Halloween at the Office

This afternoon we went trick or treating at Tony's office!

I was excited to have another excuse to put Charlie in his Halloween costume.  Come on...isn't he the cutest little monkey you have ever seen?! 

 
Every time we have tried his costume on it has been a HUGE fight--  Charlie would scream and try to tear off his head piece.  However this time, as I was putting his head piece on, he was very intrigued because his candy bucket fell over.  I was able to get it on without him paying attention!  He didn't try to pull it off once.  It was awesome.

We had such a great time!  It was so fun to see Charlie holding Tony's hand, picking up one little piece of candy at a time.  

 What happened to the traditional pumpkin candy buckets?

Hope everyone has a fun & safe Halloween weekend!

Charlie turns 1

This past weekend was spent celebrating Charlie's 1st birthday! I honestly can't believe a whole year has come and gone. It has been the fastest year of my life.

We had plans to visit a local pumpkin patch on his birthday, but we had to cancel due to rain. We stayed home, opened presents and had a special spaghetti and meatball dinner (one of his favorites and very messy).

Charlie was in desperate need for some "boy" toys and that's exactly what he got!  From trucks to dinosaurs, this house is now crawling with boy stuff. 

I wouldn't say he understood the idea of opening presents, but I think he had a good time.  Tony and I did!

We had bought a new bubble bath toy and wanted to use it that night. A messy dinner would be the perfect entrance into the tub...

A before shot

During

Have you ever seen someone so happy?!

and After

There were noodles in every place imaginable!
He had the time of his life!

Sunday we invited a few friends over for cake and ice cream.  

He had a great time digging into his cake!

He pushed his cake off the high chair, but I guess he wasn't finished with it after all!

Happy BIRTHDAY Charlie!!!

The Finished Project & an ER Trip

Remember the big yard project I had mentioned before?  Well, yesterday was the day we had set aside to do it!

Before

After 

Doesn't it look good?!  We are so happy with how it turned out.  This was our first big yard project together and we both had no idea what we were doing.  We spent a lot of time researching plants, shopping, sketching up designs, etc to get this all planned out.  This area is quite large so we had to do a big project to make it look proportioned.  

This house didn't have gutters when we bought it.  That resulted in rain practically making a mote up against the house.  We now have gutters, but had to lay a ton of dirt to level it out and a lot more dirt to raise it up from the house.  This way we'll avoid water sitting up against the house.  40 bags of dirt later and the first step was finally complete! Tony did this on Friday night while I chased Charlie all around.  He wanted to be eating, sitting and playing in everything.


 Friday night we had a bit of drama which resulted in Tony getting 2 1/2 hours of sleep and me getting the long stretch of 3 hours.  I'll write about that later.  Needless to say, we started our big day a bit differently than we had hoped, but it had to get done that day!

This project wouldn't have been possible without our old home teacher...he let us borrow his truck Friday and Saturday so we could haul everything we needed.  Not only that, but he came with 3 of his kids to help for a couple hours on Saturday.  We are overwhelmed with gratitude for them.  I thanked him for bringing his kids and he said, "I want my kids to know how to work."  They were all under the age of twelve, but helped dig holes, measure and played with Charlie so we could be busy.  It was a great parenting lesson for us to watch this dad teach his kids.

We spent weeks getting ready for this day:  40 bags of dirt, 42 bags of red rubber mulch, 3 bags of compost, 1 bag of lime pellets, 5 bags of sand, 12 small cobblestone blocks, 10 big cobblestone blocks, 4 mardi gras abelias, 3 knock out rosebushes, 3 japanese holly shrubs, 2 mums, 2 pots, garden fabric, 1 otto luyken english laurel, 1 dwarf burning bush... I do not want to be in a Lowe's or Garden Store any time soon!

Potted red mums that should blossom soon!

Mardi gras abelia--will remain green in the winter and flower spring-fall

 Back: Japanese holly shrubs-- will be green all year.

Front: Pink knockout rose bushes-- they will look like sticks in the winter

 Left: otto luyken english laurel-- will grow a couple feet wider and bloom white flowers in Spring.

Right: dwarf burning bush--will grow taller & wider, leaves change color all year.

At 8:30 PM we were finished. 

I'm so glad we did it!

Ok, so in short, here is what happened Friday night....Charlie woke up 3 times.  Each time he was coughing and scratchy, but the third time he was barely able to breathe.  We called the clinic and they suggested we take him in the the emergency room.  We got there at 10:50.  Waited 2 hours in the lobby.  Got checked in.  Waited 1 1/2 hours in our "room" which consisted of the hallway.  Luckily there was a random hospital bed sitting out so we had a place to sit.  X-rays.  Waited another 1 1/2 hours.  Doctor came, was extremely vague, said we waited so long because he "couldn't find us since we weren't in a room." Five hours later (3 AM) we left the hospital, feeling extremely confused, but happy his x-rays looked ok.  We were both very upset about the whole experience with the hospital.  Went home, got a couple hours of sleep before our yard project began.  Went to speak to a pharmacist about the drugs we were prescribed since we were questioning the doctor in the first place.  Pharmacist was wonderful, put Charlie's prescription on "critical" so we could get them asap.  He told us the doctor had prescribed a lethal amount of medicine for Charlie.  He figured everything out and got us what we needed.  We are so thankful for a good pharmacist!  Tony is going to the hospital next week to talk to someone about all of this. 

I'm happy to say Charlie is feeling better today!

Outdoor Playing

We have been spending a lot of time outside, mostly in the front yard.  Charlie LOVES the front yard.  He gets to see people walking their dogs, cars drive by and pick up the little wood chips that seem to be everywhere.  He also loves the garage...maybe it's a boy thing?

I'm always amazed at the things he notices on the ground.  The tiniest pieces of everything! 

Little legs!

I think all this time outside is making him sleep better.  He has gone to bed before 7:30 PM and woken up at 8:15!
Just woken up from a long night's sleep.....

I just had to post this picture.  I love his bedhead.

Take a little time

I'm learning I have to take time to do something for myself.  When I don't, I turn into a complete NUTJOB.  It's true--just ask my husband :)

Charlie is sleeping.

I'm baking.  Snickerdoodles.

Belting my vocal chords to this....


Take some time to get to know yourself.

Yesterday.

Yesterday I tried to get a lot done, but ended up only making more of a mess.  You know when you start something, finish half way, get distracted, start something else, etc....then you end up with half finished projects everywhere and it's more of a disaster than when you started!  That's what happened.

I started with laundry.  I had the clean clothes on our bed and started folding towels and shirts.  Charlie was pulling on my pant legs wanted to be up on the bed.  I put him on the bed and he unfolded everything I had done...Oh well, I can always refold it and he loves being buried under piles of clothes.  That turned into dress up...

He was very serious in this little get up until he would look in the full length mirror and start laughing.  We had a good time.

I'm starting to realize that Charlie is sick of his toys (good thing he has a birthday coming up!)  However, if you put his stuff in a new place they seem brand new for a few minutes. I started putting his toys and a few snacks in the kitchen cabinet and it was like Christmas!

He was playing well enough that I decided to get dinner ready.  We had several errands to run as a family and I wanted everything to be as close to finished as possible.  I was trying out a new recipe and pretty preoccupied when I heard Charlie start screaming from the pantry and lots of little crashing noises.

He had pulled on the bag of popcorn and the little kernals came crashing onto the floor scattering EVERYWHERE!  He was trying to get away but had his ankle stuck in the strap of a shopping bag.  Poor kid was stuck but trying to crawl away.  He was traumatized.  We sat on the kitchen floor and he sobbed into my shoulder.  He would gain composure, look over to the spilt corn and start sobbing all over again. 
He usually loves to take a picture on my lap so I grabbed the camera and tried to get him to smile....

He obviously wasn't over the corn incident just yet.

He tried to help me clean up, but was so upset about the whole thing he would cry every time he looked at the corn.  Oh the drama!

After that we went to get daddy from work.  We picked him up & went to the garden center to start our process of buying things we need for this weekend.  After that we went to the mall to return a dress I had bought two days before, but when I went to wear it the zipper split.  Luckily they gave me my money back, but now I'm looking all over again for something to wear for our family pictures...

Because we were out shopping and it was getting late, we stopped at Subway to get dinner (dinner was still a ways to go because of the corn mess)
Flash forward to today: Tony is home sick with either food poisoning or the stomach flu.  I'm hoping it was the subway so it's not something contagious!