgery. I can remember crying in the handicap bathroom while cuddling Nyah, devastated that I was wrong and it was still there. I had truly convinced myself it was gone and I believed it. November 23rd was our surgery date, right after her 1st birthday on the 18th.

Surgery day came very quickly. We hardly slept the night before and had to be up early to be at the hospital for 6am. Nyah was in a great mood so it made the morning easier. The staff at Children's hospital were amazing! They really took the time to make it comfortable and as stress free as possible for Nyah. Our nurse even taught us the proper words to the song "wheels on the bus"... who knew we had been singing it wrong this whole time!! When the time came for her to go into surgery, Jay stayed with our stuff and I went in with her. I held her in my arms as they administered the medicine to put her to sleep and blew bubbles to distract her. I will never forget the feeling of having her put to sleep in my arms, her body just slowly collapsing into mine and then handing her over to the doctors and nurses. This was the first time we had left Nyah with anyone other than myself or Jay. The plastic surgeon was waiting outside the room while the anesthesiologist got her settled and on my way out ,through my tears, I touched his arm and tried to ask him to take good care of my girl.

The surgery went really well. During our post op meeting with the doctor, he shared pictures of the cyst with us and said he was very pleased with the outcome. The cyst had been quite a bit larger than he had initially thought (the size of a marble) and went quite deep. He said that had he known he would have done the incision in a different spot but all in all it went very well. We were able to be with Nyah a few minutes after the surgery was over and I was able to nurse her as soon as she was stable. Jay and I are so thankful for all the amazing doctors and nurses that helped our baby girl. It's very difficult to hand over control and not be able to "fix" the problem yourself but the staff make you feel so comfortable throughout the whole procedure. We are 38 days post op and Nyah is healing very well. Once the bandages come off (she still has on a small steri strip), I will post pictures of her healing. Until then, here's a picture taking in the days following her surgery. Be warned, it looks worse than it was :)

p.s The results came back from the biopsy after the surgery and it's confirmed it's benign!! So incredibly thankful!!

My brave girl 

 

 

with a smile :)

.nyah is one.

Last month, our little girl turned one. It seems like not that long ago, I held her in my arms for the first time and she filled our hearts with more love than we ever imagined possible. Everyday since that moment has been so special. I have really tried to hang on to and cherish every minute. The weeks leading up to her birthday were very emotional for me. I can't tell you how many times I laid with her, watching her sleep, listening to every one of her breaths (trying to cry silent tears so I wouldn't wake her up) wondering how I got so lucky. What an amazing first year we have had.

I pretty much had Nyah's birthday planned by the time she was 2 hours old. Ok.... maybe not that soon but you get the idea! I had my theme and decorations all planned. The theme was going to be "little lamb" and the colours were blush, cream and browns. I ordered our invitations off Etsy and it came with a bunch of different decorations that we could print... bunting flags, favor tags, food cards etc... It was awesome! Because the theme was "little lamb" I wanted to incorporate wool into the decor so I had this great idea to make yarn balls to display in glass vases and a yarn covered letter "N". Who knew I would be so terrible at crafts!!!! Luckily, Jay was Martha Stewart in a previous life and totally made ALL the wool decorations. He even painted a large canvas painting to put above the fire place that matched our invitations!

The party was on her actual birthday, Sunday, November 18 from 11am till 2:00pm, so I had planned to serve a lovely brunch. I had these great ideas... mini caramel apples, cinnamon bun pops with cream cheese dip, french toast skewers, mini pancakes...etc...  that all went out the window! The Thursday night before the party I got really sick. I'm not talking "cough cough" sick, take a tylenol and feel better sick... I mean really sick. I was throwing up every hour and to make it even worse Nyah was of course still nursing throughout the night so I would just finish losing my cookies in bathroom and then I would have to nurse her. Talk about draining. I wanted to die. Thank goodness the worst of it only lasted 24 hours. The timing of this flu bug couldn't have been worse. I had to readjust some of my ideas and had to rely on a lot of people for help.

When it came to the actual day of the party, I was in way over my head. There was so much to do and so little time. Thankfully Jay recognized that I was on the verge of a serious meltdown and called in his family to help with the set up. And luckily a few weeks before I had recruited Deanne "the party planning expert" to come early and help me. Without their help, everyone would have starved and I probably would have had to been hospitalized in the padded room for the crazies!!

All in all, the party was a success. Nyah had so much fun and I got to enjoy watching my girl celebrate her first birthday with the people she loves (But we were missing my mom and dad because my mom wasn't feeling well enough to make the trip from Kamloops).

One of the best decisions we made was to hire a photographer to come and capture the party for us. It was so nice to not have to stress out about missing important photo opportunities. We have worked with Roger from m&m photographie before and his work is amazing. Enjoy his photos... there are lots... it was too hard to choose just a few!

 

The back of her invitation

 

 

Some sweets for my sweet

 

 

My attempt at fancy cupcakes... thank goodness the toppers make them look cute!

 

 

 Nyah's birthday cake... designed after her invitation

 

 

Brunch table

 

 

Brunch Table

 

 

Nyah's special birthday water bottles

 

Nyah's "smash" cake

 

 

Awww.... my sweet girl! I can't believe she didn't cry when everyone was signing! True be told... I was choking back tears!

She loved her candle... she even tried to grab it! Yikes!

 

She melts my heart every day!

It took her a while to dig into her smash cake but once she got a taste for it, she wanted to dive right in!

 



Happy birthday lovey!

Kieran

 

Dylan

 



 

Rhianna

 

 

Brody

 

 

Devyn... such a serious face!

 

The twins.... Devyn and Kieran

 

 

Big brother Liam

 

 

Audrina

 

 

Austin

 



 

Brody sporting his tie!

 

Nyah with the beautiful Kate

 

Auntie Deanne and Uncle Julius

 

Outfit change after the cake smash

Present time! 

 

 Miss Aleena

 

A group shot (just missing Ms. Libonati)

Loving her new toys!

 



 

I love this girl more than any photo can capture... but this gets pretty close :)

 



 

A quick family photo... Mommy really wishes she had had time to do her hair!!

 

All tuckered out after a great day!