Before the two-day snowstorm hit, we made a trip down to San Antonio for Jason’s graduation from his Air Force basic training.  We had a good time and got to see most of the Metz family for a couple days, even if the hotel room was a little cramped for Xavier and Ali (they did not like being in one little place for more than about 5 minutes…).  We explored down town San Antonio, saw the Alamo, went on a little riverboat tour, and went to the San Antonio Zoo.  If you’ve never seen it, the San Antonio River Walk is a really neat experience, with lots of restaurants and shops all right on the water and winding pathways throughout.  They don’t even have any railings up, so you are literally walking just right there next to the winding waterways.  We had to keep a really close eye on the kids, but there were a lot of ducks in the river that would walk right up to you, so the kids had a great time watching and chasing after them.

I did one big album with pictures from San Antonio and of all of us playing in the snow.  Check it out here.

This year marked my first full year as a working mamma with a full-time career to handle in addition to raising the kiddos. It’s been a challenge; balancing work and family life is hard, but I’m fortunate to have the two most amazing kiddos and sweetest hubby in the world to support me.

Josh’s job is going well for him to. I dare say he actually loves his job–which is great.  He’s been truly blessed to have landed a career that allows him to endeavor in all his nerdy exploits and get paid for it.

But, of course, our year revolved around those two amazing kiddos of ours. And of course, a big year for them equates to a big, proud year for Mom and Dad.

For starters, both kids are now potty-trained!!!!  That’s right, NO MORE DIAPERS. Ali, our over-achieving two-year old, was fully potty trained by the end of October, with little effort exerted on our parts.  She seemed sort of content to stay in her pull-ups, so one day Josh and I just decided we would do away with them, and she’s been dry ever since.

Both kids are learning SO FAST right now. Xavier recognizes his letter (X) everywhere. He’s started writing his name, recognizes the letters of Ali’s name, my “M,” and can spell “red,” “brown,” “blue,” and “green.”  He colors in the lines of his coloring books, draws most of his shapes perfectly, and is an animal expert.   He’s a budding techie, and is in every way, the duplicate of his father.  He loves cars, trucks, planes and trains, all things Wolverine (or super-hero) related, and building things with Play-Dough.  Xavey is also the single most vocally affectionate person ever.  Over the course of our break, Josh and I have heard “I love you” from him at least once during each of his waking hours, often more. Don’t be fooled by that though-he’s 100% boy, and loves to do all sorts of mischievous things to get him (and Ali) in trouble.

Ali is also learning fast, and super independent. Her approach to everything is, “I do it!”  Ali knows her “A,” and loves singing, dancing, and doing anything with crayons, glitter and glue (who’d a guessed?). She is in most ways, my mini, right down to her incessant desire to have someone play with her hair or rub her back while she’s falling asleep.  She’s truly coming into her own now, and unlike me, is already nurturing her loving side (or maybe just her bossy side, in which case, yes, she’s just like me) by constantly playing with her baby dolls. Ali is our little firecracker, a big ball of beautiful, joyous energy.

Xavey’s big goal for the year is to learn how to do a flip on the trampoline (yeah, the grey hairs are starting to sprout). Ali simply wants to be Picasso and paint some more.

My immediate, easily attainable goal is to get Josh to a concert. He’s roamed around for twenty-six(ish) years now, and still has NEVER been to a concert. We need to remedy this given my love for all things rock.

Long term, our goal is still to get outta Texas.  Northeast, midwest, Pacific northwest. I’m not picky. We just want to be somewhere where our kids can actually enjoy the outdoors. That’s hard to do here, when four to five months of the year temperatures are near or above 100 degrees.

We’ve got one final gallery for the year, with all of our holiday pictures right here.  Enjoy the pictures, and Happy New Year!

Great editorial on Nintendo.  Sums up why I don’t own a Wii.  Quite frustrating, good thing Mass Effect 2 comes out soon .

We also took a trip to the zoo while they were down since the weather was so nice (60’s or so that day).  I’m now convinced that going to the zoo during the summer is just a waste of time.  Every animal was so much more active since it wasn’t so hot, and the trip was a lot of fun.

Pictures from the weekend are up right here.

That made my day.

The kids had an absolute blast during trick or treating this year.  Ali went as a pixie, and Xavier was a dragon.  The past couple years they’ve had fun of course, but they pretty much had to ride in the wagon in between houses and we couldn’t go for very long before they got tired.  Well this year they got to walk almost the whole time, and did a great job saying “trick or treat” and “thank you.”  We still brought the wagon for the ride home, and it’s a good thing too because we were out for nearly two full hours.

It’s fun watching people react so much differently to cute little kids than to bratty, not-so-cute older kids that just run up and run off.  They begrudgingly give those kids one piece of candy.  Not so with the dragon-pixie duo, we literally had to make people stop giving them stuff.  This one old couple gave them each at least 10 pieces.  I think the old couple would have given them all their candy and just gone inside for the night if we would have let them.

Pictures from the night are up right here.  And also, if you missed the Oktoberfest album be sure to check it out here.

The pumpkings:

Since you’re still reading, I’m assuming you want all the nitty-gritty details.  All in all, it went remarkably well, much better than I expected.  WordPress just required a few variable changes in a config file to point to my new database and user on Cortana.  Gallery required pretty much the exact same thing settings wise, but migrating files is where Gallery really took forever.  We’ve amassed quite a photo collection, and moving roughly 5 GB from Site5 to Cortana took most of the night.

Other than the file downloading, nothing else really took much time at all.  In fact, if it didn’t take a day or so for DNS changes to propagate to all the master servers, I think I only would have been off-line for about an hour.  Pretty good for my first big migration .  Did any of you even hit my ‘joshandmeg.net is currently offline’ page?

If you’ve got some time, click around and make sure everything still works, I’m sure I probably missed something.  One thing I did leave out purposely is the photo blog.  It hasn’t seen much activity recently, and with the upgrade to Gallery 3 I’m thinking I’ll probably just retire it.  Everything else should be fully functional though.  Let me know if you see anything broken and how the speed is in comparison to before.

Now, on to the second phase of the joshandmeg.net 3.0 project, Graphic Design (that’s you Meg ).

The new design is going to be a pretty drastic change from the way the site has looked and felt for the past five years (I know I can’t believe I’ve been keeping a web site going for five years either).  Ever since I first launched joshandmeg.net, it’s been a black and orange theme with the fairly typical web site layout of some sort of header, a sidebar, and a main content area.  The biggest change coming is a switch from the dark background, white text color scheme to a white background, dark text color choice.  Two sites I’ve recently done in this manner are badhippodesign.com and joshkephart.net, and both of those are a good preview of what the new design will look like.  I’m also hoping to layout the site in a simplistic style, with very little clutter and a focus on the posts and of course the photos on the site.  We’ll see how that goes .

Along with the visual refresh that we have planned, there are also some other improvements in store:

• an upgrade from Gallery 2 to the brand new Gallery 3
• the ability to comment on photos in the gallery
• threaded comments on blog posts
• the long awaited addition of video clips of the kids

and behind the scenes there will be a migration from the Site5 servers to my very own server up and running in my utility room .

I tend to never be able to stay on top of anything I start unless I have some sort of organized schedule and plan in place, so I whipped up a little project and a flexible schedule.  You can check it out here and follow up on the progress if you’d like.

Stay tuned.

• me lying on the living room floor on my stomach
• Megan lying on my back on her stomach
• Xavier and Ali sitting/bouncing on Megan’s back

Megan:

“Xavier, stop bouncing on my back you are hurting me, just sit on my butt.”

Xavier:

“NOOOOO!!! I don’t want to sit on your butt, it’s stinky!” 

Hahahaha.  Greatest quote ever…. Megan please don’t kill me

Ali is finally willing to sit on the toilet! Of course, if I had anticipated that she would love sitting (and sitting and sitting and sitting) on the potty for ridiculously long periods of time, I might not have been quite so eager to get her potty-trained.

Wait, what? You want to know what I’m talking about? So glad you asked.

Tonight, Josh and I tried again to get Ali to sit on the potty. We did everything we could think of. We told her she would be a “big kid” like Xavey (and Mommy and Daddy (haha)), I put her in a pair of big girl undies and bribed her with lots of new ones… Finally, Xavier had the bright idea to SHOW her. So, she followed him in the bathroom, watched him do his business and then decided to give it a go. (Why won’t he teach her to eat without making a mess?) 

So, Ali hopped up on the potty. Within seconds, she realized that she had a captive audience – me- and took full advantage of it. (Given that she’s not well balanced on a good day while standing with both feet firmly on the ground, leaving her alone to perch precariously on the edge of a too-big potty seemed like a very stupid idea.)  She talked and sang and performed amazing toilet-acrobatics. (Really, who puts their feet on the toilet seat to pee????) After about twenty minutes, and no pee, I was begging her to get down.  Then came the really entertaining parts.

Me: “Ali you can get down now. You tried really hard.”

Ali: “No!  I still goin’ potty like a big boy!!!”

(As a clarification, I did try to convince her, for the ten trillionth time, that she is NOT a boy…. But then she just yelled, so I dropped it. The bathroom is very small, and her cute little voice is not so cute or little when it’s echoing off of the bathroom walls.)

Another five minutes passed, and I asked another question…

Me: “Gator, honey, are you almost done?”

Ali: “I dunnnn-oh! My pee-pee’s still sleepin’ in my belly!”

(After stifling my laughter)Me: “Come on Ali. You’re all done. It’s ok; we’ll try again tomorrow.”

Ali (inspecting what’s been going on in the potty): “No momma! I gotta finish!!!!”

                 *                                      *                                          *                                    *                                              *                                               *

And now you see why I never blog. I spend hours doing things like sitting on the bathroom floor, cheering my kids on as they con me into thinking they’re actually going to go pee. :):)

http://www.joshandmeg.net/gallery/v/josh_and_meg/chicago-trip/

Anyway, if you’ll forgive my absence, I promise to entertain you for at least the next two minutes and twelve seconds.  As you read along, you’ll quickly realize that I haven’t been slacking in my “off” time… For those of you new to the blogosphere, or simply with memories shorter than our two-year-old daughter’s, let’s have a quick recap.  Josh and I got married right before our senior year of college started, and a little over nine-months later, I popped out a baby boy we dubbed Xavier (also referenced as Xave, Xavey, X, Xave-o-potato, and simply, Potato)…and no, I wasn’t preggo when we got married. Then we moved our brand-new little family a thousand miles from home (being Ohio) to the barren waste land of Texas (which is not at all dissimilar to my theories about what Hell must be like).  Eleven months after Xavier was born (yes, he wasn’t even a year old yet), Ali made her debut.  You read that right. Before our second anniversary, Josh and I had somehow managed to produce two healthy, beautiful, intelligent, crazy kidletts, move across the country, and not kill each other.   Our sanity has suffered, but we’re way more fun because of it.

So… back to our amazing kids – the sole reason for my disappearance from most things I used to enjoy, but totally worth it.  Worth the kajillion dirty diapers (and dollars spent on the aforementioned diapers), sleepless nights,  stretch marks, cesarean sections (plural), and times I nearly peed my own pants.    Xavier and Ali are three and two now, and they are constantly entertaining us with their little pearls of wisdom and their amazingly insightful comments.

Without further ado, I present to you the following quotes, retellings, and stories about our kiddos from the past few months.

Xavier

This is the most recent story I have to tell you about X.  It’s a little gruesome, really hysterical, and kind of morbid. Enjoy.

Right after I finished singing, “My Sunshine” to Xavier, he reached over and put his hand on my face, and snuggled his stuffed hippo, Owen, under my arm. Then he grabbed his stuffed little lion and gave him a big hug.  I had been so amazed by the cuteness of the moment that when he actually opened his mouth, I was shocked.

“Mommy,” he looked into my eyes and patted my cheek, making sure I was looking into his big green eyes. He sucked in a deep breath, and continued.  “I gotta kill a dog.”

Our cute moment came to a screeching halt as I stuttered and stammered for words, appalled and shocked at the words my three-year-old was saying.  “No, Xavey, we don’t kill dogs. That’s not nice!” I spewed the words out, trying to think of a way to convince him that his idea was very, very bad.

“But mommy, I gotta!” he assured me.  I started to object again, when he continued, explaining himself. “”I gotta kill the doggie so he’ll lay in my bed with me and not move like my Owen and my lil’ lion.”  Finally, the wheels in my head started turning (backwards maybe?), and I could finally understand what Xave was really trying to say.

 …Yes, folks. My son thinks his stuffed animals are actually dead creatures. Maybe I’ll save the neighbors labs from whatever fate Xave is dreaming up, and just go buy him a stuffed dog before it’s too late.

Ali

Ali-gator is such a goof, and more than anything,  she just wants to be exactly like Xavier…

The other day, Xavier and Ali were in the bathtub (together, because they’re siblings, they’re little, and I’m hard-pressed for time), when she stood up and declared herself.

“Mama, I a BOY!” she screeched happily.

Of course, being older and wiser, Xavier objected to her statement vehemently. “You’re not a boy Ali. I’m a boy and YOU are a gerrr-uhl.” (Funny how even at three, he can make certain words sound like expletives.) And of course, when challenged by her big brother, Ali rose to the occasion.

“No!! I A BOY!” she hissed, splashing water everywhere.  I was about to intercede, when Xavier steered their match in a most humorous direction. In a flash, he was standing beside Ali, pointing to his pee-pee.

“No, Ali. I am a boy, you are a girl. MINE is OUT, YOURS is IN. MINE’S OUT, I’m a BOY!!! You’re a girl,” he declared victoriously. I have no idea what I said at this point, because I was trying so hard not to die laughing.

Ali looked at Xavier, and then glanced at her own situation. Then she examined more carefully, and for a minute I thought she might cry when she was unable to find her “out” parts.

Finally, Ali looked up, indignant and sure of her word. “No, Ver-ver [trans:Xavier].  I a boy too. My pee-pee’s just breaked.” And with that she grinned a happy little smile and plopped back down in the water.

I promise, I’ll update this more, with the rest of the cute stories I’ve reserved for this special occasion.