Snow Day

Today we went outside and spent some time running around in the snow. Literally, Corbin thought it was the coolest thing ever that he was allowed to roll around in the snow, because normally when we are walking to and from the car I yell at him if he tries to run through it instead of going around on the sidewalk.


So today I bundled him all up and let him go. (Although I might have over-bundled him considering his neck was starting to sweat by the time we came inside :) After the thrill of running wild wore off we built a snow castle and then played on the playground. He got a kick out of going down the slide and landing in a pile of snow. Then unfortunately all good things must come to an end and we had to go inside to take a nap... which he actually did!


Lately he has stopped taking naps, which means I miss out on my "get things done" time. I think that it is probably because we have been staying inside most of the time and reading books, coloring, playing with toys, etc... all things that don't burn off as much energy as when he used to go outside everyday. So it was good for him to get out and run around and just be a boy.

Colonization

I don't know how many of you remember this great game from my childhood...


...but it is way fun. Caleb got me a copy for my birthday that we played this weekend. I would highly recommend it. They have made a few graphic improvements over the years...



...but otherwise it is the same great game I remember playing on Sunday afternoons growing up.

My Birthday

Yesterday was my 24th birthday. It ended up being great. Thanks to all the family members and friends that took the time to give me a call and wish me a Happy Birthday, it was fun to hear from everyone.

Since it was Sunday we went to my parents house for dinner with my family and they all got me great gifts, thanks everyone. It was apparently not part of my birthday, but my mom also gave us some cute outfits and blankets she made for our soon to be daughter, which has only gotten me more excited for her to finally get here next month. The best thing was that Caleb got me a new digital camera. Our other one was getting pretty old, in fact my whole family was making fun of it not 2 minutes before I opened the new one. I am excited to have a reliable camera that has a focus feature that will hopefully work more than 50% of the time, unlike the last one. As should many of you, since I often would take multiple pictures of the same thing, since inevitably one would have the colors slightly (or largely) off and/or be really blurry and pixelated. It really was a pretty nice camera, back in the day when we got it, but lets just say technology has come a long way in only a few short years and there are some pretty cool things available now. I am still trying to play with all the buttons and figure things out, but it looks like a good one.

Caleb also said that he would make me a cake, if I would pick out what kind I wanted. I am not a big cake eater (unless it's cheesecake, which is really something else) so I decided (after much mind changing and debate, which nearly drove Caleb crazy) that I wanted an ice cream cake.

I was a little nervous when Caleb pulled out his tool kit, rather than normal kitchen appliances to assemble the cake (typical male cooking techniques I suppose), but it turned out really yummy. First he crushed up a package of oreos (thus the hammer) and mixed them with a 1/4 cup of melted butter. Then poured chocolate fudge over the oreos. (I think the recipe called for this layer to be in the middle of the ice cream, but Caleb determined that putting it on the bottom would be easier and not have any effect on the taste of the final product, so it became a crust instead.) Then you layer on some ice cream, followed by whip cream and top it off with chocolate sauce and a couple decorative oreos. Not only did it look surprisingly good, but it tasted amazing! I was quite impressed, I think it will become one of my new favorite dessert recipes.


Of course Corbin has to be involved in everything I do these days, so he "helped" me blow out my candle.


We gave Corbin a bowl of soy ice cream and a couple of oreos (oddly enough a hyper allergenic child can eat them, cream filling and all, since they contain no actual milk or eggs, lucky for us they are all 100% artificial flavors and other unhealthy substances :) so that he could join in the celebration with us. You can tell from this picture that he is not used to cold or sugary treats.


Another indication that he doesn't eat much sugar came about 40 minutes after he ate his dessert at which point he began running around my mom's house yelling excitedly and literally bouncing off the walls. At one point he started rolling around on the floor, wrapped up in the new baby blanket, I seriously don't know that he has ever been that hyper, you should have seen it.

Potty Training

So it has been a few months of Corbin asking to sit on the potty whenever he wants a treat and then just hanging out for a random amount of time until his body naturally goes pee. His interest hasn't really died like I thought it would though (I assumed that was just a phase). So now that the holidays are over and things have calmed down a little I decided maybe we can start to step it up a notch and try and teach him to recognize when he needs to pee, rather than just recognizing that he wants a treat. Plus my brother and his wife (mostly his wife did all the work, I assume) started potty training my niece that Corbin plays with once a week, so I was inspired by their efforts.

I decided the best way to teach him was to buy him some underwear and just plan on him peeing his pants a few times. Maybe that wet feeling would help him recognize when he needed to pee. So we went to the store, I let him pick out some cheezy superhero underwear and he ran around looking semi getto in just a pair of Mr. Incredible underwear the first night. Sure enough, he was jumping off a box and peed his pants (the lady at Walmart told us to buy those plastic underwear covers to save the carpet, so luckily clean up was pretty easy). I tried to talk to him and explain that when you wear underwear you have to put your potty in the toilet. Afterwards I felt confident that I had given him a pretty good understanding of this whole "big boy" process with key points and rationalizations.

So sure enough the next morning I dressed him in his second pair of underwear and was in the kitchen doing dishes when I hear him yelling from the bathroom, "Mommy I done, I did it. I want a treat!" I was thoroughly confused, then walked into the bathroom to see him sitting on his little toilet with his underwear still on and a puddle of pee soaked through his underwear and dripping into the toilet. Apparently I wasn't clear in my excellent potty training discussion that you take off the underwear before going pee on the toilet, and he had run in there when he needed to go and sat down on the toilet to pee, just like Mommy had said. He was so proud, and technically he had obeyed the rules and listened to me, fully expecting a treat for his good efforts so I had to reward him anyway, despite having still peed his pants.

Needless to say another discussion followed this experience and he is actually doing surprisingly well at using the toilet. We are quite excited for him, but mostly for ourselves, that's one less diaper change each time he does it right, I figure that's worth paying out a skittle or two.

Christmas

We had a great Christmas... sort of. (WARNING: This is a long one, but since I am not good at keeping a journal for Corbin, I figured I would take this time to make a record of our adventures for the future's sake :)

On Christmas Eve we went over to my Aunt's house and enjoyed a nice Christmas dinner with the whole extended family. The plan was then to go up to my parents house and spend the night awaiting Santa, but Corbin started wheezing and we thought that it would be better for him to sleep in his own "safe room" with the humidifier and air filter going.

So the next morning I woke up before Corbin and loaded Christmas into the car and got ready to head up to my parents first thing in the morning. Normally Corbin is one of those people that has to spend 30 minutes waking up before anyone should dare talk to him, so I assumed a 20 minute car ride would be perfect, we would carry him straight out there and he would be awake and ready to go when we arrived.

Boy was I wrong. We had been telling him on Christmas Eve that he needed to go to bed and while he was sleeping Santa was going to bring him a present and that in the morning we would open all of the other presents under the tree. And when we started to hear him waking up in the morning we went in to get him and take him to the car, and he saw us and jumped out of his little bed, ran straight past us, and stopped dead in front of the Christmas tree in the living room. "Where da presents go?" Oh I don't think that poor kid has ever looked so confused and devastated in his whole life. I am pretty sure he thought that Santa stole his Christmas, so Daddy quickly explained that Santa took the presents to Grandma's house and we were going to go get them.

There was no time for breakfast, shoes, or anything else, he headed straight for the door saying, "I ready... let's go."

He was quite excited to finally get to Grandma's and open his presents (along with everyone else's presents -- he wanted to help pass out the presents, but once he gave them to the person, he was also quite interested in helping them open it, "Oh, a ladle!" he was so enthusiastic about every little thing.)


Then about the time we finished opening presents and were starting to eat breakfast and play with all of our cool new stuff, Corbin took another turn for the worse and started with the wheezing really bad again and coughing and such, so we packed up and took him back home to sit in front of the humidifier again.

This was a particular bummer for us, because we each got a new game and needed additional people in order to play them, so we mostly we just laid around. Caleb did drive us around Bountiful to various points of interest, playing with his new GPS system and Corbin got to pick what we had for Christmas dinner... which meant pancakes of course.

The next morning we got up and Corbin was once again looking better so we packed up the car and headed down south to see Caleb's family. There was a snow storm that prevented us from getting all the way up the canyon to the cabin at Brian Head ski resort where we were staying, so luckily Caleb's brother was kind enough to drive part way down and meet us, and all of our junk, to get us the rest of the way up. Although I am think that he might have regretted that because that night is when things really took a turn for the worse, we slept maybe a total of 2 hours and spent the rest of the night comforting Corbin or coughing to death. We all three got sooo sick, it was ridiculous. So while everyone else went skiing and snowboarding, we hung out in the sick bay watching Disney movies with Bean. Luckily my mom had given him a portable dvd player to watch movies in the car on the way down, so we were able to stay fairly comfortable in our room. Considering how crappy we felt, it actually was a pretty good trip, everyone was super nice and even played games with us (sorry to Jake, who was already starting to feel a little sick when we left, we hope you can shake it before it gets too bad).

We got home from our trip safe and sound on Monday, and spent Tuesday holed up in our house trying to get better. For Christmas my mom gave me a juicer, which we decided to try out. We went to the store and bought some yummy fruits, our first experiment was pear raspberry... which tasted excellent. Corbin definitely liked helping drop the fruit in and watching it get mashed up and then drip out the end as juice.


Let's see... that brings us to New Year's Eve celebrations. We went up to my parent's house to play all of our games that we missed out on at Christmas and of course eat lots of junk food and treats. Since we were all still recovering from illness, we didn't stay until midnight though. Instead we stopped by the Walker's to visit for a little while and then headed home. We did however let Corbin stay up at home until midnight to ring in the New Year... as you can see he got a little hyper and silly missing all that sleep.


So that's basically everything we have been up to lately. We are now enjoying the last few days of freedom before the weekend is over and Caleb goes back to work and real life sets in again. Busy season will start up and we'll bunker down waiting for the baby to come :)