Happy Birthday, Baby!

This time 2 years ago Dan and I were enjoying some quiet time alone with our new baby boy in the hospital. I can't believe he is already 2 years old! He is growing up so fast and we are trying to savor every minute of it!

Last weekend we went to Nana and Pops' house for some fun. J loves spending time there with his aunts and uncle. J came up with a new nickname for his Aunt T...Tito. We love it, she's not so fond of it :) Here are some pics of us playing.

The kids (Tito, J, I, and H)

J loves to dive down the slide!

Nana and Pops

I swinging

H swinging

Pops trying to be a kid again

Dan and J on the 4-wheeler

We had J's bday party this past weekend with family. I decided I was going to attempt to make his birthday cake. That was an adventure! I never knew how hard it was to color icing! I think it turned out pretty good and J even knew it was Tyrone. Nana decided to make the cake even better looking by turning the oven on with the finished cake inside. Now we know how bakeries make all of the colors melt together so well ;) J had a blast all day!

Tyrone cake

Crazy Bday Boy

Dan and cousin E

J's new Bounce House

J loved reading the cards

Happy Birthday to You!

Mmmmmm Cake!

Chillin with Grammy and Grandad



J lovin the bouncer

Yesterday J played outside with our neighbor C. They had a blast digging in the mud and being all boy! Then as soon as we came inside the weather moved in. We got some crazy hail storms!

Dear J,

You are becoming such a big boy! We can hardly believe that you're 2 years old already, but we can't remember life without you. You are learning new things every day and keeping mommy and daddy on our toes. We are having so much fun with you and can't wait to see what you do next! You are talking so much these days. You are talking in sentences regularly and are learning new words every day. You are a very coordinated little boy and you love to play any game that has balls....baketball (basketball), Beeeeeball (baseball), gufff (golf)...you get the picture. You also love to sing songs and are trying your hardest to master the ABC's right now. Today you even went poopy (at daycare) and peepee (before tubby at home)on the potty! We aren't even potty training yet! We love you very much! Happy 2nd Birthday, baby boy!

Love, Mommy and Daddy

Music at the bottom

I started to make a playlist for the blog. I'll update as I find songs I like. Scroll down to the bottom of the blog page and press the play button to listen. Enjoy!

Pray Hard

Baby Stellan is very serious condition right now. Please pray for him and his family. It looks like he took a turn for the worse a few short moments ago. Pray hard. God please hold on to this family they need you near!

Pray for Baby Stellan

If anyone out there reads my blog regularly, you will remember the miraculous story I told you about baby Stellan. He was given a grave diagnosis while still in his mother's womb, but God had a bigger plan for him than we all knew and he was born a healthy baby. Suddenly baby Stellan is having serious heart issues and is sedated in the hospital. Things have turned around so quickly for this family in the last 24 hours. Please go visit their blog for updates and pray for them.

A fun weekend

We had a good week this past week. The weather was a little warmer on some days so Dan thought it would be a great idea to get the baseball tee thingy that J got for his birthday last year out of the box. J had a great time swinging the bat with daddy.

We had our nephew E's first birthday party this past Saturday and it was a blast. There were a bunch of munchkins there for J to play with which he loved. Here are some pics of the weekend's events.

J was all smiles on the way

Cousins Chillin

Monkey in the tree

Monkey Cake

E after digging into his cake

J enjoying his cupcake

E hitting on the ladies

J being silly

J literally 2 minutes after getting in the car...wiped out! Thanks for all of the fun Aunt Kathy! Sorry for the boring post. I will try to be a little bit more creative in the next one.

Lots of Catching Up...

I haven't posted in so long because we had to send our camera out for repair. I was so lost without my camera and am so excited to have it back finally! But that does mean that I have a lot of catching up to do on my blogging. So grab a drink and a snack and sit tight, this may be a long one.

For Valentine's day, I went and had a massage at a chain massage place called Massage Envy. Check out their site and see if there is a location near you. I highly recommend it! It was great and much needed. Then Dan and I went out to dinner and to a friend's surprise birthday party. We at at The Melting Pot and it was delicious! Neither Dan nor I had ever been to one so it was a brand new experience for both of us. Because it was Valentine's day, there was a set menu that included the cheese course with veggies and bread, a salad, the main course with all sorts of meats (beef, chix, shrimp, lobster) and ravioli and veggies, and then the dessert course with lots of yummy treats! We were definitely stuffed after that meal! J stayed with Dan's parents for the evening which was so nice. Our nephew E also stayed with them. I know he had a great time with them! Thanks, Grammy and Grandad!

Our neighbor's munchkin turned 2 in Feb and we accidentally crashed his party. We knew it was his bday so we went out and got him a gift and when we were pulling back in the driveway, they were in the middle of his bday party. He got so excited when he saw J and they started playing. So, we were invited in to his party....just a little awkward since we weren't invited in the first place, but Chris and Amy and their families are such nice people I wouldn't have expected anything different than them inviting us to join the fun. We are lucky to have such nice neighbors! Since that birthday, J has constantly wanted to sing Happy Birthday and the only name he will put in it is his buddy Christopher. Here he is practicing his singing skills at dinner one night. Oh, and I guess Dan is practicing too ;)

Last weekend I went to a baby shower for friends of ours who are due with their first baby in the beginning if April. The baby shower was absolutely gorgeous! I decided to make them a scrapbook with all of the page layouts completed basically through the first year. It was hard at first because I hadn't scrapbooked in 2 years so I had to get all of my stuff together. It turned out to be a lot of fun and I think I got some good ideas for J's scrapbook. I think the scrapbook turned out nicely and I hope they liked it. Hopefully this will be a way for them to just plop pictures in from the baby's first year and journal and not have to worry about being too creative while they are sleep-deprived. Here is a slideshow of some pics of the scrapbook pages that I did. I also left some blank pages at the end so they could add some of their own creativity and personal touches.

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

This is the daddy-to-be and the grandpas-to-be all decked out in their diaper changing gear at the shower :)

This brings me to another thing I am excited about checking into. One of the blogs I read regularly is written by a really talented scrapbooker. She has a little one under 1 so she has been doing some great scrapbook ideas for baby books. Well, she is designing an online class with ideas for baby's first year books and I am so excited to take it once it is offered. It is through an online scrapbooking site called Big Picture Scrapbooking and it will be called Don't Blink: Scrapbooking your Baby's First Year.

We finally got a good bit of snow last weekend and we took J out. We put his slide up in the snow and he loved going down it and landing in a pile of snow. We also took out his inflatable baby pool to double as his sled and he had a blast! That thing went really fast on the snow! It's too bad we don't know of any good sledding hills around here. Here are some pics of our fun.

Lately, J has decided that he wants to be like the cats. He follows them everywhere and tries to do exactly what they are doing. Luckily, he only sees them mostly eat and sleep. Here are a few pics of him trying to be a cat. The poor cats have been pretty good about tolerating him too...even Simba the "mean" one. March is going to be a very busy month. We have our nephew's 1st bday and J's 2nd bday with lots of fun shoved in between. I still need to figure out what J's bday will entail. I guess more on that will follow. This week J has been out of school because he is sick. He has started to explore the house on his own and he is pretty quiet about it since he knows he will probably get in trouble. Well this morning, I was on a conference call for work and I noticed he snuck away. This is what I found at the top of our stairs.

Sorry this has been jumbled mess, but I think I am caught up. One more thing...a prayer request. A friend of mine from my high school years asked me to keep a friend of hers in my prayers. She is a mother of 2 and is battling Hodgkins Lymphoma. Check out her blog and pray for this family!