January Cold

Recovering from our trip to denver has included recovering from colds. Our whole house has been sick. This is Owen's very first cold/cough and it's been unbearable! He is so pitiful with his runny nose and hacky cough. We are very fortunate to have made it almost 18 months without ever dealing with this so i can't complain too much. We took him to the dr on wednesday and she daiagnosed him with the crud. Only in alabama! He's not acting sick other than the congestion, he still moves at lightening speed.

Quick owen milestones update: He is 1.5 years old today. He is getting great about leading us around by the hand and he is learning soooooo much every day. He can put on his own shoes and socks, shirts over the head, and pants on the legs (but can't pull them up or get his arms throug yet). He wants to feed himself all the time now and has no interest in any food if we try to feed it to him. We are definitely entering the terrible twos and the battle of wills early but i think we're all going to make it through just fine. :)

Oh! We opened the store on Tuesday! It's been a slow week as to be expected but the people who stop in all buy and love everything! We are very excited about it and will start advertising when we feel everything is up to par and exactly how we want it. Babies (owen included) cry when they have to leave the store, so that is a great sign of how much fun stuff we have.

Hmmm...kitchen news. We ordered our cabinets earlier this month and they should be in in a couple of weeks. We bought a new dishwasher last night. We still need to get the microwave, sink, and tile for the backsplash then we'll be set. We will only be w/out use of our kitchen for about 2 weeks, the time between the cabinets and the countertop to come in.

Enough of this boring post!

One last thing: Tomorrow will mark 31 weeks in this pregnancy. WHERE is the time going!?! According to our latest updates, baby should weigh around 3.5 lbs and be @ 18 inches long. He/she kicks like a madman/woman all day and all night so I can believe they are getting that big but it's still hard to comprehend. Owen will be a big brother before we know it.

Just wanted to stop in and record a quick Owen update.

We took him to the pediatrician for his 15 month checkup at 16 months. Oops! He is way ahead on his milestones (imitating adults, stacking blocks and putting shapes through holes) and weighs 24 lbs (so lean!) and is 33.5 inches long. He's still a tall one!

Right now he has a phrase "chi-chi-tie" that we are clueless about. He says it all the time and we just can't figure out what he is saying.

He is so happy loving the Christmas trees and Santas (tantas) and Snowmen (noman) that are everywhere. He met Santa last week and was very aprehensive but very brave and didn't shed a tear. Poor Santa, basically every toddler he met screamed at him. This afternoon we're going to the Heart of Dixie Railroad for a ride on the Santa Express so he will get to meet Santa again. Hopefully he will handle it well since it's on one of his favorite things, a train!

It's beginning to look a lot like...summertime

We just returned from a long weekend in New Orleans. It was filled with working, food, and warm weather.

Owen visited the aquarium for the first time. He loved it! There were scuba divers entertaining the crowd during one part. One wrote a message to starbuck- "nice shirt". Owen didn't know what to think of all the fish, turtles, and dinosaurs (actually those were eels but I kind of see the resmblence and know where he's coming from). Uncle Jeremy happened to be in town this weekend so Owen had to impress him with his stair climbing ablities, over, and over, and over. ..

New baby is starting to change his/her waking patterns. He/she is awake and kicking when I wake up in the mornings and throughout the day which is totally opposite of Owen's in utero patterns. He was always up late which stayed true pretty much throughout his first year. New baby is 24 weeks along now and about the size of an ear of corn.

What is up with this warm weather? We are now back in B'ham and were expecting winter to be here but it's even warmer than it was in New Orleans!

Edited to add: New baby is now awake and kicking and it's 11pm. Just like my babies to prove me wrong, as always!

Owenisms

Owen is now 16 months old! Where, oh where does the time go? He's starting to look like such a little boy, there isn't much time before we can't call him a baby anymore. He's already a toddler but it's so hard to let go of our baby!

His favorite words/things right now: dinosaur, christmas tree, santa.

he can make animals sounds (this actually started more around 14 months for clarification): puppy, kitty, dinosaur (rawr!), cow, sheep and the non animal train says choo choo and the bus says beep beep.

he is truly amazing.

We tell him there is a baby in my belly and he will put his head on it and listen. He also loves to give my belly "high fives", which we assume he is directing at his sibling. :)

Right now lots of things are cottage cheese in his eyes, today we were out and somebody walked by with ice cream. owen started yelling "cottage cheese! cottage cheese!" My favorite is the bowl of mush in his goodnight moon book. We read it to him every night and have for a while but only in the last week has he discovered that the mush is actually cottage cheese!

Sad day on the frontier

Ohh noo! The Frontier hotel in Las Vegas was imploded today to make room for a new fancy complex. The place was gross and moldy but starbuck and i loved it! We always made sure to stop by and play the horse racing game and eat at little caesar's every time we were in town. Seriously, as silly as it sounds, we loved that game. It was falling apart and when we would sit there racing each other, once of us would always win, so we came out way ahead. I'm going to go try to figure out what kind of game it was so this post will make more sense....

Edit:: Here it is, our beloved game. Apparently it is called the Derby game by Sigma and is on the verge of extinction itself. Oh woe!

Halfway To Go

Today I am 20 weeks pregnant. My belly finally started to pop out over the weekend. I could actually feel it yesterday, and I'm fairly certain I could see it growing larger before my eyes. Last night he/she was kicking up a storm and starbuck got to see he/she moving around through the belly. It's all starting to seem sooo real now and 2o more weeks is soon!!

We've been talking a lot about how this next baby's personality could possibly be. We were bleseed with a VERY active first baby and we won't know what to do if we have a sleepy baby! Owen's eyes were never closed for long. He had no use for a bouncer or any other "sleepy baby" device. He was never really a "baby" per se. He was alert from day one, and was smiling on cue by 3 weeks. Surely the next baby will have a totally different demeanor? If so, I'm sure the relaxation will be nice. If so, we'll just stay on our toes, we haven't gotten to come down off them since that hot day in july 2006 so I doubt we'll know any difference.

Week in Review

Was quite a busy week.
Last weekend, we went "camping" in a cabin in Mentone. It was so nice to be up and away from it all! Owen had a great time, esp b/c Mimi and Papa came up and he got to entertain. The weekend was filled with good food and lots of relaxing.

Our other big event of the week was signing a lease on a new store. It's going to be a baby/children shop and is really close to the house, just like we like. It was kind of unexpected, we had given up on finding the right spot here but it fell into our laps and everything unfolded perfectly, so we're pretty sure it was all meant to happen. That's the way we wait for most things in our lives to work, if it's too much of a struggle, we move on and wait for the right thing to come along. Sounds cheesy but that's how things work out best for our family. We hope to be opening in the next few weeks so now we're lost in a whirlwind of buying, planning, and utilities.

Have a great weekend!