Monday, July 19, 2010

12 weeks & parker giggles

today at 10:44am, parker turned 12 weeks. & just like that, we now have a little boy who not only loves to smile & coo & talk to us, but he likes to LAUGH at us. my little man had his first giggle-fest today, & i managed to catch a couple seconds of it on video.

enjoy.




(please ignore the cheesy baby talk and awful videography. thanks.)

Thursday, July 15, 2010

where parker lives

this has been a long time coming. i've been wanting to post pictures of parker's nursery but hadn't gotten around to taking the pictures.

plus, it's not completely finished. i still want to add a reading lamp over the rocker & a couple shelves on that wall. but really, is any room ever really finished? not to an ocd decorator like myself.
parker took a 2.5 hour nap yesterday. it was conveniently just enough time to get these pics snapped & edited the way i like.

and fyi, he still sleeps in our room. but the crib looks nice, right?


and what would one of my posts be without a little eye candy? here's the little man himself. thinking about how someday in the near future, he's gonna have a pretty sweet room all to himself.

Friday, July 9, 2010

Wait... what?

getting back in shape is turning out to be a lot like work. why was i looking forward to this again?


this is me after my run last night. my first time running since sometime mid-pregnancy. maybe december? 3.5 miles. 45 minutes. ouch. well... you gotta start somewhere, right?

the thing this picture doesn't show, is the drops of sweat running from my face & the bright redness that i'm sure comes just before passing out.

despite all of this, it felt great. it felt so good to hit the pavement again & feel the exhilaration that comes from pushing your body to its limits & running just a little bit faster because your favorite running song just came up in the shuffle.

so even though i feel like i'm starting from the very beginning, & i'm very humbled by the 45 minutes it took me to run 3.5 miles (hey, that's including warm up & cool down!) it DOES feel good to be back, & i AM enjoying getting back in shape.

it's just starting to feel a lot like work.

4th of july weekend

the idea was to spend friday-monday in clarkston with sam's family for the holiday weekend. unfortunately, when we got about 2 hours into our trip away from home, we got a phone call from sam's dad informing us that 3 of them were feeling pretty sick. like, violently sick. yuck. with our 2 month old baby in tow, who had just gotten all his 2 month shots & already had a compromised immune system, we decided to not risk it. just yet.

instead we took a detour to spokane & hung out with our good friends ryan & christie. we decided we'd keep a safe distance from clarkston & see if the sickness continued to spread. again, i didn't take a single picture in spokane. fail.

after spending friday & saturday in spokane, we decided we'd come too far to not see the fam, so we were gonna chance it amongst the sickies. it was worth it. it's always bound to be a good time hanging out with the nielson clan. lots of good times, good food, games, and the such as.


parker has grown so much since sam's family last saw him & was way more interactive this time around. here's his auntie jodi showing him some love!

on the fourth, we bbq'ed and hung out until it was time to go see the fireworks. sam's brother scouted out a pretty good spot on a hill where we could lay out blankets, let the kids run around, & enjoy the show.

oh, & maybe we ate lots of candy courtesy of sam's mom. maybe.


as always, parker took all the excitement like a champ, & ended up sleeping on my lap through the show. maybe he'll be old enough to enjoy it next year?


he also got to meet more family for the first time on this trip, kasey & laura, & their three super cute little girls.

in the end, a few more people did end up becoming casualties of the sickness that was going around, but we somehow managed to avoid it. maybe washing your hands incessantly really does work? i was seriously tempted to zip p-ray up in a plastic bubble for the weekend just so we wouldn't have to miss out on all the fun.

we didn't have to go to quite those extremes & everything still turned out just fine. another successful road trip & holiday weekend. woohoo!

Thursday, July 1, 2010

2 months, iPhones, & a festival of hoops

i've been a bad blogger. the thing about blogging, is that once you get a little behind, the more stuff you have to blog about, the longer it's gonna take you to do a post, the longer you put it off because of how long it's gonna take.

it's a vicious, vicious cycle.

but i have a good reason i haven't been blogging. i've been too busy doing this:


And this:


And finally, this:


this little guy is way too distracting. when you have chubby cheeks like those, just asking to be smooched, how could one ever find time for blogging?

enough with the excuses.

parker is two months old.

another month has gone by and the little man continues to grow. he now weighs 13 pounds 7 ounces and for those who like statistics, that's the 80th percentile. he's a happy big boy.

he's found his hands, and they now enjoy being made into fists which get shoved in his mouth. he talks. a lot. he coos and squeals and smiles and makes little shrieking laughs that melt your heart. his new favorite trick is blowing bubbles by spitting with his lips together. he sticks out his tongue when you stick out yours. he is still such a good baby. he's super mellow and enjoys car rides where he can watch the trees go by out the window. the only time he cries is when he's hungry, or if he's trying to tell you it's time for a nap. he now goes to sleep every night by being swaddled, rocked until drowsy, then put in his crib awake. he babbles to himself for 5-10 minutes while watching his projector's images on the ceiling, and then falls to sleep. he sleeps every night from about 10:00pm - 4:30am and then goes back to sleep from 5:00am - 8:00am.

and he is still so dang cute.


now if anyone is still reading this, on to other non-mommy-hood related topics.

the iPhone that took 12 hours to purchase

sam and i have been anxiously awaiting the release of this year's iPhone. we decided not to upgrade last spring and wait for this year's model. so glad we did! this year's iPhone has video conferencing, a pretty decent hd video camera, a much faster operating system, and a much clearer screen. it's pretty freakin sweet.
so, when it was announced that they could be pre-ordered on June 15, sam and i were all over that. too bad we weren't the only ones. it was impossible to get through and ordering one to be shipped to your house or reserving one to pick up at the store was impossible. the website was crashing and nothing was working. but there was still hope! iPhones were gonna be made available to walk-in buyers at the apple store on their release date starting at 7:00am.
we thought we'd take our chances and showed up at the mall at 5:30am. plenty early, right? wrong. we found ourselves in a line that wrapped around the mall parking lot and down the road. sam thought it was gonna be a waste of our time and wanted to go home. i didn't want to have gotten out of my warm cozy bed and driven 45 minutes to an apple store for nothing, so i convinced him to just give it a couple hours and see what happens.
the store opened at 7 and the line didn't move. another hour went by, still no movement. sam was realizing this could really cut into his work day, and again, wanted to bail. i felt invested at this point and told him to leave parker and me there, and come get us on his lunch. i mean, if we had to waste a couple hours eating soft pretzels and playing with our cool new phones in the mall, no big deal. his lunch hour came and i had moved about 10 feet.
you see, all those people who had gotten through apple's website and were able to reserve phones had their own line. and the apple store was taking 10 people from that line, to every 1 person in my walk-in line. yeah... s-l-o-w going for my line.

luckily, i got to know the other crazies in line around me and they had no problem with me stepping out of line from time to time to go nurse parker, or head to the food court for provisions. it was kinda an adventure, really!
long story short, the line finally sped up. after the reserved line went down, anyways. at about 4:00 pm. sam ended up coming after his work day (5:00pm) and met us just as we were walking in the store. twelve. hours. later.
was it worth it you ask? i'm not sure anything is worth waiting in line for 12 hours. would i do it again? well, if i knew it was gonna be 12 hours going into it, definitely not. but with every hour that went by i felt more and more invested and was determined to not leave empty handed.
parker was awesome. he slept most the time as i held him in a cozy wrap and for the 2-3 hours he was awake, he was totally happy. i think he was just as determined to get through this as me.

the festival of hoops
we headed east of the mountains this last weekend so sam could play in his 3rd hoopfest. it's always so much fun! some of our bestest friends live over there and it's usually pretty jam-packed good times.
too bad i really stunk at taking pictures this weekend and only have a few to show for our trip. and i didn't get a single one of sam playing basketball, our friends ryan and christie that we stayed with, our friends ben and kim who always recruit us to play every year, or sam's team. oops.
here's the few i did take.
clockwise from top left: sam and parker power-napping back at the apartment between games. our little family hanging out at center court. our friends ben & tracy w. & their super cute little boy named Wade. (ben was on sam's team). a shot of a fraction of the hundreds of bball courts that take up the entire downtown spokane... blocks and blocks and streets and streets of downtown are taken over for basketball for two days. it's awesome. sam and parker watching more games.
every year sam says he's not playing next year. this year he said "we'll see." i think that's a good sign that more good times are in store for 2011! woohoo!
the end.
welp, there you have it. this really should have been 3 posts, but instead, it's one ginormous one! i tell ya what, just give me the special key word of "p-ray" and i'll send you a treat. promise.
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