Laundry Day!!!

Jansen loves to help. Laundry Day is one of his favorites - so far!!

Lake Time

We went to a lake near Jonathan's place on the way home. Here the boys are climbing on the rocks. Look at the layers!! That red TX dirt, then the sandstone up above. It is so distinct and rather interesting to see the layers so defined!

Hotel Fun

This weekend we went to Abilene to hang out. Richard had a conference in Corpus Christi this past week so he didn't get home until too late Friday to head down to pick up Jonathan for the weekend. We had a good time, especially since I hadn't been down that way much this past year and I used to go with Richard all the time! We hung out in the hotel some, but we also went to the Grace Museum and the Drive-In Movies. We saw Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (Ani Amy was right it was pretty good - BTW!). Jansen was mostly good through the movie, but when he was ready for sleepy-time I did have to get out and walk around with him for a while. That is the nice thing about the drive-in, you get to still see the movie while you are out walking around! I sure wish we'd get one here!!

Still a little squirt! I thought this was a good shot to show everyone how small Jansen still is! That fridge is just one of those little hotel ones so he is holding at those 6-9 months clothes with only a few of the 12 month things. At least we've been able to hit all seasons with the things we've been given! ;-P

Jonathan hanging out in the hotel.

Jansen jumping on my belly!

Jansen hanging out in the hotel.

The boys are just chillin' before we left for the movie!

Jansen was zooming around the room and talking to himself in the mirror!

Running Man

Jansen moves so fast lately with the push toy that he's running. He gets going so fast that he falls to his knees and slides a little. It doesn't stop him though. He gets right back up and does it again...

and again...

and again...

Yet another walking toy!

As I've said before anything that can be pushed is now a walking toy... case in point: kitchen chair!

Griller

I'll help you grill, Daddy! I have the tongs! (sorry about the background... we were both home sick from church this day and I was slow getting things picked up behind him *cough, sneeze*)


I can help Mommy sort laundry with the tongs if you don't need me, Daddy! (yup, it was laundry day on our sick day too *sigh, cough, AND sneeze* - but he was way too cute playing with tongs nearly his own height not to catch a couple of pics!)

13 Months!!!

13 Months... Geez! I thought turning one was rough, but it is a jolt to the heart everytime another month passes and my baby looks (and acts) more and more like a little boy. I must say though that all of the things he "does" now are exciting and fun. OK, the whining and frustration when he can't do something as fast as he'd like or say what he wants isn't so fun, but everything is a new discovery now. Just hanging back and watching him when he's in discovery mode is totally awesome. I loved the "baby" stage when it was all about needing me, but I must say that there is nothing quite like this grin when it is trained on you! I thought I'd share...

Cheeeezzzz! Check it out. I now have 6 teeth popped through! Two front bottom, two front top, and one on each side of the top fronts! Mommy thinks I'm working on the 12 month molars right now too. I'm nearly ready for chewing gum (OK, not really but these teeth are coming in quite steadily)!


My 13 month GQ shot! Grinding my teeth is fun right now too! I think it makes me look tough in my picture.

"Nose"

When we say "nose" Jansen will point to it on our faces. We can even say "Mommy's nose" or "Daddy's nose" and he gets it right! He'll do his own sometimes, but it seems more fun for him to poke ours. We have had to put this on hold for a bit until all "noses" clear up from this stinky cold that we've had running through our house, but we did sneak in some fun time with Daddy since he doesn't seem to be getting this bug!


Concentrating REALLY hard on getting it right!

Play Area

Here is a shot of the play area Jonathan helped me set up for Jansen. I just realized that I hadn't posted a picture once we got it all laid out. We ended up with 2 kiddie pools this year so I made the hippo into his play area toy "box" and both boys crawl into it and "swim" with the toys! The giant frog on the chair nest to the hippo is really cute and one of my students gave it to Jansen. He jumps on it and already busted a seam so it's awaiting surgery there on the chair. Everything is all a little cluttered until we would get different furniture, but at least he has a designated place to play in the living room (where we can watch him) and Cody is being trained not to go on the puzzle mats. He usually does good, but as soon as he steps on it and we start to get on him he gets off. He "knows" he's not supposed to go on it, now we just have to get him past the temptation to sneak on anyway!

What would you do(oo-oo) for a Klondike Bar?

Hmm... good question. Let me think on that.


I will blow cute kisses!


See how absolutely adorable I am. I deserve a Klondike bite right?

ABSOLUTELY!!!!!

My Son Is Gross! And I LOVE him anyway!!

I know I have to put in the updates for this week and I promise I will in the next couple of days, but I just thought I'd pop on and tell you of our adventures tonight at dinner. Jansen and I still feel kinda crummy with this cold. He seems to be doing a bit better, but I however have had the worst day of it, so far, today. That said, I have not neglected Mommy duties (Daddy did take him in the morning so I could nap some) but I will say I was a little lax in the menu tonight. We have sampled various things lately, but spaghettios has been a hit. Well.... When I opened his food cabinet Jansen immediately grabbed the little container of spaghettios and handed it to me. I tried to put it back and tell him that I was going to make something more nutritious tonight, but he grabbed it back off the shelf and handed it to me again. I took it as a sign that God was allowing me to be dinner-lazy tonight and went ahead and did spaghettios. (I also did mandarine oranges so there was some balance and he did drink milk, in my defense!)

If I thought that was the lazy route I was terribly mistaken. Turns out there was a little imp at work behind the spaghettio thing after all. I figured if I fed him then it wouldn't be too messy. Yeah well, good luck with that one now that he almost always feeds himself and has a longer reach. He grabbed them from the table and got a good handful before I could react. That means even though I was able to avoid a huge disaster on his clothes and the floor, his hands were still FULL of spaghettios and sauce. Next step was to rub it in his hair because he was frustrated with me.

When I was certain he was finished eating I thought the easiest way to clean him up would be to dip his hands in a little bowl of water, swish them around, then wipe them off (and his hair by diping the paper towel in the bowl of water). Great in theory, except by now he was still frustrated with me for taking away his bowl with the spaghettios in it so he slapped his hands into the bowl when I tried to gently dip them and then dumped the bowl into his lap. The water was pretty much clean, so other than being soaking wet it wasn't too messy. I sighed and stripped him down right there in the kitchen. His diaper was soaked with the water too and all swollen so I went ahead and took that off too. I intended for it to be a quick water mop up and I'd get him all back to rights, but.......

While I was mopping up the water, Jansen PEED ON THE FLOOR behind me!! He has "discovered himself" so he even aimed around the floor a little and when I turned around he was laughing at himself shooting the floor tiles. SHEESH!! Now I had to mop up pee, so I got another wad of paper towel and some cleaner and started in on that right away before the dog came to explore as well. Now Jansen had run, yes run, into the living room. Next thing I hear as I'm standing up with pee-towels is SPLAT! I looked behind me, now into the living room, and Jansen had POOPED on the floor. Worse he's grabbed a handful (offering it up to me like the stupid Spaghettios that started all this) and is laughing while he squishes it. I'm thoroughly disgusted by now, but at least I have a pretty tough tummy where kids are concerned (years of daycare work, I guess) and was holding out well, just tired of the saga by now. I scooped him under one arm, used the rest of the towels in my hand to wipe up the lastest mess one-handed, and immediately headed to the bath. I dropped the towels in the trash as I passed it to the bathroom and sprayed off his butt and hands with the shower hose. Then I ran his bath an entire 2 hours early, scrubbing him down while he's laughing the whole time.

I'm so glad he enjoyed his evening. I'm a tad disgusted, but thankful we have tile floors. He is now scrubbed clean, all evidence has been removed, area has been cleaned again and sanitized. AND the little stinker is blissfully snoozing away as I have taken the chance to let you all in on our evening. If I didn't feel so rotten today I'd probably just be giggling myself by now, but alas... I'm not in a giggling mood (you can though... I would be if it were yours not mine).

Daddy was taking Jonathan back to his Mom's during all of this. His response when I told him, "I guess maybe you shouldn't let him run around naked anymore then." Thanks Babe!

**G'Night. I need sleep after all this! More coming soon, with pics (though no pics of this event... Ewwww!)!

Walk this way!!!

As promised...

Jansen was more than happy to oblige his excited parents with his mad walking skills tonight! I almost forgot to catch any of it for you all!! I got him here just before he got too tired to keep up back and forth so fast. He's so excited and proud of himself it is so much fun to watch him running around now (literally)!

Basket Walker

The ever popular magazine basket has become one of Jansen's favorite toys. Here is a couple of vids of him using it as a walker. Now that he has the walking/push toy to demonstrate how it works to push something around the floor everything is fair game on the tile if he's strong enough to move it!

Froggin'

Jansen was splishin' and splashin' in his frog pool! I already posted a couple of pics, but here's some video!

And we're off!

For his birthday Jansen got this push toy. He absolutely loves it!! It's really funny to watch him zoom around and when he gets where he can't go forward anymore then he pulls it back and spins it around to keep going. It's a riot! It's amazing that at this point he didn't even realize he was hardly using it at all to walk and could probably have walked on his own!!

More to come!

I know you have been patiently waiting on me to get my butt on here and update. Sorry. I had to take the computer when I started school and just brought it back for a couple of days. I need to learn how to load things on the Mac now so I'll try to learn this weekend and keep up better! I will also post a couple of videos this weekend so that you can get some action shots, but I am just way too tired tonight.

Updates from the homefront though:

1. Little Dog has a new home as of the day I dropped Ani Amy at the airport. She is now a proud member of the Martin family and since they are military she will be traveling to Hawaii in November. Things sound like they are going quite well with her new family AND she has 2 kids to play with there as well!

2. Jonathan and I started school. Jonathan is liking the 4th grade, but has none of his friends from his other classes in his class this year so he's busy trying to make some new friends. He also got to go to his first pep rally at the high school last Friday and he thought that was really cool, but noisy! :-P I am starting this school year with another student teacher and she seems really good. I am excited about fresh ideas and so far she has impressed me with her devotion to learning how to work through lessons smoothly and she has good classroom management for a newby! WaHoo!! Quite refreshing!

3. Jansen has started daycare and after a rough first couple of weeks is settling in nicely. He has picked up a cold though and he's such a sweet & kind little boy that he shared it with his Mommy so we were both home sick yesteday ALREADY!!! We went to see the pediatrician, but he said it was only a nasty cold. No fever + no wheezing = a really relieved Mommy, even if she's stuffy too! I really just have to work on teaching him that he doesn't have to share everything, but if that means giving up those sweet kisses I'm out. It's not worth losing out on those precious gifts to avoid his sniffles. We could be in for a snotty year, but we'll deal with it if that's the case! It was like a sneezing symphony here these last couple of days between the two of us though!

4. Richard had a conference a couple of weeks ago and then a one day training on the way back from the first one. He got about a week away from us and we missed him a great deal. I think, though he said he wished we could have come too, that he secretly enjoyed the time to himself since Jansen has been teething pretty much non-stop for just over a month now. He has been dubbed McScreamy semi-permanently so Richard got a brief moment away from that! By the time Daddy got home I was ready for a moment of peace to catch up on the housework without trying to do it one-handed, so I passed McScreamy off to a refreshed Daddy and got busy. Too bad that cleaning thing doesn't last long. I've had to do it a few more times since he got back already, but it's sooooo much easier when he's here to entertain or at least distract McScreamy for a bit!

5. And now for the biggest news of all.... Hot off the press (yesterday)... Drumroll Please.... We have a WALKER!! Jansen has started walking as of yesterday afternoon. He still only takes about 6 steps successively at max, but he does it consistently. He kept going back and forth between Richard and I last night and laughing & clapping! It was so much fun!! He can still crawl faster than walk so he mixes them up depending on his urgency and the height of whatever he is going for, but he can do it and he knows it now!! WaHoo!!

Now I'm off to bed. I promise I'll shoot for those vids tomorrow or Saturday and hopefully I'll have some new walking pics and vids to add along with the ones waiting to be posted already!

Making our own walker!

Since his birthday when he got his push toy, Jansen has discovered that just about anything that isn't hammered down or too heavy for him can be a "push toy" on our tile floors. Here he is using that magazine basket that gave him such a hard time before as a walker. He also uses the kitchen chairs, any empty box he can find, a giant stuffed frog, and my shoe most frequently.

Are you looking at me?


This is how I got the basket all the way across the room, and this is how I'll get it back over there when I'm done motoring around!

New Discovery!

Jansen likes to hang out with me in the kitchen while I cook. On this morning he was "helping" with breakfast when he opened the cupboard to climb in and discovered the ziplock bags in there. I watched him the whole time he experimented. It was really entertaining! The bags making that plastic-y "shlep" sound as they are pulled out must have been facinating. Not to mention how fun it was to pull each one out until there just weren't anymore in there!

Totally focused on his experiment.


"Ummm.... Mommy, there's no more left. The box, OK BOTH boxes, are empty. What now?"

Our first Spaghettios!!

Jansen tried Spaghettios for the first time. He seemed to really love them!

The attempt to get them in his mouth, the slippery little devils!


Score!! And he even hummed while he scarfed them down!

Frog Pool Take 2

More frog pool fun this past weekend!! Big brother got to share too! After spaghettios we had to rinse off so this was the fastest and the most fun solution!

Skinnydippin'!


Playing with toys in the pool.


Showing off his toys for the camera. What a ham!

When Jansen was done, Jonathan wanted to see if he could fit!

He couldn't get very far under when he tried to "swim"!!

Jansen tried to dunk Jonathan, but he couldn't get his head past the edge to get him under!

Sitting with Mommy watching Jonathan play in the pool for a while longer.

"Pacifying" Cody

Leave a little one to his own devices and he comes up with a few camera worthy moments that you can make up a good dialogue for...

"Hmmm. Cody you look kind of sleepy on your bed there."


"See this thing. The other babies at the day care use this to go to sleep. Wanna try it?"



"I think it goes in like this! I'll help you!"

Frog Pool

Grandma got us this frog pool and it's really cool! It sprays water too, but Jansen doesn't like the spray and cried until I turned it off! Hesitant at first he really enjoyed it after a little bit in his pool after that.

Testing the water.


Can anyone see me in here?



Poor Cody had to watch from inside the door while we played on the deck!

After the pool in his cool new penguin towel from Grandma & Grandpa in Wisconsin that he got for his birthday!

Baby in a Basket

Jansen has been VERY busy lately. He has been trying desperately to get to the computer whenever we are using it in the living room. It is on the table next to the couch, but I had put a magazine rack there so he couldn't slap at the keys. Well... he figured out how to get into the bin and stand on the books in there to reach the keys and slap at them anyway. Thing is, he couldn't figure out how to get back out once he got in there. When he realized he couldn't get out he'd get mad and cry until someone would come save him. I took a picture before I "saved" him this time because he kept doing it over and over.