Fun times had in February

A Valentine’s Day visit with Mamma Tom.

What a great way to spend Love Day…..

Nora put herself on seagull patrol at Lake Ella. Get out of here gulls, this is duck territory!

click here to see Nora “scramming” off the seagulls
Our little southern accent girl, who knew that “scram” could be a two syllable word? (and yes fellow germaphobes,  I Purelled her hands immediately after turning off the camera)

Took NeeNee’s doggie Lizzie for a stroll…

Nora got such a kick out of pushing Lizzie in her stroller. She would have pushed Lizzie around all day, and I think Lizzie would have let her.

Had a dance with her shadow and a big laugh with Uncle Kia at Lichgate.


Then the same afternoon Pappy and Daddy fixed Nora’s slide, made for one happy day!

We ended the month by getting Nora’s garden going. She is quite the little helper. Springtime, we are ready!

Nora is such a happy and imaginative little girl. She is always making Montana and I laugh, taking us by surprise with the stuff she comes up with. The other night she was quietly playing in her room, Montana went to check on her and found her hammering on herself all over her body with her toy hammer. She wasn’t hurting herself so Montana just watched to see what the outcome was going to be. After a few minutes of hammering and rubbing the toy screw driver on her face she said “There, I’m all fixed!” I’m sorry I missed seeing that one for myself.

A couple more fun February moments, click the links to watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTbzhkYVsZI

This last one is really short but I just had to share Nora’s “goatee”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHHuX9a2-oQ

Sorry for the lack of Nora updates, things have been a little hectic the last few weeks. I promise I’ll be making a Nora update soon but for now here are some pictures of our sweet, happy girl.

It’s hard to believe that the first month of the new year is already almost gone. Our little family has been busy with typical life stuff and Nora is chugging along and doing great.

We wrapped up 2009 with a trip to the Sopchoppy River to visit my dear friend Ida who was in town for the holidays. Her parents live right on the river so we got a chance to take Nora out in a canoe for the very first time. It was just a short stroll in the water to see what she thought about it all and she did great and loved every minute of it. Before Nora was born canoeing was a regular hobby of ours which we haven’t done since my early pregnancy. You can see by the smiles on my face that this experience made me one happy mamma.

Watch out 2010, this is only the beginning….I see many canoe trips and more fun adventures than ever before in our near future. I am proclaiming 2010 as the Year of Nora! Not to sound braggadocios but I am saying it with pure optimism and hope, although I’m never shy to brag about my girl.

Each year since Nora has been born has come with many challenges and hardships but they have also come with overwhelming happiness and amazement at the many huge successes our Nora girl has made. Medically and socially I just can’t help but believe that this will be Nora’s biggest year yet. We have high hopes of finally getting Nora off of TPN for good this year. She has really beefed up her oral intake and is only on 3 nights of 335ml TPN which is a very low dose. We’ve been talking with her GI doctor and nutritionist and plan to start decreasing her TPN even more soon. The plan will be to take her off Omgaven first to see if she can handle not getting fats intravenously and go from there. But even if this isn’t the year for her to be able to get off TPN completely we know she’ll continue to make leaps and bounds.

Nora snuggeling up to our good ol’ cat Maxwell.

Nora had a nice visit with her Uncle Kia (Montana’s brother) this weekend.

With her fishing hat from Uncle Kia and her boots Nora is all ready for a fishing trip!

On the social front, we are planning to finally get Nora up to visit my family in Kentucky this spring. This is something we’ve been long awaiting and very much looking forward too. Some time on my dad’s farm and visiting with family is just what we need. We will still be cautious with Nora when it comes to germ exposure but we are really planning to open up her social horizon more than ever this summer and hope to have many play dates with friends and family.

Watch out world, here I come!

Oh what a year it’s been……as I sit here on the last morning of the year thinking back on the last 12 months and watching Nora play with all of her Christmas toys it makes my heart smile to just observe the pure miracle of her.

Then she asks me to close her up in her new castle tent, I peek in the window to see what she’s up to and she sweetly says “I want you to go bye-bye now mommy” and then my ushy gushy heartfeltness turns into laughing out loud and amazement in what independence my little Nora already has. That independence became very apparent on Christmas morning when we heard “I want to do it myself” many times every time we would try to show her how to work one of her new toys….oh what a stinker.

Christmas Eve delivered a very special present for all of us, Santa Crooms, I mean Dr. Crooms came by to visit Nora and bring her a present between surgeries…..amazing…. is the only word that comes to mind. We are so very blessed to have him in our lives. Who would have ever thought 32 months ago on the day that Nora was born such a special bond would have been formed between Dr. Crooms and our family.

To say that Nora loved her puppy from Dr. Crooms would be an understatement.

We know that Nora is a very special girl as well as a very special medical case. But we also know that Dr. Crooms has preformed many life saving surgeries and has probably saved the life of a newborn before. But we’ve always wondered why Nora made such a strong impression on Dr. Crooms for him to take such a personal interest but of course not wanting to be too blunt to ask him to explain. Well I think we got our answer when I called to wish him a Merry Christmas on Christmas day and thank him for taking the time to visit Nora. I was telling him how much we appreciated him being in Nora’s life outside of the medical world and he said “I will be a part of Nora’s life as long as I am around. She is such a special miracle and reminds us all of how life should be.”

Thank you Dr. Crooms, thank you with all of our heart and soul for saving Nora’s life and being such a wonderful, caring person.

Christmas morning

So many presents for one little girl, a brunch break was required to keep up the Christmas marathon…..

Sooo happy

An afternoon tea party in her new PJ’s

More Christmas celebrating into the evening and Nora helped with the cooking.

We hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas and wishing you a very happy New Year!

I can’t believe Nora’s third Christmas is the day after tomorrow. We have been having lots of fun getting ready for Santa and Nora is getting quite excited as well as we are. I was looking back at Christmas pictures from last year, it’s so amazing to see how much she has grown and matured. We only thought she was big stuff last year. But this year….look out, Nora is in full effect and knows all about Christmas and the goodies that come along with it. She’s already accidentally found my secret hiding spot for some of her gifts, obviously I need to get better at hiding gifts from such a big curious girl. The other day I hear her screaming from the back of the house “mommy! mommy! come here!” I ran back there thinking she found a spider or something that scared her but no, instead she was screaming in excitement because she got a peek of her new Wubbzy doll. Thankfully she didn’t see Wubbzy’s friend Daisy who she requested from Santa along with more books and puzzles. Although I think she’s too young still to wonder why Santa’s gift was here before Christmas but we’ve learned to never under estimate Nora’s smarts, because she has quite a lot of them.

Picking out the tree

Nora tried on her Christmas dress last week and it made her so excited she put on her boa and got dancing fever. Nora is one dancing, singing little cutie pants. I’ve been counting up all the songs she sings word for word, she’s up to at least 15 songs and the list is still growing with her adding Christmas songs to her repatwar. Yesterday she made up her first original song which I’m sure will fast become a greatest hit. “Turn around and touch your knees, I love singing my ABC’s!”

Click here to see Nora busting wiggly moves in her Christmas dress

Click here to see part 2 of Nora dancing in her “fancy shoes”

Click here to see Nora singing Jingle Bells
(sorry for the darkness of the video, it was taken in at night the car on the way to see Christmas lights)

Nora is doing great…. eating good, overall having good BM’s, gaining good weight and growing tall. I haven’t measured her in a while but I know she’s gaining length by the way a lot of her pants have turned into highwaters all of a sudden. We are very happy with her progress and are looking forward to starting off the new year, I have a feeling it’s going to be the best one yet.

(as you can see, Nora is quite fond of her boa)

MERRY NORA CHRISTMAS!

We have added a new blog category (on the left side menu) to include a Nora photo site for those of you who just can’t get enough of our precious sweetheart! I will continue to post pictures on this blog but we take so many more pictures than I post and we wanted to have a separate site to be able to share more pics with friends and family. Enjoy!

This Thanksgiving was full of all of the things we are so very thankful for…..family, love, sharing, and of course Nora! My parents, grandparents and brother were so sweet and drove down from KY to join us. My sister and her family were also planing to join us but my niece Marin got sick at the last minute. We hope you feel all better soon sweetheart!

We only had a few days with my family so we made sure to make the best of our time together and had an adventure packed visit. Nora took her very first boat ride on the Wakulla River. She had a blast looking over the side of the boat to see alligators, manatees, turtles, fish and lots of different kinds of river birds.

But as impressive as all those animals were, a little brown squirrel gave her the most entertainment. He was burying an acorn for the winter and Nora couldn’t stop laughing at it’s frantic digging and pounding the acorn into the ground. She was laughing so hard my grandparents heard her laughing from all the way across the park.

Thanksgiving dinner was extra special this year, not only for the great company but it was the first year Nora got to eat a real turkey dinner and the same menu as the rest of us. Turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, green beans (hulled) and pumpkin pie made with goat milk just for Nora by her sweet Mammie, yum! And it was even better that her tummy handled all of it great.

After we stuffed ourselves we took Nora to walk around and see the Christmas lights at Dorothy B. Oven park. Nora is definitely going to enjoy Christmas this year more than ever and is already getting very excited about it.

It was so great for my family to be able to join in the Nora fun. She is such a special little girl who we will forever be so very thankful for.