One year pictures

I took Jaymes' one year pictures today. He's the only one amongst us who is not sick with a cold right now - lucky him! I have not had a cold in years, yuck. These were so fun to take, and some of my favorite that I've ever taken. Thanks, Anne, for the idea to use a brick wall for a background! We just resided our house, and added some brick in the front, and I never would have thought to take pictures in front of it otherwise. Please help me decide which one to hang on our wall, I can't make up my mind!

Mini Vacation

Last weekend we went away for a quick weekend trip. Isabella loves butterflies, so we went to The Butterfly House, which is an indoor butterfly garden with over 800 butterflies from around the world flying all around. I'm actually a tiny bit freaked out by butterflies, so I was hoping I wouldn't have any land on me! Thankfully, I didn't have any land on me, but as soon as we walked in the door, one landed on Isabella that did not want to leave!

It was really neat to see, and quite educational. The highlight of our little trip, though, was the indoor water park at the hotel we stayed at! Monte and Isabella spent quite a bit of time there, as I stayed in the room while Jaymes napped.

This slide was a big hit!

First day of school!

Monte and I dropped Isabella off this morning for her very first day of preschool. Don't let the picture deceive you, she was not very happy! She has been excited about starting preschool up until the last couple of days, she got really nervous. She cried last night and this morning because I couldn't go with her. She was crying a little bit when we left, but as we were leaving I saw her teacher giving her a hug. I felt so bad, and was worried about how she was doing. We really like her teacher, we know her from church, and she's been teaching preschool for 27 years. She had told us last week that we should send a picture of our family with Isabella to keep at school. She also said that if it didn't work out, she would call us to come get her and we would just try again another time. Not long after I got home this morning her teacher called with good news. She said she was doing great, talking up a storm, and adjusting better than most! *Huge sigh of relief* Her teacher wondered if she was in gymnastics because she recognised another little girl, and was playing really well with her. I'm so glad she is in gymnastics so that she knows some other kids. There is also one other little boy in her class that she knows from my Mom's group / Bible Study. I am so thankful that the teacher took time to call and let me know how she is doing! I was nervous for her because she's never done anything like this, except for gymnastics, but I always stay and watch her there. We're sending her 3 days a week instead of the 4 that it is offered - Mon, Tues, Thurs, and it's from 8:00 - 11:30. Jaymes naps almost that whole time, so now I am going to have to adjust to actually having some free time during the day! The possibilities are endless, I think I'm going to try and get as much prep work for supper done that I can do ahead of time, clean, hopefully get back on a workout routine, and maybe I'll have more time to update the blog!

The teacher asked that each child bring their favorite stuffed animal on the first day. She's all about Clifford right now!

Happy birthday, baby boy!

I really cannot believe it's been a year already (on Aug. 12)! I love this little boy to pieces, and I wonder if he gets tired of me kissing him all day long! :) He is a huge Mama's boy, which is new to me, as Isabella has never been much of a Mama's girl, she's all about her daddy. He's always learning new things, and I wonder if he'll be an early talker like Isabella. He's already following in her footsteps, as he says some words, and has been slow in his physical milestones like her (they both didn't start crawling until 9 and a half months, and she didn't start walking until 14 and a half months). He speed crawls all over the place, and is not one bit close to walking. He has said MaMa and DaDa for a long time now (6 months), although of course he had no idea what MaMa and DaDa meant back then, but I'm pretty sure he does now. He also says All Done ("Ahhh Da"), bye bye ("ba ba" while he waves), and no no. I can officially say that his first sentence was "No no Da Da" to Monte last week! I had just told him no no, and I guess he was trying to pass the blame! He loves to imitate, he especially loves to imitate whatever his sister is doing. She loves to act like a puppy, and so you will often times find Jaymes crawling around, panting like a puppy! He and his sister are best buds (I realize that is subject to change at some point!) she is such a good sister to him, and always looking out for him. She is also a huge help to me when it comes to taking care of him. She doesn't like to be away from him, and is always asking me when he's going to get up whenever he is napping. He is still a great sleeper, and is just now finally graduating from baby food to some table food, now that his choking issues are starting to resolve.

He has his 12 month checkup on Friday. He did just get weighed two weeks ago because of his choking/ eating issues, so I do know that he weighs a little over 19 pounds. He's in mostly 6-9 month clothes (shirts and shorts), but wears 12 month for pants, and I'm not sure how long he is, but he seems tall.

We hosted two parties for each of our families this past weekend, along with my brothers wife and their 4 kids staying with us for a few days. It is safe to say that he had a great first birthday, which was farm themed.

Grandma brought a DQ ice cream cake for his party on Saturday, yum!





Digging into the presents.






Awesome fire truck from the grandparents.

I made the cake for his party with my family on Sunday.

Let me at it!

All of my parents' grandkids were here, even my tiny, brand new nephew!

More presents!

Silly cousins, pretending to be flowers.

Enjoying the beautiful day! I decided I love having a kid with a summer birthday!

Enjoying the water park the next day.

Rough Life

Before and After - Jaymes' room

I made the window valance for Jaymes' room a couple of nights ago, which makes his room the first room that is put together and done (except I still need to put some things away in his closet)! We all switched bedrooms, and Jaymes is finally out of our room, and into his own. The room switch didn't seem to affect him at all!

As you will see in the pictures, his room was formerly Isabella's room. She now has a much bigger room, and Jaymes is stuck with the littlest room in the house, but he hasn't complained. :) Here's a few before and after pics, each one shows the same (or close to it) view of the room.

These two are the exact same view, the biggest change is that now there is a window on this wall.

Before

After

Before

After








Before





After

I also finished Jaymes' quilt about a month ago!

I'm not quite sure where to start . . .

I've got a whole summer of posts about the kids that I want to get caught up on, since this seems to be the only place I've been documenting their childhood (I really need to actually write something in their baby books sometime!). But for tonight, I thought I would post a few pictures of one of the new rooms - the family room.

The kids (especially Jaymes) love being able to look out into the backyard. We are so relieved that this project is mostly done. I would NEVER in a million years recommend that anyone with very small children remodel or add on to their house while living in the house. The constant extremely loud noise, the lack of privacy with having three men working in the house all day every day, and most of all, the mess and amount of clean up that I had to do / still have to do, is enough to make me go crazy, I mean really, I almost lost it a few times! Working on the house has consumed all our time, and I feel like we haven't had a very good summer. People warned me that the sheet rock dust was going to be everywhere, and boy was that true. I'm slowly working on it, and things have gotten a lot better, but I'm not exaggerating when I say every single thing in my house needs to be either washed, vacuumed, or dusted. For example, one night I was looking for some pajamas for Jaymes, and the very bottom item of clothing inside his dresser drawer was full of white dust! I still have to wash curtains and vacuum blinds but then I should be finally caught up on that. It sort of felt like we were moving, as I had to pack up everything in several rooms, so I'm slowly bringing boxes back in from the garage and unpacking those.

We definitely would not have been able to do everything without the help of our parents. The kids went to stay with Monte's parents for 6 days while I painted 6 rooms. 6 days!! I had never been away from Jaymes for more than a few hours, then we were apart for 6 days! He is quite the Mama's boy, but I hear he did just fine without me, and got quite attached to Grandma. I was beyond excited to get them back after being away from them for that long. Also, my mom came a couple of different times and stained and varnished all of our woodwork for us, that was a huge help as well!

Even though it was a huge pain to live through, I'm very glad that we did it (but I never want to do it again!), and we have more space now. I'm working on some before and afters, so I'll get those posted soon.

Oh, and can you believe my baby is turning a year old next week?!!