On my mind...

~I am amazed that y'all are so curious about the circle dot cutouts. I certainly did not think that was the photo that would catch every one's eye. I'm not ready to say what they are for yet. Y'all will have to wait a couple more weeks. I will say that they are for Olivia's 1st birthday party. In all honesty, I'm amazed that no one knew what they were for, considering they have been everywhere in the blog world lately.

~As you saw in my weekend pictures, we attended the Pope's first annual family camp-out on Friday night. We had a blast!!! I must say that I think it's was Nicole's most fun party to date. You can read a detailed version of what we did on her blog here. Believe it or not, Olivia did great sleeping in the tent. She held her own with the older kids as long as she could, but finally passed out around 10:30pm. I took her to our tent and tired to lay her down in the pack-n-play, but she started whining, so I laid her down on the air mattress and she was out like a light. I took full advantage of that time and laid there to cuddle with her for about an hour. It was honestly my favorite part of the night since she NEVER cuddles with anyone. I missed out on some girl time with the other mom's, but I would have been mad at myself for not taking advantage of the moment. Besides the fact our air-mattress busted and we ended up sleeping on the hard ground and being woke up by a rooster at 4am, we had a blast and can't wait till next year!!!

~We started Project Paint-the-Ginormous-Living Room last night. So far it's going fairly well. We've had only two arguments on how my paint skills suck and one accident involving me dropping the roller (which I just rolled in the paint tray) on the carpet. Thank goodness for brown carpet and brown paint. Our goal is to paint two walls a night in order to be done by Olivia's birthday party on the 25th. I can say that with two walls down, I'm in love with the color and very tempted to go buy another 5 gallon bucket to paint the rest of the house. I'm being dead serious. This is the first room we've painted that I've sat back and said "wow, this looks so much better than it did in my mind." Usually, it's the other way around.

~Olivia has become very vocal in the last few weeks. I mean....very vocal. When it's just her, David, and I at home, she talks non-stop!!!! It's absolutely hilarious because she is now having a full on conversation with you (even though we have no clue what we're talking about) and the looks she gives are so serious. I'm sure she's probably telling me the cure to cancer or how to achieve world peace.

~I'm also happy to report that Olivia is DONE with formula!!!!!!! Can we sing, HALLELUJAH!!! A couple of weeks before she hit the eleven month mark, I started mixing her formula with a ounce of milk, thinking that hopefully by her first birthday she would be completely on whole milk. In true Olivia fashion, after about two weeks, she started completely rejecting her bottles. I decided to give her a bottle of just milk and she took right to it. So for a few weeks now, we've been straight milk. I can say that I am so happy to be done with formula (for now at least), obviously besides the cost, it was such a hassle to deal with the prep of it. It's so easy to just throw the milk in the bottle and hand it to her.

~We also got another blessing a couple of weeks ago. Just before Olivia was born, we received a letter in the mail from the IRS saying that we owed them money from three years ago. Of course naturally, we freaked out. We had a baby on the way and didn't have an extra $1500 laying around just to hand over to the government. Long story short, a company who David and I both worked for a few years back (who has since gone out of business) had just gotten around to filing their 2007 taxes and due to that, the IRS said we owed them more money. After over a year of fighting with them, two weeks ago we received a letter in the mail saying that in fact we didn't owe them money, they owed us money. We received our $160 check in the mail last week from them. Let's just say...we stuck it to the man!

I'll be back tomorrow with a book & movie review!