Our good eater.

My Monday morning blog… almost forgot to do it! (making that extra effort!)

Anyways, I have been taking a lot of pictures lately from my phone of Vince since I always have my phone handy… not the best quality of pictures, but glad I have it to capture these moments!

Vince has been making us laugh so much lately! One of his latest things is saying “uh oh” for everything. He’ll pull a page out of a book and say “uh oh” or drop something on purpose and say “uh oh”. I keep telling him he can’t do things on purpose and say uh oh… but he doesn’t listen!!! I wish I had my camera or phone the other day in our restroom when he took off his shorts and put them on his head and walked around!

I didn’t get that picture… but I managed to get some other good ones this past week. Including this one where he stole my wrap! I can’t have a sandwich in front of him without him stealing it from me. He’s eating a lot more lately. Non-stop eating really. He runs around saying mama… meaning, GIVE ME FOOD and not mommy!!! He’ll go to the pantry and open it and just look around (similar to his mommy and daddy) and go to the refrigerator and try and open it. If anyone was around they would think we don’t feed him! Anyways… here he is eating my wrap and his mac & cheese.

And he is getting a lot better eating on his own. He LOVES cereal. It gives him a chance to practice eating on his own. However, he gets tired of eating it bit by bit and tries to sip the milk… but the way he does it is by sticking his face in the cereal… straight to the point. It makes for a dirty face (notice the cherrio in the 2nd pic on the forehead)!!

Lastly, Vince got a haircut last week…. I counted them up… and this is his 5th haircut!!! Wow… he’s only been around 19 months (today he is 19 months)… didn’t have a haircut for his first 6 months… which means he has one on average every 2.5 months. David usually takes him but I did this time. I was so surprised at how well he did… my little boy is growing up!

Vince the star student, superhero, & builder

Vince started school last week… tear L. Tear on both our parts. He’s still crying when I drop him off, yet today (day 5), he only cried for 1 minute after I left. I know because I wait by the door until he stops crying. Last week, the first couple days Vince cried so hard… and conned me into staying around and playing for awhile. But that did no good as he cried just as hard when I left. The first day it was 45 minutes straight of crying and me calling every couple hours to check on him. We have come along way since. Little crying and one call a day from me J. Maybe this week I’ll go one day where I don’t call. It was really hard last week to see him crying, knowing all he wanted was me. But I have to be the bigger person and do what’s right.. leave my baby to grow. However, I will say that although he doesn’t love school yet, he seems to be doing great once he calms down. He is socializing well with the other kids, eating well, and napping well. The eating part is surprising. At home he refuses almost everything we try and give him. There, he eats everything… sloppy joes, chicken alfredo, French toast! I’m so glad he’s getting introduced to more foods. As far as napping goes, I had to see for myself. One day during my lunch I went over there knowing it was nap time and Vince was asleep. I caught this pic. So precious! He sleeps on a cot with his blankie. I still can’t believe he goes to sleep right when he is supposed to and am glad he is doing well. It’s so hard to let go.



This past weekend we went to Austin for 2 things. 1. For fan appreciation day at UT

and 2. For a party for some of our friends birthdays.

We took Vince to both. He was such a sport hanging out at UT all day. We must have worn him out because he fell asleep on the way to the birthday party around 8pm and slept through it all. It was loud too! Although I like that he slept the whole time, I did kind of want him to wake up because we had him dressed up as Spiderman. Oh yeah, it was a Superhero and Villan party. I’m sad I didn’t get a picture of vince dressed up asleep.

When we got home, Vince and I were hanging around the house and I was reading a magazine, he was playing with toys. When I looked up, I saw this! I grabbed my phone real quick and caught him in action!

More blogs to come in the near future

I realize I’ve let my blog go…. Not writing about our family vacation to Hawaii, Vince’s first days of school… I know, these are important… if only for documenting our lives for my own purposes. I love rereading my blogs and thinking about how I was feeling at the time or what we were doing… if I don’t do this, how will I remember these moments? So I’ll try and make an effort going forward… it’s just so hard to find time between work and dealing with Vince and keeping up the household.

Sooooo.... more blogs to come in the near future... (well, maybe not so near, next week?!?)

Fruit Dance & New Stadium

Vince loves the fruit dance. It's a clip from Sesame Street. He asks me to rewind the song each time it plays... not in so many words. The downside of this clip is you see me dancing too :)

This past Sunday after we got back from Hawaii we went to the Chelsea vs Club America game at the new Cowboy stadium. The stadium is so awesome! I didn't know it was air conditioned! How great is that! I was expecting a hot game but that was a pleasant surprise. We took our little booger Vince with us :). He did moderately well... although he kept trying to sneak beer. He enjoyed watching the humungo tron screen and the ball! I'm just glad I didn't have to buy him a ticket... they follow airplane rules... free until 2.

Speaking of... Vince is almost 18 months old. We go to the doctor on Friday so I'll post his stats then. He looks so skinny now... I think he hasn't gained much weight since his last appointment. Thankfully, he is starting to each more now that he is not drinking too much milk out of the bottle. Now only if he like more than fruits and sweet stuff....

We did go to Hawaii since my last post... lots of fun pictures to post... not ready to do that yet though so this post will have to do!

4TH OF JULY

Water hose fun

My mom just emailed me these pics... it's hot in their house and the air conditioning is getting fixed... so they decided to have fun in the water hose... guess you don't need a bathing suit to have fun... or even a change of clothes... yikes!

Niagara Falls

NIAGARA

David and I have now been married 5 years… 5 years! Wow… time flies. I think time going fast is much better than time going slow. I remember watching the Nick and Jessica show several years ago and they were celebrating their one year anniversary and both made comments on how if felt like much longer than a year. I am glad we are not in that boat… especially since it didn’t work out for them.

So to celebrate, we went on a trip. Where to go, where to go… we knew for a long time we wanted a Vince free weekend (no offense Vince)… but we didn’t know until the day before exactly where we were going. We love Casinos even though we are not huge gamblers. I love beaches, David does not, although he was up to go to one… but flights to all the fun places were packed. Earlier last week I don’t know what got me thinking about Niagara, but once I found they have casinos, I knew that’s where we were going :)… funny how things make up our minds.

It was a great trip and different from the usual Vegas (although Vegas hasn’t been usual for some time now). After reading reviews on several hotels, we decided that we wanted a room overlooking the falls and decided on the Embassy Suites, partially because of the free breakfast and happy hour – albeit it was only 2 drinks each, but also because of the proximity to the falls and the main new casino. Here is the view of the Horseshoe Falls from our room.



We arrived Friday and went to a NICE steak dinner at the restaurant in our hotel, which also overlooked the falls. This was probably the nicest (non-restaurant week) dinner that we have ever had together. Here’s a picture from dinner, although it is not of us because the one of us didn't turn out... but this is from our table. We found out the next morning that our free buffet breakfast was also served out of this room, so we had 3 meals here.


Friday night we headed to where else… the casino! I had a great night playing roulette and David tried his hand at Casino War… you know, that game you played in Elementary school… or at least I did – maybe why I have a fascination for card games (thanks sisters who used to make me play pick up 52).

Saturday was a gloomy and foggy day… a shame because that was our day to see the sites. After our free breakfast, we headed out in the shuttle bus (bc of the rain) to the Maid of the Mist [a boat that goes to the foot of the horseshoe falls]. Everyone gets poncho’s because you get drenched. I only have phone pictures of us on the boat, but we got this one later of another boat heading into the mist..

After Maid of the Mist we hung out at another Casino where I proceeded to lose all the money I won the day before playing Blackjack... then headed back to our hotel and got our rental car because we wanted to go on a jet boat!

Now I really really wanted to do a wet boat tour... which is an open boat that rides the white water rapids and soaks you. David didn't want to do that. Lucky for him, the only one left going out was a domed boat, so you get the same experience without getting soaked. However, it was rainy and cool so I didn't mind horribly. The domed boat is shown below.


Notice our cheesy Niagara Falls sweatshirts. We took of in the morning in shorts and t-shirts, only noticing everyone else had on longsleeves and raincoats... we're from Texas ya'll, we didn't bring those kind of clothes! So we found a sovenier shop that sold cheap sweatshirts and wore those almost the whole trip.

The boat stopped several times so the tour guide could explain what was around us. We saw a couple hydro plants that produced electricity. During the day, 40% of the water from Niagara is directed to these plants to produce electricity, at night 80% is directed there! They told us they could shut off Niagara completely if they wanted to. Because they redirect water here, erosion from the Falls only happens at the speed of 1 foot per year instead of 3-5 feet. David and I kept imagining the Falls erode to several hundred meters away, what it would look like 1000 years from now!


After our boat tour we had a quick dinner and proceeded to the last of the attractions on our list for the day... Behind the Falls and Niagara's Fury. Behind the Falls is just what it soundsl like, you go in a tunnel below the Falls and are behind the water. Here's me behind the Falls.

We also did Niagara's Fury which is a 4D type movie that tells you the history of the falls and squirts water on you... needless to say, we wore ponchos here and on almost all the attractions. It's a wet place...

We didn't see/do half the things to do here. There is an indoor waterpark for kids. Also MarineLand which is an adventure park. We spent only a little bit of time in Clifton Hill, a kind of carnival like street with a lot to do for kids, including Ripley's Believe it or not, Wax Museum's, something like a LegoLand, & several playareas. We would like to bring our family there when Vince and any future kids are older.

One of the only negatives is the drive from Toronto. If you are flying there, you can either go through the US into Buffalo or into Canada through Toronto. Niagara is only about 70 miles from Toronto, yet the traffic was horrible! It took us 2 hours to get there, probably 1.5 to get back.

All in all, a great memorable trip, more than I thought it would be :).

And here is a random picture of me in front of the American Falls.