How are you only 4 months away from turning 2? I’ve honestly been trying not to thing about it, because I forse and nervous breakdown in my future if I dwell on it to long. Not because you will be in the “terrible two” stage, because buddy you’ve already made it miles down that path, but because these past 2 years have flown by. Ugh! I remind myself everyday to soak up what little baby you have left to offer, because pretty soon my baby will be a big boy. Sob.

• As much as I loved and to this day severely miss you being a tiny infant I love the stage you are in right now. You are so much fun. You not only interact with me when we do things together, but you full on play. You actually want me to play with you. I feel like such a cool kid. The cutest boy in class actually wants me to play with him?! So awesome! What if he wants me to sit at his lunch table too? I….would….die!!!!!!

• I love how you are always checking on me. If I’m out of your line of sight you will call out “momma!?!” The inflection in your voice alway has this “i’m just checking to make sure you didn’t get eaten by a dinosaur on the way to the bathroom” sound to it. And on one particularly cute day you stood at the bottom of the stairs and called up to me “Momma?! You okay?” I just about melted into a big ole puddle of mommy goo.
• You love my hairdryer. You carry it around the house. Sometimes you drag it by it’s chord like you are walking a dog.
• You also love my hairbrush. It’s a good thing I kept my old one around, because I often find you’ve relocated the newer one. You love brushing mine, your’s, and daddy’s hair. You just need to work on your gentleness.
• You still drool like a fool. I wish all those dang teeth would just cut through already. I’m tired of the whole bib thing. Plus, I don’t think our electronics can handle the amount of water you drip on them.
• Your dad now has you saying “all right, okay!” all the time. It’s super cute.
• I now have you saying “awww, maaaaan!” all the time. It’s even cuter.
• When someone asks you to sing them a song the only song you sing is Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. You know and sing other songs, but when asked to sing a song, I guess this is the first one that pops in your mind.
• You love having conversations with Siri on my iPhone. It’s quite hilarious some of the things she translates your gibberish into.
• Lots of kids have a song that mommy can sing to them to calm them down when they are scared or hurt….yours is Wheels on the Bus. I have no clue why
• Shrek is currently your favorite movie.
• You figured out how to cross your fingers (your pointer and middle fingers) you can do it on both hands. You are in awe of this magnificent trick you’ve discovered and stare at your fingers constantly when they are crossed. You do it so much now that it has become habit, and from time to time I find you watching tv with your fingers crossed. I don’t even think you notice you are doing it.
• D and T are your favorite letters. It’s possible that you know all the letters, but I’ve never gotten you to sit long enough to test this theory out.
• I showed you how to play hopscotch, and you love it. If you see a square on the ground you immediately start hopping, and saying “opp!”.
• Dude, sometimes your poop stanks so much it burns the nose hairs. Seriously, knock this off. Especially on the days that mommy has a sinus headache.

• We started music class this past month (Music for Aardvarks) and you at first loved it, but the past two classes you have not wanted to go in the room and started whining and running to and out of the door. What’s up with that? I have a feeling it’s because you actually have to sit and be orderly and pay attention. This has shown me that we need to work on your willingness to obey and be patient. Don’t get me wrong you enjoy the class once you get settled it’s just that you think you should be the one directing the flow of the class.

• You love sliding in your socks on the wood floors. It’s like you are a tiny Tom Cruise. You know, the Tom Cruise before he started standing on Oprah’s couch and being all weird and stuff.

This is such a fun, but insane phase that you are in. You are finally playing with me and not around me. We interact, we have fun. I love you little man. You keep us constantly laughing, but you keep us constantly worn out. You are a handful, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. Love you more than life.

- Momma

Down here in the south the leaves have finally begun to change, and due to the past few extremly W-I-N-D-Y days many of those beautiful leaves have sadly made their way down to the ground. But just as much as I love looking a the colorful leaves on the trees; Grayson loves playing in the leaves once they hit the ground. We took him to play in the leaves in a public lot on our street that houses some strange green electrical box…let’s hope it doesn’t give of cancerous waves. *fingers crossed*  Our yard is filled with dog poop in the back (cuz we don’t pick that stuff up), and the front yard simply didn’t have many leaves in it yet.

He loves the bubble mower he got for his birthday and really hasn’t had the opportunity to push it around outdoors much. Indoors, he is constantly pushing it around, and terrorizing the dogs with it. Hehe. I mean, poor puppies.

He can’t quite get the speed up yet to make the bubbles come out on his own, so in steps Daddy. The child loves bubbles so much that as soon as he saw them pop out of the mower he left in hot pursuit of those soapy little floating orbs.

Then he pretty much left the mower all together to go roll around in a giant pile of leaves.

I love how he looks like a tiny lumberjack in that red plaid shirt. Thank you, Target.

It’s like a ball pit, but with leaves.

This one is going in a frame. I love how you can barely see him. He had a blast rolling around in the leaves.

By the way, he has on a cloth diaper in these pics. They tend to bulge out a bit more than sposies. I swear that’s not  3 days worth of poo & pee in his dipe. Although the pic below might look like it.

Have you played in the leaves yet this fall?

 

If these videos of my chipmunk cheeked son doesn’t put a smile on your face then I don’t know what will. There is nothing as sweet and as hilarious as a baby cracking up. Throw some HUGE cheeks on top of that laughter and you’ve got yourself a recipe for the Happies.

I hope your weekend is this full of laughter.

Even though his actual b-day wasn’t for another 5 days, on Saturday August 13th, Gray invited over about 500 of his closest friends under the age of 2 and partied RoBoT style.

This photo is just a glimpse of Gray’s 1 year photo shoot. There are more super cute photos to come. I just need to find the time to edit them.

Since the three of us can barely fit in our house on a day to day basis we thought it best NOT to have his party at our home. Plus, I don’t really care for cleaning. My parents have the perfect house for parties. They have a nice open floor plan that flows, and a dining room that is HUGE, so you can shove a ton of people and wild 1 year olds in there with out people running into to many things.

When I decided on a robot party I found invites that I really liked, but just couldn’t justify paying $50 for something I was going to print out myself. So I drew some inspiration from those pricey invites and designed some myself. What do you think? It was a blast designing them. I have a ton on geeky type fonts now. Looks like I’ll have to find something else to design so I can use them all.

See the binary on the invite? Guess what. If you decode it, it says “Happy Birthday Grayson”. How geeky am I? After the party was over I realized that I should have made a binary banner. How cute would that be? A banner made of zeros and ones that actually means Happy Birthday Grayson. If anyone out there is throwing a robot party please try this banner idea and send me a pic of how it comes out.

I did make a banner using real words.

I’m kinda in love with chevron right now. Trust me, you will notice a trend.

If you put a camera in my hands I take way too many photos. It’s an illness I tell ya. To prevent me from missing special moments during my son’s very 1st birthday party I asked my friend Scott to step in as camera man. He was already going to be there with his little girl and wife. It really helped not trying to be in two places at once.

Since it has been a million plus degrees with a humidity level of 110% here in the south; we decided to keep the food and main party happenings indoors.

We set the food and cake up on the dining room table. Note to self, setting up a food/desert table on a round table is much harder to layout than one would think.

Those two empty silver plates held some of the most delicious bread you will ever lay taste buds on. It’s called Cheddar Bacon Ranch Pulls, but it’s appropriately nicknamed Crack Bread. T-rust me, you’ve got to try this stuff. I will post the recipe soon. Here’s a pic of the bread that I took with my phone.

Did you see that cake? Um yeah. My baby sister, Stephanie, made it for me. She’s been dabbeling in the cake/goodies making game for a few years now so I thought who better to make Gray’s birthday cake than his Aunt Toof. Didn’t she do amazing? She mocked it after a cute little felt robot I found on Etsy. I used paper straws for antennas. As for the tiny banner I used the free printable from TomKat Studio. I changed the font and color of the bunting to match the robot theme a little better.

The head of the robot was Grayson’s smash cake. Just wait until you see the size of this thing next to my kid.

The cupcakes were out-of-the-box chocolate with homemade buttercream icing. YUM! I designed the cupcake toppers and wrappers myself. I kept changing my mind about how I wanted them to look. Up until the week before the party I was tweaking the design constantly. When it comes to graphic design I am never 100% happy with my final product. But what artist is happy with there designs 100% of the time?

See those silver bolts and nuts scattered throughout the table? I picked those up in the dollar section at Target and then spray painted them to look metallic.

I thought about ordering cookies from Etsy, but I was afraid that with this super hot summer the icing would melt and screw all the cookies up while in route to me. I wanted just a few cute cookies with royal icing so I gave it a stab. Thanks to YouTube I learned how to make royal icing and how to ice a cookie with it. Not horrible for my first attempt, but I’m certainly not going into business anytime soon.

In addition to the G’s and gears I also made 1′s, but I just don’t have an up close photo of them.

These little guys were super yummy, but the coloring didn’t come out quite right. I think the cooking spray I used mixed with the blue coloring and turned them a tad green.

 

I also made some little food labels and table tents.

Originally, we were going to have robot cake pops, but my sweet sister not only was making the most awesome robot cake for the party, she was also working full time, and moving that week. When she finally found time to make the cake pops the cake wouldn’t stay together so she had to scrap them. No big deal though. We had left over sucker sticks and some marshmallows, dipping chocolate, and sprinkles…so we improvised.

I kept going back and forth on the whole party hat thing. I just couldn’t find anything out there that I loved, and ended putting the decision off so long that I ran out of time to order anything. So, about 2 days before the party I decided to make him one from paper I had around the house. It came out pretty cute if I do say so myself.

Derek wanted to contribute to the robot party fun and built a robot from boxes and various things we had laying around the house.

Isn’t that precious? He gave the robot a heart.

When I saw Sarah do this for Manny’s 1st birthday I knew I had to do it for Gray’s. I took different faces of Grayson’s and put party hats on them and used them as added decoration and entertainment for the guests.

During Grayson’s 1st year, I took weekly and monthly photos of him. I decided to display the monthly portraits at the party, but was having trouble deciding how. Derek came up with the idea of displaying them on the piano by the gifts. Perfect.

I don’t really have any up close pics of the drink station, but here are a few I cropped in on to show you what we had.

I made Paula Deen’s Homemade Lemonade and it was delish!  I just loooooove homemade lemonade. Unfortunatly, it was the first time I used that drink dispenser and the lemonade poured sooooooo sloooooooowww. Sorry drinkers of lemonade at the party. My bad.

Here’s what the water bottles looked like…

I made some goodie pails for the kiddos to take home. I found the pails in the dollar section at Target, imagine that. I also made a photo book of random happenings from Gray’s 1st year. We asked the guests to write him a little message on a page in the book. I love that everyone signed it. Some of the messages made get a little teary eyed.

It was an amazing day. Our little boy is so loved. Thank you to everyone that came, and thank you for loving our little man. I’ll be back soon with more pics from the party. So stay tuned.

P.S. – Here’s a little video of the party just getting started…

Well, we finally made it through painting the nursery.  Geez, I thought scraping the wall took forever.  This paint job seemed to take twice as long.  You see with Derek currently in Grad School, taking 3…count them 3 classes this semester, on top of his full time job he doesn’t have much spare time right now.  This is why I have made it my responsibility to prepare Grayson’s room before his arrival.   My poor husband already has his hands full with class, work, projects, AND a pregnant wife.  I must admit he does help out from time to time.  I personally think he rather enjoys the time away from his studies, and painting almost seems like fun compared to studying, and working on projects.

Derek’s mom came and helped us paint the room, because we had to prime the room like 57 times…okay more like 2, but it totally felt like 57 coats.  We finished with the room looking like this…BARE!

It took a few test samples to come to a decision, but we finally decided upon a color called Online.  I think it fits our geek lifestyle perfectly. If you didn’t realize the magnitude of our geekiness you can read about it here, here, and here.  I’m sure I left out like a zillion other geek posts, but in an effort not to totally bore you I will not link to those. We purchased samples from Sherwin Williams and thew some test squares up on the wall.

They look a bit bluer in the photo than they do in the room.  The top color is Online, the bottom left is called Uncertain Gray, and the bottom right is Network Gray.  We were uncertain about the Uncertain Gray (hardy har har!), and the Network Gray was just a bit too dark for us.  We wanted something that would give the room some character, but also act as a nice neutral back drop to any art we put on the walls.  I didn’t want a color that was too overwhelming.  I also didn’t want to go with the traditional blue for a boy.  So we decided on a nice gray with a tiny hint of blue.  I absolutely love it!  Oh and don’t worry…since I was the one doing the bulk of the painting, and to protect our little guy in the future we only used No VOC paint from Sherwin Williams called Harmony paint.  The only harmful fumes in this house occur when Derek takes a visit to the porcelain throne.

Since little bit L O V E S going into Gray’s room to smell the outlet, and I now begin to drip with sweat trying to get off the couch; I can use every ounce of fresh cool air I can get my sweaty little skin on.  Oh yeah, I forgot to mention….the windows in this room are painted shut. So no fresh air that way either.  Thank you previous owners!

To prevent Wrigley from furring up the room while I was painting I made a lazer barrier on the door.  Okay, so it was made out of painter’s tape, but it did the job.  She never figured out how to get though. The dog who can break her way out of a steel crate couldn’t figure out how to bust though tape.  Hmmmm.   Instead, she just watched me like this the entire time.  So cute.

First coat on the walls.  One more coat to go!  Whoopie!

Once everything was dry I had a little help with the tape removal.  Did you know dogs that are preoccupied with raccoons that live under your house make an excellent used tape collector?  They do!

Once all the tape was carefully scored and removed the room looked like this.  I had to score the tape on the floor because it had been down there so long.  Typically you remove painters tape when the paint is still tacky, but I didn’t want to tape, un-tape, and re-tape for EVERY SINGLE COAT, ya know!

I think the blueish gray looks great with the brown floors.  I never dreamed those two would complement each other so well, but they really to play nice together.  The green piece of furniture is a buffet that we picked up at our local Pottery Barn Outlet last Christmas and we had been using it for storage in what use to be know as the guest room, but now it has been re-purposed into Grayson’s changing table.

Just slap on a changing pad and a basket for some diapers and other baby booty necessities and voila a changing table for FREE!  I think traditional changing tables are kind of pointless.  You can only use them for so long, and then you have to find some place in your attic to store the dang thing once the kid grows up.  Using a multifunctional piece of furniture like a buffet or a dresser works just fine for me.

What’s your take on the color?  We didn’t intend to name our child GRAYson and then paint his room GRAY.  It just kind of happened.  The crib just arrived too.  Pictures coming of the assembly soon.  Grayson’s grandpa and daddy assemble the crib…it was so sweet.