Love Live Grow

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Good Times

A couple of weeks ago I watched my friend's little boy for a couple of hours. These two boys had a great time playing together, we love having friends over!

West, Texas was the location of the horrible fertilizer plant explosion a couple of weeks ago. It is only about 90 minutes south of us, we drive through it often on our way to Austin. Some friends of ours were collecting supplies to take down there for the families who had lost their homes and all of their belongings. I know that Soren had no idea what was going on, but I took it as a teaching moment and had him help me place our donations into the bag. Granted, he wanted to put them in and dump them out over and over...but still, I am glad that he got to help me in this act of service.

House Full of Sickies

Last week Soren and I stayed home from church because we were both feeling pretty miserable. We both had nasty colds. It is really hard to get healthy when you have to be mom all day, you just don't get the rest that you need to feel better. Luckily, my wonderful hubby realized this and let me sleep in Saturday AND Sunday (we usually get one day each). When I woke up on Sunday morning this is what I found:

This is when I knew that Soren needed to stay home with me. He woke up, cuddled right up to daddy and fell back to sleep. Only happens when he is sick.

Sneaky Boy

Obviously I always put the good stuff in the same spot because he can find it without fail...

Silly Boys

Sunday, April 14, 2013

When Did My Baby Turn Into a Toddler????

I cannot believe that my baby has turned into this crazy, active, loving, sweet, hilarious little boy!

18 month stats --

Height: 31 inches (10-25%)

Weight: 24 lbs 10 oz (25-50%)

Favorites --

Activities/Things: climbing, being outside, playing with water, airplanes, sirens, music, dancing, balls, jumping on the trampoline, hanging on the bar, gymnastics class, story time at the library, taking off his diaper -- running around with no clothes

People: mommy, daddy, Radley (dog)

Food: bananas, grapes, clementines, peaches (pretty much any fruit), anything he can dip (hummus, guacamole, ketchup, bbq sauce), hot dogs, chicken nuggets, yogurt, apple sauce, pasta, smoothies, graham crackers, fruit snacks, cookies

Drink: Really just LOVES water

Words: Mama, dada, yeah, mo me (more please), Ra-we (radley), uh-oh, bye-bye

Books: Clifford, What Will Claude Wear? (kids pick the weirdest books), Little Critter, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Touch and Feel Animals, Silly Safari Bus, Numbers, I Spy

Shows: Only interested in Blue's Clues and only likes to watch one episode. Although he is also obsessed with the Wiggles "Hot Potato" video on youtube.

Soren is a hilarious little boy, he always has us laughing and keeps us on our toes. He loves to pull up his shirt and show everybody his belly (it's pretty much the only body part he cares to know and show off...who needs to know where your eyes and nose are when you have such a cute belly?).

I cannot believe that he was my little baby a year and a half ago, it goes so fast. As I often tell Richard, I am not sad that he is not my baby anymore (he is at such a fun age and I love seeing him learn new things and being so proud of himself), I am sad because now I know how fast it goes. I feel like the next time I turn around he is going to be leaving for college and that makes me sad.

I know that there is a time for everything. And as frustrating as toddler tantrums and mischief can be I would not trade being a mom for anything in the world. I would rather live in a box with my cute little family than be a millionaire with nobody to share it with. I could not be happier. I feel so blessed to be taking care of this sweet Child of God. I have always known that my Heavenly Father knows me and loves me, but I never REALLY understood on the level that I do now until I had Soren. Everybody always tells you that being a mom is the best and that you will never believe how much you can love one person, etc etc, but now I really understand that.

When Soren was about 2.5 months we went to New Hampshire for Christmas and we attended the Christmas Eve service at the local Presbyterian church. To bring the service to a close they turned off the lights and passed around candles and we all sang "Silent Night." I sang the words to that simply sweet yet powerful song as I rocked my sleeping newborn baby boy and I was overcome with an overwhelming feeling of love and realization of what a sacrifice it was for our Heavenly Father to send his son, Jesus Christ, to earth knowing the things he would be faced with. I knew in that moment how difficult it must have been for Heavenly Father to let his sweet, innocent baby boy enter this cruel and difficult world knowing that he would be persecuted and hated. But he did it because he knew that it was necessary in order for all of his children to return to live with him. I cannot imagine watching my sweet baby boy go through what our Savior did and sending him down knowing what would happen. It was in that moment of:

Silent night, holy night

Son of God, love's pure light

Radiant beams from Thy holy face

With the dawn of redeeming grace

Jesus, Lord, at Thy birth

that I truly understood the sacrifice that was made for each of us. It was not only the sacrifice of the Savior's atonement, but also the sacrifice of a loving Heavenly Father who saw the bigger picture.

I love my baby (always my baby) boy more than words can explain and I am so grateful that I have been entrusted with the responsibility of teaching him and raising him to be a respectful, loving human being. He teaches me so much each day, more than I could ever learn without him. I am a better person because of him.

First day of nursery!

Backyard

So when we first saw this house we were in love with everything...except the backyard. Luckily we were were able to see the backyard as something we could fix in the future. I think I hated it more than Richard so I was really pushing for us to do it and this weekend we did! HURRAY!

So about 2/3 of our yard (the section around the tree) was ivy and I HATED it for multiple reasons:

-UGLY

-Not kid friendly, what kid wants to play in ivy?

-Who knows what is living in there...snakes, rodents, etc.

-Really made the usable backyard very small

So this weekend we worked HARD! We all got up when Soren did (usually one of us gets to sleep in) and headed to Home Depot to rent a Rotatiller and buy our sod. We had to get the rotatiller back to Home Depot in 4 hours if we didn't want to pay extra for keeping it longer so we headed home and unloaded the sod so we could get the truck back with in 75 minutes. After we unloaded the sod Richard headed back with the truck (we left our car there so we wouldn't both have to go) and I got to work taking all of the paving stones out. Oh, we had taken the big paving stones out before Richard left and there were all of the snakes, we found NINE! GROSS! One of the many reasons I am so glad the ivy is gone.

Anyway, after Richard got back he mowed the ivy down then started working with the rotatiller. We spent A Lot of time cleaning that thing out, the ivy getting all wound up in there was a mess! But it worked really well! Richard would till until it was all full of ivy and then he would mow the ivy down while I worked on cleaning the rotatiller, this process was repeated several times.

(Oh, in case you are wondering where Soren was during all of this...he was happily wandering around on the deck, playing in his little pool, eating lunch and watching Blue's Clues. He was a TROOPER, but you could tell he was feeling pretty neglected. :( But he did awesome and he will love having all of that grass instead of the ivy!)

After we finished with the rotatiller Richard took it back while I put Soren down for his nap. Then we ate lunch and got back to work. It only took us about 30 minutes to lay the sod, so that was great!

At 4pm we took a break (remember we started at 8am!) to go to a friend's first birthday party. It was a great break and we had a lot of fun chatting and eating DELICIOUS food!

After the party it was back to work. We were mostly done, but we had one small section left to sod and then we had to do all of the clean up.

It was a LONG and EXHAUSTING day, but it was so worth it!