Book Review: "Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang"

Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang (Chelsea Handler)

Possibly more offensive and vulgar than her other book, Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea, but I still loved it :) Hilarious and witty, I just think she's really funny. I'd recommend it as an easy & entertaining read, especially if you're a fan of hers!

The Mama Bed

The other night, we put Jake to bed, then Brian hopped in the shower (the bathroom is right next to Jake's room, so you can hear when the water starts running) A few minutes later, Jake started to call for me, I walk in & ask him what he needs & this is the conversation that then took place:

Jake: Daddy in shower?
Me: Yep, daddy's taking a shower.
Jake: *packs up all of his stuff, including his 2 stuffed animals, pillow and blanket, then stands up with a huge smile on his face* Ok, I go to mama's bed now!

What can I say, he's a smart kid....he knows I'm weak! It was like he was in there, just waiting for the water to come on so that he could try to make the great escape into the mama bed. (and it's always the mama bed....you ask him who sleeps there, he always says mama....he must think that daddy has to sleep on the couch with Gracie or something)

Here he is, one month old, having weaseled his way beside me in bed after nursing one morning :) Look at that little smirk that he has already!! Like, "ahhh yeah....they fell for it, I'm in their bed!"

Favorite Foto Friday: Cute

For this favorite foto selection, I decided to dig back through some of the first pictures we took of Jake, since I wasn't doing much blogging then, I probably haven't posted them before. I have this first picture in a frame in his room, these have always been some favorites...he just looks so tiny! (he's about a week old):

Leaving my baby....

Ok, so maybe he's not a baby anymore, but it's not making it any easier for me to leave him for the first time. Yes, the first time ever...I know that might seem weird to some people that he's over 2 years old and I've never left him overnight, but to be honest, I've never had a reason to. I haven't had anywhere to go that's required me leaving him overnight!

That changes next week, I get to go to a conference for work in San Francisco. I'm SO excited to go, it's my first time going to California and I'm very excited to spend some time with my fun co-workers and explore a new city. But I will be very sad to leave Jake behind for 4 days, though I know he's going to have a ton of fun having "Man Week" with daddy.

I think it's just another example of working mothers guilt...I love having a balance of work/home, but it's hard sometimes. It's hard when I leave my building for lunch and I see other moms taking their kids to Story Hour at the library or hanging out in the plaza with the carousel just across from my building. It's hard walking in the door at 5:30 and trying to get dinner on the table, clean up dishes, pack lunches for the next day and spend that limited time with Jake before it's bedtime.

I want to take advantage of every minute that I have with him when I'm not at work, while also keeping my sanity at home by trying to have a reasonably clean house and not go crazy with laundry and the never ending work that comes with a house. Brian commented the other day how he's excited that summer is almost here, but he also hates the fact that it means more time spent mowing the lawn & doing other yard work, which means less time spent with Jake. The good news is, Jake has all of the tools required to help out in the yard this year, so we can put him to work & spend quality time together :)

But the truth is, even though sometimes I get stressed or sad about these things, I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm lucky to have found a job I like, I'm lucky that we have a wonderful daycare for Jake that we all love and I'm lucky that Brian & I are both on the same page when it comes to really making the most of the time we do have together. Sure, things will always come up....it seems like weekends fill up too quickly and trying to get stuff done around the house is one endless project after another....but there is time in between all of that and we take advantage of it as much as we can. He's only this little once, so if what makes him happy is going to the park every night or going to the zoo every other weekend, then we're happy to help him out :)

Book Review: Kids books!

While I love reading my own books, I definitely read more kids books in a week than my own, so I figured why not review some of those? Some of the favorites in our house are the classics (Goodnight Moon, Guess How Much I Love You, I Love You Through and Through, etc....) but for this post, I'll list some of the books that I hadn't heard of until we received them as gifts.

I don't have lists or pictures of some of the more popular ones, because they're just little ones that I pick up in the dollar bins at Target (LOVE those bins!) They often have Sesame Street board books, that are themed with counting, colors, shapes, etc....Jake LOVES them.

Here are the favorites in our house:





The Barnyard Dance - Sandra Boynton
My Big Truck Book -Richard Priddy
If Animals Kissed Like We Kiss Goodnight - Ann Whitford Paul
If Kisses Were Colors - Janet Lawler
On the Night You Were Born - Nancy Tillman
Hippos Go Berserk! - Sandra Boynton
You're All My Favorites - Sam McBratney

Now THIS is great weather!

I am the first to admit that I'm a whiner when it comes to the weather....I enjoy fall the most and I like a little bit of snow around Christmastime, but other than that, I hate extreme weather. I hate freezing at the bus stop. I can't stand to break a sweat, so I really despise heat waves in the middle of summer. And you know what else is annoying? Getting bypassed by this little season called "spring", which is exactly what was happening here in the burgh recently! Oh sure, mother nature....I just love going from 30 degrees to 85 degrees in the course of 48 hours....super fun!

Fortunately, mother nature seemed to hear my whiny pleas to bring back spring because this past weekend was perfect. In the mid-60's, sunny and not humid....ahhhhhhhh. Look how pretty everything is now that it's blooming:



We went to the zoo Saturday afternoon....we've gone to the zoo dozens of times and out of all those visits, never once has Jake even looked in the general direction of the gift shop. But for some reason during this trip, he decided to veer into the shop and announce "I go shopping!" We let him look around at the merchandise, figuring that the allure of looking and not buying would soon wear off, but then I turned around and saw him hoisting a PPG Zoo sippy cup with elephants on it up on the counter and saying "I buy this now". We had a good time once we finally got him to leave his shopping expedition....I felt his pain, I know what it's like to leave a store empty-handed *sigh*


On Sunday, we put together his new Sand & Water table that was a Christmas gift from Aunt Missa, Uncle Dennis & Ben....it was a big hit!!



Gracie finally got her hair cut and feels like a new woman...she had some extra pep in her step and even took time out of her busy napping schedule to join us outside for a bit.

The Great Outdoors

Sorry for this old post, but I tried last week to upload the video with no luck, so I just now got it to work...thanks a lot, blogger!

When we were visiting Nana & PopPop, we went to a park called Jacobsburg (very fitting, right?) :) As most of you are probably aware, I'm not an outdoors-y kind of gal. I'm more of a "sit in the air-conditioning and not get sunburned or attacked by bugs" kind of gal. But-as I'm slowly learning, having a child gives you a different perspective on things and I'm now happy to partake in some activities that I normally would have laughed at.

Here are some pics of all of us enjoying the trails at Jacobsburg, followed by a video of Jake learning to skip stones across the stream with PopPop.

Happy Easter!

We kicked off Easter week by dyeing eggs last weekend....I can't say it was a success, because there were tears involved ("no, we can't put the stickers on yet, the eggs aren't dry....no, we can't throw the eggs, they will break...please don't touch Gracie with the dye all over your hands") but he did enjoy the final product :)



We left Friday to go visit Nana & PopPop for the weekend and we were very fortunate to have gorgeous weather for our entire visit. We did a LOT of playing outside, at some nearby playgrounds and in the backyard.



Easter morning rolled around and Jake was up bright & early to begin the egg hunt...nothing like chowing down on some jelly beans at 6am to really start the day out right.



The Easter bunny brought Jake some fun stuff, but the most popular gift was the basketball hoop that Nana & PopPop got him. So popular, in fact, that ever since then, he's been sobbing when it's time to take a nap or go to bed and in between sniffles, he says "No sleep....I play two points!". It is cute and heartbreaking all at the same time.



We went out to dinner that evening and Jake got his money's worth from the buffet....when all was said & done, he had consumed 5 stuffed shells, a pile of carrots and 2 pieces of carrot cake. Here he is enjoying the carrot cake & sharing the wealth with daddy:



The highlight of the Easter dinner was that at one point, everyone was talking & Jake was saying something very softly....I couldn't hear him at first, so I asked him to repeat it and it turns out he was saying "Happy Easter!" (though it came out "happy East-ow", which made it even cuter)



We hope that everyone had a wonderful Easter!!

Favorite Foto Friday: Silly!

Thanks for doing Favorite Foto Friday, Annie...it was fun digging back through old pictures trying to find something to fit the "silly" theme of the week!

This is my BFF Melissa & I at our friend Jen's wedding, busting out some of our "best" dance moves, haha! Other favorite moves include the sprinkler, the lawn mower, the shopping cart....our husbands can normally be found hiding in the corner at weddings, we can't figure out why....

Travel Tips

Am I the only one with the vacation bug?? Considering the fact that we're not going until August and it's only MARCH, that's bad!!

In honor of my itch to go to the beach, I wanted to do a post about beach must-have's and travel tips for toddlers. I feel like my BFF and I spent countless hours last year on the phone before departing trying to figure out what to bring, how much of everything to pack and debating about items and if we would really need them.

To preface, we rented a house for the week and had full intentions of cooking pretty much every meal, which we did stick to (the temptation to go out to eat is lessened greatly with the thought of doing it with 2 toddlers!) I guess this all depends on where you go, but we had been warned that food where we were heading to (Sea Isle City, NJ) was very expensive in local grocery stores, so we made up a menu for all of the days we were going to be there, then made up a grocery list and split it as best we could so that we each bought about half of the food. We included all of the food for dinners, as well as plenty of snacks, breakfast foods, lunches, etc.... A few days before we left, I made Crockpot Salsa Chicken, froze it and brought it along with us; this worked out well because it makes a ton of food, so we had enough for dinner one night and some leftovers for lunch. We brought coolers and packed lunches to eat on the beach everyday.

Must-Haves:

• Portable DVD Player: seriously, this thing was a lifesaver. Jake did great in the car for the first part of the trip...we left at 5:30, so he slept the first 2 hours, then we were able to keep him entertained with books, songs, etc.... Then, we hit massive traffic in Philly and bad things started to happen. Books were thrown, tears were shed....not a pretty sight. Finally, I turned on the magical feature presentation and Elmo's World saved the day. Bliss!

• Rash Guards/Sun Shirts/Whatever you want to call them....it was great not having to worry as much about the sun since he was much more covered than he would have been in just swim shorts.

• Booster Seat: I think this is a good thing to have anyway, but it was very handy on vacation. I'm sure you can rent high chairs in vacation areas, but this thing is pretty compact and we've used it a lot since then.

• Baby Powder: I don't know how it works, but somehow, sprinkling a bit of baby powder on areas where sand is stuck to skin makes it magically brush right away! We kept some in the garage of the house we were staying in and just powdered him up outside, rinsed with a hose and toweled him off....ta-da! The sand disappears much easier than trying to scrape it all off.

• A few bathing suits/swim shorts: We had about 4 pairs of swim shorts for Jake and I was happy to have them...we fell into a pattern of going to the beach all morning, eating lunch on the beach, then heading back to the house around 12:30 for nap time. Most of the time, we would then head back down to the beach after nap, so I needed another pair of shorts to put on him since the others were always still damp (and EWWW, who wants to put damp clothes back on??)

• A beach cart: our house had one that we were able to use and it was wonderful. We hauled so much stuff down to the beach everyday (lunches, toys, 2 toddlers, towels, beach chairs, etc....) that we probably would have had to make more than 1 trip, even with 4 adults. We were able to get most of the stuff into the cart and it even had a handle where you could hang beach chairs....genius!
• 

Travel Tips:

• If you need to use a crib, I would highly suggest doing some research to see if there are any local crib rentals available. This was a lifesaver to us, as we have a small car and those pack & plays take up an obnoxious amount of space. The company that we used offered pick up and drop off service, the cribs were on wheels so we just slid them right into the boys' rooms and ta-da! Just like home, no headache. I think they were around $40 for the week....worth every penny! Just don't forget to bring your own sheets!

• Pack lightly on the toys....maybe it was a bit different because Jake had his buddy Ben there to play with, but aside from a few books, a ball and a truck....we didn't really need much in the way of toys. Same thing for beach toys....a truck, a football and some basics (shovel and bucket) and we were set.

That's all I have for you for now :) We've been working diligently with Jake on his fist-pumping skills, we hope to have them perfected by August.

Until next time, Jersey Shore!

Bikes & Birthdays-Take 2

*for those of you who have googlereader, sorry this showed up twice, I accidentally hit post too soon before I uploaded pics*

My mom celebrated her birthday last week....when we went out to dinner to celebrate, the server made her night by saying "21, right?" :)

We went to Washpa yesterday to see GG for her birthday and as a bonus, Uncle Nate was on spring break, so we got to see him too. It was Jake's lucky day, Nate had brought his fish home:



My parents bought a tricycle for Jake to keep at their house, which is nice because they live on a quiet cul-de-sac, with a flat stretch of road right in front of their house, so Jake loved zipping up & down the street on his new ride:



At one point, he got off of the bike and said to it, "Bike, I carry you" and picked it up and carried it for awhile, it was adorable :)



It was a nice day, so we also played around in the backyard....



Then we went to dinner (Red Robin, woohoo! I am a sucker for anywhere that gives you a free burger on your birthday and bottomless french fries any day!) Jake LOVED his mac & cheese, so much so that he attempted to drink the cheese out of the bottom after he was done:



The server brought out a sundae for my mom's birthday, which she generously shared with Jake....he then went on a bit of a crazy sugar high, started making strange noises and ran around my mom's house when we got home like a crazed man. :)



Happy birthday, GG!!