The Long Awaited Update

It’s no secret that we’re terrible at updating our blog. I would have thought that people had just quit checking it by now, but I still get emails and comments letting me know we’ve failed to keep the world informed of the details of our lives.
The question people ask the most is about Ryder’s medicine. I guess that would be since we let everyone know what was going on, asked for prayer that the medicine would work and have no ill effects, then we left you all hanging to guess for yourself where we are now. So sorry! Ryder is continually making good progress. He’s still pretty delayed on his motor skills, but always making forward progress – slowly but surely! He is handling his medicine well…we just never know if his progress is due to the medicine working or if he’s just growing and developing on his own schedule. We recently started backing off of the dose of medicine we’re giving him to see how he does without it. If he digresses and we can clearly see the medicine is helping him, we’ll be more than happy to keep giving it to him. But if it doesn’t seem to make a difference whether or not he takes it, we’ll more than likely stop giving it to him. We want him to have it if it helps him, but we don’t want to medicate him for no reason. So that’s the reason for our “test”. He’s still such a little guy so it’s hard to know what the medicine is or isn’t doing in his body. You can pray with us that God will give us wisdom as his parents to know what to do in this situation and that our “test” will have clear results.
Thank you for continuing to check in on our family after such a long period of no updates from us!
Don’t worry, there’s plenty of pictures in the posts below!

Ryder’s Birthday

It’s been two and a half months now, but Ryder had a GREAT first birthday! He turned one year old on September 2^nd. I can’t believe it! And Wednesday marked one year from the date we thought he would be making his appearance into the world. While we’re talking about momentous dates for Ryder, November 5^th was his “come home from the hospital birthday”. The last 14 months of our lives have been so different than we would have EVER imagined, but we wouldn’t trade one second of it. Ryder brings so much joy, laughter, fun, and happiness into our lives to make every difficult moment worth enduring over again. He is the happiest boy I have ever seen in my life. He loves to smile and laugh at anyone who even glances his way. And he can get a smile out of most anyone who looks at him too!
Ryder had a frog prince birthday party. He did great at his party – both with all of his friends and family who came to celebrate and the cake! Here are the birthday pictures…

The birthday boy!

Opening presents with help from a few friends

The cake Mommy made before Ryder touched it

"You mean all this is for me?"

Not so sure at first

He decided he really liked it!

The cake after

Aunt Deborah made the cutest frog cookies for all Ryder's guests to take home. Thanks Aunt Deborah!

Update in Pictures

Since we’ve been on such a long blog hiatus, I have lots of pictures to share!

First sleepover with cousin Brock. Don't they look thrilled?

Getting ready for Ryder's first haircut with Daddy

During the first haircut

Very handsome! Thanks Aunt Amy!

An attempt at eating chocolate pudding on his own :)

We went to the pumpkin patch with Brock and Aunt Deborah. Ryder didn't feel well. His face in the next two pictures shows it!

This is how I found him in his room one day. He was exploring!

Our little sock monkey for Halloween

Brock and Ryder went trick or treating at my Grandad's. This is them waiting for him to come to the door.

Still Halloween. I'm sure he's thinking "Finally, she took that monkey suit off of me!"

One of Ryder's favorite things to do

All clean and very cute!

Family Vacation

At the beginning of October, we were able to take our first family vacation! We went to Cozumel and it was wonderful! It was Ryder’s first time to fly. On the way, he was perfect – fell asleep as soon as we started speeding up to take off and woke up about 30 minutes before landing to look out the window and play a little bit. On the way home, it was a little rougher. Jeremy and I weren’t sitting together and he started off sitting with me. He couldn’t decide what he wanted to do and fussed on and off when he was sitting with me. Almost as soon as he went to sit with his daddy though, he went to sleep and slept all the way to customs at DFW!
We stayed at the Occidental Grand in Cozumel, which we definitely recommend if you’re looking for a vacation spot. We spent most of our time relaxing on the beach. Ryder was a perfect beach bum! He loved just laying in his lounge chair playing with his toys, then napping, then playing some more. He went everywhere in his stroller – it was his chariot for the week! Because we went in off season, the hotel was only about 20% full (and cheaper!) and it made it so nice. We were most definitely the only people there with a baby. Everyone at the hotel knew exactly who the people with the baby were J I think most people there thought we were crazy for bringing him, but we loved having him with us and it was a perfect first vacation as a family!

Not a great picture, but the better of the only two choices we have for a family picture

Camping, Chick-fil-a Style

We have been hearing about Chick-fil-a “campouts” for a while now and thought it sounded like so much fun. I saw a parking lot full of tents on a trip for work once over a year ago and it really made me want to do it. This Wednesday, we got to experience it and now we know it’s fun! Every time a new Chick-fil-a opens, they do a First 100 promotion. Here’s how it works: you show up on Wednesday morning by 6am. If there are over 100 people in line, everyone gets a number and they draw for the 100 people that get to stay. Then those 100 people camp out in the parking lot until Thursday morning at 6am. If you make it to Thursday morning, you get free Chick-fil-a for a year! So this Wednesday morning we left our house at 4:45 to head to the new Chick-fil-a in Denton. Ryder looked at me like I was crazy going in his room and getting him out of his bed that early! There were about 140 people in line by 6am. So we got our numbers and they started drawing….we were numbers 5 and 33 – we both got picked! It was so exciting to hear our numbers (and to get to go inside to register and have a little relief from the cold)! So then it was time to set up camp. I think we brought half of our house with us. We were just well prepared, right? Once we finally got all set up, we just hung out in the parking lot for the day. They fed us breakfast, lunch, and dinner and took good care of us in true Chick-fil-a fashion. It was really cold at night, but we were perfectly cozy all cuddled up in our tent. It was really windy too, but Jeremy gathered lots of big rocks to anchor our tent and our little house didn’t blow down! All in all, it was a great experience and best of all, we left with 104 coupons (1 per week for a year per person) for free meals!

Here we are in our tent

Jeremy's mom came down from Gainesville for a little visit in the parking lot.

Ryder was soooo good. He took great naps in the day and slept good at night. People kept telling us how good our baby was.