One Week!

ONE WEEK is all I have left before he is TWO!!!

We spent the afternoon shopping for his birthday. We got 3 new books, a new truck, and he has a new Elmo dvd waiting for him. I plan to keep this birthday very low key. Solon and Andrea and the girls will come over, and I think we will just have simple food and a cake. I am planning on making a dump truck cake though, so we will see if he can recognize it!

Future Olympian?

William has been watching the Olympics with Jason and I and he is very intrigued by the skating and skiing. He decided to use his fisher price train flat bed cars as skates, which we thought was quite ingenious!

Yet Another Play Space...

Maya stayed with us today, so I took both kids to another indoor play space here in the area. This one was more expensive, but fantastic! It was clean and really nice. The kids had a great time and they both were exhausted afterwards!

Time Keeps on Slipping...

I have been packing up things here and there that we don't use anymore. William doesn't need the little tiny spoons, or the little bowls, or the small sippy cups. The little containers for all the frozen baby food are no longer needed, along with all the bibs. It is so bittersweet. My cabinet looks very different now than it did a year ago and it makes me want to cry. I am saving most of the stuff in case we ever do have another newborn, but I know most likely, when another child comes home here they won't be on the newborn size nipples, or even on the tiny cereal spoon. They will probably be about the age William is right now. The great part about that? I love this stage. William is certainly not my baby anymore, in fact when I rock him before nap every day, I feel as though I am rocking a baby calf, all legs and flailing around. He is however becoming more and more himself. I love him more each day. He can tell me his feelings and opinions, and random thoughts that enter his head. It makes me feel all the more connected to him. At the same time though, I realize that I am in no hurry to push him to grow up. I still let him have a bottle or two a day, and I have no guilt about it whatsoever. I still dress him in footie pajamas because he looks younger in them. I have a big boy bed for him and yet, I am glad he has no interest in sleeping in it. He wants his crib and he loves being rocked as much as we love doing it. I feel like this second year went by much faster than the first. I am so glad that I have kept this blog and updated it frequently, it is such a wonderful treasury of all the little steps that have taken place in our lives. I hope someday he will enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.

JUMPFFFF!!!!

William has learned to jump! He has been attempting it for a long time, but his feet never actually left the ground. He shrieks out the word while jumping and that makes it all the more hilarious to us. At the end he says, "Are you okay?" Too cute! Please excuse my messy house....I live with a small hurricane.

Great Kids Village...

William and I decided to check out a new drop in play center today. It was great! We had a great time and the owner said they are going to open one near us soon!

Spelling things in his own language...
He LOVED this castle, there was even a little king!

He spent lots of time matching these letters and numbers...

Checking out this hot ride...

Coveting all the trains...

Le Petite Artiste'...

William kept saying "Beautiful" and "Oh, Good Job Baby!" while painting all over himself...

Cloth Diapering Horror Story....

I am a big fan of cloth diapering. I have sung it's praises over and over again to many of you. However, every time William has a runny poo I am reminded of the one downside of it. Ugh. The wrap contained it nicely, but it's the scraping. And dunking. Again. Ick. I hope that a year from now I will no longer need to do this, or at least do this for a kid who puts out this kind of volume. I will spare you pictures.

♥♥Happy Valentines Day!♥♥

Loading up the Fisher Price Truck with his haul...
Giving a Valentine's Squeeze to his Trader Joe's Balloon...

My Little Digger...

Getting Ready to Drive the Semi Around the Living Room...

One of the only shots we got at the museum that wasn't blurry!

The Great Hall of the Museum, you can see why they hold inaugural balls here!

William drinking from a big boy straw...I have no idea why Jason is looking so serious!

William spent the time waiting for our food playing peek a boo with himself in the mirrors...

A final shot of the White House. Note all the snow, this is on CONSTITUTION AVE!! Almost all the parking was still covered in large piles of snow. Crazy!

With all the snow recently, our Valentine's Day plans were lacking at best. I made the real breakfast that included bacon, which is a tradition here from the Simpsons, and we headed out to the National Building Museum again. We just went for the first time a few weeks ago, but it was such a hit with William, and it's FREE! Will loved it just as much this time as he did last time. We went to lunch at Fuddrucker's (a nice burger place) and made our way out of the city. I made us really yummy soup for dinner with great bread and now we will settle in for another night of Olympic fun! Not the most exciting of Valentine's days, but it was spent with the two most important people in my world, so it was great! By the way, William has developed Construction Fever! Wow! I have never seen a kid so fixated on heavy machinery! We picked up two new books at the Museum store today, one about a crane, and the other about a dump truck. Jason and I were getting tired of reading the same ones over and over. I hope everyone had a great Valentine's Day!

Bringing the Outdoors In...

It was really windy today, and honestly, I didn't feel like getting the both of us all bundled into the full snow gear, so I decided to just bring in his sandbox toys and go get a bin of snow. It was great! He played with it for about an hour and ate quite a bit of it too!

Cabin Fever...

William has been getting pretty squirrely with all this time indoors and so have I! He has been sitting on the potty more for fun than anything else. I thought these were pretty funny, since he is wearing my fuzzy socks and eating a cookie! I think we are a long way from actual potty training, but it's fun to let him try, and so cute to see that little naked butt running around!

100 Years of Solitude or Winter Blast 2010...

Will pretty much spends most of his time watching the Bobcat plow the parking lot...

This is the parking lot this afternoon. Notice the 4th car on the back right, that is the total we have had! Crazy!


Today we got desperate and made a sled to pull William around the neighborhood. It actually worked great!

William even pulled it himself!

Going through the parking lot by Whole Foods. It's down to one lane and the piles are HUGE!

Bounce U!

I realized that I never posted these. We went to "Bounce U" while Molly was still here. I had seen it on TV and figured we should try it out. They had a special playtime for kids age 5 and under, which I love. I hate when kids that are way older that William are running around and knocking him over. Anyway, it is basically a huge room with 4 inflatables. There was a little kid sized obstacle course, a huge slide that Molly and I both went down with him, a basketball game and a dodgeball cage with really soft balls. It was great, and really wore us out! The slide was by far the best part! A funny story about the little girl next to Molly in the second picture: She was about 3 or 4 and she was climbing up the slide behind Molly and William and she said "I like your baby. What do you call it?" so Molly answered "William" and she said "It's nice to meet you William!" So cute! What manners! I love the way she called him "it"!

You Can't Always Get What Ya Want...

As Americans we take so much for granted. When we traveled through the airport in Munich on New Years Day in 2003 I got my first lesson in what it was like to not have instant gratification. There was nothing open! No stores, no restaurants, not even a coffee stand! So abnormal! Outrageous! Then I realized, maybe this is how it should be...Maybe people should be home with their families on holidays and not waiting around for people like me to show up and get their precious coffee on demand. It was a very uncomfortable feeling at the time. We are so accustomed to everything being available here on demand. It really shouldn't say "In God We Trust" on the dollar bill. It should probably say "In Costco and Target We Trust". Last Thursday night, before the BIG storm blew in, Jason and I casually stopped in at the grocery store to get milk and eggs and it was completely picked over. I assumed this was an unusual panic and thought nothing more of it. Well, last night in anticipation of the next big storm, I stopped in again to get milk for William and it was ALL GONE! The only thing left was whipping cream and Lactaid milk (yuck!). There was little on the shelves throughout the entire store. the taco shells were gone! Who lays in a supply of taco shells before the storm? There was no produce, and even the frozen stuff was really picked over. So our meal plans have been adjusted, and Jason is searching out some milk today. It is always shocking to realize how unprepared we are for things like this, and how reliant we are on stores to provide for us. I did just get a new 15 pound bag of Basmati at Costco though so we won't starve! Ha!

Have I mentioned this before???

There is a FANTASTIC website based in the PNW written by a Mom who was a elementary school teacher in a former life, but now stays home with her little boy. She has all sorts of fabulous ideas to keep little ones busy and learning at the same time....AND it's all FREE!!! Plus she rarely does anything that requires you to buy stuff, or at least expensive stuff... check her out! http://www.notimeforflashcards.com/

Digging Out the Car...

Helping Daddy...

Daddy dug a tunnel all the way through the snow behind the car!

Look at that pile! I think the car is in there somewhere!

William was bouncing in the drift and getting in deeper and deeper!

Snow Day!

Blizzard 2010!!!!

Those snow piles on the bushes remind me of the buttes in the southwest...



It's gonna take a while to clean off all that snow!

William is getting braver and braver at diving in to the drifts!

William and Mommy climb the mountain of snow by the town square!

Daddy continues the tradition of placing the baby on high surfaces...

The storm came in slowly yesterday, but picked up speed fast! We had at least 6 inches on the ground last night before we went to bed and it was coming down at 2 inches an hour over night!
Thankfully we are safe and sound here at home and Jason doesn't have to go into work till tomorrow. He has about a 5 minute drive so I think he won't have too much trouble. William loves the snow and we walked for about 45 minutes this morning, then we decided to go home when we realized that even Starbucks was CLOSED!!! Who knew that could happen? The panic that ensued before this storm was kinda comical. People were rushing to the grocery store on Thursday night and when we casually stopped by for milk and eggs we found a full parking lot, throngs of shoppers and everything so picked over, you would have thought we were going to be snowed in for months! There was NO BUTTER!, only whole milk left and very few eggs. All the produce was gone, even grapes and mushrooms! I have been struggling to keep William busy and avoid more TV time, so I brought out the Fisher Price Little People yesterday. I haven't been letting him play with them until now because of the choking hazard, but he doesn't automatically put everything in his mouth anymore, so I figured we are safe. He loves them! He has been having a ball and they are so much more fun than the new little people. I was having a good time too, reminiscing about all the fun we used to have with them.