Happy (belated) Halloween! Part 1

As you may or may not know, Halloween is a pretty big holiday for us. We (or Noble, I should say, since I had very little to do with this part) went all out with the decorations. We even managed to creep a few people out with the decorations in our bathroom. Naturally, Martha Rose is no exception. She needed not one, but two different costumes. One is home-made and the other is store bought. Let me know if you can tell which is which.

This year was a bit sad for us, actually, in that we didn't get a chance to put up our decorations until a few days before the 31st. Those weekends away really wiped us out. We couldn't bring ourselves to take them down so soon after putting them up so they're actually still up. We figured that since we aren't celebrating Thanksgiving in Knoxville, and since half of our Halloween decorations end up becoming permanent installments anyway, that it wouldn't hurt if the indoor stuff stayed up a bit longer. 

Ellen and Kenzo had their annual Halloween party which we of course attended.


Here is Martha Rose, getting ready for the event by donning her little pig costume.

 She is holding a pig while dressed as a pig. Very meta.

We had to distract her so that she wouldn't immediately take off the pig ears.

 Martha was unimpressed by her costume:


 Martin managed to stop by to quickly check out her costume.

 And they shared a moment:

Martha shows off her costume at the party:

 Here she is posing with Ellen's Super Fly Keeper costume:

I thought Ellen's cake was suitably gory for the occasion.

This is one of Ellen's party decorations. It's a gruesome cornucopia. I told her it was good enough to pin on pinterest, which is what I intend to do.

We had so much fun at Ellen and Kenzo's that we committed to throwing our own Halloween party on Halloween night. But more on that in the Halloween Part 2 post.

Phew! It's been an eventful few months!

I'm so sorry for the long delay between posts. Noble and I were out of for a whopping 7 weekends in a row! All of that packing and unpacking, planning etc. really got in the way of my ability to get online. Anyway, I'll try to make up for it by posting an overflow of Martha Rose pictures. I'll start off with some of the pictures from one of our weekends away!

Bristol Rhythm and Roots!

It has become a tradition for us to head over to Noble's hometown for this music festival and it just keeps getting better and better! This year we got to introduce Martha to it and to all of Noble's hometown friends. I think she had a good time.


Here she has decided that she is old enough to push her own stroller:

 She is too cute not to have a close up:

 She is being rather coy here. She's going to be a heart breaker:

 Maybe she'll let them down easy:

 Ellen whisked her away so they could get up closer to the bands:

They were having a good time.

Where's Martha?

I took some stalker pictures from far away while she was with Suzy:

 This is probably one of her favorite moves of her dad's:

 In case you couldn't tell:

 Watching the bands together:

 Playing coy again:

 She decided to ham things up for the camera:

This is what my Mom calls her pechiche face.

That's all I have for now, but I'll be sure to post more pictures soon. Well, sooner than the last post, anyway!

Birthdays Galore!

    We've had a few of birthdays lately, which Martha Rose was very excited about. She has apparently decided that her gifts will come in the form of firsts. For Noble's mom's birthday, Martha Rose decided to get not only her first tooth, but her first four teeth all at once. We were all very impressed.

    We celebrated at Olive Garden, but I don't have any pictures of the actual birthday dinner, since my camera died beforehand. What I do have are pictures of our spelunking expedition from earlier in the day. Noble, Martha Rose, Courtney (who was visiting) and I all took a trip to the Appalachian Caverns. They were pretty spectacular, and Martha Rose seemed to be enjoying herself. She especially liked it when they turned off all the lights and left us in absolute pitch darkness. What can I say? She's a bit of a weirdo :)


Here is the cavern:

 Courtney and I tried to squeeze through one of the crevices.

 Martha makes sure to take everything in...

 absolutely everything.   

 She's hard to impress.

 And here she is, happy in the dark:

     Nola's Birthday celebration was up next. She also chose Olive Garden for her birthday dinner, but this time I managed to snap a few shots. Martha decided that she would dress up in Nola's favorite theme for her: Nautical.

Here she is showing off the ensemble:

 Doing a little birthday dance:

 Examining the coasters:

 Hanging out with Ellen and Kenzo:

 Posing for the camera:

 Here is a rare set of happy photos with her cousin Frank:

 She really does like him :)

    Then, at Noble's birthday, she surprised us all by crawling for the first time ever. She had been warming up to crawling for months, but she saved the actual act for Noble's big day. Much celebration was had by all that night.

Noble picked out her outfit.

 The cap didn't last for very long.

 We got a new grill just in time for the occasion!

 Noble grilled us up some great burgers.

 This is what Noble gets for teasing me right before I decorated his cake:

 Here she is, resting after her first crawling experience.

 Martha decided to show us her best zombie impression. BRRRAAAAIIINNNNSSS!!!!

 All in all, it was a very happy birthday.

Blowing out the candles.

It's very sweet, so we will overlook the fact that these gifts let her share the birthday spotlight.