Nathan's second favorite thing to do

Nathan's favorite thing to do is go outside. Even when he was little, he loved taking walks and hanging out in our tiny front yard in Brookline. On rainy days, he would look longingly towards the windows and door with this "why aren't we outside???" look on his face. And part of the awesomeness of Brookline was that I could also get things done on our walks - the grocery store, library, post office, bank, bookstores, dry cleaners, amazingly yummy bakeries and restaurants, baby goods stores, paper stores, even clothes shopping. I miss Brookline and all its urban coolness.

Now we just walk around our neighborhood and crawl around in the yard. We do have Spanish moss and alligators, but still not as cool as Brookline. Nathan is also now more vocal about letting me know when he wants to go outside, often hitting complete meltdown if we can't go outside *right then.* Rain, cold, hot, bugs - the conditions are always right to go play outside for Nathan.

One of Nathan's other favorite things to do now is read books. He has some board books he likes to read, but his favorite three books are Noisy Nora, Knuffle Bunny, and There's an Alligator Under My Bed. He loves to read them over and over and over again. Multiple times a day. Morning, mid-day, before bed, or pretty much anytime is a good time to read a book. I already had Noisy Nora memorized from my childhood, and I'm quickly learning the other two books. The former teacher in me loves that he loves to read, and the mommy in me loves snuggling with him in our glider while reading. It's a good new favorite thing to do :)

Reading with daddy before bed last night

Good grief!

I knew that the weather had been getting warmer in Jacksonville - 70+ degree days are happening more regularly, and Nathan and I have even been sporting some shorts of late. The tulips and wisteria are almost done, leaving the dogwoods and azaleas to continue their spring showcase. So, I decided to get the official word from a semi-reliable weather website. The average high today in Jacksonville is 76. 76! It's time to buy swimsuits and start hitting the beach! Woohoo!!! I knew there was a good reason we moved from Boston (average high today - 55)...

Nathan continues to make progress towards walking. He is a rock star at walking along furniture, walls, and with parental fingers. He can even climb up and down stairs without incident. He'd been good at going up stairs for a few weeks, but it took another weekend at Grandma and Grandpa Henderson's for him to master going down. Until this past weekend, he had still been determined that he could successfully crawl down head-first. He is also starting to be able to stand up all by himself. This morning, he stood up from a sitting position for the first time ever. We'll have a walker on our hands soon enough. It's about time - later this week he'll be fifteen months old.

We are still enjoying Jacksonville, and Chad's work is still going really well. Within the next month or so, he'll be running two chairs, which will keep him busy. Our callings are also keeping us busy - we had the Young Men over for dinner yesterday immediately after church and Chad will go on his first campout as Scoutmaster with his boys next month. But life is good, and we're excited for the upcoming months :)

Nathan, sporting his new summer sandals while playing outside :)

Catching up...

Nathan continues to make progress towards becoming a big boy. He still only has his two bottom teeth, but he is making other progress. He got a walker for Christmas, and he has finally figured out walking with it. Now, he can't make any turns on his own and so runs into walls and furniture and gives up unless you're there to redirect him, but it's still more than he could do two weeks ago. Here he is cruising the front room (I love that he figured out how to bring his puppy along for the ride).

Nathan's other current favorite game is to empty out his toy bin (which I have, of course, just filled with his previously-strewn toys) and climb in to play. I'm not quite sure why I even bother cleaning up since he's just going to make a mess of everything in fifteen minutes.


Nathan also continues to idolize his daddy. All day long, he asks, "Dada? Dada?" As in, where is daddy? When is he coming home? He found Chad's fleece the other day, and he would not be pacified until I'd put it on him so he could be just like Dada.

Nathan also feels that we should live in a pants-optional world. He hates to wear pants, and if he can figure out how to do so, takes his pants off at any given opportunity. It's a good thing we live in the South.

A few of my favorite things :)

#1 - Spring is here :) The azaleas, daffodilas, hyacinths, and Bradford pears are all coming in to bloom. I even discovered some tulips coming up in our own front yard! YEA!!!
#2 - In addition to the beautiful flowers (and I'm sorry rest of the country - you just can't beat a North Carolina spring, in my humble opinion), the temperatures are coming up too. Our average high is now 65, and it will be in the mid-70s for the next three days. I'll be wearing shorts and a t-shirt for our afternoon walk. It will be beach weather soon!
#3 - College basketball is awesome. Right now, I can watch ACC, Big East, or Big 10 tournament games. And our local ABC channel is once again bumping Lost tonight to show an ACC game.
#4 - My house is almost completely clean for the first time in a long time. Hallelujah!

Pretty much, I love spring. It means winter is over and summer is on its way. And you get some awesome flowers in the meantime :)

Teething - bah humbug!

So most moms (and babies) go through teething at a young age and are pros by the time they get to almost fourteen months. Nathan and I, however, started slow at this whole thing, so we're still learning. Nathan's two bottom front teeth made their long-awaited arrival Sunday, but Nathan has apparently decided that he's trying to make up for lost time. He's now working on his four top teeth. At the same time. Teething has made him such a pleasant little fellow. Our new daily schedule involves the morning dosage of Motrin (pretty much straight out of bed) and the next round about seven hours later. If we're ever late on that second round of Motrin, heaven help us all. And my favorite aspect is that after all this crankiness and Motrin, the top four teeth are still making almost no progress in coming in. Argh...

Nathan wouldn't let me take pictures of his new bottom teeth this morning. It made him quite mad when I tried (we haven't given him the morning Motrin yet). Chad and Nathan were watching Giada make a mango cheesecake on the Food Network yesterday. They were both enthralled.

Jacksonville

Chad has really enjoyed his job here in Jacksonville - Dr. Futrell is an excellent dentist and also a good guy. He's even taken Chad to a few NCState basketball games up in Raleigh (Dr. Futrell has four season tickets for football and basketball. Oh to be out of debt and have extra fun money...). They both recently agreed that the partnership was going to work long-term, so starting in April, they'll get the contracts going for us to buy into the practice. Just what we need - more debt! But, this is where we are supposed to be, and the job really is a good one. Plus, we get to be useful in the ward, which is the way the gospel is supposed to work. And houses are quite inexpensive here, so at some point in the next two years we will hopefully become homeowners.

With all that being said, there is one downside to Jacksonville. It's a Marine town. Without the Marine base, Jacksonville wouldn't exist. And other than the super-busy Walmart, tons of tattoos, babies, and cheap home prices, most of the time you can forget that the Marines play such a large role here. Except for mornings like today. Today the Marines are bombing on base. And this morning's bombs are big ones. Since we live only two miles from base, the explosions are shaking the house. I feel like I'm in some Middle Eastern country with all the bombs, three in the last fifteen seconds alone. They've been known to wake Nathan and me up from our naps. It's at times like these when I wish we lived farther from base or in Raleigh.

Nathan is *finally* becoming a big boy

For quite some time now, I've felt like I have a little baby stuck in a big baby's body. Nathan only spoke jibberish, had no teeth, showed no interest in walking or even standing upright, and was generally behind developmentally. He's still quite big (90th percentile for height), but the height was the only indication he was getting older. He's my crazy little monkey.

In the past few weeks, though, we've finally started making progress. The first helpful step was getting the boy a haircut. We hadn't been able to figure out any place in town to take him, so Chad and I decided to try and cut his hair ourselves. We figured that even if we butchered the haircut, we could always just buzz it off and he and Chad would have matching haircuts until it got long enough to try again.

Nathan pre-haircut (While I was changing his diaper at church, he peed all over his pants, so he had to lose the pants. A friend of mine had him during Relief Society, and apparently she thought he looked cold, because she put his shoes and socks on. Without his pants. It's a classic look) You can just see the Farrah Fawcett flip-out going on in the back and the way-too long bangs in the front. He's a beach baby.

Nathan post-haircut - Much better. The haircut was made possible by popping chocolate chips in his mouth anytime he started to look upset.

Nathan's next step towards becoming a big boy occurred with the acquisition of his second word. Now not only can he talk about "Da-da" all day long, he can say "this" and point to the desired object. It's a fairly useful second word, since between the "this" and the pointing, I can usually figure out what it is that he wants and is preventing him from being blissfully happy. He'll even point at the radio in the car when he gets tired of NPR and wants to start dancing to the music. And this boy can dance.

Our last recent step came yesterday. Nathan is 13 1/2 months old, and until yesterday had no teeth. No top teeth, no bottom teeth, no molars, no nothing. He still eats mostly pureed foods since his chewing is so limited. Last night, though, we discovered the reason for the miserable day at church - Nathan's first teeth finally came! His two bottom teeth came yesterday, and his two top teeth feel like they'll be making their appearance in the coming weeks as well. Yea! He will soon be able to feed himself big-boy food, and we can finish off the baby food! Let's hear it for our big boy! FINALLY!!!