Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda

I need to blog. I have lots to say (I think). I just seem to have too much else to do right now! Dishes, laundry, cleaning, feeding, napping (haha, joke), playing, going to the park... the list could continue!

I will say that Cliff and I had a most marvelous weekend! We finally had the chance to just stay here in Little Rock and hang out at our place for the majority of the 2 days. It was hot (said in a whispered voice like Sam says) hot hot! Summer is definitely upon us.

Sam has been c-r-a-c-k-i-n-g us up lately. He has now caught on to counting (a boy after our own hearts). He will say "waaahn (one), tee (two), waaahn, waahn, tee......" he said three a few times but mostly it is just waaahn and tee. It's pretty stinking cute and I will definitely try to get a video of it soon. He is turning into a bit of a mocking bird. That will be a really scary thing here in a few months. (momma, watch your mouth) I try to get him to say his name and he just says "sssss" in a whisper voice.

It is so much entertainment each and every day. He also has started giving us kisses and hugs without us asking for them- awww! On Friday I watched a friend's little 3 year old for several hours. Sam kept on giving him hugs and Josh did not know what to think about it. :-)

Stay tuned.... I'm sure I will be back later in the week with some potentially exciting news! This could be good!!!

15 months

WOW! Sam is 15 months today. It's hard to believe... I think this requires a comparison shot:

Sam on May 13, 2008

Sam on May 19, 2009

My how he has grown! Time flies.

Well, the weather has been perfect for the past few days. I am loving this and not looking forward to the too hot to get outside days that are coming up. We have been to the park to play the past 3 days. I tell Sam that we are going "bye bye" and that is it...he is standing by the door trying to get outside! I have to watch what I say to him because if I am not quite ready to leave yet he will whine and whine until we leave. It's pretty cute though...

We had a busy weekend! The trip was uneventful, thank God!!! Do I even have to remind you of how our last trip went??? (See Dallas posts.) This week started off with my "I officially feel old" birthday. I don't know why 26 is old in my book but it is. I'll try to embrace it anyway! I had a most wonderful birthday... last year was pretty awful. Cliff was sick and we were packing up to move to LR. We were NOT happy about leaving our friends, family and beautiful house behind. I'm so thankful that we have grown to really like LR!!! I couldn't ask for anything more... (except a house to live in...that's all). So anyway, this birthday started off with a visit to the park where we hung out with friends. It was fairly relaxing even though Sam got himself incredibly dirty from head to toe with rock dust. To the bathtub he went. That evening we went to P.F. Changs for dinner. Yummy! Sam loves vegetarian lettuce wraps. Wow...he would have eaten the entire plate if we let him. My gift wasn't in yet so I received it yesterday in the mail... an iPhone!!! I am pretty excited and nearly addicted to it already. Any advice on applications or uses from anyone who has one?

Sam just woke up so I have to cut this short. I'll catch up soon!

Stop, in the name of truck rollovers

On Monday we had a very eventful morning!! Sam and I were on our way to walk at Pinnacle Mountain State Park with a few friends. I was driving on Cantrell when I could see that traffic was stopped up ahead. No big deal... I'll just stay in the right lane (mistake right there) and I'll be out of here in no time! NOT SO MUCH! A HUGE dump truck of some kind had overturned in the east bound lanes of the road (I was westbound). The police had arrived, along with two semi- tow trucks. So, they were blocking all 5 lanes of traffic in an attempt to get the truck turned back over. People were running out from all of the surrounding businesses to watch! It was kind of amusing... Anyway, after 30 minutes of sitting in traffic the tow trucks finally unhooked from the still overturned truck and moved out of the way to let traffic get by for a while. Sam and I attempted to keep ourselves entertained with books and toys but those got old quickly. He wanted OUT of his car seat and I didn't want to let him out so I finally got smart and remembered that I had my camera in the diaper bag. Yeah!!! That kept him happy. He enjoys when I take pictures of him and he enjoys looking at pictures on the camera so we were good to go. (by the way, I never got to walk, no one was there when I showed up and there was a creepy guy lurking)

The next day, Tuesday, I was trying to feed Sam some yogurt and applesauce and he took the spoon away from me so I just let him go at it. He had a great time and was so freakin' cute! (Notice his long hair, next week I will have to post pictures after his Aunt JuJu cuts it for the first time on Friday).

He was pretty good at it. He was concentrating really hard to get just a little in his mouth each time. He started out with the spoon in his left hand and then after several minutes he switched to his right and then back to his left. He was trying to decide which hand worked better! It will be interesting to see if he is right or left handed in the future.

After creating such a mess it was time for a bath! Sam loves bath time. He always has to have the water running while he is in the tub so he can play with it. If we turn the water off he promptly turns it back on. Cute, but it makes for a TON of water for him to play in and a mess at the end of bath time. He splashes mommy quite frequently, and that really makes him laugh!

Later on that night Cliff grilled some delicious burgers. When it is grilling time, Sam wants to be in on all of the action that takes place outside. We can't go to the back porch without him throwing a fit! It makes for an interesting grilling night. I was trying to feed Sam some dinner when Cliff went out to start the fire. He would not have it. He was throwing a huge fit in his highchair and would not eat. He was just sitting there crying with a mouth full of food. I finally took him out and put him on the couch where he could watch what Cliff was doing. This was good enough for awhile but then he HAD to go out there to supervise the grilling action. He loves to watch the fire and say "hot, hot hot hot hot...". It's never ending! We can't wait until we have a house again so we can have a yard for him to run and play in. Then he can always be outside while daddy grills!! No question!

Well I guess that's my random pictures post for the week. I've been pretty busy so I haven't been writing as much but hopefully things will slow down after this weekend. We are headed to NWA for my little brother, Andrew's Confirmation. We will be back on Sunday, just in time for my birthday Monday. I have a feeling that I am going to feel old after this milestone...

Mama Drama

Some of you may not know but I'm an assistant organizer for the "West Little Rock Mom's Group". It has been a ton of fun helping to organize and create events for the entire group to enjoy. It has truly been a blast to meet new people and enjoy my time as a stay at home mom more fully- with others who understand me. :-) We have had a pretty much drama free existence in this group until this week when some stuff blew up. I was pretty stressed out today but things turned out well with no (ok maybe just a few) hard feelings. Why is it that getting a bunch of random women together always creates a sorority like atmosphere? Now there is nothing wrong with sororities, it just wasn't my thing, especially going to such a small college. I just don't understand why some women just never grow up. I was having to argue with women who are much older than me who were being very childish and argumentative. It was too much to handle. I felt like I needed a stiff drink (or 5) in the middle of the day!!! Oh well, said drama is over (I believe, hope, pray) and life as a stay at home mom in WLR mom's group should continue on as normal.

Sam in Ft. Morgan, AL last summer. Can we go back now??

That being said, Sam and I had a wonderful time in the SUN yesterday at a group swimming party/ lunch! We arrived around 11:30, had some food and then swam for at least 2 hours after that. Sam had such a wonderful time. The pool was a salt water pool so it was much better than those nasty chlorinated pools (like we have here at the townhouse). There was a very shallow part where Sam could walk around without a problem. Well, the only problem was that he could walk around!!! This made him think that he was in a much bigger version of his bathtub. He was way too confident and kept on slipping and dipping his head into the water. Don't worry, I was right there to pull him back up but he did get a good sinus cleaning a few times! The pool functioned as a HUGE pool of saline solution :). He did not get upset by having his head dunked at all. He just got up, shook his head a little and wanted to do it again. It was also fun when I swam around the pool while pulling Sam in his floaty boat thing. He talked and giggled and just had an all around great time. We are supposed to be doing this once a week if the weather is good so I'm sure I'll have more pool adventures in the near future!

I hope you all have a most wonderful weekend and Happy Mother's Day to all of my fellow moms out there. Enjoy the day and make your husband change all of the diapers and cook for a change :)

Part 2: Dallas or Bust (Can't believe we didn't bust)

9:20ish am: (this time varies based on if you ask me or Cliff... I thought it was 9:15, Cliff says more like 9:30) We are OFF!!! We waved goodbye to Sam and he just waved back. No crying, wailing, trying to follow us, nothing. Should this make us feel good or bad? Are we bad parents if our baby is completely fine with us leaving him at Grandma and Grandpa's house? Well, one thing they have that we don't is a brand new baby kitten. Aunt Katelyn got it for her 14th bday so little Milo has now become a great source of entertainment for our 14 month old. Fine by me!

Back to driving... we take off from Rogers and Cliff immediately says something that made me not so happy so we didn't speak for the first 30 mins of the drive. Nice start to the weekend... he asked me if I wanted to turn around and go back to Rogers. :-/ (I still love you honey, don't worry) Then everything was fine and dandy but it was raining raining raining already.

10:30am: I was exhausted so I decided to lay my seat back and take a little nap.

10:35am: I woke up to some major pot hole driving. Holy cow it felt/sounded like we were driving on a horrible gravel road! Bump bump bump, Cliff was swerving to miss as much as he could but it just didn't work! I knew we were in Oklahoma. lol!

11am-2pm: Nothing major happened...it rained and rained and rained and we stopped for lunch but it wasn't anything that the wonderful Cliff driver couldn't handle.

2pm: The sky is clearing out! I think we can see the sun a little! Hallelujah!!! I am so excited!!

2:37pm: I receive a text from my brother John "There are some super severe storms moving into Dallas soon. Be careful!" Great....perfection! We are just about to drive into Dallas. This will be grand.

3pm: We arrive to the Dallas metro area and are greeted by some horrendous winds and rain. We were traveling at about 30-40 mph for the rest of the trip. The rain was driving down so hard that people were pulling off of the interstate to wait it out... we would never do such a thing! By this time I was freaking out. My blood pressure was probably through the roof and I can't imagine what Cliff was feeling since he was the one behind the wheel! I was just waiting for the inevitable demise of our car/us. (never happened, thankfully!) The rain was quickly flooding the interstate...a car that was 2 cars ahead of us hydroplaned/ fishtailed 90degrees one way and then overcompensated and went 90degrees the other way. Scary but we were all going so slow that everyone was able to stay out of the cars way.

3:45m: We finally arrive at our hotel!!! We drove through some crazy water filled roadways after we exited..there was a river on our exit but we drove on through... the T-Rex can handle anything (even boating, apparently)! This is when we started to wonder if our concert was even going to take place. Seriously, we were going to an outdoor concert and we have general admission tickets on the LAWN. Yeah for us. So, I called the amphitheater and they said that they have a 'rain or shine' policy. (Umm...seriously? What about tornadoes? Will Dave play through those???) She suggested that we wear rain boots and bring a tarp to sit on.

6pm: We have determined that there is a slight possibility that the rain may let up and let us enjoy the reason we traveled all this way. We are off to search for a Target or Walmart so we can get the necessary supplies. We headed to where the Target was located, according to Google Maps. Not so much, it's the sight of a FUTURE SuperTarget... well that's just, umm...SUPER! So we head off in the opposite direction to find WalMart. We were successful there but the skies again opened up on our way to WalMart. This time, including ground lightning. This weather is just becoming comical!! We RAN into WalMart, soaking our shoes and pants. We found and purchased a tarp and rainboots. Yeah!!!

We then decided to head toward Superpages.com amphitheater to see if we could find a place to eat before the concert. No luck there but we did find the concert site so we decided to just park and then get something to eat inside the venue.

7:30pm: We are at the concert! Yeah!!! It's not raining!!! YEAH!!! We left our boots in the car so we could return them. They were so freakin' ugly that I couldn't imagine wearing them unless I absolutely had to. I'd rather wear wet tennis shoes any day. We went inside, got a (much needed) beverage and some nasty food then we went to scope out a location on the lawn.

Found a spot but it seemed to be a little bit of a crazy area, plus there is a pole kind of in the way so we decided to move to a nice little open area close by. We saw what looked like a mound of mud in this area but it was nothing that our tarp couldn't handle!

7:45pm: Drunk girl falls on me...

8pm: Dave starts playing! Yeah!!! It was great!!!

9:30pm: The sky opens up AGAIN. I had a poncho to wear but Cliff didn't so we stood up and Cliff held the tarp over our heads. So nice! I was only getting wet on my legs so it wasn't a big deal.

10pm: Cliff asks me if we can move over because he's getting bit by the ANTS that made the ANT hill that we were sitting on. lol.... It wasn't a mound of mud after all!

10:45pm: The concert ends :) It was really really fun!!!

10:45-11:30pm: The drive back to the hotel was not too bad. It was pouring again...we drove in some nice lake areas. We also saw where there had been an awful car accident on the interstate. That was scary.

11:30pm-8:30am: Showers and bed. Ahhhhh sleep! Uninterrupted sleep! I haven't had a night without a baby monitor in 14.5 months. It was pure bliss! We slept in for the first time in ages. Cliff said that the wonderful night of sleep he has was worth the $100 it cost us for the room! (like he gets up with Sam at night anyway) ;)

9:45am: We are off to IKEA!!! I was so excited to get to go to IKEA for the first time ever. Yeah! We headed on a tollroad to save us some time. We got to the tollbooth, went to a change only aisle, paid $1.05 and didn't get the green light...crap. It says we still owe $0.30... what the heck? We have NO MORE CHANGE! GRRR... we wanted to get the attention of a guy a few aisles down but it said NOT to get out of our car! So, I made Cliff back up 30 yds so we could go to the booth and tell the guy that the machine stole our money. Thankfully he believed us and let us go through!

10:30am: We arrive at IKEA and spend 2 hours drooling at everything. We could have spent an entire day there. It was wonderful. I especially loved the kid section. We bought Sam a chair, a bunny bath towel, a step stool, bibs and a rug for his room.

4:15pm: We met my mom in Alma to pick Sam up. It was so nice of her to meet us! That saved us 2 hours of driving!! It was great to see him again. He was very happy to see us too! Sweet boy!

6:30pm: We arrive back in Little Rock after one of the craziest weekends I have ever had. It was great to get away! Cliff said that concerts have always been a huge adventure for him.... I didn't know that we would have such an adventurous first concert together. I'd do it again with him, though! :)

**Edit to add: MIL does not have the swine flu. Just the plain flu!!!

Dallas or Bust (Can't believe we didn't bust)

Friday May 1:
7am(ish): I woke up excited... we are going to Dallas for the Dave Matthew's Band concert!!! This will be MY first night away from Sam. I finally get my Valentine's Day present :) YAHH! I was a little overwhelmed thinking about everything I had to accomplish before we left that next morning (little did I know). My mother in law was coming to stay with Sam so we didn't have to pack him up and bring him somewhere too (hahah).

8:15am: My phone starts ringing, telling me that Cliff is calling. Uh oh! It's never good when he calls me that early in the morning... I just saw him 45 mins ago. Cliff, "Umm... my mom thinks she has the swine flu, she can't come to babysit this weekend". Me, "WHAT, you're kidding, right"..... Cliff, "No, she has a high fever and is achy all over, she can't come. Why don't you take Sam up to NWA to your parent house today and then we can still leave from LR tomorrow morning".

So, this started my panicking. I had to now pack Sam, drive 6+ hours to drop him off all by myself, and figure out how I am going to leave him for not just 1 night, but now 2 nights?!?! HUH? So, I of course decide that there is no way we are going to do all of that. I told Cliff to try to sell the tickets... I told him there was no way we were going to do all of that! Well, then after thinking about it all for awhile I realized that we've been planning this trip for many months and there is no way that I'm going to let one little (BIG) thing get in the way of us going!

9am-12pm: So, I call different family members to get their opinions on my situation. My dad said that we could bring Sam up, mom said it wouldn't be a problem. My sister, Julie, said she would meet me in Alma to cut down on my driving time... I just didn't know what to do! Then some genius (I don't remember who it was) told me to just drive up that evening with Cliff after he got off of work! DUH! Why didn't I think of that earlier?!?! (Maybe because I was freaking out) I run this idea by Cliff and he agrees that it would be the best way to approach this (disaster) I mean challenge.

1pm: So now I have to pack for Sam, Cliff and myself. Joy of all joys. Instead I decide to make some strawberry muffins. I saw the recipe yesterday on my container of yummy organic vanilla yogurt. Lowfat, delicious strawberry muffins can cure any problem, right? (except the problem of having to pack for my entire family) So, I made the muffins... they smelled heavenly!

2:30pm: Now, I'm ready to get some packing done. I pack all of Sam's bedroom up just to make sure that I don't forget anything that he may need, want or desire on his first night away from me (WAIL!!!!)! That part isn't so bad, I can do the rest... so I head upstairs and immediately my mood changes. I HATE PACKING. I don't know why this is the case, it's just so annoying to me. I never know what to bring to wear. I know the weather in Dallas said that there is about a 30-40% chance of rain on Saturday evening (this is laughable now), so I better pack some clothes that could get wet and possible messed up at the concert. So, I finally just throw some stuff in a bag for myself and Cliff and call it a success.

4pm: I'm just waiting around for Cliff at this point. He said he would try to get off of work early so we could get on the road at a good time.

4:30pm: Cliff calls and says that he is just leaving work.

4:45pm: Cliff gets home and we quickly depart for NWA. Because of my excellence in packing/preparing, we are on the road in no time! Yeah!!!

8pm: We arrive in Rogers! Sam was great on the trip and it wasn't a bad drive. We only hit scary driving downpouring rain for a few minutes on the interstate around Johnson and we only had to slow down for one accident at Wagon Wheel! Not bad not bad. Maybe this weekend is looking up!!!

10pm: I get Sam to stop screaming because he doesn't want to go to bed. Now if everyone will just leave him alone so he can get to sleep....

10:05pm: WAHHHHHH WAHHHHH WAHHHH MOOOOOMMMMA!!!! I rush out of the bathroom to pick up a screaming baby...his dad went in to go to bed a little too soon... he coughed and scared Sam to death. Great.... now what.

11pm: Sam and I finally fall asleep with him lying right inbetween mommy and daddy. sweet...

2am: I wake up and try to lay Sam in the pack-n-play. No success there. He's screaming again. I go back to bed with him and he's rolling around hitting Cliff in the head, back, face. Nothing is working. I try to lay him down again, screaming wailing, great...

3:30am: I finally go to sleep on the couch with Sam. Fun.

7:30am: Sam's awake for the day. Great... perfect. He never sleeps in, regardless of whether he sleeps for 12 hours or 6. I'm freakin' exhausted. Perfection.

Stay tuned for the REALLY great part of our trip!!!!!