Oops...

... I got a little behind on blogging this week!  I feel like I just updated, but it's been almost a week, oops.  I'm trying to remember all that's been going on in the last week.  Well, let's see... Jace and I went to the park about twice per day last week.  Sometimes it was to meet up with friends, othertimes it was just a spur of the moment trip to the park to pass time.  Usually on the days that Tate travels we hit a wall of boredom around 3 pm and realize there are still 5 hours before "bedtime" in our house... so we head out somewhere before dark and that always helps alleviate the stuck-inside-blues.  We've been meeting alot of great moms and munchkins through our meetup group.  I had no idea it would catch on as fast as it has!  We have about 27 members so far, and alot of the moms have become really active in the group and are forming friendships with eachother, which I love to see.

Tate, Jace and I were invited over to a cook out at Eunjee's house on Saturday, she is someone I've met through the meetup group.  We went and enjoyed hanging out with other families, most of whom are also somewhat new to the area.  We had some really delicious food and the kids got absolutely filthy playing in the backyard, which is always fun.  It was nice for Tate to be included in one of our gatherings since he hasn't really had a chance to meet other guys since he's always working and traveling, and there just aren't really the same resources for dads as there are for moms.  I'm looking forward to planning a family cook out at our place sometime in the next month.

The grass in our front yard is starting to get green, I'd say it's about 50% fresh green grass and 50% dead brown grass.  Our backyard is still mostly brown with small patches of green, though.  I can't wait for spring.  We picked up some flowers at Lowe's garden center last week and have some in pots on the front steps.  I was hoping to plant the flowers in the ground out front, but I decided to wait a bit because the weather cooled down a little bit this week and I want to make sure to give them a fighting chance!  We have a water fountain bird feeder out front that wasn't working properly so while Jace napped one day last week I cleaned out the tubing and got it working properly again.  I was pretty excited about that.  It sounds really peaceful and will be the perfect thing to plant all of our new flowers around.  Oh, and we also bought a new lawn mower this week, that was pretty exciting too.  ;)

We spent some time spring cleaning and organizing this weekend.  Our vacuum cleaner hadn't been working properly for months so I finally unscrewed the bottom and took it all apart and realized what the problem was... there was about 10 pounds of long hair strung around the spinning brush that was causing it to no longer rotate.  Umm.. yuck.  Good news is, after cutting all the hair loose, cleaning it up, and replacing the belt it works good as new.  I didn't know our carpet could actually look semi decent... for about a day that is.  Something is always being spilled on it... for example last week we were running out the door late to a meetup and I had just filled up a sippy cup of milk for Jace to drink on the way.  Well, he saw it in my bag and pulled it out, pulled off the lid and spilled the entire cup of soy milk on the carpet.  As if we weren't running late already!  I've cleaned that huge spot 3 times and it still has a different texture than the rest of the carpet, so I guess more extreme measures will have to be taken.  Sigh.  I'm trying to let go of some of my neat freak tendancies since that just doesn't work well with a toddler... You will probably never walk into my house and not find at least one peice of crushed snack on the floor, that's just the way it is.

I also spent alot of time clearing out Jace's closet.  He recently hit a growth spurt and grew 1 1/4 inches overnight.  (We measure him on a chart in his closet to keep track)  It was pretty sad packing up all of his too-small clothing.  I feel like we've done this every couple of months, but this one was especially hard to do.  Most of the clothing in his closet was 12 month stuff... some of the 18 month stuff is getting too small too.  I can't believe it.  I think one of the reasons it was hard this time was also because most of his "big boy" looking clothing started at the 12 month size, and now he's already outgrown most of it.  He has a couple 24 month and 2T shirts and they actually fit him pretty well, we'll just have to get more.  Luckily he hasn't outgrown hardly any of his pants because he still has a mini-butt.  We also had to bump him up a size in diapers... he's wearing size 5s now.  He was soaking through his size 4s almost everynight for two weeks and I was going crazy washing his sheets and pjs constantly, so I was happy to see that switching to size 5s instantly fixed that situation!  No one likes waking up in the morning to a pee stain all the way up his chest, poor kid.

Jace is becoming a little more daring lately, it must be that extra 1 1/4 inches of bravery, haha.  Last week we picked up a power wheels 4-wheeler for him off of craigslist and I thought he might be intimidated by it at first.  Nope, he was into it right away.  He can climb on and off easily and knows how to steer it and make it "go" by pushing the little red button.  Thankfully for Tate and I it's made to go "toddler-speed", very slow.  Which is good so that we don't have to sprint after him to make sure he doesn't drive into the pond.  I think he could actually run there faster than he could drive there.  Perfect!

He's also become more adventerous on playground equiptment.  He climbs up the steps by himself and will walk over bridges, crawl through tunnels, and even go down big slides by himself.  I try to let him explore without hovering over him, but sometimes he gets my heart racing when he gets a little too close to those tall ledges.  I don't think he fully understands the concept of falling from up high, since he never has.  I have no idea who designed most playground equiptment and why they had to make so many wide open ledges, but they should be tortured and killed.  Just kidding!  I'm always running from one ledge to the other just-in-case Mr. Brave decides to make a jump for it.  If he's on a short ledge I let him fall, because I think it helps him become more aware of his surroundings... but I draw the line at about a foot high fall.  He's beginning to learn from these short falls though, so that's good considering he's a climber in all environments.  (As I'm typing this he's climbed onto the gliding chair and is rocking himself and watching his "show" which he now gets to watch 30 mins of per day.  At least he's sitting this time!  He got two time outs this weekend for standing on the furniture so apparently those paid off.)

Last week Jace and I also went to the Fire Museum in North Charleston.  It was interesting, but I think he was a little too young to enjoy most of it.  He isn't that into fire trucks yet, if he were it would have been the perfect place to go.  There were a couple of things he enjoyed though.  There was a tall slide at the top of a steep flight of stairs and he went down that by himself a couple of times thanks to our mom friend Michelle catching him at the bottom while I helped him get to the top safely.  This slide was WAY bigger than any he's seen before.  I was proud of him for doing it.  There was also a fire truck that you get in and it simulates riding to the scene of an accident.  That was pretty fun for the boys.  All in all, it was worth the trip because we got to spend time with Michelle and her boys (one of which is only 3 days older than Jace which is pretty fun to see)... but I don't know that we'll be going back anytime soon.  Jace got to take home a fire hat as we were leaving, and he had a ton of fun playing with that.  The first thing he ran to the next morning was his fire hat.

Your turn mom!  This went on for hours...

This morning we went to our monday Storytime at the library, and it was Dr Suess stories which we love.  Jace is usually one of the youngest kids at Storytime and he has a hard time sitting still, but I continue to bring him anyways.  I can tell he's starting to learn from going... maybe not from the books, but definitely from the songs.   He doesn't usually do the motions that go along with the songs in "class" but he does them at home, so I know he's paying attention to the other kids and what they're doing.  I think he's also learning a little bit about patience and indoor voices.  Now we just need to work on the "sitting still" concept.  I realize it's a little unrealistic to expect most 15 month olds to sit still for 20 minutes of stories... but he has to learn at some point!

After Storytime we headed to Doty park, which is only about a mile from our house, but we didn't know it existed until today.  It's a new park and is very fun for toddler aged kids.  Jace loved trying out the tire swing all by himself, it was so fun to watch him holding on while I pushed him and spun him.  He also was climbing the steps to the slide by himself and sliding down.  My big boy!  Doty park also has a twisty climbing wall that Jace liked being perched on.  He enjoyed sitting on the top and looking around at the world from a that view.

One step down...

He found crawling up to be easier...

Ready to slide down all by himself!

Weee!

Does it get better than this?

Takin' it all in...

Oh, I almost forgot the cutest new thing Jace has learned.  He says "your welcome".  He's been saying a form of "thank you" that only I would understand for quite a while now, but now that he says your welcome it is just the cutest thing ever.  I didn't tell Tate when I first heard Jace say it, but then over the weekend Jace handed something to Tate and Tate said "thank you" to which Jace replied "I welcome".  It's not exactly "your welcome" but it's pretty clear what he's trying to say, and he says "welcome" really clearly.  It's pretty funny considering he doesn't say much, but says that.  Such a polite little boy :)

Speaking of my polite little boy, he's back into a bit of a picky eating stage.  He really only will eat things that are starchy or sweet... like waffles, pancakes, oatmeal, fruit... everything else gets thrown on the floor.  Sigh.  I'm trying to remember that it will pass, just like it has in the past.  He has a 4th molar breaking through, so that could be part of the reason but I feel like I'm constantly rationalizing behavior with the "teething" excuse.  Oh well... we're working on it. 

Alright, I'm sure there are plenty of things I'm forgetting to mention... but I will update again soon with more.  Jace is currently trying to hint it's time to go outside by trying to put my keys in the door to escape... it's his new thing, I took a picture of him doing it this weekend... little stinker!




"is dis how i get owt??"