15 month appt.

Hadley had her 15 month check up today and she is doing really well! Here are her stats:

Height: 31.25" - 74th percentile
Weight: 21 lbs, 7.5oz. - 28th percentile
Head Circumference: 18.5" - 80th percentile

Apparently, she has had a big growth spurt in the 3 months since her last check up. She was previously in the 43rd percentile for height, but now she's in the 74th! The doctor wasn't worried that her weight is not right in line with her height since she's constantly walking around and she eats well (and we don't give her junk food). She definitely doesn't LOOK too skinny. They checked her iron level today, too and that was right where it should be.

Hadley says about 5 words now...although she mostly just babbles constantly. The words she can say: Mama, Dada, hi, hey, amen, Abby (short for Abuela, this is what she calls Rey's mom). She still plays her keyboard all the time and she will often set it to one of those repeating beats and she'll bob her head and dance around - it is SO cute! She will also sing with me sometimes now. She has started to throw little tantrums sometimes when she doesn't get her way. She'll sort of collapse on the floor and cry really hard for a couple minutes until she calms down. I try to just ignore it for the most part...I definitely don't want to give in! She's already starting to not do it very often anymore so I think it's working. :-)

First trip to the zoo

This past Sunday we took Hadley to the zoo for the first time. I think she had fun, but it seemed that she was more interested in the other kids than she was with the animals. She did really like the parakeet enclosure, though...we were able to hold her right up to the birds and they would fly only a few feet over her head. Of course, what she really wanted was to touch them and hold them, but I don't think the birds would have enjoyed that too much! Our friends, Gail & Chad and their son, Jack came with us so Hadley and Jack were able to play together a little bit.

Happy Halloween

Monday was Halloween and Hadley was Snow White. We took her to Publix to trick-or-treat and show off her costume and she was a little show-stopper! We wanted to take her to a few houses in the neighborhood, but the only way to do that would be to have one of us carry her from house to house and she's not light anymore, so that's a bit difficult! Next year, she'll be walking well enough to walk through the neighborhood on her own.

Smoky Mountains - again!

In the middle of October, we went up to our favorite cabin in Pigeon Forge. As usual, it was gorgeous up there, and the weather was great! On the trip, we stopped at The Dillard House on the way there for a fabulous breakfast and one day we drove over to Cades Cove for the wilderness drive. We were really hoping to see a bear or two, but no such luck.

We did have a little buddy at our cabin, though...a raccoon! He was eating the corn kernels out of the front porch decorations and he didn't seem the least bit scared of us. Dad finally had to use a metal shovel from the garbage bin to bang on the porch and scare him off so we could get in the house that night.

On the wilderness drive in Cades Cove, we stopped at a primitive Baptist Church and it had a really old graveyard behind it. The dates went back to the 1700s! I always find old graveyards really interesting...just imagining the lives of these people and sometimes the headstones will have little tidbits. One of the headstones said that the man had been in the NC militia during the Revolutionary War....another said that the man had been murdered by a rebel. And then there were really sad graves of young children...that hits me a lot harder now that I have my own child. I can't imagine how hard it would have been to live in a time where a common illness could kill you or your child so easily.

We also got to see and tour old log cabins from families that lived in those mountains in the 17 and 1800's. You can see part of one of these cabins in the photo of Hadley in the tree.