Happy Birthday Graham!

Well, I can hardly believe it, but my baby is 1! What a fun little boy he is. He has more and more of a personality every day. He loves to eat, and much to my great joy, he is eating table food. He loves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which I am still trying to get Nate to eat. He loves cheerios and graham crackers (of course.) He is starting to walk, and he can sometimes walk across the room, but is still fairly unstable on his feet. Crawling is his preferred mode of transportation. He has a mouth full of teeth. Today he has 9 that have broken through, with one coming in the next few days, and two more molars in the coming weeks. (Which means that he will have cut 6 teeth in a month's time.) He loves to dance all day long. His favorite toy that he got for his birthday is the one that he can just keep on pressing the button to make it play the song over and over again to dance dance dance. He is a little monkey and loves to climb the stairs and open my cabinets. He has learned to slide down the stairs on his belly, which is a little frightening to me. He still is not so great at turning around at the top of stairs, so it's still a chore to watch him.

But every day I am amazed at how much I love this little boy. How much I love to play and cuddle with him. How much I just love to be near him. So happy birthday little boy! Let's hope this next year is just as wonderful as the last one. As it turns out, Graham must not care for chocolate cake. We tried a few times, and he didn't really like it any time.

Best Friends

Graham found this little kitty a month ago or so, and he loves it so much. Grammy gave it to Nate years ago, and it was loved very much back then too. It has a little meow sound that it used to make when you squeezed it. Then it started to sound like a cat that was hit by a car. Now it has been reduced to a low buzzing noise. It is almost quiet enough for church. Whenever Graham finds this cat lying around it is in his hand all over the house for hours afterwards.

Brothers

Oh what fun it is to have a brother that you can wrestle with.

And sometimes they are even great buddies!

Thankful

So among all of my many other blessings, this year I am also thankful that Graham has not learned how to climb yet.

A Happy Thanksgiving

Well, we had a good Thanksgiving over here. We spent Thanksgiving with Jesse's family. I always feel bad when we don't have it with my parents. Growing up we didn't have family close by, and there were a ton of us, so we always just had Thanksgiving with our little family. As a result, as kids move away, my parent's Thanksgiving is smaller and smaller. This year I am the only kid in the area, so even if we did go over, it would have been a sad small little gathering. Anyway, it had been 3 year since we had spend Thanksgiving with the Markhams, so I thought we were due. Plus, there had been a turducken ordered. That's right, a turkey stuffed with a chicken and duck. It was actually really good, but hard to tell the meats apart.
We spent the afternoon with the family, and the only downside was that Graham would not take a nap, but he was a trooper none the less.
The big news is that he was taking a lot more steps yesterday. He has taken a few steps here and there in the past, but yesterday he was taking 4 steps together. He still is quite wobbly, and often just head dives to his target, but he has started taking steps. So that's exciting.
Today, despite the fact that I am sick as a dog, I went shopping at 5am. Jana came to pick me up, and we hit toys r us, which was way more crowded than I thought it would be. Then we went to Target to pick up a few more things. I didn't really get that much stuff, since I am waiting for Jesse to be able to come to do Nate's shopping, but I did get some 50% off deals. I agree with Jana that door buster sales on Black Friday are best for people buying big ticket items, not me with my, oh, it's $15, not $30. We did wait in long long lines at both places, but we didn't see any fights much to our great disappointment.
So now it is over. We all sit here, most of us a little sick. Jesse finally got his birthday present of basketball shoes today, so now he is going to head to the church with Nate to play a little ball. Graham and I will stay here and rock the Einstein.

prayer Time

So, Nate has gone through these phases of praying. He did it for a long time, repeating what we said, and he loved it. He also went through a phase where no matter what we said, what he said was "thank you for Nate." But then he stopped. He didn't want to say any prayers ever. He would listen most of the time, but he didn't want to participate. But then the other day he started again. This time around he can say them by himself. They don't include much, and tonight it was about how he had to go to church and be quiet and eat goldfish and juice, but he is excited to say them alone these days. It's nice, it makes me feel like maybe I did something right. So there's my little guy, I'm so proud of him that he is so happy to say prayers.

He's just so cute

So, Nate is nowhere close to being potty trained. We hit the weekend, and I never want to do something like that on the weekend, so it kind of stalled. But then today I put some underwear back on him, and he cried and cried for a while. (Of course, he was kind of in trouble at the time, so that contributed to it.) Finally I sat and talked to him, and pointed out that it didn't hurt, and it wasn't scary, and he stopped crying. Then I think he kind of felt liberated, and he's been dancing around all day now. And he's just so cute. He's so cute in his little monkey underwear, sitting there with no pants on. When he's grown up, he'll hate me for putting this on the internet, but hey, at least there are no pictures. Anyway, so I'm prepared to do it for the long haul this time. The only problem is that I have trouble with the whole, stay home and don't go anywhere thing, so it's going to take longer. Already this week I'm going to be at my mom's house tomorrow, so he'll only get morning practice in. Then we have somewhere we need to go on THursday afternoon, so that'll pause things. Part of me feels like I have plans on Friday too, but maybe that's just because I feel like I always have plans. But we're going to go out an rent Kung Fu Panda and maybe another movie and just sit and watch movies and hopefully sit on the potty the entire time. Then maybe when he has an accident, he'll be in the right place. Oh the joys of parenting.