Sunday afternoon

Here are a couple of pictures from after lunch on Sunday - playing with his leapfrog learning table and trying to get a good picture with mommy after playing outside.

Happy Birthday, Great Grandma

On Sunday Dave, Luke and I headed to Golden Corral to celebrate his Grandma's 88th Birthday. With everyone's busy schedules we don't get to see his family too often (especially his cousins) so it was nice to get a chance to catch up. (In the picture below are Dave's youngest brother Stephen, his cousin Jared and his other cousin Caleb). Luke thoroughly enjoyed the buffet and he chowed down on mac and cheese, steamed carrots, mashed potatoes, jell-0 and banana pudding. Yum!

Laundry!

Last Saturday Luke and I spent pretty much the entire day doing laundry - which he found highly entertaining!

I Love Dad

When Dave's off work, Luke is often found sporting his I Love Dad pjs... imagine that :)

We have a gate set up in an attempt to keep Luke semi-contained, but he's discovered a way to escape - through the coffee table:
This week he's been pulling up on EVERYTHING!

Here's Luke playing peekaboo with a bowl and showing off his major paci rash (aka binky burn - which, by the way, is completely cleared up thanks to some lanolin)

Peek-A-Boo!

So cute!

I know that I've blogged many times about how much Luke and Cadence love each other, but last night while I was at book club, Dave was doing the dishes and when he looked into the family room there were Luke and Cadence ... this is completely unstaged, Cadence was just sitting there and Luke was chewing on the end of her collar. Too cute!

Cousins

Yesterday we went and visited Jonathan, Tori and Lilly and it was too much fun. Lilly is very excited about Luke now and she wants to hold him, help feed him and even help change his diaper. Unfortunately, Luke is at his wiggliest right now and wasn't very cooperative when Lilly wanted to hold him...

How cute is this?!?!?! Lilly has a baby doll that she named Luke and she pretends that she's me and Jonathan is Dave. :) So sweet!

Sunday

On Sunday we went and visited Jared, Rachel and their new baby Jaxson. Here are a few pictures of Luke hanging out before we went:


Rachel and Jaxson... so sweet! Check out all that hair!
(apparently I didn't get the memo about brand new moms looking super cute - I don't think I put makeup on for at least a week after Luke was born) :)

Jaxson and Luke being introduced... in a year or so I think they'll be running circles around Rachel and I.

A few more...

The layout below highlights a few events from our week: Luke and I went to the MCA Varsity basketball game(s) last night and he had a blast! He loved seeing all the people and my students got to enjoy passing him around. :) He seemed to really enjoy all of the people and the noise (and the cheerleaders). He got to wear his one-of-a-kind "Go Mustangs" hoodie that my hostesses gave me at my MCA shower and I remember when I opened it that it seemed SO big and I never thought he'd fit into it - when I got it out last night it was almost too small! The second picture is of him eating his new favorite treat - a Baby MumMum rice cracker. Since he's still toothless I was looking for snacks that would be easy for him to "gum" and came across this asian treat at WalMart of all places. I thought I'd try it out and he seems to love them... but not as much as he loves yogurt (which he had today for the first time and you can see in the third picture). Other highlights of the week included breaking in a new frog towel, waking up with a crazy case of bed head and successfully shoving an entire limb of a stuffed giraffe into his mouth. It was an exciting week: Now that Luke is mobile snuggle time is exceptionally hard to come by, and so I definitley try to take advantage of those cuddly moods when they happen: The word "determined" pretty much sums up Luke's personality these days, whether it's trying to crawl through our coffee table or pull the earrings out of Gibi's ears, once his mind is set on something, there's virtually no changing it!

A few pictures

Here are a couple of pictures from the last few weeks...

Luke and Cadence's friendship continues to grow as evidenced by the pictures below. They love to snuggle and play and are each others best friend :)

These pictures are from a few days after Christmas when we went to see Jonathan, Tori and Lilly to hang out and play guitar hero. Luke got to take a ride on a wooden horse that belonged to Tori when she was little and Luke and Lilly got in some good bonding time:

Mystery solved (we hope)

As of Monday I think my blog-stalker mystery is solved (or at least, I hope it is!). To make an extremely long and complicated story short - on Sunday night I was super-relieved to find out that the blog had been removed. YAY! It was a complete answer to prayer, although I was obviously still dying to know who was behind the whole thing. When I got to school one of my students came to me to tell me that she had received a message on facebook with a link to the defamatory blog from someone that she didn't know. When she gave me the name of the person who sent her the message I was shocked... it was someone named Courtney who (warning - this is a complicated social web I'm about to weave) is the current girlfriend of an "ex-friend" (I guess you could call him that), Chris, of ours who is also an "ex-employee" of Dave's (who left under some very unfavorable circumstances) and an ex-husband of a really good friend (Courtney is also an ex-employee of Dave's... this is how she and Chris met). Dave called and confronted Courtney who denied her culpability and tried to blame it on someone else by claiming that her laptop had been stolen. Her story is full of holes and inconsistencies and I know without a doubt that they're behind it, although they'll never admit to it.

Anyway, I still have no clue why Chris and Courtney would do this to us, other than the fact that both of them seem to be lacking in the "morals" department. I know that they're never going to admit to it, and I'm trying to be mature and just let it go. At least I know that it's not some creepo whose watching my house through a telescope or something strange like that. :) So for now, I'm going to chalk this up to some warped sense of jealousy, sick sense of humor and lack of moral judgement.... but I'm still keeping my blog private!

Thank you to everyone who prayed about this for us - God completely and quickly resolved this situation and brought to light those who were behind it and we much appreciate Him doing so. :)

On a side note - if this has inspired you to modify your privacy settings, my sweet friend KB brought another setting change to my attention that you may want to make as well:

Go to your blog settings and under the heading "Basic" , make sure that you select "no" to "Add your blog to our listings" and "Let search engines find your blog". This way none of your text and/or pictures will appear on a googe search.

Back with a vengeance

I'm officially back to the blogging world with a vengeance and a warning: what you put on the internet for everyone to see... everyone can see! Even wierdo creepy people. As most of you know, over Christmas break someone named "Mike" started leaving bizarre comments on my blog. They weren't anything overtly mean or sinister or anything like that - just wierd. I'd go in and delete the comments and when I'd check back later, they'd be back on there. In response, I changed my blog settings and had all comments emailed to me for my approval before they were posted. I received several emails from blogger asking if I would like to approve or decline the numerous new comments that "Mike" was wanting to leave on the blog and I rejected them all. Of course I was curious as to who this "Mike" person was, but there was really no way to find out as when I'd click on his/her name I was kindly told that they had no profile/info. Then on Wednesday night I received several comments from "Mike" in the nature of ... "what, you don't like my comments?", etc., etc and so I decided it was time to make the blog private. In a final attempt to figure out who this wierdo was I clicked on their name again and you can imagine my shock when the link opened up and there was "Mike's" profile... complete with his profile picture - a picture of Luke! As if that wasn't bad enough he had created his very own blog using pictures from my blog that he copied, that way he could post all the nasty comments he wanted. Over the course of the next several days I found out that he was posting comments on several other people's posts advertising his blog and he even managed to create a fake facebook account and track me down there as well. I felt violated and hurt that someone would do this and it was even more frustrating because it's considered freedom of speech and there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING I can do about it other than pray that whoever this is will have a change of heart and delete the blog completely - otherwise it will be out there in cyberspace forever. Anyway, PLEASE take my situation as a warning... I have a feeling (by the nature of most of the posts) that this is someone who has something against me, not Luke, and that they're harmless in their obsession, but that's not to say that someone else looking at my personal information isn't. I will never post anything in a public forum like this again and I sincerely urge you to think about what you're posting and where you're posting it. I didn't think that there was anyone looking at my blog other than my friends and family (and their friends and family :) ), and there was. In the grand scheme of things, this is just a little bump, but a wierd and disturbing bump nonetheless. So, if you're as mad about it as I am and just want something to do about it - pray. Pray that whoever this pathetic person is will stop harassing us (yes, they're still blogging about us) and that somehow and some way the website will be removed. I'll be sure to keep ya'll updated, but in the meantime make your blogs private. :)

McChristmas :)

The day after Christmas we had Dave's parents and siblings/spouses (sans Sam and Elizabeth) over to celebrate. We ate, opened presents and got to relax on an unseasonably warm (and windy) afternoon. After we finished eating and unwrapping gifts, we headed outside to test out Luke's new wagon and take the customary McAnally brothers photo.

Love You, Uncle Mark!

Mark headed back to Lubbock today for his first semester of Graduate work and Luke was definitley sad to see him go. We opted out of church (and therefore the nursery today) as both Luke and Mommy have been trying to get over a stomach flu and decided instead to take a video that Mark would appreciate - Luke jumping!

So here you go Mark, your very own video to watch when you're thinking of Luke 'cause you know he was thinking of you when he was jumping :)

Can't wait to see you soon, UM!

Pictures from Christmas

These are pictures of pretty much the only gift Luke managed to unwrap before his nap... a basketball goal from Uncle Mark:

The picture on the top left and top bottom are pictures of Luke and Grandpa both trying on Uncle Mark's "Clark Kent" glasses during breakfast. The pictures in the middle left and bottom right are of Mark and Dave trying to figure out that they got Cotton Bowl tickets for Christmas (I wrapped up some cotton cosmetic pads and q-tips in a bowl... it took them longer than anticipated to figure it out) and the picture in the middle is of Luke and I when he first got up:

We thought it would be a cute tradition to take Luke's picture each Chrsitmas morning in front of the Christmas tree, but didn't anticipate how hard it would be to get a picture of him sitting still this year. Almost every picture that I took was of him turning around trying to get to the tree and this was the only one with him facing forward and also the only one of him not smiling :)
Christmas 2008 Recap: