Bob

Chris and Will are reading the Jesus Storybook Bible right now. Chris called me in there because they were looking at a page that had pictures of about eight different Bible characters on it and Chris read them to Will once and then he remembered who all of them were. He wanted to ask me if we had looked at them before and that's how he remembered them so well...but we hadn't. Yes, he is that smart! :)

Sometimes when he notices that we are trying to get him to "perform" he starts being silly because he knows we will laugh. Chris said after a few times of him naming all the characters correctly, he went through a few of them again and it went like this: "Peter...Mary...Daniel...Bob." Bob was actually Moses...but it did make us laugh. Good one, buddy!

I will admit that a lot of the things he says right now make me laugh even though they normally wouldn't be funny. There is just something about words that actually make sense coming out of a two-year-old's mouth. At dinner he said, "I dropped my napkin" and Chris and I both laughed. Now what is funny about that?

On Saturday morning, Chris and Will went to get donuts and and then went to the park. They were home before I ever woke up. When I did wake up, Will got very excited and the first thing he said to me was, "Mommy want a donut?" Hilarious! I cannot get it out of my head...I hope I never forget how that sounded.

And I will end with one sweet story. Will woke up crying before I went to bed a few nights ago. He was still half asleep when I went in there, but I patted his back gave him kisses before I left. He asked for "more kisses" three times and after the third time of more kisses, he said, "Thank you!" and rolled over to go to sleep. Sweet boy!

Mother's Day

My first Mother's Day was perfect! We went to church with my parents, then ate lunch with the family (Brandi made us some awesome lasagna), and then I got to come home and take a 2.5 hour nap!! That night, the girls in the family went to see Made of Honor...I loved it! I thought it would be too much like My Best Friend's Wedding...but I liked it better.



Chris took the day off of work on Monday to hang out with Will and me. They took me on a mini shopping spree to Old Navy as part of my Mother's Day present, then we took Will to get some ice cream for the first time, and then we headed out to Legacy Play Village. We had never been to Legacy Play Village and we were all very impressed! Will had a ton of fun and thought he was too cool for school in his rockin sunglasses. It was hilarious!















































Sorry for the picture overload...I had a hard time narrowing it down!

Kiss Me

I did a Valentine's photo shoot of Will today. He was pretty tired when I took these pictures, and I wasn't sure if I got any good ones. I actually thought I would have to redo it sometime, but I was pleasantly surprised!

By the way, I've decided that I'm going to start a part-time photography business. This is not the first time that I've decided this, but this time I'm going to do it. I've had so many excuses. The biggest one is that I don't have the time, but I could use that excuse forever. I'm not going to be able to do much until I can get Will into a Parents' Day Out program...which may be in the summer.

My other big excuse is that I'm not good enough yet. But I've got to start somewhere, right? I love doing it and I would do it for free for everyone if I could. But since there is time involved (and a lot of it on the post processing side), I can't really do that.

Anyway, I just wanted to write that on here so that I can be held accountable to it. I'll keep y'all posted on the progress of it.

Almost Crawling

Will has really been trying to crawl since last week! He will get up on his knees and he can even go forward a little bit. It is tricky to get good pictures of it, because he is easily distracted by the camera.

And he gives up! Relaxing is a little easier.

Baby Food

I just finished up making Will's first batch of sweet potatoes and I am so proud of myself that I just had to come share it with the blog world. I've been wanting to make Will's food instead of buying the jar stuff...but I didn't know if I would really be up to it once the time came.

Last week, I bought some avocados thinking that would be a really easy first food to give Will since it only requires some mashing. Wrong. Avocados turned out to be a pain and Will didn't even like them. Anyway, as I was browsing the organic produce, I noticed that sweet potatoes were 1.29 each and there was one HUGE sweet potato in there. It was at least twice the size of the other sweet potatoes in the bin, so I thought I would go ahead and buy it. It ended up making 20 ounces of pureed sweet potatoes! Gerber sweet potatoes cost 59 cents per jar. There are 2.5 ounces in a jar. That is about 23 cents an ounce. Mine cost about 6 cents an ounce! I saved almost 75%! I'm sure the savings would be even more if I had used normal sweet potatoes, rather than organic.

I'm thinking it was worth the effort considering it will be enough sweet potatoes for at least a month. I just peeled the sweet potato, cut it into chunks, and steamed it. After steaming it, I pureed it in the blender and spooned it into two ice cube trays. Tomorrow, I will transfer the frozen cubes to freezer bags and when Will is ready to eat it, I'll just remove a cube or two from the bag and thaw it. I'm really excited about this now that I've made my first batch and I'm anxious to try some other food! I'm just hoping Will likes sweet potatoes.

On a related note, we gave avocados one last try yesterday. He did better with them, but still didn't seem to like them too much. He would at least get the avocado in his mouth, but he wouldn't swallow and eventually just spit it out. So we moved on to rice cereal today and he did a lot better. I think he even swallowed most of it. Maybe he can try out those sweet potatoes later this week!

To make up for the boring post, I will leave you with this video that I am totally stealing from Trichelle's blog...but it is the cutest thing. Chris and I have watched it over and over again and it is still funny!

Carrots

We aren't really starting solids until Will is 6 months old in a couple of weeks, but he has started reaching for our food while we are eating, which is supposed to be a sign that babies are ready for solids. We were eating stew a few nights ago and Will started smacking his lips like he really wanted to try it. So I thought I could just mash up a carrot and try to give it to him. Chris and I were both curious to see what his reaction to real food would be. I checked the recipe to make sure I didn't put anything too crazy in the stew and then mashed away. This is what happened....



Actually, that isn't all that happened. Chris gave it a try after I had tried a few times and Will ended up gagging himself. Needless to say, we will be waiting a few more weeks to try anything else and it won't be carrots next time. Oh, and I also found out that his first solids should actually be liquid. Lesson learned. :)

Here is another video of Will playing with a new toy Christmas night. It cracks me up when he notices the video camera.

Road Trip

We took Will on his first road trip for Thanksgiving. We went to see my grandparents and the rest of my dad's side of the family in Denver. It's about an 8 hour car ride (it took us longer) and Will did great. I was pretty nervous about how he would do in the car for so long, but he did this most of the way...

We let him drive some of the way to keep him entertained. Don't worry, he could almost see over the steering wheel.

Will got to meet his great grandparents for the first time.

He also got to meet my cousins that are actually closer in age to him than me.

Laurel, Elizabeth, and Will

Alex, Amanda, and Will

Will and Micaela

Alex was so excited to have a boy cousin!

Here is Will's great great grandfather (yes, two greats) seeing Will for the first time. Will slept through the first meeting, but it was really neat!

All five generations. Will, me, my dad (Pop), my dad's dad (Grandpa), and my dad's dad's dad (Pop).

I love this picture of Pop holding Will.

Will with Uncle Kevin and Aunt Aimee (I guess that would be his great uncle and aunt).

Will also got to meet Uncle Brian, Aunt Kathy, and my cousin Jackie....but I did not get pictures of any of them! I think Brian and Kathy were busy chasing around Micaela and we only saw Jackie one night at dinner. My cousin Jessica is in the cousin picture below.

It snowed the first night we were there and this is what it looked like out of our bedroom window when we woke up the first morning.

Casa Bonita is a place that I loved going to when I was a kid, so I wanted to take Chris and Will there. The whole family went one night and we all had a blast (at least all of us kids did). They have a huge waterfall in the middle of the restaurant that divers dive off of and they have fun little skits that they do while you're eating dinner. There's also a scary cave that you can walk through. It still scared me, of course. Little kids kept jumping out at me. Chris thought it was pretty funny.

The tower at Casa Bonita.

Us with my cousins (minus Micaela) at Casa Bonita. The waterfall was in the background, but you can't see it. I'm bummed that this picture came out blurry.

Our little family standing in front of the waterfall at Casa Bonita.

This is my cousin, Amanda. She is 5 and has quite the personality. She looooves Will and Chris too, for that matter. I have a hilarious video of her singing a song about Chris that I will put on here, if I can ever figure that out. We have a lot of pictures of her because she just loved playing with "Baby Will"...she said so many funny things while we were there. She kept getting in Will's face to kiss, hug, and talk to him. At one point, she got right up to his face and very enthusiastically said, "Hi Baby Will! I'm your family!" One day, I was sitting in the room we were staying in, quietly feeding Will and she busts into the room and asks, "What are you doing?" I told her I was feeding Will and she said, "I can't believe it! I remember when my mom did that, and it was soooo disgusting!"

Will's first Thanksgiving.

We went up to the mountains one day to see Kevin and Aimee's house and Pop's new apartment that they added on to their house.

You can't really tell that we're in the mountains in this picture, but it was really cold and we didn't want to take Will too far away from the house.

Will was sleeping in the car when this picture was taken.

The last night we were there, we celebrated Pop's 94th birthday!

We also did lots of relaxing while were there....

Will got to lay around in bed with his daddy.

Chris even let Will borrow his Tempurpedic eye mask.

Will took a few naps on Pop.

All in all, I think Will had a pretty good time.