Let it snow...

Sorry it has been a while since I last posted something. Finals week was really rough. I actually did pretty well in all my classes, but there was 2 of them that I really thought I had a possibility to fail. I passed them all and I have had this last week off to relax. Which is good since my last test took 16 hours of cramming in the 22 hours before the test started. Here is a picture of me and Lily shortly after I finished it.


(This is actually a decent pic, in all the rest I look like the night of the living dead).

So this week off has been used getting to know my family again and getting the house ready for winter. I pretty much finished what I wanted to Friday afternoon which was great because this morning we woke up to this:



Amanda has thrown herself into christmas. Per her instructions we have made sugar cookies, purchased and decorated a tree, gotten other decorations for the house and set up the ones we already had, and been listening to Christmas songs including a CD of the chipmunks (my family should appreciate the signifigance of this purchase, it's not christmas without the chipmunks!) Here is Amanda working on the tree.



To get all this done she has had to be creative. Like when she does the laundry:



Only 3 more weeks till our trip to Arizona! We can't wait to see all of you.
-Andrew

Happy first half birthday!

Lily is 6 months old today! As though this blog is not already a tribute to the little angel in our lives, I wanted to write about the wonder of my daughter. Lily is 6 months old today, and she is crawling, really crawling, not that army crawl/scoot thing. She sometimes gets so anxious to get where she wants to go she will try to stand up on her feet, which results in a little triangle with her bottom up in the air, and she usually will fall foreward on her face when she does this because she can't balance on hands and feet yet. She is constantly crawling to something like a couch or drawer and pulling her self into a standing position! She loves to stand, and will probably be walking long before her first full birthday!

Lily tries to eat EVERY-THING in sight! She especially loves big white tags, and electrical cords. (We fight her tooth and nail on that score!) But anything she can get into her mouth is good. Like this basket handle. We just wanted to take some pictures of Lily sitting in the basket, but in 95% of them she is chewing on the handle! She is currently playing with a ribbon I gave her to distract her from chewing on the cable cord that runs from our PC to our TV. She seems to be enjoying herself, but I think the ribbon has met it's doom. ...Oh no. She's got the cable cord again!

Lily is the center of our lives. She is the most beautiful creation I have ever beheld. Her smile lights up a room, and her big, dark eyes speak volumes! She has so much inteligence in every look, every movement. I have watched her sit still for a few full minutes at a time, watching something new, and taking it all in! She isn't afraid of anything... except Andrew throwing her in the air and catching her. That scares her. But nothing else. Not even a giant spider! (This was part of our halloween decorations).

Lily has two teeth now, both on the bottom, and one on top that has tried to break through 3 times, but it can't seem to do it. Her bottom teeth are so sharp! It really hurts if she bites your finger, but she doesn't hurt me when I breastfeed, so, for now, I'm still safe. She has tasted breastmilk, Similac, rice cereal, a small bite of mashed potatoes, and canned banana baby food. She seems to have no real prefrence for any one thing, except tags and cords, and the occasional Kit Kat with the wrapper still on. (Her shirt says "I want candy" on it. It was a gift from her great-aunt Tracy Warnock).

Oh, how I love to be a mommy! I am so grateful for my little family, my husband and daughter, my greatest blessings! They are what life is all about. They make life wonderful! How blessed I am to have them in my life! Happy half birthday my little Lily! You are what I am most grateful for!

Happy Halloween

We've had a great couple weeks with Nonni (Mom Bitter) being here for the last 2 weeks taking care of Lily, dishes, laundry, cleaning, and cooking. I can't believe we are actually letting her leave on Tuesday, but as they say "All good things..."

I have been meaning to talk more about life here in Kirksville and med school in general, but since it is late those things will have to wait. Till then enjoy the latest pictures and updates:

Lily has begun to crawl across the floor when something has her interest. (Or something similar to crawling.) But what she really wants to do is stand. She lifted herself up against this computer tray the other day.




Here are some pre-Halloween pictures (More to follow later). While the second pcture is not a great one of Lily it is a great shot of the wonderful outfit Grammy (Mom Freeman) made for her. The first pic is in our neighbors front yard where she has lots of beautiful leaves. (note the sign says Boo! Not Bod :-)



A parting shot of Lily on our front lawn. One of my personal favorites.

We hope you all had a great Halloween. More pics to follow this later, and just maybe some of them will have Amanda and me in them.-Andrew

Another milestone!

Lily is simply amazing! She just keeps hitting these milestones as though they are nothing! Today she cut her first tooth! She had a fever last night of 99.7 under the arm, and she has been doorling for the last two to three months, and chewing on things all the time. Today her gums looked a little white where the tooth was pushing up on them. Then at about 5pm she put my finger in her mouth to chew on it, and I felt a sharp little tooth! I looked, and sure enough, that thing had pushed itself right through already! So, the first tooth is in! She is trying to pull herself up to stand, even though she really isn't strong enough yet, and she scoots backwards and sideways, but hasn't mastered the forward crawl yet. She is so busy! And such a joy in our lives!
My mom is here for 2 weeks now, so we are having a ton of fun, and she is trying to take lots of pictures to share with Andrews family as well as the rest of the Bitter clan.
Andrews mom made Lily the cutest halloween costume; a black kitten! I can't wait for halloween! She will be SO cute! We'll post pictures later (I'm not at my home computer, so I can't post any now).
So that's the update! Lily is a little protigy. :)

Old home movies?

Not really though. Just some old footage I took with my cell phone a couple of weeks ago that look like old movies. I wish I had got them up sooner, but better late than never right?





More to come later. (ie. when I make them) I hope you all are doing great. And if you are lamenting the heat the daily temps here are low 60's to high 30's. I need to get me an ice scraper. Poor Amanda has been using a credit card to get the frost off the last 2 days!

So we are a little busy

Sorry about the no-posts for so long. Truth be told this one isn't going to coun't for much either. We are in Nauvoo at a motel the night before Stake Conference. We got a last minute deal on a room and decided to stay the night here instead of getting Lily up at 6am and driving the 2 hours to Nauvoo. Anyways I wish we could say that we are going to get some great pictures form here, but in our haste to get here we forgot our camera :-( But we will be back and we won't forget it next trip.

In the mean time Medical School is going well. I just aced a test for the first time. All it took was 8 hours with a private tutor (classmate), ditching 6 of the nine classes to study the material myself, 2 two hour group study sessions with Q & A and at least another 6 hours of study on my own. (Did I mention that I have another 5 classes besdies this one?) My reward for ace-ing it? 48 hours to study for the next test (If you don't count sunday). And my reward after that? 48 hours to study for a Osteopathic manipulations practical on one of my classmates (graded 1-on-1 by a professor). Sorry if it sounds like I am complaining. Just figured you all would be curious about how Medical school life is. And remember the hours between classes (ie 48 hours to study) have to include watching Lily, sleeping, other classes, errands, moving a piano in a town 10 miles away for a member, and driving to Nauvoo and back. How is that for a mathmatical word problem?

We have gotten alot of rain here lately. Not really lately, but in the last few months. I am not sure how much rain we got in July but this is what it did to our new 12.5 million dollar school library. (When I say new, I mean open a few months.) Watch the whole security feed for different angles!)
http://www.atsu.edu/library/flood.htm
We "officially" got 11.5 inches in September which I think is an underestimate. Typically Kirksville averages 2.5 inches in Sept. Just a little different right? It's gotten to the point where I have honestly considered building an ark. Another month or 2 like July will convince me.

Sorry I don't have any pic's but this tablet is mostly for school work. I will try to load some on it for my next entry. Amanda should have some up for you soon though!
-Andrew

Our Big Girl

Guess who's gearing up to crawl!
Lily is getting up on her hands and knees strengthening those muscles and learning what she needs to do to go mobile! She hasn't mastered it yet, if she tries to move an arm or leg she usually topples over, though she did move a knee forward yesterday without falling down. She is getting stronger every day!

Andrew and I are both excited for her to crawl and nervous about how that will change things. Part of me just wants her to stay as she is. But maybe this will help her be more self entertained. We'll see. For better or worse, Lily will be crawling before we know it.



In other news... Our TV died, and Andrew, thrifty shopper that he is, found us a really cheep deal on a new TV! It's even a flat screen HDTV, which he said he wasn't going to get b/c it's too expensive. But he found one for cheep, and since I have a bonus coming at the end of the month, we decided to go for it! Hooray! So here is Andrew putting in the new TV!

We can see pictures again! Conference was interesting on the old one. Much of the time the picture was very dark or gone altogether. At least we didn't loose sound! Durring the Sunday Afternoon session our friends the Stacey's dropped by because they couldn't get their internet to work, and miracle of miracles, it worked through the whole session! No outages! Afterwards it was back to being bad, but for 2 glorious hours it worked like a charm! See how happy Andrew looks!