Damian's Happy Birthday!

I considered posting this in one week, exactly one entire month since Damian's actual birthday.  It would only be appropriate since that's about how long things take around here.  But I suppose 3 1/2 weeks is a good enough representation of my procrastination.  So...

HAPPY 2ND BIRTHDAY DAMIAN!!!

Damian turned two on March 24th.  The week before that, we decided to "fwy" to Utah one last time before we have to pay for a seat for Damian and spent a week with my family.  While we were there, we had a pre-birthday party with my family and Marty's sister Marie and her husband Ian.  Marie and Ian gave him a cute ball, which is totally Damian's bread-and-butter.  And my family gave him a Buzz action figure, which can "fwy".  He looks very possessive, doesn't he?

So we returned from Utah on Tuesday the 22nd, so I was obviously not prepared to have a party on his actual birthday two days later.  Instead, we just celebrated as a family.  It's tradition in our family to go out for a birthday dinner, and while Marty and I would have preferred a nice, real restaurant (at least the food at a real restaurant, not the prices), we thought Damian would probably prefer McDonald's.  And he did!!!  We walked in the door, showed him the Happy Meal toys, and told him he was getting one, and it was truly instant happiness.  Then, as we were picking up our food, we mentioned that we were celebrating Damian's birthday, and the worker was all excited and offered to give Damian a free ice cream cone.  All my mom-fibers begged me to protest, but it was his birthday, after all.  So Damian ate his free ice cream for dinner.  And surprisingly, he also ate most of his fries (occasionally dipped in the ice cream), cheeseburger, and apple juice too.  And he absolutely adores his Superman toy, which can also "fwy".

We then made a stop at Goodwill!  Our favorite place to buy toys!  We found a cute little airplane-looking riding toy with Tigger on it, which Damian fell in love with.  Then we came home and discovered, to Damian's elation and my irritation, that it makes all kind of noise when you put batteries in!  (Maybe I can convince him it's "broken" when the batteries run out.)  But he loves to "fwy" on it when he's watching movies, or when he's eating, like in this picture. 

Anyway, one week later, on March 31st, we had a Toy Story party and invited a bunch of Damian's friends.  I have to brag for a minute.  First, the invitation that I created:

I don't know about you, but I think it turned out freakin' AWESOME!!!  I'm very proud of it.  Second, since there weren't really going to be any games since most of the attendees were toddlers, I wanted there to be something Toy Story themed besides just decorations.  So, I got creative with the food.  We had a "Toy Story Potluck" featuring:

• Woody's Best Darn Mac & Cheese in the West
• Jessie's Rootin' Tootin' Fruit
• Buzz's Chips & Queso Con Salsa (Spanish mode!)
• Rex's Mean Green Drinking Thing, and
• Slinky's Wiener Dogs

And finally, the cake!  I've never ever in my life attempted anything beyond a 9x13 inch cake served straight out of the pan, so this cake, while not incredibly impressive, was quite the accomplishment for me!

It's supposed to be Buzz's spaceship, if you couldn't tell.  :-)  Anyway, the party itself was lots of fun.  We love having an excuse to get together with our friends, whom we absolutely love.  And although it might have been a little overwhelming for Damian (mostly just because our little apartment was CROWDED), I think he had fun too.  We had a great time celebrating our adorable, fun Damian, and we love him so so SO much!!!



SDC: Mr. Fix-It

I have a lamp that sits on the dresser next to my bed.  It lights my late-night scripture reading, novel writing, novel reading, and all the other things I do when I should be sleeping.  This is a desperately important lamp.  A few weeks ago, the switch stopped switching.  So I replaced it with another lamp that we don't use as often.  Easy enough.

But Marty decided that he could fix it, and we can always use another lamp.  I mean, it's March in Seattle, where the sun don't shine until at least June-ish.  So one Sunday morning, while I was sleeping off my late-night escapades, Marty began repairs on the lamp, with the help of his assistant, Mr. Damian.

Damian has always been fascinated by tools, like any respectable male, so he was all over this project.  If you look closely, you can see the little screwdriver he was using to fix the lamp.  So.  Dang.  Cute.

The boys had success with the lamp, and I was extremely impressed, proud, and happy to see it functioning again.  But, nevertheless, it has been demoted to the position near our piano.  It failed me, and I'm holding a grudge.  Okay, in reality, it just works better at the piano than the other one did.  But still.

SDC: My Teddy Is A Football

It's been awhile.  Again.  And it is definitely not for a lack of pictures to share.  Damian has been so much fun to watch as he gets older, and I think we have the camera out now more than we did when he was born.  Okay, maybe not quite.  But close!

Here is the first installment in the "So Dang Cute!" series (SDC).

First, I have to admit that I stay up way too late sometimes, usually working on my novel (which is SOOO close to being DONE!!!)  But that also means that I have a hard time waking up in the morning when I hear Damian.  Fortunately, this kid loves his crib.  He jumps around and throws everything he can reach on the floor and sings his own original songs and just lounges around.  Sometimes, though, we will let him go to bed with, oh, say, a football for entertainment purposes in the morning.  On this particular morning, he was having so much fun cuddling his football that he didn't even get up when Marty came to get him. 

After this, I wasn't so worried about the high heels fetish anymore.  As long as he likes the football too, I think we can steer him in the right direction.

Oh Yeah. Valentine's Day.

Valentine's Day was last week!  I've been meaning to post about it since BEFORE the actual holiday because that's when we did most of our celebrating.  Marty scored free tickets to the Pacific Northwest Ballet's dress rehearsal of "Cinderella."  Ballet is not my favorite thing in the world, but I absolutely love dance and theatre in general, so it still gets me excited.  When I got downtown to pick up Marty, he surprised me with a THREE POUND box of chocolates!!!  Yeah, see the picture? 

There were two trays completely full of delicious chocolate.  He actually got it for free from one of the residents at his condos, but that just makes the deal even sweeter.  (Pun intended.  Yes, I am funny.)  On the actual day of Valentine's Day, we camped out at home to avoid the crowds.  Actually, I guess we went to Albertson's.  It was deserted.  So romantic, huh?  :-)  We chose to go to dinner on the Saturday after Valentine's.  It was Italian food and there was no wait.  That's what I call romantic. 

Anyway, since we're talking about Valentine's Day, I also wanted to brag a little.  While we were in St. George with Marty's parents for Christmas, his mom helped me to create a Valentine's Day decoration.  It's a gourd that I burned, dremeled, and stained.  She does gourds ten times more beautiful than this all the time, and I was so excited to learn how to do it from a true master.  And I think it turned out pretty good. 

I love it so much that I might leave this Valentine's Day decoration up way beyond February.  It works for St. Patrick's Day, right?

We Heart Sugar Cookies

We have a ward Family Valentine's Dance to go to tonight, and I volunteered to bring some heart-shaped sugar cookies.  When I started on them yesterday, it quickly became a group effort.  Apparently I've never learned how to roll out cookie dough, so Marty had to teach me.  And Damian can smell sugar from a mile away, so he was eager to "help", aka, help eat the cookies at every stage of the process.


Rolling out the dough



Cookie cutter



Sampling the dough

NO clue where he got that idea.  :-)

So, tangent, whenever my mom made cookies, she always gave each of us kids a little ball of dough to eat, which we LOVED.  But if we tried to sneak any more, we got in trouble.  In fact, I got in trouble this past Christmas for taking extra dough when we made sugar cookies at my mom's house!  But I think she was just kidding for old times' sake...  :-)  So now that I'm a grown-up, that's the main reason why I bake.  So I can eat all the dough I want.  And so far, it looks like I'm passing this psychological problem on to Damian.  As we were rolling out the dough, I was like, "Look, you can eat this!"  After that first taste, he kept taking more, even out of the dough that had already been cut into cookie shapes.  But I just laughed.  So basically, if we ever have more kids, I'll have to make a quadruple batch of dough if I want to end up with any baked cookies.

Frosting a cookie (after he'd already eaten half of it)

And survey says...

Looks like he hates it, huh?  But this is the face I got when I asked him to smile.  He's so photogenic!  He actually loved the cookie, which became very obvious when he finished the cookie, asked for more, and sprawled out on the floor sobbing after I told him no.  I should have taken a picture of that!  But overall, he loved all of it.  We've got a baker on our hands!  Or maybe just a sugarholic.  We can blame that one on me too.



Big Shoes To Fill

Lately, Damian absolutely loves shoes.  In fact, he was sitting on my lap when I started typing this, but he just walked away saying, "Shoe?  Shoe?"  He likes his own shoes just fine, but he's been having fun trying on other people's shoes lately.  In fact, I just heard Marty say, "No, those are Mommy and Daddy's shoes.  Let's go find your shoes."  This whole thing started out okay, trying on Daddy's shoes.  That's normal, wanting to be a big man like Daddy, right?

Then, he moved on to Mommy's shoes.  But they look like they could be guy shoes, so we didn't worry about it.

But then he moved on to Mommy's more feminine shoes.  And I must say, I think he walks in them better than I do.

Up until this point, we chalked it up to curiosity, or wanting to be like Mommy and Daddy.  However, a little later in the day...

I know it's kind of hard to see in this picture, but these shoes belong to his little friend Abby.  They are pink with high heels.  And this is one of several poses that he did for me, and this is probably the least girly of them all (but somehow those ones didn't make it onto my camera).  And then, when it was time to go home, he put these shoes on again and totally intended to walk out the door with them.  Under no circumstances would he trade for his own boy shoes.  Now, I have to wonder, was it a mistake to get him a doll for his birthday last year?  This year, we'll get him a nice manly football.  :-)

Take a Hike. Or Two.

I was looking through my photos from our trip to Utah and realized that I never posted these pictures from the hiking we did with Marty's family.  There were two separate hikes we did, both on the same day.  That's how it goes with Marty's family!  I'm always exhausted by the end of the day!

So the first hike was in Snow Canyon.  There's this cool little slot that I'm sure people pass over all the time because it looks like nothing, but it has petroglyphs from ancient inhabitants of the area.  It's pretty narrow, as you can see from the picture.  We're practically touching both walls of the slot.

On the way back to the car, Damian got his first try at hiking.  In the past we've always just carried him, but he was restless, so Grandpa Dave helped him along.



Here's all of us hikers.  Isn't it beautiful?  And this is in December!

After this first hike, we jumped in the car and drove to our next hike, to see some more petroglyphs just outside of Ivins.  This was a longer hike, and Damian decided to snooze through most of it.  But this looks super comfy, right?

So if you've been wondering what petroglyphs look like, your curiosity is about to be satisfied.  I forgot to take a picture of my favorite one, which looked unmistakeably like an alien. I think aliens used to visit the Indians back in the day, which would explain the spaceship in this picture.



Later in the day, we went to Olive Garden for dinner, where Damian threw the tantrum of a lifetime, and then fell asleep in my arms.  I guess we wore him out!  Only Marty's family could fit enough fun into one day to make my toddler zonk out in the middle of a restaurant at 7:30 in the evening!  But we definitely loved it!

The Potty Chair

Damian has recently become fascinated by the toilet.  When he started asking us to let him sit on the toilent, pulling his pants and diaper off as he insisted, we decided to get him a potty chair.  He still has no idea what he's supposed to do when he sits on the potty chair, but he sure loves sitting there.  Every hour on the hour (or at least it seems that frequent), he asks, "Poo-poo?"  So here is a picture of where we've been spending the majority of our time lately. 

Hopefully it won't be long before he figures out what the potty chair is really for, because I'm getting tired of spending my days in the bathroom for no good reason.  But it sure is cute!  :-)

Three Christmases - One Short of Filmdom

This year we were able to spend two weeks in Utah during the holidays.  We spent one week in St. George with Marty's family, and one week with my family.  We had real Christmas with Marty's family, then we had a second Christmas with my family.  Since we didn't want to pack up the stuff we got for Damian, we left it all here at home and had a third Christmas just yesterday.  Here are some of the highlights from the festivities.

On Christmas Eve at the McFaddens, we did a live nativity, and Damian was assigned to be a shepherd boy.  That lasted for all of five seconds, and those five seconds weren't even during the nativity.  But he was adorable!

I think his favorite part was riding the sheep.  Ride 'em cowboy!  Or sheepboy, I guess.

For Christmas with the Reynolds, I wanted to pretend like it was really Christmas, and I got upset when everyone just started coming downstairs like it was any other day.  I made all the kids go back upstairs at least for the photo op.  As for our strange pose, watch the SNL video called "Surprise Party."  We were "just so freakin' excited!"

I especially like Marty's face.  Don't you? 

And as is cliche, Damian's favorite toy that morning was a box.  I think he wants to be an astronaut when he grows up.  :-)

Our third and final Christmas was here at home, and we actually didn't take very many pictures because somebody (me) didn't take the pictures from the trip off the camera, so we kinda ran out of space on the memory card.  Oh well.  It was actually really nice to have a quiet Christmas all to ourselves.  Here's a little video, right before the camera died. 



I will relieve you of your suspense.  It was a saw to go with his new workbench.  And by new I mean old because we got all his gifts from DI and we only spent maybe $20 total.  We were very proud of ourselves because we like to give gifts and it's hard to keep it cheap.  And it was $20 well spent because he LOVES his tools and workbench.

Even with three Christmases, it seems like the season was too short.  We had so much fun with our Christmases, and it was such a blessing to spend this special time with family for the first time in three years.  There is no better place to be when we celebrate the birth of Christ, the one who made it possible for us to be with our families forever.

New Favorite Movie

"I didn't want to do this but you leave me no choice. Here comes the smolder..."