Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Griffin Is 5 Weeks Old!



  • I can not believe how fast time has been flying by! Maybe it's the sleep deprivation or our pretty scheduled days now but how is my baby already 5 weeks old??

  • Right now Griffin is sleeping most nights from 10ish to 2 ish. I'm pretty happy with this stretch because at least now I'm getting a lot of uninterrupted sleep in! He wakes up around 4am and then again around 6am.

  • Griffin's baby bedding and some room decor is now being shipped! I'm soo excited to finally be able to put his room together!! I hadn't before because I felt like I was jinxing things if I ordered it. But, now that he's here safe and sound it's time that I get my rear in gear. I can't wait to show you the finished product but right now here is the sample room from where I ordered it!
The portion of the bed skirt and valance that looks yellowish is actually more lime green. I'm not sure why it's coming out so dull in this picture.

  • Griffin is nursing almost every two hours now. In the mornings he usually takes one really long nap so he isn't eating every two hours then and then in the later evening hours he's super hungry and eats sometimes every hour. I'm thinking that in all he's eating on average every 2 hours.

  • Bobby has been giving Griffin one formula bottle every night with a little bit of cereal in it while I got to bed early. This helps both of us get extra sleep!

  • Griffin now weighs 10 pounds! Bobby got on our household scale last night and weighed with out him and then with him. I was pretty proud of my little chow hound for gaining so nicely!

  • Griffin is about to transition into size one diapers. I am just waiting to run out of newborn size that we got tons of.

  • Griffin is no longer wearing Preemie clothes. He is solidly into mostly newborn sizes and some 0-3 months that run a little small.

  • Because he no long wears preemie sizes that means that I now have a small stack of clothes to put into a "to be given away" box. I'm super sad about this :(.

  • Griffin still loves his Nap Nanny but is starting to really dislike his swing. This is soo weird to me because both my other boys loved theirs. Oh well, to each his own. I think that its time to put it up since it takes up a lot of room and he hardly ever uses it.

  • Griffin is still trying to coo. Its super cute. He doesn't do it all the time, mostly when he's super excited about something or after a hard sneeze. I love it!

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El Destructo (Part 2)

My middle son has made quite a name for himself for being the crazy one of our family. In case you are a new reader (or just under the delusion that Grady is some kind of angel) you can read (or re-read) about some of his crazy shenanigans here and here.

Last Friday I went into Grady's room to get him up from his nap and guess what I found?




I know that its a little hard to tell in these pictures, but he had been jumping so hard and for so long (like since he has had the ability to stand up in his crib) that he finally cracked the wood  at the back right corner and entirely broken one big screw in half! Later that night when Bobby went to take the crib entirely apart to see if he could fix it he showed me how badly it had been damaged. Yikes! It was pretty funny though that Grady still managed to sleep at a totally crazy angle all afternoon.

I'm a little sad, but not totally surprised, that Griffin will not be able to use the same crib that both of his brothers did :(. I really wish that we could somehow fix it, but I know in my heart that I would never be comfortable with my little guy sleeping in something that could potentially be really unsafe.

So for right now our big turkey is sleeping on his crib mattress on the floor. We gave him the option that night of sleeping like a "big boy" or like a "little kid" and sleeping in an extra pack-n-play that we have. He choose to sleep like a "big boy". We must have said a thousand times that he was NOT allowed to get up in the middle of the night. I was really worried that he might try to wander the house while it was dark and hurt himself. I even had Graham leave his door open wider than usual that night to help us listen for him getting up. So far he has not gotten up. I have caught him multiple times trying to get up and play at nap time but never at night. So, so far so good I think!

Since we were pretty unprepared for Grady getting out of his crib we don't have a toddler bed for him yet. I may actually not ever get a toddler bed for him. It's almost time for him to hand over all his nursery furniture to Griffin anyway so we may just go to all "big kid" furniture. Bobby and I decided a long time ago that once our kids were out of cribs we would fork over the extra money and get them good bedroom sets with the intention that we would never have to buy them furniture again. (meaning that they would haul their bedrooms off with them when they leave for college :) Maybe this weekend we will get a chance to head out and start looking for Grady!

Times should be pretty interesting around our house for a while. I never thought that I'd ever be in the position of worrying about a nighttime wandering 3 year old and an up half the night newborn. Aack!! :)

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Blue Angels Adventure

This past Sunday we were able to experience one of the most exciting things ever! We were invited by one of the Dads in Graham's Cub Scout group to attend an air show at one of the local Air Force Base's here in San Antonio. We thought that we were just going to get a tour of all the activities but we were soo wrong!



The gentleman that was giving us the tour is an Air Traffic Controller at Randolph Air Force Base and works up in the above picture. We started our tour at the very top where they actually do the air traffic controlling from. We were only able to stay in there a half of one second before he had to leave. We also were asked to not speak while we were up there. The military takes their jobs pretty serious when it comes to air safety :). After leaving there we went down one floor to the catwalk area. We were also supposed to stay there for only a very short while but we were able to get clearance to stay up there and watch the air show from 5 stories up!! We were honestly flabbergasted by our luck.

We ended up standing right next to the professional film crew and photographer for the Blue Angels!





Our viewpoint. You can see the blue angel airplanes lined up ready to go off to the right.


This is a picture of the C 130 that the blue angel group flies on. It was pretty funny. They call it "Fat Albert". For such a large plane it was able to do some pretty incredible maneuvers!


Fat Albert in flight.





The Blue Angels getting read to take off!



They are able to fly soo close together that many times you can hardly tell if its one plane flying or two!
We all had the BEST time there and were so thankful that we got to spend such a fun day together as a family!








Halloween Fun!

We had so much fun celebrating Halloween this year! We started out with some fun at our church on Saturday night. They had a pumpkin patch, jumpy castles, food, games, candy, and even an ice cream truck!! We had such a great time hanging out with some friends and family.



This year the kids went as Spiderman and a Ninja.


To celebrate the actual night of Halloween we went to my SIL, Melanie's house. We had a blast there too! We started off the evening with pizza and tons of family. The boys got loaded onto the wagon that Bobby pulled with his dads tractor. The boys always love the free ride around the neighborhood! (The parents don't mind it so much either :)
I was super hard pressed to get this child to even look at me the entire night for a picture! :)

I love these two smiling faces so much! They are such good buddies and I can't wait to watch them as they grow into even better friends!

My sweet nephew Carter was the cutest little sailor you ever saw!

Part of the group of kids riding. Can you tel how excited Graham was to get started! He never stopped smiling this big !

My handsome Spiderman! He kept telling me how strong he was because of all the muscles on his costume!


We all had such a great night. We look forward to this time spent with wonderful family every year!

Monday, October 31, 2011

Happy Halloween!



I love Halloween! I really enjoy a good spooky story or movie (nothing too gory or scary though...). I thought that it would be fun today to share some of my own spooky stories with you all and then maybe a local story from around the area that I live. I know that everyone has their own small story of unexplained weirdness that has happened to them. So in honor of the spooky day that it is, here goes!






(Disclaimer - my stories are pretty lame and not all that scary :)

So my first story involves 2 houses that I have lived in. When Graham was a baby we lived with Bobby's parents while we were building a house. It was very very early one morning and Bobby had to go into work really early. I was super worried about him because we had had some really bad flooding in our area and I was waiting up to get a call from him saying that he was able to make it into work safely. While I was waiting I decided to watch the local news on the T.V. that was in our bedroom. I had it on pretty quietly because Graham's crib was in our room too. In the middle of a news report I started to hear a really faint whistling. The whistling grew louder until I could hear a definite melody. I turned down the TV but could still hear it! I was seriously scared because I could not figure out where it was coming from! It was soo early in the morning that Bobby's parents weren't up yet, it wasn't from the TV because I had turned it down, and it could not have been the wind outside because I could hear a melody! It stopped after a while and I pretty soon forgot about it.

Flash forward about 9 months later... Bobby and I had moved into the new house that we had built. Once again, Bobby had already left for work and it was still really dark and early. I had just gotten Graham up to take to daycare and as we were about to leave the house guess what I hear?? You guessed it! It was the same whistling melody that I could hear! I have never run out of a house so fast in my whole life!! To this day I can still hum that melody...




My second story is a little more scary! Bobby and I had moved once again to another house (to get Graham in a different school district) and one night I heard something at our bedroom door. It was maybe midnight and we were sleeping with our door closed. It sounded like maybe Graham needed us and was fumbling to get our door open. I waited a second and wondered why he hadn't come in yet. By this time our dog Crash had started to growl at the door. I was starting to get scared (I'm a super big scardy cat with too big of an imagination) so I nudged Bobby awake and told him to go and open the door for Graham. He went to the door but Graham wasn't there. He walked across the hallway to check on him and he was sound asleep. When Bobby climbed back into bed he told me that I was hearing things and to go back to sleep. (Bobby is the much more reasonable, level-headed person in our relationship :). About 5 seconds later the sound at our bedroom door started up again but this time Bobby could hear it too!! We laid there together listening to it and trying to figure out what the heck was going on. It sound just like someone was pawing or scratching at the door and doorknob. You could hear something tapping or hitting at the knob but tell that it wasn't actually turning the knob. Crash had started up his barking again because he could hear it too. Bobby once again got up and re-looked around again. This time I made him check the whole house and thankfully he still found nothing. We never figured out what was making that sound. I do have to say though that my level headed husband was sufficiently scared enough though that the next night he set up a video camera outside our bedroom door to record all night. I watched the first 15 minutes of it one time before I got bored and stopped. Maybe one day I'll have a free 8 hours (yeah right) to sit and watch the whole thing to see if we caught anything!

See, I told you my stories weren't all that scary or exciting. :)




And now a local one from our area! Incidentally this is where Bobby and I stayed the night we got married!

The Comal Hotel (later renamed the Prince Solms Inn) was built in 1898. It was known to be the most romantic and most luxurious hotel in this area, as it is still today. In the early 1900�s, a young woman and her family came to the hotel to celebrate a special occasion. It was to be the young woman�s wedding day.
On her wedding day, the young woman got dressed into her beautiful wedding dress, draped with layers of lace. She waited for her groom to come so they may be wed in the hotel. She waited and waited, he did not arrive. The young woman began to cry. Her two over-protective brothers decided to ride on horseback in search of their sister�s husband-to-be. They were not going to allow this man to run out on their sister.
As the two brothers followed his trail from town to town, they reached a town to discover he never arrived there and that no one had seen him. The two brothers proceeded back to the hotel to tell their sister they could not locate him and suspect something devastating had happened to him. The young woman went into denial. She told her family that she was not going to leave the hotel and that she was going to wait for him to come so they could be married.
The owners of the hotel offered the young woman a job to stay at the hotel as long as she did chores for her room and board. The young woman agreed to this and stayed at the hotel and later became the innkeeper of the hotel. Sometime in the late 1920�s or early 1930�s, the young woman passed away due to natural causes. This was a terrible tragedy as she had waited over 20 years for her true love to arrive so they could get married and he never came.
In 1935, a young gentleman came through the front doors and proceeded through the hallway of the hotel toward the staircase to the second floor. The new innkeeper, sitting in the parlor, heard the man come in and approached him. As he started to go upstairs, she asked him if she could assist him. He continued up the staircase and said that he was here to see someone.
The innkeeper looked upstairs and, to her amazement, saw a young woman in a wedding dress at the top of the staircase. As the young man reached the top of the stairs, he embraced the young woman, kissed her, and then they both disappeared.
To her astonishment, the innkeeper realized that the woman at the top of the stairs was the young woman who worked here and was the woman waiting for her true love to come all these years. Was this man her true love she was waiting for?...
The innkeeper did not believe what she had seen, so she went out the front door to ask if anyone else saw anything. On the front porch, there were three gentlemen, who were guests of the hotel, talking with each other. She asked them if they saw the young man enter the hotel. One of them said, �Sure, his horse is over by the hitching post.� He pointed to the side of the building and sure enough there was a horse tied to the post.
The innkeeper told the men what she saw. They did not believe her, so they went into the hotel to look for the young man and the young woman in a wedding dress. The men searched every room, every closet, in the basement, and in the attic. There was no sign of either one of them. Where did they go? Who was it? The horse that was tied to the hitching post remained at the hotel for three months. No one ever claimed it�
After this sighting, the ghost of the young woman in a wedding dress has been seen several times since 1935. She has been seen in Sophie�s Suite lying in bed with her wedding dress on. Also, she has been seen upstairs walking around in the hallway. Again, in her wedding dress and smiling in happiness. She has been seen downstairs in the cellar, as recent as 1960.

Has anything scary or creepy ever happened to you? Leave me a comment or maybe a link if you're posting a scary story today!

Friday, October 28, 2011

It Happened Again

It happened again. We lost yet another tree in a small-ish wind storm this morning!



At this rate we will have no trees left at all!! Thankfully it was only one of the branches. Hopefully we can salvage what is left of the tree. My poor hubby just got one more chore added to his honey-do list for this weekend ...

I Need A Lot More Sleep...

Are ya'll ready to laugh with me for a really short blog post?? :)

I posted yesterday that Griffin was 1 month old. HA! He is one month old today...not yesterday. I don't remember my own kid's birthday...

I need a lot more sleep.

So to make up for my mishap :), here are a couple more pictures from his real birthday... (and a couple days thereafter).





This is one of my most favorite pictures of all times. Neither of us looks super great in this picture but I think it speaks a thousand words. We were both just soo glad that our baby was finally here safe and sound.


This is what I came home to! During a small wind storm our tree was ahem damaged.


It missed our house by 2 inches. Swear to God. It missed my MIL's car by 1 inch.


This was Grady's very first time to hold his brother!


Brotherly love!
 Maybe this wasn't such a short post after all! :) Thanks for hanging in there with me. Many more random, forgetful posts to come!

Hope you all have a great weekend!
 
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