Happy Birthday Aunt GiGi!

While I am notoriously bad about forgetting birthdays, I wanted to wish my wonderful sister-in-law, Gina, an early HAPPY BIRTHDAY! My brother, David, took her on a surprise vacation. I especially wish that I could be there to celebrate!

Memorial Day Weekend

This past weekend we traveled down to Houston to visit the Great Grandparents. It was great to see the Hamby Family and there was definitely no shortage of love and attention for Liam!

Liam's attempts to "help" pack the suitcase. Liam has been doing this ridiculously cute toothy smile lately whenever I am about to take a picture.

Papa Bill

Aunt Debbie B.

Liam and Noni Mary. Liam was eager to see that his "friend" in the mirror had also made the trip down to Houston.

Papa and Noni on one of the rare occasions that Liam would sit still.

Liam and Uncle Paul B. Babies and kids gravitate towards Paul.

Enjoying the swing before the Houston day heats up.

The best seat in the house.

What a wonderful time we had in Houston! We hope to see the Hamby and Boedeker families very soon for a planned trip to the infamous lake house.

Weekend fun

This past weekend started off with both me and Liam feeling cruddy. However, in an attempt to maintain some normalcy we decided to start the weekend by going to the McKinney Arts Walk in downtown McKinney. Local artists from around the area sold their goods around the old town square. And live musical artists played in different areas. We had some awesome coffee at a great coffee house and visited some friends who own a clothing boutique and have renovated this great old Victorian right off the square. We came home and Eric made us a yummy steak dinner.

On Sunday we took Liam swimming for the first time! This past spring has been so unusual weather-wise. Usually by now we are in the 90s. But this year we have had a great and long spring. The downside is that it hadn't been quite warm enough to go to the pool. However, this weekend we hit the low 90s and it was time to break out the swimsuits!

Our pool has a great area for kids with a splash section for the little kids.
Liam wasn't really sure what to think, but he tried to drink the water a few times!

He spent time in his floaty taking it all in. Here he is "sunning himself."

Starting to warm up to the water...

Hmmm. Maybe this isn't so bad.

While for now he is more confident outside of water, in time
I think he will learn to love the pool just like Mom and Dad.

We ended the weekend by watching LOST. Sniff. Sniff. For all you LOSTies it is bittersweet. But now I can move on with my life! I am not sure which show will occupy my time now. Maybe I should put my English degree to some use and read more books. But then again....Have a great week!

The graham cracker thief

It is hard to know at what age you can start to teach your child lessons about life. I think it is safe to assume that until a certain age, any efforts to instill certain values may be futile. But what is that magical age? The age where they know that they should or shouldn't be doing something.

Case in point: Yesterday as I was picking Liam up from daycare, his class was having a snack. His favorite snack. Graham crackers. Because I didn't want to disturb his schedule, I just sat at the table with Liam and his two buddies. Liam demolished his snack pretty quickly. I turned my head to converse with one of the teachers, but upon looking back to Liam, he had another graham cracker.

My first thought is that he had retrieved the cracker from someplace on his body. For anyone who has kids, you know that the folds of a baby's body can be hiding places for the most interesting things. It is not uncommon during bath time to disrobe him to discover a Cheerio between his chin and neck, or a rogue strawberry in his diaper. It briefly crossed my mind that he had taken another kid's graham cracker. But not my child. After all, he is the kid who usually has his snack, his sippy cup, his blanket taken by the more self assured babies.

Upon demolishing the second graham cracker, I caught him red handed. He was trying to take another baby boy's graham cracker right from his hand! I gently, but firmly grabbed his hand, looked him in the eye, and told Liam that it was not his graham cracker and that he was NOT to take it away from the other baby. Liam promptly melted down, at being denied this tasty forbidden treat. I am not sure if it was because I was there or whether this is standard practice, but one of the teachers promptly responded by giving him another graham cracker from the box. Liam greedily took said snack and "went to town."

Because I am a first-time parent, I feel like I sometimes struggle to figure these situations out as I am approached with them. But it begs the question, at what age do you start to teach these lessons? The first lesson being that you can't take something from somebody else just because you want it. Sure I know that this is just a graham cracker, but I also realize that the world is full of people who were never told that they couldn't take something they coveted even though it belonged to someone else.

And the second lesson being that, sometimes the proverbial graham cracker is gone. Finished. And you can't have anymore for now. Dare we indulge our kids to the point where they believe that there is "always more where that came from." As I look around and see what an epidemic childhood obesity has become, I want to raise kids that don't have food issues, but to also realize that just because you can have more, doesn't mean you should.

Any how, I realize the irony of posting about a graham cracker as a metaphor for life lessons, but I also don't want to be one of those parents who never thought to teach any lessons until it was too late.

Caught in the act.

Belated One-Year Pics

One of our good friends, Amy, took one-year pictures of Liam around his birthday. As I have been a lazy blogger lately, I am just now posting them. Here are a few of my favorites!

Snot, snot and more snot...

Similar to last fall, when Eric last did contract work, Liam has spent the majority of his time in daycare being sick. The first week he threw up all over his crib and sheets. The second week he was sent home with a fever. And as many of you know, kids have to remain fever-free for 24 hours being you can return to daycare.

When I dropped off Liam at school this last week and heard several of the teachers and students coughing up something fierce, I knew that the odds of him escaping the week "bug" free would be minimal. Especially when I saw Baby C (I will protect her tiny identity) come up to Liam with a double snotty nose and love on Liam's bottle.

On Saturday morning Liam woke up for the first time with his eye crusted shut. He was frantic, partially because I am sure he was scared. And it the worst feeling as a parent to feel like you can't help your child. I would take every illness in the book if it would spare Liam any grief. So Saturday was all about trying to keep his fever down, his eye gunk-free and his nose minimally runny. By the afternoon, we decided to take him into a weekend walk-in clinic. There we were told that it was not pink eye, but rather a sinus infection that had partially manifested itself in his eye. After receiving some amoxicillan we were on the road to recovery. Or so we thought...

Week three began today with a call from Liam's daycare. Apparently his eye was so swollen that he couldn't even open it. The gunk, which had started to subside, was now making its ugly return. So after an afternoon trip to his regular pediatrician, he was diagnosed with an ear infection AND an eye infection. Sigh. Poor baby is a little doped up on meds these days. He kind of reminds me of that kid that was posted on You Tube after returning home from the dentist. It was a bad sign when (some of you may remember his affinity to look at his reflection in our stainless steel trash can) he kept trying to crawl into the trash can and was making babbling conversation with "that baby" looking back at him. He is now on a different antibiotic, eye drop, allergy medicine and any fever reducer/pain killer that might be needed to help curb his teething.

A picture from this evening.

You should see the other guy.

Mother's Day

I have been delinquent in blogging lately, but life has been pretty busy here. Eric is doing contract work at an architecture firm in the area for the next few weeks so we have been trying to balance both of us being out of the house with Liam being in daycare.

While in some aspects it has been hard to have Liam in daycare, in other ways he is really thriving. He comes home with all these new little skills and mannerisms. I also think that from a social aspect it has been good to have him interact with other babies. And in other news....his first tooth! Which means in addition to the new things he is learning in daycare (like music time and how to dance [unfortunately he seems to have inherited Eric's white man dance genes]) he is now showing more interest in eating solids! When I no longer have to feed him Gerber's baby foods life will be sooo much easier.

The main challenge is having him eat nutritious and wholesome foods and not just the stuff they give kids in schools like pizza, mac and cheese, chicken nuggets, etc. Don't get me wrong, I am not against those foods, and being a working mom means having to make concessions, but I really hope that Liam will eat a lot of the same foods and veggies that Eric and I love. My sister-in-law, Jolyn, is a great example because she gives her kids great things like hummus, bell peppers, fresh fruit and edamame and they seem to love it!

A brief glimpse of his first tooth!

You can see the zoned out look in his eyes while he was watching a Baby Einstein DVD.

Not quite walking, but getting closer.

Now on to Mother's Day! This is my second Mother's Day, but the first year we had just gotten home from the hospital so it seemed like we were still trying to recover as new parents. Those early days of motherhood were sometimes a little overwhelming so we didn't have a big to-do last year.

This year, I awoke to the smell of fresh coffee and waffles, because Eric let me sleep in. What a treat to have belgium waffles with nutella and fresh strawberries! Yum!

Lovely roses courtesy of my boys.

Eric surprised me with a gift certificate and appointment to go have a massage today at a local spa. My neighbor, Joannie, was also the recipient of the same great surprise from her husband, Derek, so off we went! What a treat to have a spa time and catch up with a great girlfriend.

Upon returning home, the boys were all smiles. And so was Mommy!

The best gift of all: Being a mom to this amazing little man and a wife to my wonderful husband!