August 31...Day 217

I is for...ipod. I just love my hot pink 4 GB ipod nano. I realize there are way better ipods (and iphones) available now. But I'm perfectly content with my little ipod. I listen to it all the time...while driving, cleaning, reading, stamping etc. It makes me happy.

August 30...Day 216

H is for...hot dogs! The church had a cookout/ice cream social/swim party tonight to kickoff all their new fall programs. And no church event is complete without lots and lots of hot dogs. Unfortunately, the high was about 60 degrees today, making it a bit chilly for the swimming (though that didn't stop some crazy kids from swimming anyway). A bonfire was offered as a warmer (and more sensible) option.

August 29...Day 215

G is for...Good Times on State Street!

Tonight was our annual Block Party! They blocked off the street to our block this afternoon, then set up the party in the street (right in front of our house). There were games and activities for the kids, and lots of food and fun for the adults! Good times!!! I just love our block. If we ever have to move, I will be very sad to leave this block (and our house!). Audrey had a good time hanging out with our neighbors. Here she is with our across-the-street neighbor Karen. Karen is a faithful reader of the blog, so I thought she should be pictured here today!!

August 28...Day 214

F is for... Friday Night Fun With Friends! After our super top secret planning meeting for the upcoming Worship Ministry party at church, we had a fun game night.

August 27...Day 213

E is for...the letter E! About 11 months ago (it would have been cooler if it was a year ago, but close enough) , I wrote this post on my other blog, giving a hint for the name of our soon to be born baby girl. The hint was that her name had the letter E somewhere in it. Now, almost a year later, here is our baby girl, Audrey Paige, playing with that same letter E!

August 26...Day 212

D is for...Dress...my favorite thing for Audrey to wear. Audrey has so many dresses; I'm pretty sure she still has some in her closet that she hasn't worn yet. And summer is almost over, so we better start digging them all out before it's too cold to wear them anymore. Winter dresses involve layers and tights and shoes and are not nearly as much fun as light, summery dresses and bare feet!

August 25...Day 211

C is for...cup (sippy cup to be exact). Audrey was drinking out of her sippy cup today! This is a big deal because we've been working on it for months now, and she was just not interested in the cup at all. I bought another brand yesterday (this is the 4th brand we've tried), and maybe she just liked this kind better than others. She picked it up, put it in her mouth, tipped the cup back and sipped! Now we just have to work on swallowing. Because once she got the juice out of the cup, she just let it run down her chin and all over her shirt. I'm not sure that she really swallowed any of it!

August 24...Day 210

I was planning to take a picture of the 7 books I currently have checked out from the library for "B" day, but Kellie posted a book picture today, so I decided to use a different picture for mine.

B is for...baby trying to feed herself! Oh, what a mess!! Audrey does not like for us to feed her anything off a spoon anymore. Today, she would only eat from the spoon if she got to put it in her mouth herself. Needless to say, I think more food ended up on her than in her mouth.

August 23...Day 209

It's time for another theme. Kellie, Amy, and I have decided to take a picture representing each letter of the alphabet for the next 26 days. Should be fun!




A is for...Audrey! That's an easy one! She wore a bow in her hair for the first time today. I'm getting ready to post more pictures on my other blog.

August 22...Day 208

I was stumped again tonight on what to use for my picture. I hadn't taken any pictures today, so I pulled out my camera and started snapping pictures of our living room.

Here is our messy coffee table. Question: Why is our coffee table always so messy? I think I am noticing it more now that Audrey wants to stand up and pull everything off the table. Tonight the table is covered with: clothes, a dryer sheet, cups and bowls from our movie snack tonight, a bottle, two remotes, a cell phone, a watch, a pile of receipts, some books, and a Netflix movie. We should rename it and call it the "place where we put all of our junk because we're too lazy to put it away" table.

August 21...Day 207

A couple of friends came over tonight to help make baby announcements for our friend Mollie. Mollie was supposed to join us, but she ended up being in the hospital and is getting ready to be induced tomorrow. We are excited to meet Baby Girl Hofner (and to add yet another member to our ever growing small group!)

August 20...Day 206

Audrey DID NOT want me to put on a diaper or pajamas after her bath tonight. Instead she wanted to crawl all over the room and play with her toys. So I let her play for a little bit and figured it would be a good chance for some naked baby pictures!

August 19...Day 205

This afternoon I decided to practice my "taking pictures without a flash" skills. I need to work more on finding natural light in the house for my pictures so I don't have to use the flash. It was a cloudy day today, so there wasn't a lot of light in the house, but I still got a couple of decent pictures. Also I came to the realization that Audrey is not as good of a model as she used to be. She's still as cute as always (if not cuter!) , but it's hard to get her to look at the camera, and even harder to get her to sit still (which is a necessity when taking pictures on slower shutter speeds without a flash!).

August 18...Day 204

Tonight was Girl's Night Out. We went out to dinner and to see The Time Traveler's Wife. What a fun night!! Here is most of our group at the theater.

(I took this picture quickly and wasn't paying attention. I ended up focusing on Heather, so it looks like she is the star of the picture and everyone else is a little blurry. That wasn't my intention, just bad photography on my part!)

August 17...Day 203

Our Direct TV was installed today! The install guy left at about 3:15. At about 4:00, a storm blew through and we lost the satellite signal. Kind of frustrating...as we were a little leary about getting Direct TV because of outages during bad weather. It was out about 30 minutes, then back to working fine...hopefully it won't go out every time it rains, or we won't be very happy customers!

August 16...Day 202

We went to the state fair today...in the rain! Not the ideal conditions, but we got to see the butter cow and the prize winning hay. And we enjoyed some mini donuts along with a lemon shake up. So I've now had my fair fix for the year!

August15...Day 201

Saturday night, 6:30 pm: Daniel's brother and his family are in town this weekend. Tonight at 6:30, we were finishing up dinner and getting ready to go to the Muni and trying to corral all the kids and pick up toys and keep the kids away from Maggie...and in the midst of all of that, I forgot to take a picture.

So instead I'm posting this picture of me and our niece Mariah at about 9:30 tonight. This was during intermission of High School Musical at the Muni. Mariah enjoyed the show, but the real highlight for her was getting Sharpay's autograph at the end!

August 14...Day 200

Friday night, 6:30 pm: At 6:30 tonight, Audrey was watching a Baby Einstein video so I could play with my new phone. I feel a little guilty for sticking in a movie to "babysit" Audrey for 20 minutes, but my new phone was calling my name! Plus I got this Baby Einstein DVD for 50 cents at a garage sale this morning, and I wanted to see if she would like it (and she really liked it a lot!).

I have to explain a little more about the phone. It was a big day in the Shelton household. Our contract with Sprint was finally done, and we decided to look into switching providers. And while were looking at cell phone plans, we just happened to start looking at cable TV plans. We discovered that if we get rid of Netflix and switched our TV, internet and cell phones to AT&T, we could upgrade to Direct TV with DVR for only $10 more per month than what we have been paying (we have always had basic cable, which is only 24 channels...a majority of which are PBS and home shopping channels). We discussed and debated about it all afternoon and finally just decided to go for it! It was such a big decision; you would think we were buying a house or something. I am super excited about my fancy new phone (with text messaging, we've never had that before!), and even more excited about the TV with DVR (which will be installed on Monday!).

August 13...Day 199

Thursday, 6:30 pm: Here is a view of our street as we are going for another walk! Audrey and I tend to go for walks and run errands quite a bit during the evening, and our walks often involve a stop at Walgreens. Tonight our Walgreens pit stop included picking up some pictures and getting a Redbox movie.

August 12...Day 198

Wednesday night, 6:30 pm: At Sonic, getting a peach shake! For the past few weeks, I always have a craving for a treat from Sonic after I put Audrey to bed and can't leave the house to go get one. So tonight, I decided to make a Sonic run before bedtime to avoid that situation!!

I actually had to go to 2 Sonics to get my shake because the first Sonic had a water main break. It was actually 6:30 at the first Sonic I went to, but I was too chicken to take a picture of the guy who told me their Sonic was closed. So I took this one at about 6:40 when I got to the other Sonic. And the peach shake was definitely worth the drive across town!!

August 11...Day 197

Tuesday, 6:30 pm: It's stamp club night, so here are a few of my stamp club ladies getting ready for club to start. Thanks to them for being good sports and letting me take their picture!

August 10...Day 196

I'm trying a new theme for this week. I picked a random time (6:30 pm), and I'm going to take a picture of whatever we are doing at 6:30 each day. It may be interesting; it may be boring (as we tend to do the same thing every day). So we'll see what happens.Monday Night, 6:30 pm: Daniel saying goodbye and good night to Audrey before leaving for an elder's meeting at church. Audrey and I were getting ready to go for a walk.

August 9...Day 195

Hmm...another day, another frantic search for something to photograph before bed. I haven't been feeling too great the past couple of days, so I haven't really been in the mood to take many pictures or do anything really. Audrey has been kind of sick too, so she hasn't been very much fun to take pictures of anyway. She seems to be feeling a lot better tonight, and I'm hoping I wake up feeling much better tomorrow morning.

But I digress, back to the search for a picture tonight...Because Audrey is asleep and Daniel is at the Muni, the winner tonight is a self-portrait of me and Maggie . I woke Maggie up from her comfortable sleep on the couch...needless to say, she wasn't too enthusiastic about posing with me for a picture!

August 8...Day 194

Mimi and Papaw (Daniel's parents) are in town for a visit. Here is Mimi reading a story to Audrey tonight.

August 7...Day 193

Trying to be more creative, as most of my pictures of Audrey look exactly the same. Here she is playing with a new toy that I found at a garage sale today. It was a good day at garage sales, and Audrey's play room is now starting to look a little fuller!!

August 6...Day 192

Our friends the Lanters have a ball like this and Audrey seemed to like it when we were playing at their house, so I decided to get one for her at Wal-mart tonight. It's about bigger than she is! She thought the ball was the coolest thing ever for about 2 minutes, then she saw the stereo and the door to the entertainment center and took off in that direction, quickly abandoning the big new ball that Mommy got just for her. When will I learn that toys (even cheap balls from Wal-mart) cannot compete with the really cool things in life...like stereos and doors and electrical cords and all the other things that babies are not supposed to play with!

August 5...Day 191

I think it's time for Maggie to get a haircut. Poor dog, it's got to be annoying to always have hair in your eyes.

August 4...Day 190

I didn't know what to take a picture of today. I think it may be time to do another theme for a week for this blog becuase I'm running out of ideas.

For tonight, here's a close up picture of the popcorn I am currently snacking on. I am enjoying being able to relax on the couch with a bowl of popcorn in a quiet house (it wasn't so quiet about an hour ago when my baby girl decided to scream for 35 minutes before going to sleep!).

August 3...Day 189

Audrey was Little Miss Grumpy today. She had some yucky diarrhea this morning and gas all day, so maybe her tummy was hurting her. But grumpy or not, she is still a cutie pie!!!

August 2...Day 188

I love to get good deals, and I found some great deals while grocery shopping today! I really didn't need to buy too much, because we are eating mostly out of the food we already had this week. But I did stock up on a lot of items that we regularly use and bought laundry detergent, and I only spent $30!! I saved about $35 by using coupons and shopping sales, PLUS I got a coupon for $15 off my next purchase! That means I'll be getting some really good deals next week too!! (Notice all the exclamation points in this post...can you tell I'm excited??)

August 1...Day 187

Since this was the Bungard's last day here and I've posted a picture of Ava for the past 2 days, I decided I might as well do one more. The kids had fun playing at the park today, and I had fun taking pictures of them!!