Steve and Jenny Valentine

We just passed the eight month mark a few weeks ago.  We are thrilled to have Karis in our lives and continue to enjoy the true blessing she is in our lives.  Exciting news for month eight, she cut her first tooth!  I had gone for a 6 week post six month check up (more on that in a bit) and the doctor asked if I had noticed any teeth yet, and I said no not yet...however as the doctor looked inside, there was one little tooth peeking through the gums (bottom front right tooth).  Must have come up over night and I hadn't notice yet!  The very next week I was checking out if the tooth was coming up any more and noticed the one next to it was also peeking through!  Such an exciting new phase, well sort of (all you nursing moms can understand)!  She hasn't seemed to have too much fussyness related to the teeth coming in yet, just a few times of having a hard time going to sleep, which as soon as we give her a teether in the crib, she's happ...

I am a needy person.  Most people don't want to admit that about themselves, in fact, I don't really like admitting that about myself, but I am.  Even worse, some people fool themselves and say they are not needy, so therefore wouldn't need to own up to that fact about themselves.  Of course we do this...we live in a culture where we do not "need" anything from anyone.  We can literally provide for ourselves (given that we have the proper resources)... We have stores very close to our homes, where we can buy all the food, clothes and anything we need and/or want.  Or we could just stay in our home and order what we need off the Internet and have it delivered to our home, how about that for service! We have restaurants to serve us Entertainment at our fingertips Theme parks (especially for us Orlando folks) Cell phones (most with Internet access these days) Social media (where we burn up hours of time looking at peopl...

Karis is ACTIVE...and that just might be a slight understatement!  Anyone who tells you that life goes by fast and appears to be a blur when you become a parent, seems to be telling the truth.  As I'm reflecting over the past couple months, I can't help but wonder how did they go by so fast!  I'm really learning what it means to enjoy every moment with my daughter and can't seem to thank God enough for allowing us to be her parents.  She has been learning and trying to perfect several new skills and it's fun to watch her personality really start to emerge! Month 6 The biggest news of month six, was she started crawling (and not just army crawling).  Steve and I celebrated our anniversary and took Karis along to Jekyll Island; after being in the car for 5 hours, she was ready to be out of the car seat and showed us by crawling once we got her out of the car.  We could not believe it was actually happening!  (As you can imagine, we are tr...

Well month four and five have come and passed in our little daughter's life and we couldn't be more thrilled with each new day we get to spend with her. Some of the amazing new abilities she has learned are: babbling non stop squeeling noises - very high pitched noises I might add perfecting many other types of noises with her mouth - it seems when she learns a new noise, she repeats it over and over until it's perfect! sitting up without assistance - still wobbly at times, but mostly because something gets her so excited and she can't seem to sit still! rolling like a champion - she perfected the tummy to back first and it seemed like several weeks later she mastered back to tummy rolls...ever since then she has been a rolling machine and uses this as her primary way of "getting around".  This also makes for some very interesting sleeping positions we find her in when she's in her crib :) army crawl to reach for objects - toys, mom, dad, paci, et...