Of course Megan outdid herself again this year, with what may be her best cake yet.  The main part of the cake was a big decaying log, with vines and flowers and all sorts of stuff growing on it to go along with the enchanted forest theme.  Then sitting beside the log is the little pixie she made by hand, and it’s all edible!

We decided to get the kids power wheels for their birthdays this year, and so Ali got a pink Barbie Jeep.  She’s got quite a ways to go before she really knows what she’s doing, but she loves taking her little Eva doll for rides in it, even if she doesn’t like to use the steering wheel .

Lots of pictures are up in the gallery, so check them out here.

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!

The pumpkings:

• 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

http://www.joshandmeg.net/gallery/v/josh_and_meg/summer-2009/?g2_page=1

Wow, what a weekend we had.  It was ridiculously busy, but over all it was a lot of fun and we got some awesome pictures out of it.

To start things off, my parent’s and sister flew in on Thursday afternoon to visit and help us with the kids during the Tabije-Walters wedding.  So we visited with them Thursday night and Friday morning.  Then, Friday evening kicked off the wedding events with the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner.  Grandma, Pappy G (that’s what he insisted on being called, I swear), and Aunt Gracie watched the kids during the rehearsal dinner, so it was nice to get to go out and hang out with friends for the evening.

Saturday was the big day for Mark and Stephanie, and Megan, Xavier and myself were all in the bridal party.  Xavier was adorable in his little tuxedo, although he was too shy to walk down the isle.  Megan had to walk back down and carry him.  Oh well though, everyone thought it was adorable.  After the wedding the kids went home to bed with Grandma and Grandpa again, and Meg and I got to have another evening of fun.

Finally on Sunday we celebrated an early joint birthday party for Xavier and Ali.  Since my parents were already down they wanted to give the kids their birthday presents and see them open them and stuff.  It was a blast.  Xavier got six little squirt guns that we all had a big water fight with.  Mom got some awesome pictures from it.  Unfortunately she’s only in like 1 picture though!  I guess that’s the price you pay for being the photo lady .

All in all, quite the kick off to our crazy hectic month of May.  This weekend we’ve got Ali’s birthday party, then a week off, then a friend from work has a birthday barbecue, then another week off, then Xavier’s birthday party.  Somewhere in between there I think our subdivision is supposed to have a block party as well.  Craziness!

Anyway, pictures from it all are right here.

So, we decided we would break down and buy some computer upgrades with some of our tax return.  I’ve been using this really great financial software (GnuCash) for the past year or so, and since I had all of the information I needed to file my taxes in this software, I was able to get them filed pretty much as soon as the IRS began accepting returns (January 16th).  So, about a week after filing, I had my money back from the government and in our bank account.

The first order of business was a laptop for Megan.  She has always wanted one, and after shopping around for a bit, I found a great deal on a Dell at Best Buy.  It’s a small (14″), lime-green inspiron 1420, and so far Megan loves it.  She’s definitely the type of person that doesn’t like to be confined to the desk, she likes to be able to use her computer wherever she happens to be.  I don’t know how she got through college with a desktop!

For me, I came across an excellent deal on a 3 year old computer that a friend at work was getting rid of.  It’s also a Dell (an XPS 600), and was a top of the line computer a couple years ago.  It works perfectly for what I need and I couldn’t pass up the price.  Right now it has two NVIDIA 7800 GTX cards in SLI (geek-speak for two graphics cards put together to be more efficient and better performing), 3 GBs of RAM, and two 250GB HDDs in a RAID 1 mirror (geek speak for two drives exactly mirrored giving me kind of a built in backup if one of them fails).

I went through a really annoying week trying to figure out what OS/OSs I wanted to run on it, and after having Vista, Ubuntu, and Windows 7 all on it multiple different times, I finally settled on the beta release of Windows 7.  I was really torn for awhile and didn’t want to give up on Ubuntu entirely, but since Windows 7 is currently free and such a huge improvement over Vista, I decided I’d go with it for awhile.  I’d also really like to start getting all of our home videos onto the computers and start doing some editing, and Ubuntu unfortunately doesn’t have a good video editing program.

And finally, completing our computer upgrades is my absolute favorite, my hp mini 1000.  I’ve been dieing to get a netbook for a long time, and finally settled on the hp.  Dell also had the really appealing Mini 9 at the time, but after playing with the hp in person and seeing hp’s MIE (Mobile Internet Experience, basically a nice looking theme for Ubuntu) in action, I decided to go with it.  It is so tiny it’s almost ridiculous.  My hand is literally like an inch shy of being able to span the entire thing diagonally (I’ll post some better photos after I fix our camera, but that’s a topic for another post).  It has a 10.1″ screen, built in web cam and mic, and only weighs a pound and a half.  It is pretty crazy picking it up and moving it around for the first time.  Even Megan likes how light and portable it is, even if she doesn’t like the tiny screen and keyboard.

All in all, we’re now up-to-date in the computer world, and all of that for a total of about $1100.  I think we did pretty good.  Now to get our camera fixed so we can get back to taking pictures of the little ones!

I’ll post an update as soon as things slow down.

So I ran it by Megan, she made fun of me a lot, and I’m now typing this post from the closet, my new little man-cave.   (Let me interject something here… About two years ago, right after we found out I was pregnant with Ali, and it became painfully obvious to Josh that he would have to forfeit his office to our darling daughter, I suggested that we turn the closet into an office. Of course my suggestion was met with comments like, “The desk won’t fit, ” “that’s a stupid idea,” and [my favoirte] “I don’t want to.”  So yes, of course I got a little frustruated, and first made Josh admit that I’d been right all along.  And yes, it is endlessly funny to me now that his “man room” is merely a closet at the back of our house.) During the process of making the move though, we nearly lost our only remaing computer, Megan’s desktop.  I unhooked it all like I’ve done countless times in the past, hooked it all back up, and all I got was a ticking power supply (it literally sounded just like a bomb).  Thankfully that was all that was wrong, and 14 bucks later we’re back up and running with at least one computer.

We’ve also been getting ready for our voyage back to the homeland.  We’re planning on driving this time, and in order to get our Jeep in good condition to make the trip we just got done with about 2 weeks of ridiculous repeat trips to transmission shops and service garages.  Ask me about it some time, I’ve ranted about it too much to bother typing it.  (Or me. I’m the one who was in Southlake when her hubby called to inform me that, “Oh yeah… Be careful. The Jeep is leaking someting.”)

All of our technical problems aside, things with the kids couldn’t be better.  They are so much fun.  Some things Xavier likes to do now: play with staplers, cut paper with scissors, open doors, and lock doors.  No joking here, he literally takes a piece of construction paper, staples it like 100 times, and then cuts it into pieces (and leaves them all over the floor for his mommy to pick up).  It’ll entertain him for at least 30 minutes, easily.  And as far as opening doors goes, I swear, I think we are going to have to remove our door knobs.  Locking them barely slows him down, he’s already learned how to take a small thin object and turn the little slot on the outside of the knob. (Fun, when you’re the only one up in the morning, and all of a sudden a little hand touches your leg or your arm…)  Just the other day I was literally locked out of the house three times in one evening.  Xavier managed to listen to me the first time and unlocked the front door so I could get back in (after about five minutes of incessant pleading).  The second and third times they (yes Ali does this too) locked me out in the garage, but Megan was home and after about 5 minutes of me knocking on the door she had finally managed to quit laughing long enough to let me in.  Oh, and the early morning wake-ups with a little 2 1/2 year old face about 2 inches from yours have started since he can now stroll out of his room and into ours whenever he wants.  Did I mention how fun they are!?

Ali is just barely a step behind him, she follows him everywhere, doing pretty much doing every single thing he does.  They are quite the little (terrible ) twosome.  She has some of her own interests too though, she’s becoming more and more obsessed with shoes and little purses.  Meg made the mistake of giving her a purse to hold while we were grocery shopping, and there was no way Ali was leaving it behind. We wound up having to buy the thing and hid it away until Christmas.  She also loves anything sparkly, glittery or messy.  Meg’s jewelry is always fair game, as is her makeup and her shoes.  It’s a tough call–Ali definitely has a wild, rough and tough side that makes me think she’s gonna be the athletic-type of kid. But then there’s that girly nonsense too… and it just makes me pray she doesn’t have her mommy’s taste in jewelry and clothes.

What else about Ali girl? She’s a huge flirt, she’s growing like a weed and she’s quite the talker. She’ll repeat just about anything you say to her, and I think she really drives Xavier to talk more. (No way is he letting his litter sister do something, anything, better than him! )

Soon enough, we’ll be home and you can see them for yourselves. There’s no denying how crazy things get around here, but I don’t think either of us would have it any other way. We love our crazy little kiddos and the chaos that they create.

Merry (early)  Christmas!

Pebbles and Bam-Bam… Monsters from “Monsters, Inc.”

This year, Halloween included costume changes for the kiddos.  For their school parties (and parade) on Friday, I made them little Pebbles and Bam-Bam costumes to wear. Josh and I decided that their monster costumes would not only be too hot to wear all day, but if you’ve seen Ali try to walk in hers–with it’s big padded belly–you’d understand that it would have been a disasterous day at preschool.

That said, this year we got some awesome pictures of our kiddos, in their various costumes. They must’ve looked pretty cute, because each came home with their pumpkin buckets overflowing with candy. (Really, I have no idea what we’re going to do with all of it!!)  I know for a fact that I never got that much candy when I was trick-or-treating, but apparently it’s hard to say “No” to the two cutest little monsters ever.  (Prepare yourself for a tangent here…)Ali even milked her way into more candy. At one of the first houses we went to, the family had a little bitty dog (I mean, teeeeeeeeeeeeeeny), and it stood by its owners legs as she opened the door to dole out the goods to Xavier and Ali.  Ali took one look at the little ”cat” as Xavier called it and burst into tears and cried so hard that her little body violently shook. The lady who owned the dog felt so bad that she dropped like 10 pieces of candy into Ali’s bucket, and then a whole handful more just to make her smile.  Then she did the same thing for Xavier, because “They’re just so darn cute.”

Later, Ali fell (her belly threw her balance off) and practically landed on the feet of this sweet old lady. The poor old lady also felt bad and loaded Ali up with candy. Josh and I kind of joked that this would just be Ali’s system and she left with her bucket almot half full from that woman’s house.l

Not to be outdone, Xavier would walk up to people’s door, and act really shy. Then they’d lean over, drop a couple pieces of candy into his bowl.  Then he’d turn on the charm, and finally look at them, and go “Mooooore peeeeeeeeeeeeez.” …And of course, no one could resist. My little con-arist (who is not in the least bit shy in real life) would then practically yell thank you to whomever he had just suckered into giving him way more candy than they shouldv’e, turn as fast as he could, and with a big grin on his face say, “More houses-more candy Mommy!”

Haha. It was a fun, fun night.  Pictures in the gallery.

Love you,

~ Josh

September 2008 album