Flashback!

So, we're at the grandparents house and while snooping around on their computer I ran into all of these fun pictures. It is fitting also that we take a look back at the last few months because Saywer's six month birthday is THIS WEEKEND!! I can't believe how much my little family has grown in the last half a year. I love them so much.

Sawyer on the car ride home from the hospital.

Sawyer's blessing. This is the Tallahassee side of the family. None of my family was able to make it.

The new family of four. Such fun.

The grandparents first visit to Gainesville brought us to the Museum of Natural History which includes a rockin butterfly house. In this picture I think Jake and I are talking about how soon Sawyer would need to eat (new mom milk supply is crazy!).

Best friends. Sawyer is Jane's "Best Boy". I love my kids. They are such a wonderful blessing in my life.

Easter Pictures

The Flower Park

Jane and Sawyer love each other so much!

One of the beautiful lakes at Kanapaha Botanical Gardens. We actually only made it through half of the garden.

A waterfall...

This is Sawyer the majority of the time.

I asked Jane to smile and this is what she gave me.

I asked Jane to smile and this is what she gave me.

So the other day I took the kids to the Kanapaha Botanical Gardens.

Jane is obsessed with flowers and I thought this would be the perfect place for her to go and explore. It was great! There weren't a lot of people at the garden and it isn't organized the way a traditional botanical garden would be. All of the different gardens are connected by winding paths under canopy trees. It really was beautiful.

Hanging out

Sawyer's not playing with dolls. This is his girlfriend, Aurora.

Sometimes Sawyer is serious.

Usually he is happy.

Movie Day

Sawyer is REALLY interested in food. I like to peel the apple and let him suck the juice out.

My Old Navy babies.

Beachin' it...

A bunch of us moms got together and went to the beach for the day. It was a real adventure.

Jane has finally decided that smiling for the camera might not be such a bad thing.

Wearing Daddy's hat. She really missed him that day. He works hard for the money. So hard for it honey.

Shadows are interesting; they inspire serious conversations.

Sawyer slept a large portion of the day. He didn't like the wind so I wrapped him up in this blanket with only a hole to breathe through.

Finally remembered to share

Okay, as a tribute to all of you mothers out there who feel like you've messed up with your kids today or yesterday or whenever I'm going to share an experience that made me cringe a little with embarassment.

For starters, I should tell all of you that don't live near me that I am a nap nazi. Seriously.
I don't go anywhere or do anything if it is going to conflict with nap/bed time.

A couple of months ago, somehow, the clocks in our house got all screwed up. I don't know if the power went out or if I accidentally messed the time up while I was setting an alarm but that clocks were an hour fast.

One day Jane was having a pretty bad day and I had decided that she would go to bed a little early (she was acting really tired). Normally Jane goes to bed between 6:30 and 7:00pm. Well, we went through our routine; I read stories, brushed teeth, said prayers, sang songs. When I told Jane that it was time to go to sleep she started screaming. So I left and let her have her emotions. When she finally quieted down and went to sleep, an hour later, I realized that instead of putting her down at 6:30, I had put her down at 5:30pm!

The poor girl really wasn't ready for bed and I was a mean mommy for letting her cry for that long without realizing my mistake.

Luckily for me, she didn't even remember crying the night before when she woke up in the morning after a nice long night of rest... :)

Off the wagon

I've completely fallen off the blog band wagon! I haven't even thought about my blog in a couple of weeks. I haven't looked at anyone's blog in a couple of weeks. Let me see if I can give a relatively decent recap of the last few weeks.

-Jake has one week of FTO left and then he'll be in the car on his own. Hooray! That means he can do off duty work and we can really start to make some moola.

- We're Dave Ramseying it up. We've called and cancelled our credit cards. We're on a budget and we'll be debt free before we know it.

- Jane refuses to use the potty. When we ask her to she says "I won't". There is no "I can't" about the situation, only "I won't".

- Sawyer seems to be suffering from early onset separation anxiety. Jane and I tried to walk out the front door this morning to walk around the porch and each time we took one step away from him he started whining. If we stepped toward him, he stopped. Can you believe that stinker?

- The clocks our apartment got mixed up one day and I didn't know what time it was. I thought it was 6:30 at night so I started putting Jane to bed and it was really 5:30! It was a long night. I felt so badly because I didn't realize my mistake until AFTER she cried for an hour and put herself to sleep!!

- Florida winters are a dream.

- We're making new friends.

- I'm learning how to keep the house clean. (Hallelujah!)

More to come later. I'll try to stay on the wagon this time. Let me know what you have all been up to!

Update!

Hello All!
I've realized that my goal of having a blog post a day for the whole year was a little unrealistic. I'm back though! My internet was "down" and I finally have it connected again.
Lately we have been hanging out around the house, thinking about cleaning, making new friends and trying to sleep train.
I tried to potty-train Jane for half a day and after she peed on the carpet 4 times I decided it wasn't worth it to me yet. I just don't feel like fighting about it or cleaning up pee all day.
I thought I was failing in my attempts to sleep train Sawyer but he only woke up one time during the night yesterday and he has been napping regularly today! My kids are so different from each other! It is hard to try to figure a new kid out when it doesn't respond to the methods that your older child responded to. I almost feel like I am re-inventing the wheel. Sawyer is such a little joy though. He laughs and smiles all the time. He is alert and strong and so masculine! He is such a little man; he even looks like a little man when he gets his little scowley face going.
I have Carpel Tunnel. My doctor says it is really common for new moms to get it so I am confined to a write brace for the next couple of months. Anyways, I've got to run! I'll post more later... :)

Baby Sawyer

Christmas Holidays!

The ICE Exhibit: Orlando

Well, here I am again. It might appear as though I am falling off the bandwagon but I assure you I am not. Yesterday was kind of hectic. I’m still trying to unpack my house but I am finding that nothing is ever easy to do with two kids. I’ve been feeling a little dizzy with fatigue but I haven’t been able to take a nap because as soon as I get one of the kids down, the other one wakes up!
Jake got home from work two hours late yesterday. He had a load of fun stories to tell us. He got to participate in his first arrest yesterday. A man drove his car UNDER a semi! Can you believe it? I’m not sure what the detail sharing protocol is so I’ll err on the side of caution and not say more than that. I’m so proud of Jake for getting this job. We have spent so many hours talking about where we are going and what our goals are. It feels so good to finally have our foot in the door.
So after my last two posts I realized that I need to make a real attempt to document something of value over the next year. Writing something every day just to meet my quota isn’t going to be valuable in 20 years outside of simply knowing what went on day to day. I would prefer to leave something on this blog that will help my children have a better idea of who I was as a young woman. Do any of you moms ever think about that? We know our children so well. They will learn who we are on a deeper level eventually but that will be after years and years of motherhood and 20 or so years of marriage. We won’t even be remotely close to the same people that we are today!
That is my goal for this blog; to give my children a snapshot of who I am today when my children are 2/3 and less than 1.

I’ve been saying one thing that makes me lucky or blessed every day. I have to say that today’s blessing is a little silly.

I am so blessed to live in a city with warm temps and high humidity because I can never get my act together and put the top back on Jane’s stamps when she is done using them on the porch. Lately we have been starting our day with a healthy dose of “Super Why”, “Clifford”, and “Curious George”. After our shows we turn the T.V. off for the day and play on the porch and in the living room and bedroom for the rest of the morning. Well, for the last few days Jane and I have been making buggies with stickers and markers and using our stamp pads a LOT! The only problem is that I get busy and leave Jane to her art in the middle of the project and forget to go back to help her pick it up. That means that it stays out over night! Well, because the humidity is high, the stamp pads don’t dry up! Isn’t that great?!
Some differences Jake and I have noticed about Jane and Sawyer:
1) Sawyer has WAY more hair than Jane had at this age. He still doesn’t have a lot by most standards but he does have this cute little swirl of hair at the top of his head. It reminds me of the top of a dairy queen ice cream cone.

2) Jane spent a lot of time looking around and a decent amount of time looking into my eyes. Sawyer spendsa lot more time looking into my eyes or studying my face than Jane did. Isn’t that an interesting difference?

On another topic,
We talked about food storage at church on Sunday. This lesson kind of inspired me to get a better idea of where I stand with my food storage and to learn how to use what I do have better. We have a little less than three months of the basic food storage the the church advises us to have. That said, I make all my own bread, we eat a lot of rice and if necessary we could drink powdered milk until the situation allowed us to drink regular milk again. In my studies I found this great blog with a ton of recipes for food storage. You guys need to check it out.

Foodstorage911.blogspot.com

Since I stumbled across this site, I have made wheat berries, rice pudding, an awesome rice ad beans salad and I still plan on making a pasta chicken salad, chili, and potato soup. All of the ingredients for these six meals cost me only $38! I have almost everything I need stocked in my pantry or included in my food storage.

Well, that is enough from me for the morning. My kids are antsy and Jane needs a new diaper!
Later.

Happy Birthday to me!

Hi All,
It's my birthday! I'm 24. Wee haw.
Today was such a blissfully quiet day. Jane was a little upset when she woke up and Jake was already at work but she was quickly consoled when I told her that Daddy would be home after her nap. After that, we ate breakfast, made art and played together. It was pretty fun.
Jane kept telling me that it was HER happy birthday.
Today, I'm really lucky that Jake chose an unconventional white cake with rasberry filling instead of my usual choice of chocolate. That cake was DANG good. In fact, I'm going to have another piece right now...

A post a day...

Hello again, to all my friends.

I'm still feeling quite chipper and enthusiastic about the new year. In large part because Jake was blessed with an EXTRA day off before he starts work. He went to a meeting the day after Christmas last week and we thought it was going to just be extra vacation time to use later. Well, as it turns out, his training officer is on vacation until Monday so Jake CAN"T start until Monday so we get an extra day off PLUS we are being paid for it (on top of the last two weeks he has been home with out working AND with pay).

So anyways, the year is going well.

(note to reader: I wrote the opening of this post two days ago.)

I've never been one for new year resolutions but this year, in order to stave off insanity, I've decided to set a couple of goals for myself.

1. Keep a clean house. I want to be able to have people over and not worry if they wander towards my room or need to use the bathroom in my room because the kiddos are napping in the other rooms. I want people to be able to drop by without me worrying that they'll judge my by the state of my house (I would judge me...).

2. Be presentable. This could mean a number of things. For me, this means making the effort to shower every day ( I know that it sounds gross for all of you empty Nester's but when you have kids you'll understand), blow-dry my hair and put on a little bit of make-up. No Sweats!

3. Potty train Jane.

4. Rebuild our savings account

5. Train for a triathlon. I've already started running. When it warms up I'll start swimming and when we start making a LITTLE bit more money, I'll buy a bike. I should point out though that it is completely ridiculous that I think it is too cold to swim right now in Florida. If I lived in any other part of the country I would be dying for a dip in the pool at the temperatures we've been having lately. In my defence, I've lived in south Georgia/north Florida for going on six years now. I'm officially acclimated to the climate (even though it is hotter than hell here in the summer) and that means that 77 degrees with no humidity just isn't hot enough to justify a dip in the pool.

6. Post an entry a day on my blog. I'm laughing at myself a little bit too. I've been horrible about posting to this blog but I really want to make an effort to post a little something every day. In every post I'm going to try to note one way that I have been blessed. Since I've already missed two days I'm going to post three ways that I a lucky today.

Jan 2: I was lucky to have Jake home for one extra day.
Jan 3: We had a great day with Jake's parents, Manga and PopPop, at the Natural History Museum here in Gainesville. I'm lucky to have in-laws that I like and to live in a city that has cool museums.
Jan 4: I'm blessed (hallelujah) with 9:00am church.

SO anyways, tomorrow is my birthday. I'll be 24. I can't believe it.
Until then, keep on truckin'.

Off to a great start.

Welcome, welcome 2009!
Our new year has started off nicely.
Our day yesterday consisted of hanging out around the house. Talking to a great friend on the phone and having some new friends over for a movie and conversation. The new year is looking like it is going to be our (my and Jake's) best year ever. We've got a decent job, two great kids, a nice place to live, we're making new friends and keeping in touch with old friends, and the vacations that we are talking about today aren't just a dream hanging up high on the ladder of "someday".
I hope everyone's new year is as great as ours is going to be! To all our family and friends, we love you dearly and hope that this new year brings you all the happiness and joy you deserve.