Grocery Shopping With 2 Toddlers

This is what is known as…not a good idea. This was stop #3 and it ran into lunchtime. I would absolutely not recommend trying it.

Skeleton Key

I found this key tucked behind a bunch of junk we hastily piled onto the built-in shelves in the office. How exciting, right? And can you imagine my giddiness when it actually worked in our old door hardware?!

IT’S BACK: Things We Fish Out of Bode’s Mouth

In this case, what’s left of a restaurant crayon. Appetizers, Bode-style.

Grown-Up Markers

And yes, this did end with me cleaning red marker off of the white moulding Sometimes it’s worth it.

2011 Recap – The First Half

January

Well, the big news in January was that we FINALLY went from one to two. Bode James Gay arrived sometime around 7pm on January 7, 2011 and he was NINE freaking pounds, one ounce. Still have vague intentions to write up his birth story.

I can't even believe how much hair has grown in the past 12 months on that child.

February

Bode developed an angry case of baby acne, which still plagues him as eczema. G-Mum came to visit and we got to see the awesome Carnegie Science Center.

March

I gave up on growing my hair out. Dagny got the worst cold she had ever had and we had Saint Patrick’s Day dinner at my in-law’s.

April

The big news in April was that we moved into our new house! Bode started rolling over and we spent Easter in Denver.

Dagny's First Easter Egg Hunt was at our friends Christina & Jeremy's house!

May

James’s cousin and her twin boys came to visit. Dagny adores them! I hope they all grow up to be buds. We also made friends with a sweet little boy who lives up the street. We discovered Veteran’s Park, a lovely local park with a great playground. I went to visit Dan in Florida before his latest deployment which is to Afghanistan. It was a last minute trip and I flew down there with both kids BY MYSELF. I’m still waiting for my gold medal, and believe me, I earned one. Right after I got home from Florida we celebrated Memorial Day at an aunt’s house. Dagny was just not her usual pool-crazed self and we later discovered it’s because she had a raging fever. Obviously things turned out OK

June

I turned another year older on the first, just like I do every year. We celebrated at Mad Mex with the kids in tow. Playing in the kitchen sink became a thing. I gave homemade pizza dough another go, successfully. We attended New Kensington Community Days, where I found some awesome new brand name one piece bathing suits for super cheap! Dagny had her face painted for the first time and we had a generally fabulous time. Bode started rolling around, and became quite proficient at rolling under the couch.

This post was starting to overwhelm me because I have so much I want to share. Hopefully if you’re here, you’re liking that I have lots to share. I decided to split the year in review into two posts because I wanted to put lots of pictures in there and the whole project was taking me too long. So, I have whole second post that I need to finish to complete this thing. It will probably take me a week or so to get that taken care of. Hopefully I don’t disappear forever in the rabbit hole that is our pictures

Anyway, point being…more to come soon…

 

Mom’s Night Off

I’m channelling a bit of Trinity and a bit of Selene. I hope. Yes that is a potty on the floor behind me.

FINALLY!

We had a couple inches of snow the night before last, then a glorious sunny day, followed by several more inches last night. To say I am thrilled just doesn’t quite capture the squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! (:Notice the Bode photobomb:)

Nap Time

He’s very fond of his blankets.

Watercolor Painting Devo

These days, any time we give Dags a marker, paintbrush or even a pencil, it devolves into turning herself into a “catty.” I’m pretty sure it’s a consequence of her Halloween costume of Cat In The Hat. However, this particular incarnation was inspired by having her face painted as a blue cat (her request) at a Kidtopia event at Keystone this past weekend:

She was tickled beyond pink and kept running back to the mirror to see herself again and again.

Quick Update for Friends & Family

This post is for my family and friends who mostly communicate through email, phone, snail mail and other old school “technology.” I’m going to try to recap the year month by month in my next post. So far, it will be mostly pictures. If it starts to get really long, I’ll break it into two posts. Before I get to that though, I wanted to talk about my plans for the blog and possibly a vlog this year.

I think what I’m going to do is just use this blog as my platform to communicate with all of you Facebook-phobes. And if you’ve been keeping up, I have become a little more leary of Facebook this year too.  I discovered the other night that I can post photos directly from my phone to this blog. So I am going to start using this like I used to use Path & Instagram. Some of you were enjoying the Path app I was using to share pictures from my phone and told me as much. I have to apologize that lately you have not seen any of those because Path removed that functionality from their app. So I emailed them about it and then ditched them when they confirmed it was true. They stopped sending those emails to you guys and they took down the website where you could view them. Now you have to have the Path app and also “friend” me on Path to see all that. It’s complete crap, and now Path is just like every other social media flavor of the week.  OK, now that I’ve got that out of my system…

I also am toying with the idea of a vlog. We enjoy watching the Shaytards from time to time and they have inspired us to at the very least fantasize about different YouTube channel ideas. I have 3 channels I think would be fun, but damn it’s a lot of work. I haven’t even tried it because video editing has presented as very overwhelming. Nonetheless, I am making it a goal, right here and now to try vlogging for a few weeks. Not sure which weeks, but I’ll be sure to announce it here.

That said, life is good. More details about our goings-on in the 2011 recap post that I’ll put together next.

Hopefully you are still reading this. If you want to get an email every time I post something here, be it a picture or an update on how my “grow out my leg hair” project is going, just enter your email in the top right hand corner of this page. Click the button that says “Sign Me Up!”

Love,

Carly