Teeth - Month of Mornings Day 14

Yes, another picture of Grahm -- but it's because we hit a milestone.  We have teeth.  Two of them, the middle bottom ones.  One broke through last night and one this morning.  He's been a trooper and isn't fussy or running a fever or anything.  Just a little more cuddly and drooly than normal -- which is completely fine with me, all 23 lbs of his chunky little body is the cuddliest thing ever.

Sitting Up: Month of Mornings Day 13

Grahm is just over 6 months old and is sitting up so well. Luckily he's got all that extra chunk on his thighs to support his big body! At his 4 month appointment he was 22 pounds and 26 inches - can't wait to go to his 6 month appointment to see how much he weighs now - all I know is that I get a serious arm workout carrying him up and down the stairs all day.

Guest Photographer: Mason

This is Mason.  Mama wanted me to take a picture this morning with my camera to put on her internet.  She said I could take a picture of whatever I wanted to.  I was just glad that she was fixing my camera since it was out of batteries.  I got my own camera when I was 3. I took a lot of pictures but she said I had to choose my favorite one.  I chose a picture of Bonzo.  He is my mouse.  He lives in my room.  MeeMaw gave me a real Bonzo. He is my friend, and he is scared of the vacuum. I don't take him to Preschool but he stays home. He eats cheese.

Mason was so excited to get to take pictures and choose one to put up for Month of Mornings. Bonzo started out as his imaginary friend mouse (along with Kebbin the horse) but then we got the stuffed Bonzo and now there are two: Bonzo and Bonzo, Jr. Bonzo, Jr. is the tiny imaginary one that wreaks havoc around our house and comes with us in the car. Regular Bonzo is the stuffed one that doesn't ever leave the house. I asked Mase to tell me whatever he wanted to about the mouse and this is almost word for word what he said.

Date Night

The new movie Date Night coming out in April looks so good. Can't go wrong with Steve Carrell and Tina Fey together. We will have to see this one in the theater for sure.

2 Gabbas & a Pigeon

Mason wanted to help me set up a picture this morning ... thus him choosing his 2 Yo Gabba Gabba animals and then deciding to throw one of Grahm's toys (the pigeon) in at the last minute.

Favorite - Month of Mornings day 9

There is nothing better than warm cinnamon rolls on a freezing cold morning.  Lucky for me I had this little batch sitting in my freezer all ready to be put in the oven just waiting for a cold and snowy morning like today.

Definitely my favorite thing today!

Pat's BBQ

We are BIG fans of BBQ restaurants and have become quite the BBQ snobs -- I will only eat at certain "real" BBQ restaurants and eat specific BBQ sauce.  We have a smoker as well as a BBQ also and one of my favorite things during the summer is when Marc smokes ribs or BBQ's chicken.

This past weekend we ate at Pat's BBQ in Salt Lake.  It was SOOO good.  You might recognize the guy in the picture as Guy Fieri from the show Diners, Drive-In's and Dives ... we are big fans of his show and always try to eat at the restaurants he's visited.

Our dinner was so good - I had a pulled pork sandwich and Marc had ribs.  We got a couple of sides to share and it was plenty of food to share with Mason and fill us all up.  The place is kind of interesting ... it's pretty relaxed and so you're in charge of getting all your own utensils, napkins, etc. 

Mason recognized him from his tv show and wanted his picture taken with him ...but it was so dark inside it was hard to get a great picture with my phone.

Can't wait to go there again!

Sleepyhead - Month of Mornings Day 9

I tried to tiptoe into Mason's room this morning when he was still sleeping to get a picture of his perfectly angelic face as he was still asleep .... but the little sneak popped his eyes open and grinned as soon as I snapped the picture - he must have heard me coming.  I love that little man - crusty morning face and stick-up bangs and all.

Monday - Month of Mornings Day 8

Some Monday mornings just call for Diet Coke this early.  Oh yes they do.  While writing out some cards that are going in the mail this week.

I Do Not Want to Get Up Today - day 7

My bed this morning is cozy and warm.  It's very cold outside.  It's early.  The heater has not kicked on yet.  I have a million things to do today.  A certain little someone will be climbing into bed with me soon and freezing up the place with his icicle legs.  All of these are reasons that I Do Not Want to Get Up Today.

Can't I just pull the covers up over my head and go back to sleep?

Thinking - Month of Mornings Day 6

Having some juice and thinking about lots of things.  About the fabric still sitting on my kitchen table and what to do with it.  About Grahm and how he might finally be teething because he was up all night.  About an appointment we have later today that I'm very nervous + excited for. About spring, and wishing that it would hurry up and get here.

What to do?

Last year I was in 3 virtual quilting bees. I have loved all the different blocks that I have made (stay tuned for a post soon about some of the more recent blocks - I haven't blogged them for a long time!) but my most favorite thing was seeing all the different amazing fabrics that are out there! Last January I started saving a small snippet of material from all the different patterned fabrics people would send me to make their block out of (save for -ahem- the few blocks I have left to finish up from the end of the year!) with the idea that at the end of the year I could have a great collection of scraps to do something with - a kind of overview of all the pretty materials I worked with.

So now .... I have about 200 2x2" little scraps of fabric with NO idea what to do with them! A few weeks ago I caught the hexagon fever that was going around and made these little beauties out of about 20 of the squares ...

Which I absolutely love, but honestly I can't imagine what I'd do with 200+ of them. I'm not a big fan of an all-hexagon quilt ... I like the ones better that have hexes sewed onto a bigger piece of fabric providing some white space ... but I just don't know.

The only other option I can think of right now would be to disassemble the 20 or so hexes I already have put together (which wouldn't be that big of a pain) and do something else with the scraps. Maybe a ticker tape quilt - like this one:

(photo by DeeRoo_G)

Or something else all together? I just can't decide! What would you do?

Bookworm - Month of Mornings Day 5

Every morning when Mason goes into Grahm's room to help me get him up we usually sit on the floor and read some books. This morning I put Grahm back into the crib so I could get Mason in the bath and before getting in the water, Mase jumped back to Grahms room and threw a book into the crib stating he was going to get bored if he didn't have something to look at. Luckily, the book didn't poke an eye out or anything, and this is how I found Grahm a few minutes later when I went to check on him.

I had already taken the lower picture of the books on Grahm's shelf in his room to use for our theme "books" this morning, but the picture of Grahm with the book was too cute not to include, so I made it a diptych. :)

Dreary - Month of Mornings Day 4

Rainy and cloudy here today -

Daily Life snapshots

One of the things I love most about my snazzy cell phone is the camera on it ... its SO easy to just snap pictures and I do it often throughout the day ... even Mason knows which icon is for the camera app and I often find pictures that he has taken without me knowing ...

A few recent snapshots from our days:

Someone in this household may be obsessed with the Olympics ....


And another someone may be getting some seriously chubby cheeks ....

Blue - Month of Mornings Day 3

For Month of Mornings Darci and I decided that on some days we would choose a "theme" to use for our picture. It could be anything we each came up with and we are going to just text each other the morning of so it will be a surprise. This morning Darci said "blue" because it's Gwen's favorite color --- so I looked around and the first blue thing my eyes landed on were on Mason's little art table - he had been practicing writing his name before Preschool this morning with his favorite, blue pen, and it was sitting on a piece of blue construction paper with a blue crayon! It was perfect, because it fit the blue and the morning theme, and because now that I look around we really don't have that much blue around our house.

The paper that has his traceable name on it I made and printed from here. LOVE that website - you can create your own handwriting worksheets with whatever you want printed on them. Mason knows how to write his name now from learning how to shape the letters from practicing from those sheets!

Breakfast - Month of Mornings Day 2

Another simple shot. Grahm's breakfast spoon - after he scarfed down his peaches and rice cereal this morning.

In His Room - Month of Mornings day 1

Darci and I decided that we would continue our Week of Mornings .... and actually start over today and do a Month of Mornings! This is a big commitment for me. I am not a great morning person anyways, and especially on Preschool mornings, or when we have to get up and get out the door for something rather early, it's going to be hard. I need to learn to be ok with having (in my eyes) an imperfect picture, what I think we're really going for is just a snapshot of our mornings; a captured moment that otherwise would have just passed by without really registering in our memories.

Grahm is such a good little guy. He is so patient and willing to just lay on the ground in his room and play with a toy while I get his older brother ready for the day. It takes a lot more effort to brush the hair and teeth of a preschooler than it does to just get a squishy little baby dressed.

pj's - week of mornings day 7

Whenever we can on the weekend we like to take it easy in the mornings and it isn't uncommon to find us still in our PJ pants at noon. But today we did roll out of bed when it was technically still "morning" so we could get today's picture. Darci and I had decided to do one day this week as a self-portrait ... she did hers a few days ago and since today is the last day, I had to put myself in the picture somehow. So, hope this counts, my PJ pants were all that I was willing to put on camera this early in the morning on a long weekend. Next time I'll try for during the week. ;)

Mason had been watching me try to figure out a half-decent picture that was a self portrait and not completely lame. He thought it was cool to be taking pictures in the mirror and kept trying to jump in the picture. I captured this one almost by accident, but the more I looked at it the more I loved his little feet next to mine, both in our PJ pants, both embracing the lazy and slow day we were enjoying so much. Perfect to wrap up the week of morning pictures for me.

Happy Hearts Day !

“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love, actually, is all around.”

(Photo credit: jaroslavd)

brothers - week of mornings day 6

Lazy morning in bed.

rushed - week of mornings day 5

We had a long day planned today of driving, dropping off Grahm at MeeMaw's, going downtown, doing errands -- things that needed a lot of preparation and getting ready for. I woke up early this morning to have a little time to myself before waking up the boys to have them get ready too. Not seconds after I poured myself this bowl of cereal (at 6:45 am!) Mason woke up and it was all a whirlwind after that.

Sometime during the morning I snapped this picture of my bowl of cereal sitting there, untouched, and knew I wanted to use it for my Week of Mornings picture. But then as I sat down to the computer to post it, another calamity happened (someone probably ran out of milk) that I had to attend to. I got as far as editing the picture and uploading it to Flickr, and then then next thought I had about it was when we were on the freeway and I thought "Crap! I didn't hit 'publish' on that picture!"

Now it's 6:15 pm and we are finally home and I am finally sitting down to post this "morning" picture. And yes, this poor bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats sits on the table as untouched as it was this morning.

crafty things - week of mornings day 4

Up early today to finish some Valentines for today and Sunday. Yaaaawwwwwwwnnnn.

super kid - week of mornings day 3

Today Mason was the Super Kid at preschool. He goes to an awesome preschool and the teacher does a great job of making them feel special during thier week .... we had to make a poster with some pictures and he got to bring a few of his favorite things to show his classmates ... and pick out a treat for everyone. He has been SO excited all week to get to have Grahm and I come to school today to help show his stuff and his poster.



The writing on the chalkboard are the things that he wanted to bring:

Mickey ears from Disneyland
Bonzo/lizard (his stuffed friends)
soccer trophy
baseball mitt signed by the Angels
picture of him and Marc at Angels stadium for his 1st game, when he was just a little over a week old
Ratatouille movie
Go Dog Go poster.

You can also click over to Flickr to see the picture with additional notes on it.

I'm so proud of you, Mason!

Week of Mornings - Day 2

A new project is in the works.

Week of Mornings - Round 2

I can't think of a better way to jump back into this blogging buisness than with a Week of Mornings with my best friend. We did it almost a year ago - and yeah, just a bit has changed within the past year.

Our rules are: we both have to take a picture within an hour of waking up and post it on our blogs. No cheating and using our iPhones, have to use our real cameras. Pictures can be edited or not, and of anything we choose. Can't peek at each others pictures/posts until we've got our own up.

Your can see Round 1's pictures in my Flickr set here or Darci's Flickr set here.

This is my not-so-little guy, first thing in the morning. We're really working hard at tummy-time and he is really starting to like it.



See Darci's picture at Just a Peek.

Returning Soon

A lot can happen in 6+ months.

Back Monday, February 8th, 2010.

Be there.