November

November was a very eventful month for the Connell family. We started the month off with Rory’s first birthday party. I can’t believe that my baby is already a whole year old. Her party went well. She got loads of great stuff.



When it came time to dive into her birthday cake she didn’t know what to do at first. She just poked at her cake for a while until I put a few yummy morsels into her mouth. Once she tasted it, she got a huge smile and began eating with gusto. It was really cute.

This picture makes me laugh. In this picture Rory is about to blow out her candle and delve into her cake. I didn’t put her into her chair and when I look over I see her just sitting there in her beautiful white shirt (one of my favorites) with no bib. I panicked a bit. In this picture you can see my hand up saying, “Stop”. I am scrambling around trying to find her bib. Everyone was wrapped up in the moment, so no one heard me. At one point she actually has her hand in the cake and I am holding her arm to stop her until I can get a bib on her. I didn’t want to be an annoying mom, but I could just see all of the brightly colored frosting just ready to irrevocably stain her lovely outfit. I just wanted the moment to be perfect and it was not going to be perfect for me without a bib. In the next picture you can see that I did finally get her settled with her cake and bib.




Thanksgiving was pretty uneventful this year. Unfortunately, Duane had to work until 6:00pm on Thanksgiving. Rory and I spent most of the day hanging out with Emma at our house. When Duane got off we had dinner with my Mom and Doug and Stan and Breda. We had dinner at Stan and Breda's house this year. Breda cooked and it was a lovely meal. The last few years we have had dinner at our house, so it was nice to relax this year. For some reason we did not take any pictures during dinner, but I did take a few earlier in the day when we were just hanging out. I thought that I would include a few of those.

Rory stayed Thanksgiving night with Grandma and Grandpa so that Duane and I could get up early to face the Black Friday sale madness. We had a blast! All of the stores were crazy busy, but everyone was very polite. We got a lot of our Christmas shopping out of the way and found amazing deals. The whole experience was festive and fun.

Rory has a mad and passionate love for our dog Emma. She loves to hug and snuggle with her doggie. When we send Emma outside to go to the bathroom Rory stands by the door pointing until Emma comes back inside. If the curtain is open and Rory can see the dog she points and laughs and plays with Emma through the glass. I took some pictures of her pointing at her Emma through the sliding glass door. I think that they are cute, so I thought that I would share them.

October (A Beginning)

October

I have finally started a blog. Rory is growing faster than I would have ever thought possible. I figure that everyone can probably live without regular Duane and Bree updates, but Rory is such a special little person that I know I would be doing everyone a disservice by not giving regular reports. Children just change too much in such a short amount of time.

I am going to try to create a new post each month summarizing the Connell family events and milestones. I decided to start with October because it is the best month of the year, and it is recent enough for me to vaguely remember what went on in our lives. I am going to be playing catch up for a few months, so I will do multiple posts a month until I am caught up. I could just start with January, but I cannot bear to neglect the fall. My posts are not going to be anything fancy. I enjoy taking pictures of the baby, so occasionally you will find pictures without much of a story attached. I just like to show off the little cutie.

In my opinion October is “the” month of fall. The entire month is a celebration of fallishness (I just made up that word). We enjoyed a very warm October this year. It was almost too warm for my taste. It just doesn’t seem right to be standing in a pumpkin patch sweating in the hot sun. I was also anxious for Rory to wear her cute fall outfits. As you will see in the pictures below, I was able to get those fall outfits on her. The beginning of the month passed without much interest. We played about in the leaves and marveled at the warm weather. I think my fall mission was to get pictures of Rory with leaves and pumpkins. She has been walking for a few months now so it seems that all of our pictures show her on the go. I was able to get a few stationary posses. I included my favorites below.

The beginning of the month was a bit boring so I am going to skip ahead to the good stuff.

The moderate weather made it possible for Duane, Rory and I to visit Duane’s mother and stepfather in Durango. We avoid the trip when the snow comes because nasty mountain passes are part of the journey. The mild weather let us sneak over for one last visit before winter. We were grateful, as we always enjoy our visits with Beverly and Pat. We spent an afternoon walking around downtown Durango. We took the pictures below (with the animal statues) in downtown Durango. We missed the prime fall foliage, but there was a bit remaining.

We spent the weekend before Halloween in Durango, so when we returned I was scrambling around trying to put the finishing touches on our Halloween costumes. I had been working on our costumes all month, but there were a few things that needed to be finalized. Rory and I had matching costumes this year. I was Mary and Rory was my little lamb. Duane toyed with the idea of going as a wolf for a while, but nothing ever came of it. He does not share my costume obsession.

I was excited to have coordinating costumes this year. I had a costume contest at my work. I found my costume on ebay and was ever so happy when I tried it on, because it actually fit. It was a great costume. I found Rory’s lamb costume first and I knew that I had to be Mary to match. I have to say that it was amazingly difficult to find a Bo Peep costume that was not naughty. I was grateful that I was able to find just what I was looking for. I made a poster with pictures of a little forlorn Rory lamb with the words “Have You Seen My Little Lost Sheep”. I thought that I would win the contest for sure because I had Rory as part of my costume, but an overweight guy in marketing dressed up as a nun and stole my thunder. I took third place.

Duane and I were a little unsure about how to celebrate Halloween with Rory this year. If we went trick or treating it would have been nothing more than a shameless candy grab, as Rory can’t have the candy yet. We wanted to take Rory around a show her off to a few friends and family, but as we were heading out I could see our neighborhood sidewalks literally swarming with kids. I could not bear to leave everyone without candy. We decided to just stay home and hand out candy in our costumes. Rory was feeling a little sick too and we didn’t want to have her out in the cold.

We get sooo many kids on Halloween. For a while we just took turns standing at the door because it seemed a waste of time to sit down. The second that you did the doorbell would ring again. We have a bunch of sweet kids too. We had our carved pumpkins out on the front porch with candles (so they would be spooky). One of the candles blew out and when we brought the pumpkins in we saw that someone had put their glow stick in the pumpkin so it would still have a light. I thought that was really sweet.

Overall October was a great month. Just writing this makes me sad that I will have to wait another10 months for the next one.

Come back soon because I will have November up before you know it.