Story Time with Mary Beth

I was walking by MB's room the other day and heard her reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar and cannot believe I was able to capture this on video. Due to a brief intermission, the reading was told in two sections. This is priceless to me.

Oh how I love him! (Lamb Photos and Updates)

I missed the three, four and five month updates so I am going to try to squeeze one in for my little man before he hits six months. Wow, didn't see that happening so fast! I think the word that best describes him is smiley! He smiles all over himself most of the day. It's pretty amazing actually. I try to smile back at him as much as I can but my mouth eventually gets tired, he out lasts me every time. He only cries when he is tired or hungry and I have gotten better about figuring those things out before he gets fussy. He is grabbing at all kinds of things and loves playing on his floor mat. He loves to stare at his hands in amazement and grab onto his feet. He could give or take tummy time but has been doing better with it lately. He isn't rolling over yet but he is getting stronger on his stomach. We started rice cereal at five months and he is loving it! Since I started back to work a few weeks ago, he hasn't done so well with the bottle. He was doing okay when I tried a new type of bottle and then this week, he wouldn't drink anything from the bottle. Our nanny ended up getting several ounces into him through rice cereal so that is what she has been feeding him since he is refusing the bottle. The little stinker! The good thing is that I only miss one feeding while I am working so I think he just saves up until he can nurse again. I guess that's what happens when you spend the first month or so working so hard to get them to nurse, they just don't want to give it up. He thinks MB is the funniest thing and he spends most of his day watching her bounce around. She is quite the entertainer although she is only interested in him in small amounts of time. The more he starts interacting with her, the more she is going to love it! She is very helpful and always make sure that he has a fresh bib and burp cloth. He is a spitter like she was but we are handling it so much better this time around. We just know to give him the zantac and not wear anything nice around him and he will be just fine. I love this little guy to pieces and he can brighten up my day with one flash of those gummy smiles. He is so precious to us.

Five days old

One Month Old

Two Months

Three Months (onesie courtesy of Merran)

Four Months

Five Months

New Year Blow Out

We rang in the New Year in the North Georgia mountains with some of our favorite people and it was as wild and crazy as these pictures look! There were eight kids three years and under and eighteen adults. We had a blast!

With all the nap/feeding schedules, it was so hard to get a picture of all the kids. I'm so sad that Luke (aka the Tatum Tot) was not in the picture. He was being a responsible kid and buying groceries so the rest of us could eat.

These were the two best pictures that I was able to get, I don't think we had more than one kid looking in the right direction the entire time. The only thing that would be better than this is if I had a picture of the line of parents next to me trying to get their kid(s) to look and smile. True awesomeness!

Our contribution to the chaos.

Christmas Wrap Up

I can't believe it's almost February and I am still wrapping up Christmas and 2011! Please don't give me a hard time for being so slack....I already have major blog guilt for being so behind! :-) I am going to try to bang out a lot of posts over the next week to get caught up. I have been spending my spare seconds creating a photo book for 2011. I am going to try to do one of those each year since I don't have time to scrap book and haven't printed out a picture since MB was three months old. For shame!

Let the final Christmas update begin! I can already feel the stress lifting as I type!

We hosted the Merritt Christmas at our house this year and had such a great time. It is soooo hard to get these cousins to pause long enough to get a picture so this was the best I could do. MB misses having her cousins around, they have so much fun playing together.

I now understand the beauty of having a kids table for family gatherings. The kids did so well together and the adults actually had a chance to finish a sentence for once. It was awesome!

Papa loves his grandbabies so much!

I love this picture of Ben and G-Mother on Christmas Eve. We were the first ones to arrive and were able to spend a few minutes alone with her before the whole gang arrived.

G-Mother had all of her nine great grandchildren together! Ben and Mason are the 2011 additions. G has a necklace with little people on it that represent her children, grandchildren and greats and that thing is getting heavy!

All of the grandchildren and greats, minus Matt. Such a fun group!

This was the first year that we spent Christmas morning at our house. It was strange but wonderful at the same time. We felt so grown up! Dan and I set our alarms so we could be up and ready before MB and Ben woke up. Well, we could have slept in because MB didn't wake up until 9:45 and Ben woke up after 10:00! They were exhausted from the Christmas Eve celebration I guess. We couldn't get over it! The morning lasted for an eternity waiting for them to wake up. We ended up going ahead and opening presents from each other in the quiet of the morning and it was so relaxing.

The salt and pepper shakers were a big hit. I'm sorry to report that three of the four tea cups have already broken so I had to remove all of the breakable items from the kitchen this week. I don't want to find anymore ceramic shards in her bedroom. I'll put up the other breakable things until she is a little older but for now the plastic tea cups are hanging in their place.

Helping daddy sweep up the needles with her new broom and dust pan. Every girls dream gift, right? She was in heaven!

Isn't he a little doll? He really is this happy most of the time!

Happy feet! MB is normally opposed to wearing shoes inside but we sometimes can talk her into wearing her new slippers. Our floors are always cold and we can't imagine why we have to fight with her to get her to wear shoes inside. Crazy girl!

Trying out the new jump rope. She mainly just whips it around so you have to give her plenty of space or you will get tangled in her web.

When MB opened up this nativity set she shouted, BABY JESUS' HOUSE! It was absolutely adorable and we loved her excitement for it. She played with that thing for so long and she was concerned that the hay just wasn't comfortable for baby Jesus. The next thing we knew she was marching through the living room with her baby pillow and baby Jesus had a new bed for a few days.

After nap time we went to the Milam's to celebrate Christmas with them. As you can see, Ben was whipped from all the excitement!

MB got a Mustang convertible from mimi and papa and she loves it! She was so excited and ran straight to the passenger side. That is one thing about having older cousins, you are used to being chauffeured around. She didn't know what to think about us putting her in the driver's seat. She loves playing with the radio and dancing to the 15 second sound bite. We are still working on the steering but she is going to get it in no time.

She probably was trying to talk Owen into driving her at this point. We were cracking up.

Ben is loving this jumpy thing and he almost can reach the ground. We joke that this is a laxative for him because he often has a blow out while he is in this thing. MB had a similar thing with Target. You could almost count on her having a diaper blow out ever time we walked through the automatic doors. I'm not even kidding.

This is just your average Tuesday morning around here. She had to wear this hat to brush her teeth that day, she definitely has a mind and style all her own.

Ben and I waiting on MB to brush her teeth, oh how I love him!

I love this video of MB saying good by to baby Jesus' house. She called the three wise men, Golden, Myrrh and Frankincense.

When I started taking the ornaments off of our tree, Dan took the little tree out of MB's room. She came out and said "I sad" and I couldn't help but agree. We had such a wonderful Christmas and loved celebrating for the entire month of December.

Because Ben needs some face time every now and then...

A Pinterest Christmas

Y'all, I absolutely love the Pinterest website! I'm pretty sure that I didn't have an original idea or cook a new recipe before it came into my life. My sister raved about it and I finally joined a month before Ben was born. It was then several months later before I logged back in to see what the fuss was all about. I have to admit though, I am a total repinner. I think I have had one, maybe two original pins since I have joined. I'm okay with that though because I like to think of all the original pinners out there doing the dirty work for the rest of us. If you want to join, let me know and I will send you an invitation. Several of our ideas for Christmas came from the website so I thought I would share. I made a decision early on that I was going to actually implement the ideas that I found so the website would be more than just a time waster (it's so easy to get sucked in).

Some of the first things that I pinned were these retro, re-purposed kitchens (here and here) and I knew right away this was something I wanted to make for MB for Christmas. I spent a long time trying to find the right piece of furniture to turn into her kitchen. I quickly learned that the goodwill closest to our house has very quick turnover. I found several things that I thought were the right pieces and by the time we could get back up there to buy them, they were gone! Who knew? So, once I found this white, kids cabinet from another thrift store, I jumped on it. The total project cost less than $40.

The before shot. It had great potential and I loved that it already had shelves since that was something we were going to add.

Halfway there. The sink is a $1 bowl from the dollar store. Dan cut out the faucet and stove eyes and we painted wooden knobs for the sink and stove that she can turn. He gave the whole thing a coat of white paint.

Finished product! Dan cut out a oven door and we added some hardware and black chalkboard paint. He painted the back of the shelves green to match her wall color, hung hooks for the tea cups, and added towel and utensil holders to the sides. I found the teapot at goodwill and the tea cups are from an antique store in my hometown. The salt and pepper shakers and polka dotted boxes for storage were things we already had.

I have had this utensil holder thing (the technical term) since I lived in DC and it has been sitting in our garage. It's perfect for her broom and her stove utensils.

Dan cut out the towel holder by drawing it free handed. He is so talented! I really had little do with the actual transformation and just gave Dan my vision and he went with it! The best part is that MB absolute loves the kitchen! She opens and closes the oven door a hundred times a day and is always sure to use her hot pad to get things out of the oven.

I think I have posted this picture already but just in case, this wreath was my inspiration.

Although I wanted to do this with my Christmas cards this year, I couldn't find a shutter that would work. Maybe next year. I found this other idea on pinterest and really loved how it turned out. I taped wide ribbons to my cabinets and then pinned the cards to the ribbon. We have spent so much time looking at the cards. Thanks to this post on the Lil Light O'Mine site, we are going to pick one family a week to pray for throughout the year. I'm thinking we will put the card up on our fridge that is being focused on each week so we can all see it.

On Christmas Eve morning, I wanted to make breakfast since we were going to be at home. Dan LOVES sausage balls so I decided to give these a try. I thought I was being fancy by making them in my mini muffin pan but I think they would have turned out better on a regular baking sheet. They were still pretty good though.

I also wanted to make this sticky bun recipe because it looked easy and delicious. As you can see from the picture, most of the good stuff stuck to my pan. It may be due to the fact that I prepared everything the night before and just put it into the oven that morning. This may not have happened if I had made it all in the morning.

As you can see, mine looks nothing like the original. I may give this another try and make it all at once because it is so easy and it tasted pretty good. Fortunately, I didn't try these new recipes on Christmas morning and I stuck to what I knew would be good. We had pigs in a blanket and some of my mom's homemade cinnamon rolls. Delicious!

Besides the kitchen, this was one of my favorite pinterest Christmas ideas (photo courtesy of this blog). I gave Dan twelve pre-planned dates for 2012. I had so much fun thinking about where to go and what we would do each month. Since Ben is so young, we haven't been able to go on too many dates but we are hoping to change that this next year. There are so many fun things that we want to do but we never think about them when we have an chance to go out by ourselves. Dan is going to open each envelope at the first of every month and let's be honest, it will be a surprise for both of us as I already have forgotten the order of most of the dates. For our January date, we went to Dialogue in the Dark and had dinner at Atlantic Station. We were excited to finally make it to this exhibit since we have been wanting to go for several years. It was incredibly fascinating and I highly recommend it. All of the guides are blind and the entire exhibit is pitch black. I kept thinking that my eyes would adjust to the dark but they never did. I am so grateful for my sight! Our guide had only been blind for seven years as he was in a terrible motorcycle accident. He had a 10% chance to live and was in the hospital for seven months. His story was truly remarkable. I will try to remember to blog every few months and update on what we have been up to.

Made with Love

I am a super sentimental person (almost to a fault) and I love thoughtful gifts. My Maw Maw gave MB and Ben the most special gifts for Christmas that we will treasure for a long time. She recorded her voice reading Frosty the Snowman and Twas The Night Before Christmas. I had never heard of the recordable books before (the benefits of having a DVR and never watching commercials) and could not get over how cool these books are. I cried hearing her sweet voice read to my kids. It took her three days to record them and she said that she lost sleep over them. I'm so glad she stuck with it. They are awesome!!!

As if that wasn't enough to get the tears going, she made two amazing afghans for them and they are absolutely beautiful! I like to imagine these being worked on during Braves games as she is a big fan. :-) I made sure to get some pictures of them with the books and the blankets and we will love these gifts for years to come. She also made scarves for the all the ladies but I didn't end up with a picture on my camera of all of us together. So sweet!

Frosty was up first!

MB's book was next.
Checking out the fancy popcorn stitch

I love this picture of them! You can tell how much my Maw Maw loves him.