August 19-26

And the winner of the poll is...  Listed above.  I'm assuming it's Jacque, since she's had a commanding lead (4-2-2-2) for several days, but the poll ended after I went to bed and this post goes live before I get home from church.  If there's a huge upset, I'll make a note of it later.  :)

UPDATE: Jacque did win.  Congratulations, Jacque!  Your prize has been ordered and will come with us some weekend when we visit.  :)

Olivia officially has six teeth.  Three on the top and the three directly underneath on the bottom.  As Bryan says, "how disturbingly not symmetric of her."


Most mothers put cheerios or juice cups in the little cup holders on strollers.  What do I put in them?  Rocks.  One rock in each holder and Olivia is happy as can be during our walks.  Usually she holds two of them, occasionally knocking them together, and the third is just a backup in case she drops one.

When Jillian was younger, she had a favorite cupboard that she sat in.  It was narrower than normal cupboards and was right next to the stove.  She would pull all the cereal out, arrange it in a little semi-circle around herself, and sit in the opening of the cupboard.  Olivia doesn't do this to my cupboards, but she does like to crawl behind the stroller and sit in the fireplace.  It reminded me of pictures we have of Jillian in her cupboard.

Pictures:

August 12-19

My family doesn't have 1-year-old pictures of us kids, they have 13-month pictures of us.  My birthday is in December, and mom and dad wanted to avoid the rush of holiday pictures, so they got my picture taken in January.  Of course, this placed many of my younger siblings squarely in the holiday zone that my parents were trying to avoid.  Oh well.  Bryan and I decided that this was one tradition that we didn't need to follow, so we planned to take 1-year pictures like normal people.  Unfortunately, Olivia and the portrait studio are doing their best to frustrate this goal at every turn.  We scheduled a session for two Wednesdays ago, but Olivia had a fever.  I canceled and rescheduled for Friday (since her fever broke), but she developed a rash the next morning.  I canceled Friday and was trying to reschedule all week, but the studio was busy.  WHY IS EVERYONE IN TOWN TAKING PICTURES THIS WEEK?

On Tuesday, our nephew, William Ignatius was born!  The hardest part will be calling him William instead of WD.  :) Apparently my dad is making a push for Billy Iggy.  Won't Justine be pleased with that!

Olivia is getting braver with letting go of things.  She stands right next to furniture without holding on quite regularly now.  She's still unwilling to stand by herself in the middle of the room, although every now and again I see her trying to get to a standing position.  Her walking bravery is also changing, although I'm not sure if it's getting better or worse.  She's more willing to walk across a small gap to get from a chair to me, but she sees it as a game and knows that I'll catch her, so she less walks and more flings herself the couple of feet into my arms.

Friday we finally did get our pictures taken.  We did Olivia's one year old pictures and a family picture.  You can see all of them at www.Searsphotos.com.  Login using the Session number 122758 and password RXD3P.  This picture is one of my favorites (although not the one we ordered).

Pictures:

August 5-12

If you haven't noticed it yet, there's a "Points" section on the right sidebar.  I periodically decide something should be worth points and write that in the blog.  Usually it's the first correct commenter who wins the points.  The points aren't important, they don't mean anything, and they're rather arbitrarily assigned.  In these points that don't matter, though, my mom is crushing everyone else.

Monday was Olivia's one-year checkup.  If you didn't know or have forgotten, one and four years old are apparently the worst checkups.  I learned this from the nurse as she gave Olivia four shots (two in one leg, one in the other, and one in an arm) and then sent us down to the lab so that Olivia could also have blood drawn (from her other arm).  She was not a happy baby.  To top it off, Olivia also had a slight fever, probably from trying to cut 4 teeth at once.*  There was a silver lining to the fever, though: I now know that I have the mom superpowers.  My mom could always tell when we had fevers, and I never knew how.  Throughout Olivia's first year, I've wondered if maybe she had a fever and I just didn't know (when she had an ear infection, for instance).  She did not.  I told the nurse she felt warm to me, and she took her temperature to confirm that she had a fever of slightly less than one degree.  I will no longer worry about not noticing the ridiculously high fever that may one day plague one of my children.

*It turns out that the fever was because Olivia had roseola.  The fever broke Thursday morning and she had a rash by the time she went to sleep.  The good news is that roseola is a relatively benign illness, except for the fever bit.  The rash is harmless and kids usually act pretty normal (except for being more tired than usual) for the week that it takes for roseola to run its course.  Also, once you have roseola, the chances that you get it again decrease dramatically.

In positive checkup news, Olivia is 21 pounds, 10 oz and 30 inches tall.  As the doctor showed me the growth chart, he started laughing and motioned to the line connecting Olivia's 9 month height to her 12 month height.  Apparently genetics are kicking in, so there was a noticeable decrease in the amount of increase between appointments.  At 9 months, she was on track to be about 5'10" as an adult.  Now she's looking at 5'6".  :)

When I had my half day off a few weeks ago, I picked up some great fabric at JoAnn's:

I slapped a backing on it and now I have a world map blanket!  You can't tell from the picture, but the countries are all labeled.  If you're ever wondering exactly where Brunei is located but are too lazy to google it, come over to my house and we'll scour my map blanket until we find it!

And now what you've all been waiting for:

The Olivia Face Contest!
Scroll down to see the entries.  Since I am out of town this weekend, the poll will not go live until Monday.  You will see it at the top of the page, right under the Barhorst Brewed header.  Due to a significant portion of my readership being out of town this coming week, the poll will be up for two weeks and will end Saturday, August 25.  Each reader gets one vote; spend it wisely!  (Note: I will have the poll set to record only one vote per person.  Having never used the poll feature before, I'm not sure exactly how this works.  In the likely event that multiple readers using the same computer and/or login email address have trouble casting their votes because of the poll settings, simply leave a comment or send me an email with the name of the voter and the entry chosen.  I will add these votes in manually.)

The Entrants:

Entry 1: Jacque

Entry 2: James

Entry 3: Jillian

Entry 4: Kara

Pictures and Video:

July 29-August 5

So far I have ZERO entries for the contest.  Lots of people have mentioned it to me, and I've even seen a few attempt the face, but none have been brave enough to email me a picture.  It's not too late!  You have until Friday to get entries in.  As added incentive, I'll give 2 points for every submission.  Here are some samples/motivation:

Photos by Josef

Photos by Jillian

We spent the weekend visiting my parents and a van full of people and stuff left early Monday morning for the 13 hour drive to the Aufdy family campout in Nebraska.  Poor James and Jillian were wedged in around Olivia's carseat in the back, but they didn't complain too much.  They spent the whole trip entertaining Olivia and feeding her grapes and Cheerios.  All in all, the trip there was pleasant (except for the whole 13 hour thing).  As is standard for long car trips since 2010, we kept a log.  The pages are at my parents' house for those interested in reading it.

Camp was fun.  Three days and four nights of roughing it in air-conditioned cabins with cable TV.  We don't have it that good at home.  :)  There was a pool and a mini-golf course on the campsite, so we weren't hard pressed to find things to do.  The weather was hot, but not as wet as I remember camp being, and the bugs were obnoxious but not inclined to bite.  Bryan's determination to make a camp gift only increased during the gift exchange.  He already has ideas.

Olivia spent a lot of her time in the car pulling out her hair, so she's balder than she used to be.  We think she does it when she's tired, bored, or hot.  In retrospect, we should have expected a bald baby after two 13 hour car rides with a hot, sticky, sandy campout between them.

Friday was Olivia's birthday.  She is now one whole year old!  Unfortunately for her, she spent her whole birthday in the car on the way back from Nebraska.  Saturday we had a mini celebration for her at my parents' house.  She was uninterested in opening her present and disgusted by the messiness of her cake.  She did, however, eat cake when I fed it to her.

Photo by Jillian

Saturday evening we began the trip back home.  One of us is worse at sleeping in the car since discovering the joys of stomach sleeping.  I'll let you guess who that is.  I'll even give 5 points to the person who guesses correctly first.  As a result of the lack of sleeping, we decided to stop at Bryan's parents' house on the way home and stayed overnight there.  Then we were up bright and early Sunday morning to make it home in time for church.

Sunday afternoon was Olivia's birthday party.  The cake-smashing was not as exciting as advertised, but Grandma helped by sticking Olivia's hand in the cake.  Already full from dinner and a few forkfuls of frosting, Olivia was mostly uninterested in eating the cake, but she happily fed Grandma the entire piece.  At least someone got messy.

I unwrapped presents for Olivia, who was stymied by the tissue paper in the bags.  It's hard to figure out.  She got some excitingly noisy things from her Grandma and a toy cell phone that she particularly appreciates from a great-aunt.  Sometime this next week I'll take pictures of her gifts (including the ones she got at campout) so that I can put them up in next week's post.  For now, here are a few more pictures of Olivia:

Photo by Josef

Photo by Josef

Photo by Josef

More Pictures: