Weekend in St. Louis

Last weekend, Brooke and I went to St. Louis for Aunt Jen's baby shower. In between 2 very long drives, we had a fun weekend and enjoyed a very nice baby shower. Brooke even got some presents of her own!

Getting ready for the baby shower

Giving Aunt Jen the present Brooke picked out (and then she took it back!)

One of the presents Brooke got: princess dress up things..including earrings! She had to add my shoes to complete the outfit!

Some Random Pics...

These pictures are a few weeks old, but I had so many others with wedding pictures and Halloween, I figured I'd save them for when I was in need for some new blog updates...

Helping daddy rake leaves

(this was when it was much cooler out!) and this is not even a fraction of the leaves that were in the yard!

Practicing...this was after she had given the baby a bottle, is currently rocking her, and then proceeded to put her to sleep. She's going to be a great big sister!

Brooke LOVED to be swaddled when she was a baby. I think we swaddled her until she was 6 or 8 months (way longer than most people do). Her blanket was loosely covering her when she went to bed and this is how we found her when we checked on her! We often find her like this and aren't quite sure how she gets her self so tightly wrapped up!

Happy Halloween!

Flower girl dresses make great Princess Halloween costumes! Brooke was thrilled to get to wear her dress again. She was not so thrilled with carving the pumpkin. She didn't want to get her hands dirty! But, she did LOVE the pumpkin seeds that I roasted! She enjoyed trick-or-treating too, although we never actually got her to say "trick-or-treat." She did say thank you though! After EVERY house we went to, she would say, "I got candy!" and then later it changed to: "I have LOTS of candy!" She was pretty excited with the candy!

Our little princess

Aunt Arianne came to trick-or-treat with us!

The princess in her chariot

Eating candy when we got home!

Flower Girl!

Uncle Jason and Aunt Clarissa's wedding was 2 weekends ago, but there were so many pictures it took me a while to get organized.

First of all, CONGRATULATIONS JASON AND CLARISSA! The weekend was wonderful and the wedding was beautiful.

Brooke had a great time and did awesome as the flower girl. She keeps saying, "we had so much fun at that wedding!" Below are a few of my favorite pictures from the weekend.

Our beautiful little flower girl.

Family pic

One of my favorites!

Okay, so I couldn't just pick a few, here are some more favorites from the weekend and if you want to see even more, click on this link for the whole wedding weekend album!

Melanie's Bat Mitzvah

Two weekends ago, we went to Kansas City for our cousin Melanie's Bat Mitzvah. It was a fun family weekend and Melanie did a wonderful job! Brooke loved staying in the hotel and had a blast dancing at the party!

Brooke in her "pretty dress" and new hair bow. Apparently, I've been depriving her, as this is the first time in 2.5 years I've ever put a bow in her hair and she LOVED it! She wore a bow to daycare everyday that next week. She loves to show people her pretty bow and look at in the mirror!

Brooke and Melanie

Brooke and all the cousins!

Below is a slide show of Brooke dancing at the party. As you can see from the pictures, she loved it! She was not intimated at all by all the other kids on the dance floor and we couldn't get her off of it...she had a blast!!!

Little Gymnast!

We have been going to "big and little" gymnastics for a little over a month now. Brooke took a few weeks to warm up to it but now she gets excited every Wednesday to go. Its hard to take pictures because most of the stuff involves my help but I was able to get a few good ones. She really enjoys all of the activities but seems to like the balance beam stuff the best. She loves to volunteer to show how to do the activities (as you can see from the videos). I couldn't decide which video to put up so I put them all..they are short though!

Grandparents and Singing

Grandma and Grandpa Nickell came to visit for the day today and Brooke had a fun day playing with them. They brought her a new hat (with Grandpa's vet clinic logo on it) and she wore it all day. She loves her hats! It was a beautiful day out so we went for a walk and she enjoyed looking at all the leaves changing colors.


Brooke has a new thing where she likes to make up songs. Below is a video of her singing one of these songs. You can't really understand what she is saying but it's pretty funny. We can't usually understand her either, but she apparently has something to sing about!