Best.Christmas.Ever.

With that being said, I am pooped. :) I will expound on this amazing Christmas and preparations for a certain little boy's first birthday party in the next post after I've caught up on some sleep.

Hallothanksmas.

I'm still up at almost 11pm wishing I could find The Office on somewhere in TV land with no such luck. I will probably find it the second I finally get myself to go to bed. And right before Ben went to bed we had to keep ourselves from waking up Thatcher to play with him :)
Thanksgiving was so much fun. We went down to Tremont IL and spent it with my dad, sister, aunt & uncle, and my uncle's kids. Thatcher ate turkey and napped just like all the big boys.
Last weekend we visited our dear friends the Van Zees in Iowa. We had such a lovely time with them, even though they passed around a fun 12 hour stomach bug :) But we celebrated Sarae and Thatcher's 1st birthdays together (hers is Dec 8) and that was so fun. It was neat to see them interact and love on each other.
And now it's time for Christmas!!! We put up our tree right away and Thatcher has done great with it! He mostly ignores it but every once in a while he'll grab a branch and shake it with all his might. We will be doing Christmas Eve with Ben's parents and Annie, and going to the 11pm candlelight service at church (my favorite!!). Christmas morning we'll open gifts with my mom and Kara, and Christmas day Ben's parents join us at my big family gathering, which also includes a visit from Santa! Then hopefully within a week we'll do Christmas with my dad and aunt. I'm about 70% done with my Christmas shopping so far. I work best under pressure.
And it finally happened, I caved into the peer pressure. Thatcher got his first hair cut tonight. I must say, I didn't think he could possibly look any cuter, but now with his new hair cut he is for sure the most dashingly handsome little boy I know. And he's a speed walker with 7 teeth now. Melts my friggin' heart.
And even though I own it, I can't wait for A Christmas Story to be on tv 24 hours Christmas Eve.
Here's to family friends and blessings a' plenty.

These boots were made for walking.

AAAAAAAHHHHH! Why don't I keep up with this?? I have 1.2 million things going on and thoughts running through my head that I would LOVE to get off my chest and down on print to make my load feel a little lighter. I digress.
I'm feeling muy overwhelmed lately, but who isn't?? I looooove the holiday season but along with it comes cah-raze-ee-ness season. But who am I kidding, as if I need the holidays to blame for the craziness that is my life :)
Right now pumpkin pie #2 of 2 is in the oven baking, I have teeth whitening strips on my teeth, and both of my men, plus the animals, are all passed out.
Oh! So Thatcher totally took his first steps the other night not holding on to anything! It was the craziest thing ever. Ben and I were just telling someone the other day how Thatcher has zer0 interest in walking on his own. We were at our friend Andy's birthday party. We were just about to leave but of course I had to have pie first. Ben and Thatcher were on the floor hanging out (after I kicked Ben off the couch so I could eat) and I sat down and started eating and feeding my boy some icecream. It just took a second for a light bulb to go on, Ben and I were like, duh, let's see if he'll walk for it. It never occured to us before to try and motivate him somehow to walk on his own. Sure enough he did it! It's so hard to describe how uniquely exciting it was to see our son take his first independent steps. Now I know why "the first steps" are such a big deal.
Ok my teeth itch.

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

We had soooo much fun at the pumpkin patch yesteray. This time last year Ben was working a turn-around at work and I was very pregnant. Kara came with me to the patch with my small group. When we were wrapping up I called my Grandma to see if I could come over, but she told me no because all of my baby shower stuff was all over her house and she didn't want me to see it. Fast forward to yesterday, and I'm at the same patch with Ben and our now 9 month old son. It wasn't until yesterday that I realized what a fun age 9 months is. Thatcher really and truly seemed to enjoy every bit of the 2 hours we were there yesterday. I think his favorite part was playing in the corn kernels with his buddy Carsten. My heart grew a few sizes yesterday, seeing my son enjoy an activity that was meant for him. At the end I picked out a pumpkin for Thatcher and showed it to him, he immediately got this huge grin on his face and then tried to eat the pumpkin :) He cracks me up.
At his 9 month check up he was 21 lbs 14oz, and 29 & 3/4 in long. He has 4 teeth that have cut through, and now the two top front middle are about to cut through. He smiles, laughs, crawls, makes the raspberry noise on his own, lays his head on you, walks with his "shopping cart" as I like to call it, loooves Georgia and Auto, jibber jabbers, says mama and dada, loves pulling dvds off the rack, loves climbing on and over his Winnie the Pooh chair, the list goes on and on. I like that this blog helps me to keep track of his milestones, but shoot I need to update his baby book now.

In other news, IT'S FALL! MY FAVORITE TIME OF YEAR, WEEEEE! I love the weather, fashion, anticipation of upoming holidays, food, tra la la!

One of those "mom" moments.

Kinda funny story. I fed Thatcher right before we went to the chiropractor tonight (fed meaning I nursed him, sorry if that's TMI but it's relevant to the story) and as I was about to hand him off to Ben to change his diaper I realized he must have peed one too many times in that diaper so it leaked out. I threw Ben a new outfit for Thatcher to wear that I thought was on the "clean" pile of clothes in his room. Then we load up in the car to go. It's then that I realized I gave Ben a dirty outfit caked with baby food around the collar to put on Thatcher. I also realized that the shirt dress I was wearing had a big wet spot. Yup, when I was feeding him and he peed it leaked on me and I didn't notice. So I ran inside and changed both of us, right? Nope. I went to the Dr. smelling like pee with a dirty-clothes baby.

Ben just showed me how Thatcher can take a handful of steps forward using his little walker/car toy. Scary.

(This is the toy so you have an idea, I don't know why amazon has it for $99 when it's like $18 at Target
http://www.amazon.com/Playskool-WALK-N-RIDE-PLAYSKOOL/dp/B0002HZUL0/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&s=sporting-goods&qid=1253068290&sr=8-9 )

I'm so in love...

With these two songs right now.






I think we may be introducing this second song to the congregation in October the Sunday I'm up to sing. So excited.

Hillsong widget by 6L & Daxii

8 months and all that jazz.

It's almost 5am. Thatcher woke up about an hour ago, I think he was chilly, so I patted him down, put a blanket on him and he's out. He's doing better with sleeping through the night, and I'm trying to read Healthy Sleep Habits Happy Child to help me help Thatcher sleep better. I'm only on the second chapter, I feel like the author is kind of using scare tactics so it makes me a little nervous, but I'm hopeful it will help. Anyways for some reason I'm up instead of being back in bed. So why not blog :)
He is 8 months old today. I can't believe it. It's like he was just born yesterday. I LOVE him as a baby, but the older he gets the more fun it is to hang out with him. He is a talker and so mobile and all over the place now, I can't imagine how much more mobile he'll be when he can walk. Thatcher is also really paying attention when I sing stuff to him, like the ABC's and the books of the bible. For some reason I always get stuck after Song of Songs, so I'm hoping singing it to him will help me get them all memorized. One of the things I'm most excited about is teaching him about Jesus and for him to lead his bedtime prayers with Mommy and Daddy. He's such a good boy, and hilarious. I think he gets that from his mom.
It's Labor day weekend, which means it's officially fall, woo-hoo! Fall is by far my favorite time of year. Perfect weather, and tons of excitement in the air. In the movie You've Got Mail, Tom Hanks says something about it reminding him of a bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils.

"But, oh, I love my life And all that jazz."

Happy Anniversay

Our 5 year wedding anniversay was August 7th. I cannot believe its been 5 years. Not to mention 8 years together. We watched our wedding video before we left for our get-a-way downtown last Saturday. I love watching it but Ben was right, it's kind of sad to watch because of all the people that have moved away since then. My favorite part is still when Ben starts crying when he sees me for the first time :)
We decided to go downtown Chicago to celebrate. Kara came to spend the night with Thatcher. It was the longest I had gone being away from him, definitely the first overnight away, but I think we both did pretty good. We stayed at the Wyndham Hotel, which was beautiful. Definitely not your typical Holiday Inn. We wanted to stay at the hotel we stayed at our wedding night, but it was totally booked this weekend.
Then it was off to the Signature Room for dinner. That was super cool. We sat at a window seat so we could overlook the North side of the city from 95 floors up. The food was delicious, we had fried green tomatoes for an appetizer, I had the pork tenderloin and Ben had the duck breast. We had dessert too and they wrote Happy Anniversay on our plates. Then we went up a floor to the lounge for a drink, which was neat but after a few minutes we decided against more drinks ;) so we left. We got to take the "secret celebrity" elevator back down. Apparently Kevin Costner and Christina Aguilera have been in it. Now they can say celebrity couple "Bedana" have been in it too.
Then we watched a live band play down on the steps of the Cheesecake Factory. After that we walked around and headed back to the hotel, went swimming, then to bed. Unfortunately, the one night I could have slept straight through the night, I was up ALL night. I think it was the coffee with dessert. Combined with the sirens that went off EVERY 5 freakin minutes in the city. That totally sucked, but oh well. Then to top it all of we had room service bring us a yummy breakfast :) A great weekend with my wonderful baby daddy of 5 years. I am truly blessed.

P.S.

I'm embarrassed to admit I already bought Thatcher's Halloween costume. That's right. I know it's only July.

Grape Crush

Currently Thatcher is asleep in the stroller, in the living room. We just went for a super long walk to the gas station (to purchase the above mentioned soda pop) and back while Ben is out collecting landscaping supplies (this landscaping will be the death of me I'm sure). So anyway Thatcher fell asleep on the walk and instead of taking him out of the stroller I just left him in it and brought it in the living room. I squeeze out whatever naps I can get from him :)
Since last post, he is crawling all over the place with no problem, pulling himself up all over the place, and he loves getting up on the bottom shelf of the coffee table. And if he's crawling around and I'm not paying attention, the next thing I know I feel the little fishy nibbling on my toes with his two little teeth! He's like a piranha. A piranha that doesn't sleep through the night anymore. But it is getting better, slowly but surely. The past few nights he's been getting up around 1am, I'll pat his back for a little bit but then give up and crawl back into bed. He cries for a few minutes and then the next thing I know it's 5 or 6am. Of course the one day I had to get up early to go into work for a few hours, I had to wake him up at 7am to leave. Go figure.

Diet Pepsi is my friend.

Ok so crap, I wanted to blog sooner than this but oh well. The important thing is, BEN IS BACK FROM TEXAS. I told him he is NEVER allowed to leave me for extended periods of time again. Thatcher's two front bottom teeth have decided to make their appearance, so bye bye sleeping through the night. It's been giving me flashbacks to those first few weeks home with him, man that was scary *shudder* I'm glad we survived it. It's crazy how the second he turned 6 months he started doing all this new stuff. There's the teeth thing, he can sit up really well by himself, he pulls himself up to standing in the crib and ROARS like a velociraptor, and is seriously on the verge of crawling.
They finally hired someone to replace me at Bethany. I got a twinge of jealousy when my director told me, I felt a bit territorial if you will about someone taking over what I've done the past 3 years. But I'm very glad at the same time. I will slowly phase out as I train her and she phases in. But our director would like me to stay connected with Bethany, which I am happy to do. I think he recognizes that I am a good worker :)
My parents' divorce is final. Maybe I'll go more into that on another post. But for now, next subject.
I'm on a huge humus kick right now. More specifically sun-dried tomato flavored humus. Every time I eat it I hear Phoebe from friends go "I've got the humus!" (From my all time favorite episode, "The One Where No One's Ready.")

Ta ta for now.

Look Ma!

What a crazy fun exhausting wonderful life we live...
I shipped Ben off to Texas yesterday, boo. I over-packed my day, and I paid for it last night. We left the house at 5am to take Ben to O'hare, came home, went to church, went to our friend's house for a 4th of July party, visited Grandma who was back from her trip to Brazil, then I finally make it home and my work cell phone rings, I had to go pick up a baby and take her to interim care. So I called my mom exhausted and crying and she was over in 15 minutes to watch the baby. I got home at 10pm. Needless to say I'm a day behind on my P90x workout. That's ok cuz Tony Horton probably would've pushed me over the edge last night.
Thatcher must be teething because he's crabby ALL the time lately and not sleeping well. He's been sitting up on his own really well lately, so today I set him in his crib to play. I was playing peek-a-boo with him and the next thing I know he's pulling himself up to standing! I was shocked and he was thrilled. I'm so glad I'm able to be home with him so I get to witness these things myself.
The house is in total disarray, oh well. I forgot to get the garbage out this morning, so that's 2 weeks in a row we've missed it. Oops.
I wish I could just snap my fingers and stop time like Zack Morris so I can have a moment to breathe, catch up on things, and spend time with God and renew my spirit a little.

Good Times

For our little mini vacation this year, Ben and I decided we would load up the baby and spend a few days with my aunt and uncle in Tremont, IL. My Aunt Barbara is my dad's sister (his only sibling). Kara and I are very close with her, and growing up everyone thought she was my mother when we were together (we look a lot alike).
My Uncle Don owns a funeral home (Davis Mortuary) and their house is attached to it (creepy for me, Ben loves it). The home part is beautiful and inviting, Barbara has great decorating skills.
Our first afternoon here, Wednesday evening, we were all hanging out watching Thatcher zoom around the kitchen in his little car walker. The "Amish" family across the street pulled into their driveway so Barbara and I dashed to the windows to be creepers and watch them unload into the house. Reason being is that there are 6 kids, 1 boy and 5 girls, and they do not wear shoes in their house. So one by one big brother carries all of his little sisters into the house on his back from the van. It was so interesting to watch when they were all finished I exclaimed "This is better than TV!" Maybe you had to be there...
My 27th birthday was yesterday. Weird. I had a very hard time with 25, 27 just feels weird I guess. (Before we left for Tremont Ben gave me my birthday gifts from him, 2 beautiful dresses from Hansen's in Manhattan! (Good job Ben!))We went to the pool in town and did water aerobics in the morning, which was hilarious and fun (Kara, her bf Nick, and my dad had come down for the day. The guys hung out with the baby at the side of the pool, they did not join in the aerobics). Then we played with Uncle Don's new Harley (riding on the back with my dad makes me feel like a kid again) and his old go cart in the afternoon, then we went for dinner at Gil's, this fabulous little country restaurant in the middle of no where. It was a wonderful day. I missed my mom, but she is in Brazil at the moment on a missions trip with church.
Tonight is our last hoorah here, I'm sad to go tomorrow, it's been so nice spending time here. Another highlight was going to the little town grocery store, it was so quaint and charming.
Sunday I take Ben to O'hare because he's going to Texas for work for a week, boo. I asked if Thatcher and I could come, he said no. Hmm. :)

"I'll be there..."

This morning I wake up to find that Farrah Fawcett passed away after a long battle with cancer. I can't imagine her struggle and I hope she has some relief now. Then as we arrive at Ben's parents' house for dinner, I get a voicemail from my sister saying Michael Jackson has died after a cardiac arrest. All scandals aside, he was an incredible entertainer, and so many of his songs remind me of specific times in my life. I always think of how Ben explains why he likes High School Musical so much, because a lot of the songs and dances (mainly Zac Efron's parts) remind him of MJ. I know he had quite the childhood, I hope at some point before his death he was able to feel the comfort only Jesus can bring. I can't wait to play his songs for Thatcher and to try and dance with him to "Thriller." :)
Speaking of Thatcher...I looooove spending every day with him. Of course I find some relief during his nap times, when I can scramble to eat or jump in the shower, but then at night I find myself wanting to go in his room and pick him up just to cuddle. I almost did that last night, but Ben said no :)
I can already tell this summer is going to FLY by. We have wedding 3 of 4 coming up, my birthday, our vacation, 6 month check up and pictures, bridal shower, birthday parties, our 5th anniversary, possible canoe trip, and wedding 4 of 4 just to name a few...yikes! I need to remind myself to sloooow down sometimes, and to always thank God for every moment of every jam packed summer day.

Crazy Wavin'

Before I get to what this post is about let me address that I am attempting to do a blog. So it may be a few posts into it before I let the world know I even have a blog. So for now the only readers are me and Jesus.

Today was Father's Day and it was a really nice day. Ben went into work for like 2 hours before church (crazy I know) and then he opened his crab pj pants from the Shedd Aquarium and High School Musical 3 dvd. Then off to church where my mom's mission trip team was commissioned, lunch at Mattina Cafe with the in-laws, chillaxin' in the afternoon, then dinner with Dzia Dzia (my grandpa).

At 7:30pm we're home and starting cereal with Thatcher as usual. Tonight I added sweet potatoes. Thatcher didn't seem to interested in either tonight. I noticed him looking at his right hand a little more than usual. That made me think of sign language so I did the sign for "more" and he stared at me pretty intently. Then I noticed his hand was open in the "wave" position, palm facing me, so I did the same and waved side to side saying "hi." To my astonishment, he waved back!! It was crazy! He did it for a good 30 seconds while Ben scrambled to find the camera. He stopped for a minute but then did it again for the camera! I told Ben it felt like seeing a dog wave at you, because it's a being that normally isn't able to communicate ya know what I mean? Shortly after he went to bed, but I must say I've never been so excited for him to wake up in the morning so we can try this waving thing again :)