Ode to Kiki

Today is my mom (known to her grandchildren as Kiki)'s 59th birthday. I told my mom when I had Will that I could have never really understood her love for me until I had a child of my own. I cannot imagine what we would do without my Mom! First and foremost, she is saving us HUNDREDS of dollars a month by keeping Alex for this whole school year (she did the same for Will)....such a blessing knowing that your wee little one is being loved on JUST like you would be loving on them. She comes to my house because I don't have time to get both boys dropped off-another huge blessing! If I am running around like a crazy person (which is pretty much every day), she helps me make my lunch or get Will's shoes on or change Alex's diaper so I can get out the door on time. She makes my dreams become a reality-if I just mention something that I would like for the one of the boys' birthday parties or something I would like on my porch to get it looking festive, she makes it happen without thinking twice. I could not have pulled off the train party for Will without her and my porch was beautiful for our party this weekend....I just mentioned I wanted to get a big mum for my planter beside our door and pulled into the driveway after work to find a HUGE, gorgeous mum. I could go on and on with examples like these. She is the most selfless person I know. She is ALWAYS thinking of others and how to make their lives better. She goes above and beyond the usual call of duty for motherhood and we are extremely blessed!! I love that my children are growing up around both sets of grandparents. My mom is so intentional about making memories with them and it is fun to sit back and watch. We celebrated my mom this weekend while my brother and his family were in town. Will loved spending time with his cousins and loved the icing on my mom's cake just as much!
This morning Will greeted my mom at the door and told her Happy Birthday (No...my mom doesn't get to take the day off on her birthday :) And she doesn't even complain!). Then they shared a birthday muffin that we had gotten for her at Edgar's yesterday. She was perfectly content sharing her muffin with Will on the bench. I wish I would have taken a picture! He even sang happy birthday to her and asked if we could light a candle so HE could blow it out :) And of course we obliged :) We hope your day was extra special, Kiki! WE LOVE YOU!

Controlled Chaos

Sunday afternoon we hosted a little Halloween Party for our church crowd and their kids. This is the 3rd year we have done it. It is so fun to get the kids dressed up and even funnier trying to get everyone situated for a photo opp. I am pretty sure that our group of kids has doubled in 3 years. There were 16 kids here ranging from 3 months to 4 years. All of these little people brought along their big people (parents) and so needless to say, there was A LOT of people here in our tiny home. But I loved every minute of it!! Will was a bit overwhelmed at first when there were at least 10 kids at any given moment in his room playing with all of his toys, rolling in his bed, taking his train table tracks apart...but he was such a trooper and no tears were shed. At one point he came up to me and said, "Mama, that boy is messing with my choo choos." For him to say "that boy" just cracked me up. There were so many here he couldn't remember all their names :) We had some festive snacks and basically just let the kids run wild, inside and out, for a few hours. I am so thankful for this bunch and love that we have so many kids all so close in age.
It will be so fun to watch them grow up together!! I didn't manage to really get a decent shot of everyone...there was always someone crawling away, etc :) All in all, we had a Pig, Train Conductor, Spider Man, a T-Rex, Aubie, a Princess, a Pumpkin, a Butterfly, a Caterpillar, Zorro, a Pirate, a Dragon, a Bumble Bee, an Angel, a Lady Bug, and a Duck!Before saying our prayers Sunday night I asked Will who we should pray for. He ran down our usual list of family members and then said, "Oh, and my costume friends." Precious, I tell you!!!

Best.Gift.Ever.

I have been wanting a "smart" phone for a while. I would go through spurts of begging and pleading....and then I would decide that it was okay if I continued to use my dinosaur phone. I went back and forth like this for a long time and despite which end of the spectrum I was favoring, John's answer was always that we didn't "need" it. He is absolutely right-it was more of a "nice to have" than a need...
For our 6th anniversary John caved and pre-ordered me the new iphone 4s. His hang up was never the cost of the actual phone (we had an upgrade), but more that it would increase our cell bill by $30 a month.
We picked it up on Friday! Now that I have been using it for a few days I really do not know how or why I ever waited so long to enter the land of the smart phone. Y'all IT ROCKS!!! It is every bit as good as the hype says it is. I am AMAZED at all it can do.
Saturday after leaving the pumpkin patch we used this app called "Around Me" to locate some lunch. We totally went out of our way to a Zaxby's simply because we liked watching our little car on the map and thought it was so cool that it gave us step by step directions and charted exactly where we were all along. It also gave us the phone number and an image of our destination...I know that GPS systems do this...but it makes it all the more fun my phone does it! And we don't have a GPS anyways.
Another app that I am obsessed with is Grocery IQ. It kills me that you can just go in your pantry, scan the barcodes of items that you are running low on, add them to your grocery list, and then choose your grocery store where it then categorizes all the items on your list by aisle. That right there is totally worth the investment in the phone!!
Of course I am loving the camera/video camera. With kids, it is now so handy to capture the "little things" that you might not be dragging your big camera around for.
John is scared to death that I am going to drop it and break it. I will admit, I am a little scared of that too. I found a really cute case that I wanted for it but John insisted that cute was not what mattered. He wanted me to get an otter box....the kind that would make me look like a contractor working on a construction site or something. I was not having it. In the end we compromised and I did get an otter box, but it is a decent looking one that is not so bulky and a cute color!
So...for all of you people that have had smart phones for a few years now, please let me know what apps you love!!!

Pumpkin Patch 2011

On Saturday we took our annual trip to the Grand Ole Pumpkin Patch in Clanton, Alabama. This is our 3rd year to take Will. He loved every second of it this year! The first year it was freezing and he couldn't even walk....so it was more a "we have kids now so we are supposed to go to the pumpkin patch in October" kind of trip. We did the hayride, grabbed the first pumpkin we saw, and got right back in the car to head home. John barely let me snap a few pictures of Will because it was so cold!
Last year it was burning up. I had to strip him out of his cute little outfit in the car on the way home because he was soaking with sweat. Will had fun though...he loved the inflatables!
This year, we headed out early to beat the crowds and the heat, and we were successful in both! The weather was barely 70 when we got out there and only turned hot as we were walking to our car to leave. I had bought matching outfits for the boys and I was bound and determined they were going to wear them, regardless of the weather. Luckily, they worked great!John was a genius and came up with the plan to go on the hayride and pick out our pumpkin first.This was super strategic seeing as how once we were in inflatable land, we weren't leaving unless we were headed to the car. Will is definitely John's child. He looked at maybe 3 pumpkins before he had made his selection, quite content and not at all worried that there might be a better one in the hundreds of pumpkins that surrounded him. Me...I would have walked up and down that patch making sure I found the best they had to offer :)Then we headed to all things inflatable. They have a good set up in Clanton and you can't beat the price-$5 gets you 5 different inflatables for as long as you want to play....and they don't charge parents, so John and I could go down with Will. Will's favorites are always the big slides. He loves them and has no fear!! His face always cracks me up and as soon as he was down, he walked right back over to the ladder ready for more! This year he also did the obstacle course and he caught on much quicker than I thought he would because neither of us went in there with him. He had a GREAT time!!
Alex was perfect and slept in his car seat most of the time. He is so content wherever and I love that about him. We are actually contemplating going back one more time before Halloween to let Will play on the inflatables so I can get a funnel cake. We left right before lunch this past weekend and I just didn't feel right eating a funnel cake at 10 AM. I am starting to regret this decision...

four

Alex was four months old on October 1st. I know...I'm a little behind. He is as sweet as he can be. He is content 99% of the time and is such a snuggle bug. His personality is starting to come out a little bit. He is so smiley and laid back. I LOVE having a laid back child :) I guess he sort of has to be, but he is so fun and just very "go with the flow."-At his four month doctor appointment, Alex weighed 16 pounds 13 ounces and was 25.5 inches long (Will was 16 pounds and 26.5 inches long at his 4 month appointment). He has a TON more hair than Will did at this point. I didn't really realize it until I looked back at Will's pictures from four months. Will's had fallen out by that point and was trying to grow back. Alex never lost his. When he gets out of the bath, it sticks out everywhere and curls on the ends....we call him Kramer :)
-Alex started oatmeal and stage 1 foods last Saturday. It is always so funny to me when little ones start to eat. It took him about 4 days to get the whole spoon thing down but now that he knows how it works I can't seem to get food into his mouth fast enough. As soon as we put him in the high chair his arms and feet start kicking and he opens his mouth wide. He has had squash, carrots, sweet potatoes, and bananas-the only thing he didn't care for were the bananas. He spit them out and shuttered!! I think they were just a bit too sweet for him. We are sticking to veggies for now.-Alex started sleeping through the night when he was 10 weeks old and praise the Lord that we have been blessed with another great sleeper!! We are on a four hour schedule and he is taking 2 really good naps each day with a short snooze in the late afternoon. We think he might be our "lovey" baby. Will NEVER showed any interest in a lovey...still doesn't. Alex will hold onto one all day long.

-Will is still doing great with him. I think he is really ready for Alex to be able to run around with him outside and play!! Alex still hasn't rolled over yet...like I said, laid back :)

I have got to be better with grabbing my camera. With Will, we could have filled a whole picture album with pictures taken in just September '09. I took ONE picture of Alex the whole month of September. Hopefully I will do better in the upcoming months!!

Oops!

This came home with Will yesterday...I mean really??? My sweet precious angel of a child doesn't hit or shove....he chooses to SPIT on his friends. I was appalled. Over the past 2 weeks or so, parenting has gotten tough around here. I mentioned this today on the playground to a teacher friend who has a 15 year old and she just laughed out loud at me....obviously knowing there are going to be much harder parenting times ahead of us :) But seriously, this is really the first time that we have had to deal with disciplining Will for something a little more serious than the usual not listening or pat patting Alex too hard or whining, etc. And y'all its hard. It is hard trying to think long and hard about how to explain something in a way that not only your 2 year old will understand, but also doing it quickly because he has the attention span of a fly right now. I talked to him yesterday about it on the way home from school. He told me that his friend had a toy he wanted and his friend told him "NO" and so he spit on him (these were his exact words). Apparently in 2 year old land spitting is a means for getting what you want??!! John talked to him about it on their stroll through the neighborhood. And then we BOTH talked to him about it together before bed. We prayed with him. We prayed for him. And today we didn't come home with a note. He had a good day. But his temperament is just so unpredictable these days. This was the first time he has acted out at school. I know that this doesn't mean he is a bad kid. And I know a lot of it has to do with his age. But it is hard watching your sweet boy expose his sinful heart. And a little sobering.....

2,190 Days and Counting

Today is our 6th wedding anniversary. Our absence from the blogging world should be a telltale sign of our life right now. Crazy busy. Not sure how or why our life seems to be stuck in fast forward mode but I guess that is just life with two kids. The most significant thing that happened in our sixth year of marriage was welcoming a new precious boy to our family. Alex has totally changed our family dynamic (in a good way) and has also contributed to that crazy busy I just mentioned. We are non-stop from the time we wake up until we fall into bed at night. This has certainly changed the amount of time John and I actually see each other and have a real conversation. John leaves for work as soon as I get up in the morning. We both are home by 4 and he usually mans the outdoors and all things ride-on with Will while I spend some time with Alex inside, feed him, etc. Sometimes we venture out there too and enjoy the cooler weather. About 5:30 we are trying to get Will fed dinner, eat some dinner ourselves and then chaos ensues for the next hour. Baths for both boys, reading and prayers with Will, bottle for Alex, and if we are lucky, both are sound asleep by 8. Then the sterilizing process begins which literally takes until about 9 (RIDICULOUS). Our DVR is backed up (we haven't even watched any of the Office this season...our favorite show!!) because after all of our "work" is done, it is just time to crash in bed to get some sleep and do it all over again. It probably sounds miserable, and it really is not, just something John and I are having to get used to. There has been NO down time for the two of us. Date nights have gotten much harder...I think we might have been to dinner by ourselves once since Alex was born. This is a season in life, and one we are very grateful for. We know it will not be like this forever. But it can wear on a marriage. John and I have learned that we have to be very intentional with our time. This is probably why the blog has been abandoned for a while. I just can't find the time.
This morning we took our boys to Ranch House for breakfast. This was the first time we have gone to breakfast as a family. It was fun. Alex is on a four hour schedule now which makes lots of things much easier, as far as getting out and about. On the way I couldn't help but smile at how different our lives are since we became husband and wife six years ago. While date nights a little more often would be so nice, time spent with our precious boys is just as sweet!