Snuggling My Baby

I know that I've showed off these pictures of Jayce and I before, but I thought they would be fun to use again today. I didn't say it at the time, but these photos are even more important to me now because the week after we had them taken I found out that I was pregnant.

My first thought was along the lines of, "Aww man!" Not about the baby, obviously, but about just having gotten professional pictures taken, when I knew that I would want new ones done in 8 months when the baby arrived. But then I realized that I was actually really glad that we did this before I knew that I was pregnant. Now, whenever I look at these, they kind of represent this time in my life where I was just Jayce's mom. A stay home mom with her first born kid, figuring it all out together.

Last week Jayce was sick and one day at nap time he just couldn't get himself settled down. I abided to a long list of requests, including several that I don't usually do, but in the end he miserably said, "Mo-om, hold me. Rock Jayce." So we sat down to rock and he fell asleep on my shoulder, just like this. And then I fell asleep too.

It is the same way that I used to rock and snuggle him when he was still a tiny baby.

When I woke about 30 minutes later, I just sat and looked at him, running my fingers through his hair and across his round cheeks. I honestly can't remember the last time that I rocked him all the way to sleep, or that I fell asleep rocking him. It was a lovely indulgence that I don't take lightly, especially given my impending awareness that the season of rocking this baby to sleep is winding down.

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Valentine's Day

Chris and I got into the habit, in college, of going out for Valentine's Day near the day but never actually on  the day.  This had a little bit to do with the annoying wait at every restaurant on the day, Chris serving one year and it being much more financially beneficial for him to work that night and take me out another, and a year where we had an absurd experience at Outback Steakhouse. Basically, they had set up white table-clothed card tables (literally) to accommodate the inevitable influx of "parties of two."  Our was so wobbly that we had to take turns holding the table while the other one cut their steak, and it still wasn't enough.  It was far from romantic and I felt like we should have gotten a discount on our meal for having a second rate Outback experience.

While I would agree with statements like, It's a Hallmark holiday, We don't need the calendar to get us to say I love you," and many more like that, I do think it's a good excuse to make time to go out with my husband.  We got a babysitter, had Outback on a solid wooden table, and saw a movie we've been wanting to see since before Christmas.  (The Fighter if you're interested.  It was great, just like everyone has been saying for the past 4 months. :)

In addition to the Valentines that Jayce and I made, and the Valentine cookies we made for Chris' class, we also made Chris' favorite dessert just for him, scotcheroos.  I left Jayce licking the spoon while I went to the bathroom and returned to this big chocolatey mess.  Yeah, he's a ham.

The scotcheroos were loved equally by the young and the old.

I made this banner for my chalkboard frame, and it has been getting us into the holiday spirit for the past month.  It also is helping Jayce with his lowercase letters.

 

I made Jayce this little stuffed truck and gave it to him for Valentines Day.  I wanted it to look like a snuggly version of Chris' truck, and it definitely is snuggly.

Jayce seemed to like it and has been driving it around the house, but I think Chris likes it more.

We ended up with a low key Valentine evening.  Chris got Jayce out of the bathtub that night and realized that he had a pretty high fever, so he ended up rocking with him for almost an hour to get him to go to sleep.  We have since discovered that he has some teeth coming in, since he has no other symptoms and has been uncharacteristically chewing on his hand.  But it was a sweet night, and a nice holidays with the boys I love.

 

 

 

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Pre-Valentine's Day Celebrations

Valentines Day has never been a huge celebration around our house, but having a little one who is old enough to take part and get excited bumps it up on my priority list quite a bit.

So last week, Jayce and I got busy making Valentines. We colored paper, stamped hearts, drew lines, and then cut our paper into hearts. I got a few sweet pictures of my little guy, printed them out and attached them to the cards. Then we put them in the mail to our Valentines.

We also started what might be a new Valentine tradition, sort of a spring version of our Halloween tradition, and took cookies up to Chris' class. We always do this in the fall, and apparently some of the students in Chris' spring class were asking if Jayce could deliver Valentine or Easter cookies, and though I was slightly annoyed at first (they can't ask for them, geeze!), I got over it quickly and decided that we would oblige. The original idea behind this was that since Jayce was too young to celebrate Halloween with his own class, that he could dress up and celebrate with dad's class for a few years. But I'm a little worried that next year when Jayce is in preschool and can take cookies to his own class, that Chris' class will be requesting them too and I'll be making cookies all day long. Oh well, I guess I have plenty of time to practice up.

Jayce was the happiest little helper. I was not the happiest cooker by the end of it. On this day, Jayce decided not to take his nap, and it was one of those days where I really needed him to!! But that also meant I didn't get to roll out and cook the cookies while he was asleep, so he "helped" with every single stage of cookie-making from scratch. Mixing ingredients, rolling out dough, cutting shapes, icing and sprinkling. His enthusiasm and energy definitely surpassed mine that morning/afternoon.

But we did end up with a huge beautiful batch of cookies for class. I have been trying out lots of different sugar cookie recipes these past few years, and this year I tried Patrice's recipe, which you can see here, and it was the best by far!!

When I mentioned to one of my friends that we were taking Valentine cookies to Chris' class, she asked, "So, what is he going to wear?" which I hadn't even thought about. I have never given him a Valentine shirt before, but he had never been a Valentine cookie delivery boy before. I knew he had a red t-shirt that was about to be too small, so I pulled that out and made this cute little "boyish" Valentine shirt. I showed it to Chris and explained, "I know that it's red with a big heart, but it has trucks all over it, so it's boyish. It's like it says, 'I love trucks'." Chris was not convinced, but I was. And he was the cutest delivery boy ever.

Jayce carried the cookies in a little Valentine bucket, ran across the classroom to Chris as soon as he saw him through the door, stood on the table in the fornt of the class and told them all, "Happy Balentine's Day!" several times. It was great.

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Valentine

Happy Valentines Day!

From my little sweetie to yours.

 

 

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Our Little Lady

We've had a fun week and a half or so over here, letting the knowledge that our little baby is a little girl soak in. There have been lots of new phrases floating around our house, like daughter, sister, and it's a girl. I even told the baby a few times on that day, "You're a girl!" I'm not sure that she knew.

I love her little profile in this picture, and that you can see her little hands in it. Although the more that I look at it, I think it kind of looks like she's got her arms in a "put your dukes up" position. Maybe she's already ready to fight off the boys, or fight her brother for toys or something like that. She is exactly where she needs to be as far as her size. The average is between 12 and 14 ounces and she is 13, so perfect. There were no problems and no concerns.

She has pretty big feet, at least I think so. (Proportionate to her leg, they seem big to me anyway.) But Jayce had really big feet when he was born and has always been tall/long for his age, so maybe she'll be the same.

We weren't sure that we'd be able to find out the sex at all, because she had her knees up with her legs pulled snugly against her body, and the x-ray technician spent about 20 minutes trying to get her to move her legs around. Our first clue was when she said, "Well, I'm leaning towards a girl," which was certainly not enough information to go by, and I was hoping that we'd leave with more information than that. After a little bit she said, "Yeah, I think it is a girl, I can see lines, so..." which made me laugh. But then she finally got the shot, and we have photographic evidence to prove the girl-ness. I won't put the gender photo on here, because even though I'm glad we found out the sex, I do think it's a little strange how a lot of worry and effort goes into getting an x-ray picture of our unborn child's genetalia. You know what I mean? If only they had a little pink or blue bow on, that would be a bit nicer.

The next picture is her profile, but with her arm up over her face. We also have a scary "baby looking straight at the camera and kind of looking like skeletor" picture, that I didn't get a good picture of. Maybe I'll show it next time, but I doubt it. It's not nearly as fun as the profile one.

Speaking of the profile picture, I made this cute little display for our house and put it on Lemon Tree this week. I found out the next day that it had been featured on Apartment Therapy in the Children's Section, called Ahdeedoh, here. Fun right?!

Back to the sonogram, once we found out that the baby was a girl, it was a little bit funny how she wouldn't move her legs at all. We told the tech that she was just modest, and we knew the baby would be stubborn no matter what. But the "knees up in front of her stomach" position blocked a few pictures of the umbilical cord that the doctor needs, so we'll get another sonogram at our next visit. She said everything was completely fine, looked normal, and she had no reason for concern, but they need these pictures and the baby wasn't cooperating, so that is what we're doing. And I won't object to seeing her again in there. :)

Several people have asked me if I've been shopping since we found out the sex, and the unfortunate answer is no. As soon as we arrived home from the doctor that day, a huge snow/ice storm hit that lasted for about 24 hours or so. (Notice that Jayce is standing on snow that is above Chris' knees in this picture.) It was pounding wind, ice and snow that shook the house, left thousands of families without power and even closed the universities for a few days. The storm was followed by several days of below freezing weather, and it is only now finally creeping towards 30. So, basically, the weather has forced me not to shop. At least in stores.

But I must confess, I HAVE been shopping, kind of. What do you call window shopping if it's done online? I've been doing that, lots of that. I also have spent an embarrassing amount of time online finding the perfect fabric for the nursery. (It's not actually that embarrassing, I spent as much time as was necessary to hunt down exactly what I was looking for.) I have a few things ordered and a few samples on the way, so now I am absolutely hounding the mailbox. It's kind of fun that in this period of waiting, this is something that I can do to prepare for the baby a little bit, and since I take on new projects every week for the blog anyway, there might as well be some baby-inspired projects. Since I haven't even bought a little pink onesie yet, hopefully this will appease me a little. :)

Discovering the gender has also opened up the floor to the Great Name Debate, something that we had been putting off until we knew the sex. Neither of us had a mental (or physical) list of names, so that night we would randomly would throw out names to one another, which is kind of nice to do at this "no pressure" stage of name suggesting. The only thing that we decided that night was that we know entirely too many crazy people. Many of the names that we suggested (at least Chris' suggestions), I could think of someone we knew with that name that was kind of crazy or at least drove us crazy. I guess that is what happens when you move around a lot? You meet lots of people, and there are always crazy ones in the pack, right?

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Improvising

Jayce has trouble with the word "airport." He starts to say "airplane" but by the time he reaches the pla part of the word, he remembers that he needs to switch to port. So it ends up coming out, "airpa-ort." He gets really frustrated, and will try again, (and I laugh sometimes) because he will end up saying, "airpa-ort, airpa-ort" with a little stutter in the middle as he's trying to get it right.

Yesterday while we were at the grocery store Jayce was telling me about how sometimes he rides in an airplane to go see Grandma and Chelsea. He eventually said, "Mom and Jayce go to airpa-ort, airpa-ort, airpa-ort...plane station."

I was really impressed with this. Chris was only impressed the first 2 times that I mentioned it to him.

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Chris' Birthday

Chris' birthday was almost 3 weeks ago now, but I didn't want it to go by without noting a few fun highlights.  We celebrated on the day, but it was the week when we were potty training, which I woefully discussed here if you missed it, which may help to explain why it has taken me a while to get these pictures up and why Jayce isn't wearing pants. :)  But his crossed ankle in this picture cracks me up, he does that all of the time.

Jayce got busy coloring a "Happy Birthday Dad" sign while I cooked, which I thought he did really well on given how small the space was to color!  I didn't get an after shot because Chris took it to work with him, but on one of the letters he messed up and colored outside of the lines (I think, he didn't really explain this to me, I was just watching from a distance), so he kind of let out a frustrated yell/growl and furiously scribbled all over that letter and all around it, kind of like a big square.  He then went on and colored the rest of the letters like normal.

In lieu of a birthday cake, which Chris doesn't really like, we made scotcheroos, which he REALLY likes.  So does Jayce, and so do I for that matter.  I left the room for a minute and came back to this.  He didn't even have the courtesy to look guilty.  He just glanced at me, turned back to the scotcheroos and dipped his finger in for more chocolate.  Little rascal.

Jayce had helped me wrap Chris' presents earlier that afternoon, and when I brought them into the kitchen to put on the table he got really upset and demanded that I put them in the living room on the ottoman.  When I went in there were a bunch of toys on the ottoman and I started to clear them off into the toy box, which set Jayce off again.  "No Mom! Toys for Jayce and Daddy to play Mom!!" When I looked back at the pile it appeared that these were actually a carefully selected collection of toys, basically all of the medium to large sized vehicles that Jayce owns.  I remembered that the day before they had all been lined up and Chris and Jayce were racing them, so apparently this was on Jayce's agenda for the night as well.  So we stacked Chris' gifts and sign right next to his evening activity.

When Chris got home, he opened presents immediately, before dinner or anything else.  It's hard to turn down a kid who is excited to give presents, especially when there is no real reason to make him wait, so we didn't.  We then moved into the kitchen for a birthday song, candles and scotcheroos.  You may notice that there is already a big piece taken out of the "cake."  It's also hard to turn down a birthday boy who wants some dessert even when it isn't quite time for it yet.  I think my boys must have some sense of entitlement about their dessert around here.

 

 

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