10 months, 11 months, almost one year!

**Disclaimer: I totally started this mid-September and then forgot to finish it!  As of last Wednesday my class is finished and now I can focus on sewing a sparkly blue snow princess dress for a certain little three year old I love- what was I thinking?!**

I have neglected to keep our few followers up to date on the kiddos' growth in the last couple months.  I feel like I put out a post like this every month, asking for forgiveness for my lack of energy and attention to the blog!  School is back in session, I'm taking a graduate credit course to renew my teaching license, and life is just overall crazy like any other day.  As I'm looking into beginning studies toward a master's degree in education or literacy, this one class has me a little frightened for the work it will entail and how I will balance family, work, and continuing my education.  But, I guess we'll take it one step at a time, right?

Look at our little Doodle Bug! 

I cannot tell you how much he amazes us everyday.  With Cailyn we were always waiting for the next milestone, we only had one kiddo to pay attention to.  With Colby, I feel like he reaches milestones and it's unreal.  I think to myself, "When did you learn to do that?" 

Like, climbing into the Cozy Coupe and pretending to drive!

And drinking from a cup- which he apparently taught himself to do whilst taking a bath...ew.  (Don't get any crazy ideas- he basically choked himself doing it, still some refining to happen in that process)

Arrrr, babies!

We are definitely in that "NAKED!!" stage.  You know, the one that lasts until like, forever with boys.

I realize this one's a tub picture so she's supposed to be naked, but I often feel like his big sister will fall under the "NAKED!!" category forever as she was just running around in her birthday suit this morning shaking her bare butt in everyone's faces and singing about poop.  She's classy like that.

But look how beautiful she is, too.  It only took seven different walks and about 50 requests for her to smell the flowers before we got this picture, but I'll take it!

Just chillin', watching some Red Zone with Daddy.

I imagine his thoughts went something like, "What the hell, mom?!  Just wait until I throw all your tampons in the toilet, then we'll see how cute you think I am..."

...but seriously, he is so cute!

This would be one of his favorite places to hang out, watching from the full glass storm door- and trying to shut himself between the doors.  (Also, full disclosure, I totally mistyped shut as sh*t at first and I'm still laughing at myself- I mistyped it the second time, too, hee hee!)

Poor kid, he hated those wings- but the picture had to be attempted.  Success!

Favorite place to sit, bonus points if he gets Cailyn to pull him around like it's a wagon.

Stay tuned for another post soon, October 6th is Colby's first birthday!  I will try not to disappoint and have a post up by tomorrow night with all of his monthly photos so far. 

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Three reasons Summer Vacay Dailies can SHOVE IT!

Three great reasons for me to spend less time blogging and more time snuggling, coloring, swimming, building, movie-watching, dancing, singing, and chillin'.  Dailies were stressing me out, always having to remember to take pictures and upload them into collages.  I wasn't all there in the moment because I was preoccupied.  Sorry to disappoint those of you who follow those posts- they're done.  I'm posting the last ones that I've worked on and then I'm signing off.  The kids are in bed, but I have a marriage to upkeep and being on this computer doesn't aide that.  Enjoy these last collages!

 Saturday July 12

Cailyn's first birthday party with friends- a pirate theme.  It was small, but a success!

 Sunday July 13

Quiet.  Headband decorating as promised. :)

Monday July 14

Beautiful weather = outdoor picnics and time to play in the sand.

 Tuesday July 15

West Marshall played East Marshall in the second round of districts.  So the kids and I decided to check out the outlet mall in Story City beforehand- and that's basically what we found, a whole lotta nothin'.  Trojans lost a heart breaker in the final inning, but it was a great season!

Wednesday July 16

Lunch and climbing at Anson Park in Mtown, followed by grocery shopping in a race car cart- one of the best inventions any grocery store has ever come up with!

Thursday July 17

It was an eat-breakfast-in-your-underwear kind of morning, and we repainted the kids' room with paint purchased from Target.  Yeah, that's right, Target!  They have several different paint colors they're selling now, and this one was perfect for a boy/girl combo room.

Friday July 18

Someone's learning to pedal her new bike on walks with mom and dad!  And, I don't want to toot my own horn- but I make some delicious oven nachos!  If I had a restaurant, oven nachos would be on the appetizer menu, served up right on the cookie sheet. :)

 Saturday July 19

Congratulations to Tyler and Amber Rabey- don't they look fantastic!  Cailyn was so enamored with Amber and her "princess dress", she creeped up on her during the dollar dance to touch it.  Haha.

 Sunday July 20

Baseball banquet complete with a dodge ball game and sewing monster bibs for all these babies being born in our friends' and families' lives.  If you want to try it out go HERE.

 Monday July 21

We finally put our basement back together after the basement leak of 2014, and had a couple drinks and watched Frozen downstairs to celebrate!

 Tuesday July 22

Selfies, smiles, and swimming, oh my!

That's all folks!  I'm sure I'll come up with some new summer blogging scheme next year.  Until then, I'm going to enjoy my last 8 days of vacation before going back to work next Thursday!

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9 months! (And 26 days....)

Although this post is a little late- the picture was actually taken when he turned 9 months old, and I was tossing this kid into the corner of the couch just to keep him from falling off!  He was so quick to pop back up and try to nosedive right off the edge!  Welcome to my life people- the boy is into EVERYTHING.

Do you see what I mean??

This is basically what each and every mealtime looks like.  You betta get yo' hands out the way when you put food in front of this kid.  However, he makes for hilarious photos as such.

This little man was a cruising champ at 9 months old- and even stood up on his own a couple times!  But, he would immediately go right back down to the floor, because even he knew that his crawling skillz were just too speedy to mess with trying to walk.  :)

He has learned how to put ball caps on himself.  Too.  Stinkin'.  Cute.

Like father, like son.

We had Cailyn's 3 year check-up and Colby's 9 month check-up on the same day to knock 'em both out at once.  Cailyn was in the 85th-90th percentile for height and weight, she's always been bigger than other kids her age.  Colby was in the 25th-ish percentile for height and weight. (crickets)  I'm sure he'll just hit a growth spurt later on- although neither Jerod nor I are big and tall in any way, shape, or form.  But it's just so crazy that his sister is so big and he's, seemingly, so small.  Oh well, I guess we'll just have to see what the future holds!

Of course, we love him no matter what size he is, and he's his own person in personality, so why shouldn't he be his own person in size?  The following are some snippets of his 9 month photo shoots (yes, plural- because he may be laid back, but he's also crazy active):

I apologize for this picture being sideways.  I am too lazy to switch it around after already uploading it to this post.

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Summer Vacay Dailies- Halfway there

This post marks the enjoyment of half of our summer vacation!  It is just flying by and I'm beginning to think about all the work I need to do before school starts.  Which would be a lot easier to do if I could get in to my classroom and set stuff up, but I guess B&G is installing a new air conditioner over my tile area which can't be waxed until they're finished.  As Cailyn would say- UGH.  Maybe it's God's way of making sure I don't work away the few weeks I have left with the fam before getting back to the grind.  Here's to another fantastic five weeks!

Saturday July 5

Grandmas, Papas, Aunts, Uncles, and Greats came by to celebrate an early birthday for Cailyn.  What's more satisfying than Pizza Ranch broasted chicken and Dairy Queen ice cream cake??  I suppose getting new running shoes, headband craft kit, new clothes, princess goodies, and your first bike might top the food in this case! 

Sunday July 6

This summer marks our 5 year anniversary, so I made Jerod do something special with me.  My mom and sisters stayed with the kids after the party on Saturday and he and I drove up to Minneapolis to spend some time by ourselves.  Of course we had to stop at IKEA so I could get some things for my classroom and then we hit up a restaurant near our hotel.  They just happened to be showing the UFC pay-per-view, so we stayed for over 3 hours having drinks and watching the fights.  Let me just say that drinks up there are not as cheap as they are in Iowa!  Sunday we watched the Yankees play the Twins at Target Field.  Jerod is a huge Yankees fan and loves Derek Jeter, but I had heard he hadn't really been playing a lot of away games so we were ecstatic to see he was in the lineup!  It was amazing to see the crowd reaction to him in his last season before he retires- the entire stadium cheered when he was announced- louder for him than any Twins player.  Goes to show the legacy he has left in the world of baseball.

Monday July 7

Monday night was a varsity double header and the kids and I decided to walk to the field instead of driving.  We should really do that always next year for home games, it's so close!  (But then again, everything in this small town is.)  Remember the rabbit having babies?  Well, we hadn't seen anything for a couple weeks and then we found this little guy.  We saw him for a couple nights after Monday evening, but there were some cats lurking around....I think they my have nabbed him. :( 

Tuesday July 8

First round of districts for softball was on Tuesday, the girls played a good game, but in the end they just didn't make it happen.  However, Colby loved all the cheers they were doing in the dugout- couldn't stop babbling while they were cheering!  We also FINALLY got the back door painted the same as th,e front door, woohoo!

 Wednesday July 9

This was a chill day, working on the garage again, eating powdered donuts for breakfast, and hanging out at a(nother) baseball game- this time with my former fellow baseball widow, Jamie, and the rest of her clan! 

 Thursday July 10

I got my new personalized planner in the mail!!!!  I spent a little extra on this, but it will last me through December 2015 and it's a perfect fit in the diaper bag and my purse, so I can bring it everywhere.  I love being able to write things down rather than put them in an electronic organizer.  I feel like if I write it down I internalize it better and kind of have a little alarm in my memory when something's coming up.  I tried to get a couple more 9 month pics of Colby, painted a wall in the kids' room (that's all I have time for- one wall a day when I have an hour), went to the final home and regular season game, and watched Cailyn try Sour Patch Kids for the first time.  She was not impressed.

 Friday July 11

Happy Birthday to our sweet baby girl!  Leah got her special cupcakes from Scratch Cupcakery- she certainly knows the way to Cailyn's heart.  :)  We didn't do much this day, except prepare for her Mermaid and Pirate party for Saturday.  When asked what we should eat for lunch, Cailyn said pretzels at Sam's- I swear we eat there at least twice a week in the summer.  The evening was a short one for her as she has been refusing to sleep at nap time lately, but then being a crabby pants the rest of the day.  I told Jerod I think I'm too hard on her sometimes because I don't let her get away with anything, but I just want to be consistent.  He reassured me that it's hard now, but it should pay off later.  I can only hope that's true.

Hope you are enjoying this beautiful weather we're going to be having!

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Summer Vacay Dailies - Cuatro mis amigos

Saturday June 28

The Trojans had the extraordinary opportunity to play at the Waterloo Bucks stadium, and they won the first game!  Which was awesome for them, but meant that we had to find something to do for the next 3 1/2 hours until their second game would start (if it started on time).  We opted to have lunch with Jerod and some of his players and then hit up the mall in Cedar Falls.  It was perfect because Colby slept while we strolled, I got to do some shopping, and Cailyn was able to play on the rides when Colby woke up and ate lunch.  They started the second game but it was stopped during the second inning due to impending monsoon weather!  The drive home was interesting for the first 20 minutes- and by interesting I mean the road was pretty much invisible because it rained so hard.

Sunday June 29

A chill day at home before borrowing a friend's truck to pick up some more drywall and supplies for finishing the rest of our garage project.  Colby is becoming quite the climber, I went to grab a few things out of a tub in the attic and looked down to see him halfway up the ladder!  I had a minor heart attack and tried desperately to hold back the fear in my voice and not startle him while I called for Jerod to come grab him, land alive!!  Also, Cailyn has been in full "selfie" mode lately and I am constantly finding pics she has taken of herself on my Google+ account, such a ham.

Monday June 30

While Jerod got a hair cut the kids and I went to The Ark, a pet shop in Ames, to get an animal fix.  Have you ever had a parrot talk to you?  It's not cute, it's totally creepy- that's the culprit in the top left photo.  My favorite thing to see in the pet shop is the saltwater fish- I would love to have a tank except that would require me to pay for them and upkeep their tank and I'm not committed to that.  It rained ALL DAY on Monday- like, it poured cats and dogs ALL DAY.  There was a river running between ours and our neighbor's house, which is never a good sign for our basement.  We had water leak in again- ugh.  The good news is that we knew to just pull everything back to save the carpet and started ripping out wet carpet pad and sucked the water up right off of the concrete.  Our steamvac was filling up in about 30 seconds flat.  Craziness.  We had some assistance from a good friend of ours and we repaid him with a beer and dinner from a restaurant in town- Lord knows we weren't cooking anything after that fiasco.

Tuesday July 1

Working on the garage, painting pictures bought from the Target dollar bin, attending story time at the library and making paper tambourines, going to the park, and making up rained out baseball games is how we spent our Tuesday.  Easy.  Breezy.

 Wednesday July 2

I have never truly tried to get an actual nice photo of the kids together.  But, Cailyn is going to be 3 and Colby is going to be 9 months so the timing is perfect since I'm taking their milestone pictures anyway.  So we went to the old schoolhouse in town to try some and they were both in moods, but I somehow ended up with a couple great candids.  Thank Heaven for digital cameras!  If I weren't able to take as many photos as possible I would never get a shot!

 Thursday July 3

My mom and a few of my siblings came out for the weekend and traveled with us to an away game at probably the most mosquito-affected site in the conference.  I'm thankful for the cool weather that night, which made it easy to wear long sleeves and pants to protect from those stinky blood suckers.  The boys won a great game to cap off a fun night!

 Friday July 4

Our 4th of July was spent at home with s'mores and sparklers.  There may have been some drinks involved, too.  :)  On this day and everyday I am so thankful for the sacrifices of all the military men and women and their families, that ensure we are able to do these things with our families whenever we want.  Thank you!

 

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