.V Day VI

We love Valentines Day around here. No matter what we do it always ends up being an extra special and happy day for us. Sorry (this is mostly for our own record), but here is a play by play of our day:

6:45 Air left to work (busy day for him)

7(freaking)o’clock: Ames woke up early and I forced him to stay in bed with me for another 20 minutes until I could no longer contain him

7:30 Feed Ames bananas and oatmeal for breakfast. Pour myself cereal

9:00 Ames stops playing for long enough to eat a snack

9:45 Put the tired boy down for a nap (way earlier than usual)

10:00 Read my scriptures, pass out for 30 minutes, shower and get ready

12:35 Woke Ames up from his nap

12:45 Air pulled up on his lunch break to bring us the car

12:50 Drop Air back off at his office and rush over to Ames’ Dr appt….

1:05 I apparently mis-scheduled Ames’ appointment since they told me it wasn’t scheduled for exactly one month from that day. On Friday March 14th (Weird that his 18 month checkup wouldn’t be until he is 19 months old)

1:10 Feeling pretty annoyed with this fact. Like maybe I’m not the one who made a mistake?

1:15 Stop at home for a quick lunch

1:45 Ames and I went shopping (yay!) and to the pet store (yay!)

3:45 We got home and I gave Ames a Valentines gift:

 

4:15 A lady shows up at our house to buy something I had on kijiji. I was in the middle of changing Ames’ (really sore) bum so I put the naked boy in his crib to answer the door.

5:10 Pick Air up from work and go straight to dinner. Sushi!

 

6:30-8:00 Back at home to play play play giggle giggle giggle:

8:15 Put Ames to bed and we started really cheesy and lame chick-flick that nobody’s ever heard of. I don’t even know what it was called… ?

Who even cares what movie we’re watching when we’re snuggling like this!?? It honestly could have been anything, I wouldn't have minded. I have the cutest valentine in all the land.

Also! Thanks to my Momma for sending us these adorable valentines once again this year! She said she made approx 1 billion valentines for people this year. She is truly the queen of paper crafts. Also quilting... and just sewing in general.

.18 month old little buddy

This Ames of ours has grown and grown and grown. You know, just as all babies do, but it really seems to us like he’s grown at an elevated speed. He is so much bigger and heavier than all the other babies we know around his age... (for the record, he's 97th percentile for ht. (33 3/4") and 75th for wt. (27lbs))

Ames talks and talks all the day long and he repeats anything and everything that he feels like. Some of his favorite phrases right now are “stop eet”, “pweees”, “tank-oo da-da”, “nack?”, "check eet" (meaning he wants to check if the windows are cold by gently placing the back of his hand on the glass)… I could go on. He likes to tell jokes too. He’ll just start jibber-jabbering then yell “funny!” and he throws his head back laughing.

He points out all the animals and their sounds all day. He calls bugs “buggy” for some reason. Whenever we’re outside he looks at the sky for “tweet-tweet’s”, airplanes, and he can always spot the moon somehow. Sometimes we’re out there in the middle of the day and he looks up and yells “MOON!” I chuckle that he thinks he sees the moon, and then I look up and there it is. This kid knows his stuff and I want to know who taught him all of this??

His favorite toys change day by day. He usually rotates around between his current favorites though. His matchbox dinosaur car set, toy hammer, his horse and cow figurines, cars, the balloons left over from Air’s birthday, his play house, an old basketball player figurine we all lovingly call “Pippen”, and my iphone of course.

 

Out of no where one day last month Ames became obsessed with his binki for the first time in his life. I let him have it for a few days because it was so weird to hear him asking for it. I thought it would be a short phase, but here we are, still hearing him ask “beekee?” throughout the day. So weird.

We have had so much fun lately introducing Ames to some of the movies we grew up with. He is a HUGE fan of Lion King, Jungle Book, Lady and the Tramp, “Hop Hop” (Looney Tunes), Oliver and Company, and pretty much anything animal themed. haha

At the end of the day we have jammie time, we brush teeth (he hates brushing his teeth and just cries “all done?” the whole time), we have family kisses, and then it is the simplest thing to put Ames to bed. I take him to his room and rock him while he reaches around my neck and pulls himself real close and falls asleep so fast. He is such a good boy, he sleeps 12 whole hours most every night.

Air’s dad asked what we did to deserve such a good little guy… I really can’t think of anything, but Heavenly Father knew we needed some help, and we have been so blessed by him giving us Ames.

Air and I are constantly talking about how much FUN he is. Life could not be more fun than this time right now. Could it?

.ice on Whyte

We love to tour our city… There’s a lot going on here in Edmonton all the time, no matter what the weather is. Pretty much all winter we haven’t gone to any events because of the cold but we decided to be brave last Saturday and hit up the “Ice on Whyte” festival. Basically just a bunch of ice sculptures and slides made out of ice and food and lots of people. It was fun! But yeah, sooo sooo cooold.

And of course, none of us were really dressed appropriately.

↓↓↓This sculpture is a giant grasshopper chasing a little man with a lawn mower. My favorite one ↓↓↓

↓↓↓This one was Air’s favorite. We called it “bubble head and block head” ↓↓↓

↓↓↓This one you can tell melted a bit with the warmer weather we were having. Her ski poles are bent↓↓↓

↓↓↓They built this enormous mountain out of snow and had a big staircase to the top and about 6(?) ice slides going down. It was amazing, but not as amazing as this video of Tiana going down with Ames↓↓↓

↓↓↓We found a heated tent with a live band (pretty terrible) and hot chocolate (watered down)… so nice haha↓↓↓

We all went to IHOP for dinner afterwards… oh my goodness it was so nice and warm in there! Its crazy how your body changes in the cold. I kept saying that it felt like my jaw was freezing because it was hard to talk and my mouth moved in slow motion. So weird.

.new happenings and etc.

There have been some big new changes in our lives lately that I've failed to mention on the blog. I really should blog more often these days. I'm too aware of the fact that very few people care or read the stuff I write on here… but then I remember that I’m not really just doing this for the readers, but for our family record too. If it weren't for a lot of the posts I've written in the past, those days would probably be erased from my memory today.

And so I write.

1. Air got a new position within his company starting this week. Not a promotion, but a big change. He’ll be working in an office that’s only about 5 minutes from our house so that’s kinda cool. We are excited that he will no longer be on 24/7 phone call watch… this will mean a lot less stress and some regular working hours. Finally.

*****

2. On the day before Air’s birthday he celebrated by getting high. haha… Let me explain this. He had his first colonoscopy that morning and whatever medication they pumped into him definitely made him loopy/high. Ames and I had been in the waiting room for quite a while as they kept telling us that he was slightly inebriated… he finally stumbled out with a huge smile on his face and a glazed over look in his eyes. I knew something wasn’t quite right with the way he was acting so I filmed him as I drove him home. Best decision I ever made. We watched the videos with the family and we all got a lot of laughs, Air doesn’t remember most of this. I’m sharing them with you guys too. I’m sorry if we say anything in here that is TMI about Air’s health etc. Maybe these videos aren’t for everyone? Just a warning

in this last video Air was a little more conscious, but still pretty weird... as you'll see. Also plug your ears if you dont want to hear about blood clots and what-nots

They did find some things with the colonoscopy and are running some tests for us currently. He will also be going in for some minor operations soon. We are really happy that something is finally being done!

*****

3. Aside from the colonoscopy/gastroscopy business, Air was also referred to a dermatologist to check out his moles. They removed three of them (one on his nose) and are running some tests now too… We’ll see how that goes. I honestly couldn’t list to you all of the specialist appointments, medical procedures and everything we’ve got scheduled for Air right now… there really are so many. It’s keeping us extremely busy… but we like it. We are willing to do anything to get Air’s health back.

*****

4. I planned and carried out my first full cub scout meeting this week. It was…. alright? Those boys are pretty wild most nights. Its hard to get some of them to stay still and listen for any amount of time. We have a lot of work to do I guess. The great thing about this calling is how much my Sunday’s at church have changed. I get to go to Relief Society and visit with all of the women again. It’s so weird to see all the new people in our ward who I never even met when I was in primary.

*****

5. My baby is turning 18 months this week and thus will be beginning the full two hour stretch of nursery alone on Sundays. I’m going to write more about Ames in another post, how bout.

*****

6. We got a new camera… A Canon 6D. It’s been our dream for a while and it’s pretty heavenly to finally be using it. All of the pictures from Air’s birthday party were taken with it. I’ve still got to learn more of the buttons and settings, but gosh it’s a beauty!

.30 year old Air

For Air’s 30th birthday we had a big party at our house… we’ve been wanting to have a lot of people over for a while, mostly to see what kind of crowd this house can handle. We invited about 30 people but only had a turn out of 18? Now Air knows who his true friends are, so that’s nice. haha jkjkjkjk

We had SUCH A GOOD TIME. Honestly, we both feel like it couldn’t have gone better in a million years.

  

I made my first pulled pork and I have to brag here because it was DELICIOUS. In fact, all of the food was fantastic! Thanks to Alexis for letting me use her crock pot (mine was too small)! Thanks to Mom-Gusa for the delicious spinach/strawberry salad! Thanks to Chantelle for bringing the fruit bowl! Thanks to Air and Kyle for throwing together my caesar salads when I ran out of time!

We asked for no gifts but some people broke the rules (me included)… We watched Air open them. In this photo he’s holding part of my gift, a hand-held back massager:

And I had the genius idea of putting out some paper and pens for people to write a small note to Aaron about how they met, or something funny they remember about him or whatever they wanted. By popular demand he read them all out and we had a major laugh-fest at all the awesome and hilarious notes these guys wrote.

I scanned them all in so you can read them too.

And then there was cake (and ice cream)

Aaron requested angel food cake again this year… I tried to make it look different from last year’s cake, and I used an awesome lemon glaze topping. Best choice I ever made. (also I hand stamped those little cake toppers… that was fun)

 

I’ve been in major planning mode for the past few weeks with this birthday party… I can’t tell you how happy I am that it went as well as it did. We are just so grateful for all of the wonderful people we know. You guys are all so awesome. But, you know, I truly ESPECIALLY believe that all of us are just so dang lucky to have Aaron in our lives. I mean….. LOOK AT HIM!! He’s a light to everyone he meets, you really can’t help but love him and smile whenever he’s talking.

Air-bear, you are hilarious, intelligent, kind, spiritual, outgoing, hard-working and so much more. There really couldn’t be a better man in the world.

And thanks for taking this one photo of me last night, it’s aiight: