Happy New Year!

I hope everyone enjoyed the end of 2011 and are currently having a great start to the year. Well, where did I leave off? September? EEK! Sorry about that. Around that time I ramped up my NoVa Mom Blog and since I update that daily, you may want to start following that blog as well! There are plenty of Molly pics for those of you not on Facebook.

Since my last post we celebrated Molly's 1st birthday. I can't believe it's been over a year since she was born! Time goes by so fast. We had an owl themed party, of course! I blogged about her party so you can see a bunch of photos here. It was a small gathering, but with lots of presents for Miss Molly!

Not only is she walking now, Molly is quite the chatterbox. I've been trying to keep track of all her words so here they are:

• Mama
• Dada
• Doggie - "doddie"
• Hi
• Bye Bye - "buh bye" - waves
  
• Night Night - "nih nih" - puts her hand to her ear like she's sleeping and blows kisses
  
• All Done - "ah duh" - she also signs this
• Thank You - "da doo"
• Cheese - "chess"
• Cracker - "ka ker"
• Purple - "pa pul"
• Bellybutton - "be boo"
• Diaper - "di der"
• Bottle - "bobble" - she signs milk when she wants her bottle
• Up - "uh"
• Please - "peas"
• Banana - "nana"
• Ball
• Uh Oh
• Eyes - "ice"
  
• Nose - "nus"
• NO!
  

I think those are most of them! She is great at imitating, so she picks up words pretty quickly and does a great job of remembering them. She's at such a fun age and is always giggling.

As I type this, our newest family member, Gracie is sleeping next to me. Yep, we got a dog! She's 8 months old and you can read all about how she came to be ours here. It's definitely been a challenging week, but I'm learning how to juggle a toddler and a dog and to manage my time even better! I'm also trying to figure out how to keep Molly out of the water bowl and to stop throwing her food on the floor and laughing hysterically when Gracie eats it!

As for us grownups, Ben is still enjoying his job at Pure Matters and is headed to New Hampshire later this month for some Google Immersion training. Very cool! I think I can officially call myself a freelance writer! I still blog for Pure Matters and I was just hired by NickMom to contribute there as well... I'm VERY excited! If I'm not writing at either of those sites or my blog, you can probably find me in the kitchen baking away.

Here are some recent photos!