Moments to remember

Tonight was my turn to put Audia to bed. (Chris and I take turns every night with the kids.) After Jammies, teeth brushing, potty, and books come songs, then snuggling and telling her good things to dream about. When I sing, I sing three songs. The first is 'Once Upon a Time' from the Broadway musical version of Peter Pan. The second song rotates between a few different favorites including 'La La Lu,' 'Goodnight My Angel' (Billy Joel,) and 'I Have Never Loved Someone' by My Brightest Diamond. The third song is always 'Twinkle twinkle little star.' The past month or so, the second song default has become 'La La Lu.' But tonight I decided to mix it up and sing 'I Have Never Loved Someone' instead. When I started singing it, Audia snuggled in closer to me and I could feel her smiling. And when I got to the part that says "When you grow to be Queen or Clown or Pauper...." She said to me, "I'll never be any of those things, mommy. I'll always be your sweetheart even when I'm an adult." I told her that she can be whatever she wants to be and be my sweetheart at the same time, then finished the song and the rest of bedtime. Moments like that are so fleeting, but the types of moments that make everything else melt away. They are the moments I want to bottle up and relive when we're having a rough day and not getting along so well. We had a very long day of cleaning and errand running....the type of day where too much menial stuff was planned and there was very little quality time spent. The type of day that I try to avoid, but sometimes just have to trudge through even though I'd rather be doing a million other things instead. But it is so refreshing to know that even though today was not filled with fun things and quality family time, my sweet daughter still would rather be my sweetheart for the rest of her life than a Queen. :-)

Now You Are Two.....

Callen on the day he was born

Callen at 1 year

Callen at 2 years



Dear Callen,
Today you are 2! And what an amazing 2 years it has been, getting to know you! You, my son, are the sweetest of sweet boys. You brighten our lives so much with your sweet smiles, your snuggly cuddles, and your amazingly silly personality. You love to poke fun, to tease and trick, to do whatever you can to make us laugh. Lately you've started pointing and saying "Hey!" when someone does something like tickle you. It makes my heart melt every time.

Over the past few weeks, it feels like you have exploded verbally. You are saying so many words now, and stringing 5-6 words together at a time, completing thoughts and sentences! It feels to me like this has just happened over night. You also will repeat what other people say, with a question inflection in your voice like you are verifying that what you heard was correct. You understand so much!

You are still (and will always be, I am sure,) OBSESSED with wheels. You LOVE vehicles of all shapes and sizes, but the bigger the better it seems these days. We switched your car seat to be forward facing a few months ago, due to your height, and you love being able to see forward! Any time you see a bus, you'll tell me, "Mama! A Bus!" and if you see a big semi or any sort of out-of-the-ordinary vehicle (a garbage truck, construction vehicles, etc) you let out a loud, "Wooowwww!" that 9 times out of 10 makes me jump.

Another thing you love to do is play with water! Whenever daddy gets home from work, you want to stand on a chair and play at the sink while he makes dinner. You also love baths, showers, the lake, and the water tables that we have here and the one at grandma and grandpa's house.

Other favorite things of yours are the mall (many mornings when we get up you ask, "Mall day?"), play kitchens (you could pretend cook for hours!), looking at photos of nails on my phone (you frequently want to sit in my lap and look through my instagram pics of nail art) and Fievel.

But your most favorite thing is your sister. You love and look up to your sister in a way that makes this mommy's heart melt into a puddle on the floor. Sure, you have moments where you get tired of her directing your play, or times where you don't want to share, but you always want to know where she is and what she's doing. You also always want to get one of anything you might get from me or daddy, be it a snack or a drink or a dessert...whatever...for Audia. I know you don't know it yet, but you are so, so, so lucky to have such an amazingly patient and loving big sister. Audia loves you so much, Callen. She is always looking out for you, and worrying about you, and frequentlygoes out of her way to make sure that you are happy and having fun.

Personality-wise you are, these days, much more shy than your sister has ever been. You like the people that you know, and you do warm up eventually to people that you sense are "safe," but it always takes a little while for you to warm up to even the people you see regularly. You are very considerate, it seems....either that or you really see the benefit of having a clean play space. I frequently see you picking up toys and putting them away (in the right places!) all on your own! Mommy loves this....please keep it up and try to teach your sister to do the same ;-) You also love to bring people things of theirs if you see they are without them. You are constantly bringing daddy and me our phones or our beverages.

You fill our lives with such love, such light, and so many smiles. It sounds corny but you really do complete our family and make it whole. I feel like there is a perfect balance among the four of us; it is not always apparent or in it's best form, but it is there more often than not. I love you so very much, and I am so proud of you, and so excited to see what you will do, my handsome TWO year old!

Love,
Mommy

The best of friends

The friendship developing between Audia and Callen is something that I feel so very grateful to be able to witness. Since the day Chris and I decided we wanted to have a second child, I've been worried about how it would affect Audia and how the two siblings would get along. I know plenty of people who either do not get along with their siblings, or for whom it took YEARS before they started getting along. I am not naive enough to believe that Audia and Cal will always be such close friends; all relationships wax and wane, and there are of course moments where one or the other of them wants nothing to do with their sibling. But overall, I really don't think they could be any luckier to have one-another. From the day Callen was born, Audia has been right there, wanting to help keep him happy, play with him, snuggle him, and love on him. And as Callen gets older and more independent, he turns more and more to his sister for play and assistance and hugs and loves. If Audia is upset about something, Cal is right there to give her a hug. Audia will give Callen half of her cookie, or snack, or whatever she has that he wants, usually without even thinking twice about it. And pretty much every time we go for a ride anywhere in the car, they can be found holding hands. It melts my heart every. single. time. I can only hope that their relationship will continue to blossom in such an incredibly sweet way, and that no matter where life takes them, they will always find their way to one-another.

Halloween 2012

As the kids grow older, the holidays get more and more fun. This year for Halloween Audia decided that she wanted to be Iron Man. Well, first she decided on the Hulk but then changed her mind to Iron Man when finding a Hulk costume in her size proved to be difficult (they do exist, they were just sold out everywhere we went.) I was a little surprised that she didn't go with Spiderman but I wasn't going to push the issue. And she still does L-O-V-E Spidey. This is really the last year that we got to decide what Callen would be, so I decided to go the oh-so-cute route. I found a super cute Lion costume at Target, and you can't tell me that he isn't the cutest lion you ever saw. Because I will hear none of it!

The weekend prior to Halloween, we went to Ghouls and Goblins at the Arboretum with my parents, and it proved to be a hit yet again. Audia kept running up to all of the decorations and saying "take my picture with him, mom!"

Halloween night we went to the mall closest to our house for Mall-o-ween so that Callen could go trick-or-treating indoors (aka safely) and then stopped by a family friend's house to see her new kitten. Last stop (but not least!) was to go to N,D, A,M, and A's house so that the men could take the girls trick-or-treating and us ladies stayed home with the babies to hang out and pass out candy. It was a very fun halloween for all of us!

Mourning the little things

I have written and re-written an opening to this blog entry about a dozen times now and nothing seems to flow properly. I really don't know how to lead into what I want to say, so I'm just going to jump in all abrupt-like and drive my inner-linguist a little bit crazy.

There are little things that Callen does that, because he is my second-born and I now actually know how fleeting stages and phases are, I really find myself mourning, even before he's done doing them. When Audia was a baby I felt like I was always looking forward to the next thing, but with Cal I feel like I am a little more present, and as a result, a little more aware and emotional over the passing of stages and of the fact that my baby is no longer that. He's a toddler, and after toddler comes preschooler and after preschooler is a kid and after a kid is a teen and after that, good lord, the kids are moving out and entering adulthood and WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?! Audia is only four, and Cal only 15.5 months, and I am already feeling the panic and sadness and excitement of who they will be, where they will go, and what they will do.

But the passing of the little things is really hard this time around. Maybe because we don't know that we'll expand our family any further. There is a good chance that Cal is our last child, and there will be no more babies in our house. Little things like the way that Cal will rest his head on my shoulder, even if only for a second, any time I pick him up out of his carseat. Soon he'll be climbing out of his carseat himself and those wonderful seconds, which add up to wonderful minutes over the course of a week, will be no longer. The way that Audia will snuggle in next to me on the couch for a minute when I sit down, before she gets distracted by something and is up and playing again. How long will that last? When did I stop snuggling with my mom and decide that it wasn't cool to be affectionate? The way Cal wants to hold my hand when we're in the car and he's tired, and how without fail, about a minute after I reach back to let him hold my finger, he's asleep.

The passing of time, the changing of seasons, the transitioning of phases. They happen to everyone and no one can stop any of it. But it still comes as a surprise, and as a heartache, when it happens to you. I think of how fast the past four years, the past 15 months have gone and it feels like tomorrow I'll be writing about how Audia's off to college somewhere and Cal is in High School. *sigh*

Audia's First Day of Preschool 2012

Audia's first week at her new preschool went so amazingly well! Munchkin LOVES her new teacher, Miss Lacey, as well as her FOUR other teachers. She's in a class of 12 kids and they have one main teacher with four other assistant teachers. She is already talking about other friends that she's playing with and is just so, so excited to go to school every day.

This is all very exciting to me for many reasons. Number 1 is that she's skipped a year in preschool; we got her into the four year old class this year even though she is 8 days past the cutoff (it sounds like it wouldn't be a big deal, but most of the preschools we talked to were absolutely unwilling to budge on their cutoff date regardless of Audia's maturity and readiness.) So she is the youngest in her class. We are very hopeful that she will be able to test into and start Kindergarten next year. Number 2 is that she is at a new school, and was very hesitant, scared, and anxious prior to her first day, about not being at the same school she was at last year. Number 3 is that I was painfully shy pretty much from birth well into college and I've always worried that my kids would have the same disposition towards being afraid of talking to/befriending/meeting new people. Audia is proving over and over again that this is absolutely not the case for her and it literally makes me want to shout out and jump for joy. I felt like my shyness was such a huge limitation for me, and to watch her warm up to her new class in mere seconds on the first day, and to say goodbye to me with hardly a glance back, makes me over-the-moon excited for her. And I am so excited to see what this school year holds for her!

Audia's 4th Birthday

Our baby girl turned four on Saturday. FOUR. Growing at the speed of light. We had a party for her at the party room of our housing association; a nice, open space with lots of room for the kids to run around and very little for them to destroy. It was perfect.

Audia picked a Spider-Man theme for her party this year. She is very into Spidey the past few months and there was no question when I asked her what kind of party she wanted to have. We all had a blast.

 

As Audia gets older, it gets harder to keep track of milestones and interests as she seems to change so quickly in some ways while staying the same in others. It is fascinating to watch her try on different hats, so to speak, whilst keeping these core traits that are already so much a part of who she is. Her compassionate, willful, imaginative, outgoing, and silly nature are things that are steady and constant through everything else. She has been more shy with new people or people she hasn't seen in a while lately, but I can't help but feel like it's just a mask she is trying on, as she will say, either to me or to the very person whom she's shying away from "I'm being shy right now." Minutes later, she's over it and playing with that very same person.

As for her interests, obviously there is the Spider-Man obsession. She is also really into Fireman Sam and still really enjoys Yo Gabba Gabba when it comes to TV shows. Peter Pan, The Care Bears Movie, and 101 Dalmations are favorite movies of the moment (or year, as the case may be!) And as far as play, she loves her stuffed animals, care bears, legos, puzzles, and anything that makes music.
She surprises me regularly with her creativity and rhyming capabilities when she makes up songs about anything and everything.

She still adores her brother, although now that he is getting more and more independent, there is more 'arguing' that goes on between the two of them; fighting over toys and chairs and what-not as well as just general screaming at one-another is becoming more a part of day-to-day life. As an only child, I do find myself struggling to understand how they can be fighting one minute and best friends the next, but I love to watch their relationship grow and as long as they're enjoying eachothers company at least half of the time, I feel like we're doing ok there.

Happy, Happy Birthday, my dear sweet Audia. You enrich our lives in so many more ways than you will ever understand (until you have kids of your own!) We love you so, so much!!

Moved!

Whew. What a summer this has been so far! We moved at the beginning of the month into a much bigger place; from a tiny 2-bedroom apartment to a (what seems to us, anyways) ginourmous 3-bedroom townhouse! It is a bit more than double the size of our apartment, and on three levels, so nice and sound-proof when the kids are sleeping, which is FABULOUS! Our place is in a gorgeous area called 'The Preserve' and aptly so! We are surrounded by wooded areas, marshes, and a bazillion walking trails, little private neighborhood-only parks and playgrounds, and the biggest bonus is a 3/4 acre natural sand-bottom, filtered and treated swimming pool! It is basically a lake that they have hooked up a filtration system to. We haven't had a chance to venture over there yet, but it is on our agenda in the near future!

Audia took the move quite a bit harder than I expected it to, but she seems to be settling in a bit now (even though just yesterday she told us that she misses our 'little apartment,') and her behavior/mood seems to gradually be leveling out a bit.

We are still not even close to being totally unpacked, which has been a struggle for me sanity-wise. Unpacking whilst watching two youngins (or at least my two youngins...) is pretty much ridiculous. We moved on Sunday the first, Chris worked Monday and Tuesday, then we had Wednesday (the 4th of July) to get bigger projects done (I painted Callen's room, Chris worked on unpacking the playroom) and then Chris was back at work Thursday. Friday we went up to the cottage to be with his entire immediate family minus Brent's fiance, who was ill (boo!) for the weekend, which means nothing got done that weekend. (Photos from our visit below!) We have been getting things unpacked here and there as time and the children allow but keeping up with dishes and laundry on top of unpacking, as well as having regular playdates to keep Audia from feeling like her life has been totally upheaved, has me beyond exhausted. We did make quite a dent this past weekend but I still feel like we have so much to do....We definitely are not moving again until the kids are old enough to pack and unpack their own stuff!

In other news, Callen is now walking 98% of the time! He's been taking steps solo for a while now but just this past weekend he's started walking full-time. It is so fun to see him cruising around....and a bit scary....dude is fast! It's so fun to see how proud he is of himself when now that he can follow his sister around upright. In no time he'll be chasing her!

Playing with Cousin Courtney



Cuties

That Auntie Heather is funny :-)

Loving the lake

Mustachioed Nephews

Silly Cousins

Lance and Levi

Tubing Extravaganza

Audia's first time tubing

Family shot!

Callen's First Birthday

One year ago today, I went from the most difficult (by a landslide) of my two pregnancies to the easiest (by a landslide) of my two labors and deliveries and gave birth to a big, beautiful baby boy.

Since that day, Callen has enriched our lives in so very many ways. He is proving to be much like his sister in that he always seems to do things his own way, though in many ways he is the Yin to his sister's Yang. Their different personalities really complement each other well, and they have become such great playmates, with a friendship that I feel so blessed to be able to watch blossom.

In the past four weeks, Callen has started saying 'hi' regularly, saying 'bye' when he waves bye-bye, saying 'ma-ma' and 'da-da,' signing 'more,' giving kisses, clapping his hands, dancing, getting off of the couches all by himself, and drinking out of a sippy cup.

This past weekend we had a little birthday party for Cal. Even though he skipped his afternoon nap, there were no meltdowns or tears shed; he was quite a trooper, and really seemed to enjoy himself!

I designed Callen's birthday invite from scratch using some ocean-themed clip art that I purchased. I used the clip art to also make a Happy Birthday banner (which I forgot to photograph. Boo!), a 'first year' banner (seen below), and to give to our favorite bakery for his cake (also seen below). My parents were gracious and let us use their house and beautiful back yard for what will hopefully be the last time (we are moving July 1st into a house that will actually be large enough so we can host our own parties! Yay!)

The invite

Wuollet Bakery does it again!

First year photo banner

Playing with Grandpa Mustache

With Daddy and Grandpa Mustache

With Daddy and Nana

Sissy did a great job of helping Callen open his presents

Showing Callen how his new CAT toy works

Audia loves to help with the clean up....I really hope this trait sticks!

Callen knew how to make 'Danny the Dinosaur' rock right away!

Our happy birthday boy!