Change

(Okay y'all, as a warning, I'm in a really sentimental mood right now - this post isn't lighthearted and funny:))


I've always been resistant to change. I like to stay where I'm comfortable, and when the things in my life get shifted around and messy, it makes me uncomfortable. Right now God is doing a lot of shifting in my life, and as always, it's making me a little uncomfortable. I know He knows me perfectly and is trying to grow me and teach me. I know I should cling to Him, especially right now, but I for sure have days where that is a struggle. It's so much easier to just have a big pity party, right?


Many friends of ours are moving away or have moved away or are considering changes in their family that will take them away from the place where we are often together. I have always cherished my friendships. God has richly blessed me with many beautiful women who I can call on for different things, and as I've grown older I've been even more blessed with families that He's provided to invest in and pray for my family. I know that people flow in and out of your life leaving pieces of themselves as they go. I only wish some of them could've stayed just a little longer than they did.


Our good friends, the Velascos, left for California last weekend. They are not coming back. (Okay that seemed totally morbid, they're not dead or anything, just moved:)). I am so sad now that they're gone. I wish I would've taken more advantage of the time we had with them while they were here in Dallas with us, but I will carry with me the many lessons they taught me. I've learned so much from Bernie and Kat. So much about the Lord and how He loves me and made me perfectly. I will miss hearing their wisdom on a weekly basis, but know they are sending me prayers from the west coast.

Everyone, go love on your family or neighbors or friends today, and be thankful that God has brought them into your life! I know I am.

See you soon Bernie and Kat (before we get to heaven). We love y'all!

Engineer or Rock Star?

Hunter LOVES to figure out how things fit together. I mean the kid's favorite part of playing with bubbles is taking the lid off and putting it back on. So everyday when I put my make up on he is fascinated. He darts over to me and quickly begins pulling out my tweezers or moisturizer or foundation or any other piece he can get his hands on.

His particular favorite is my eyeliner (again, it's the lid that draws him to it). Yesterday I caught him with it and quickly grabbed it from him. After taking it out of his hands, I looked up at him and saw this...Apparently, I need to improve on how "quickly" I take things away from him. That or pay better attention.

Weirdo

When I was in college, we used to play little get to know each other better games during work week. My favorite one, tell us one of your weird habits, I loved so much because it made me feel so...normal. I mean there are some serious weirdos out there:)

I remember thinking everyone, even the most beautiful, seemingly perfect girl, is the same as me. We all have some little insecurity or idiosyncracy that, if witnessed by a stranger, would make them run far, far away...well maybe that's a little extreme, but writing in hyperbole does make the post more interesting, right? Right.

Well the past couple of weeks Hunter has started doing 2 things that he could answer the "weird habits" question with. I've been trying to catch them on video and finally did yesterday.

In the first video, he finds his favorite book and pulls out the baby chick (which he often carries around the house with him) and smells it. Yep. Told you. Weird.

This next one is Hunter's favorite new game. It wouldn't be that weird, except that he does it ALL THE TIME and would probably continue at it for hours if I didn't pull him away.

Bye Bye Begonias

Remember this post?

Well. That will be the last of the gardening posts on this blog. If you're interested in learning how to make your flower beds beautiful, don't call me. But if you want to know how to kill not only one, but two sets of flowers you've planted in your front beds, you know who to contact.

All of those beautiful begonias have now turned into this...

Notice how the back flower beds still look great. Yeah. Didn't have anything to do with that. All of the credit goes to James. So as a way of showing my gratitude and deep appreciation of his green thumb, I let him take care of planting that sod all by himself.

Right Now

Hi Readers. Guess what? Um, right now little H is sleeping soundly in his crib for his afternoon nap. I guess he must be so tired from all of that walking he's been doing this afternoon.

Oh yes he has! (Insert cheers of joy and applause here)

To those of you who told me to calm down because my kid wasn't going to crawl into his kindergarten class on the first day of school, thank you. And to those of you who listened on the other end of the phone as I endlessly obsessed and analyzed my kid's gross motor preferences, you are my angels. (There are a couple of you to whom I owe HOURS of listening time. You know who you are. Call me up anytime - my ears are ready.)

Here's some proof, just in case you wanted to see the cuteness and scream "hooray" at your computer because you can't contain the excitement...

And in case that wasn't enough, here's some more...at a different angle.

Signs that a toddler has invaded your house...

1.Your neatly folded laundry piles end up thrown all over the room or used as impromptu accessories.

As you can see in this picture, Hunter felt the need to accessorize with a scarf this morning. Should I be worried that he went for the pink pajama pants?

-

2. The magnetic field drawing your child to the dishwasher is so strong, that you must keep your dishwasher locked at all times to prevent injury. And when you forget to lock it, he will know. And he will crawl over to it, pull it open and take out his dish of choice merely seconds after you leave the room.

3. Stains will begin to appear on all light colored furniture in the house. The origin of these stains being milk, regurgitated milk, drool, snot, ink, and the latest at my house...

lip liner. Yes ladies and gentlemen, that is lip liner on my couch. A piece of advice to future parents...if you want to avoid permanent stains, invest in microfiber!

4. Any bag or briefcase or purse left within said toddler's reach will be turned over and all of it's contents thrown all over the room.

Believe it or not, all of these things happened this morning while I was doing laundry. Except for the lip liner incident which happened in the wee small hours of the morning while I was actually supposed to be watching my child. Don't ever lie down on the couch and shut your eyes for "just a second". You may think that your toddler will sit nicely and watch the rest of My Friends Tigger and Pooh, but he won't. He will be doing dangerous, destructive things. I promise.

Note: no toddlers were harmed during the typing of this blog post. Due to his love of knives, I made sure mine was asleep in bed before I began typing.

New Braunfels

So my family takes these little vacations together every year, and this year we went to New Braunfels. Last year's trip worked great because I could just wear Hunter everywhere and he was really good about sleeping on demand. Since wearing a 25 pound toddler is out of the question, I knew this year would be a little more challenging.

We got off to a great start because Hunter was pretty good on the car ride there (and awesome on the way home!). We stopped at McDonald's on the way down, and Hunter got to play in his first fast food kiddie area (man I am racking up points with the nutritionists of the world). As you can tell, it wasn't the most exciting moment of his life.

Once we got there, James and I had to sit in the condo a lot while Hunter napped or slept, but it was good to get to relax...and I got to watch the finale of The Bachelorette because I'm hooked and can't miss it even if I am on vacation. Uh, I mean my kid was sleeping and I couldn't leave him. Yeah. That's it. That's definitely the reason I sat down and watched THREE STRAIGHT HOURS of tv while on vacation.

Despite our devout patronage to the American Broadcasting Company (or is it America's Broadcasting Company?), we found the time to work in many other activities - while Hunter was actually awake...

We went swimming at the resort's pool...

The rest of my family played tennis and went bike riding and hiking, but like I said I had tv - I mean a baby - to watch.

We also went to Schlitterbaun for the day, which in my opinion is pretty lame for America's number 1 swim park, but whatever...As you can see, Hunter agrees.

It rained while we were there, so we ran into this little castle until it passed. Hunter had so much fun hiding from the rain under my sun hat.

After the rain stopped, we took the little tram to the other part of the park, which is DOWN THE STREET (I mean there's seriously like an entire town in between the two sections).
I liked this side a lot better. Hunter on the other hand, was still not impressed...
Hunter had so much fun playing with my hat at the water park, that when we got home that night, he put Aunt Katie's hat on and started crawling all around the room, which is amazing to me because he couldn't see a thing and he didn't run into the wall, not.even.once. And when you consider the genes this kid is made up of, you will see the miracle that this actually is. Of course, by the time I got the camera, he found his way to the table and stood up...
If you asked Hunter, I'm sure he'd tell you his favorite part of the trip was probably all of the different food he got to eat, especially the chocolate ice cream.
That boy loves him some sweets. He obviously gets it from his dad. I'm soo the health nut in this family. Can't you tell?

Independence Day Pictures

July 4th was super busy (and fun!) for us, so I have plenty of pictures to share! My posts have been so wordy lately, that I'm gonna try to keep it brief...

Independence Day is also my mother-in-law's birthday, so we all went to breakfast that morning and then over to my in-law's house to hang out. Hunter had so much fun crawling up and climbing down the stairs...

Will someone explain to me how it is that my kid refuses to walk on any flat surfaces, but will walk down the stairs? That boy is crazy stubborn...Later that afternoon, we went over to my dad's house to grill out, ride the four wheeler (which I've discovered is not as much fun as it was when I was 10...or maybe it's just that the daily trauma I see at work is beginning to take over my life), and watch fireworks. I also got to learn some new things about cows and post-partum dogs that I would've been happier never knowing...or seeing.(About 2 minutes after this picture was taken, I was jumping off that all terrain vehicle as quickly as possible.)

Hunter was not aloud anywhere near the four wheeler, but he had a great time anyway...

He wasn't really phased by the fireworks my dad set off. I was more jumpy than he was. How dang cute is he?!

Happy Birthday to...Me!

I turned the big 2-8 on Thursday, and it was such a great day! All of my friends and family made me feel so special! I really couldn't have asked for it to be any better, everyone went out of their way to shower me with love and attention and gifts and emails and phone calls and texts and food and cake. I could go on and on.


When I got home from work, I found a birthday gift that had been sent in the mail, and when I didn't dive to move it out of the little tornado's way, he looked at me like this...
He's all, "Do I really get to play in this? Who is this lady that's taken over my mommy's body?"

After the shock wore off, he started digging away. He had way too much fun in those packaging peanuts! I started to get kind of nervous because he would pick up one little peanut at a time and break it into a million pieces to be thrown all over the new rug (which can't be vacuumed while I'm home alone with Hunter because he FREAKS when I turn it on).

He must have sensed my stress levels rising, because it didn't take long for him to give up on examining (and tearing!) each little piece. He decided dumping all of them out would be so much more fun...At least it was a small box, right?

James sent me beautiful flowers (as always:)) and took me to dinner. We rarely take pictures of the three of us, so before we left for dinner, I made sure to get one...

Thanks everyone for making my birthday such a special day!

So Grown Up

Hunter is such a toddler these days. Every day I'm more and more amazed at how quickly he's growing up. He still babbles like a maniac, but he's using a lot more intentional speech also (granted a lot of what he says sound pretty much the same, but I'm smart enough to use context clues and figure it out...most of the time at least).

Since Hunter is getting older, we've been working on only having the paci during sleep times and car times. So of course during all other times, he's CONSTANTLY coming up to us saying "paci?", which really sounds closer to "babuh", but like I said, we're good at decoding. I've tried to get creative with distractions, so at least when Hunter gets the shakes from the paci withdrawal, he's preoccupied. Hawaiian Falls works well, but I can only take so much sun. Y'all have seen my pasty white skin, right? And my child's even pastier, whiter skin? We have to limit the sun intake here in the Brooks family.

So here's a list of some new things little H got to experience this week to avoid a paci takeover...

1. The realization that the Bumbo seat only lasts so long. Toddlers beware: You're legs may (i.e., will) get caught in the tiny little holes!

I usually just put Hunter's afternoon snack on our coffee table and he stands up to eat it, but I'm SO over scrubbing little bits of food off every night, so I decided to pull out the ole Bumbo for snacks. I also let Hunter watch Barney or Elmo or Veggie Tales during snack time. The couple of times I've tried the tv in Hunter's life, he hasn't really been interested, but he seems to LOVE Barney now (much to James's disgust).

Yes, my kid is totally in a tv trance here. Don't judge me. That Barney can teach some pretty good concepts with those catchy tunes.

2. Fun with the lego table. Okay, so this is by no means a new activity, but the way Hunter gently removed each piece off of the table and carefully placed them on the floor is totally out of character, so I'll call that new.

See how gentle he's being in that first picture...and the small space that all of the pieces are confined to in the second?

At least until this moment...

For a split second I had a dream of no more scratches on my floors. Then the throwing commenced...

Notice the green and white pieces thrown against the back wall. (And yes, that is a new rug - early birthday present from my honey.)

3. And finally the new thing that should win me parent of the year (drumroll please)... Hunter had his first happy meal this week. Dr. Sears would be so disappointed in me.