October 2014

So my 2014 New Year’s resolution of blogging every month has officially fallen to shambles.  I’ve thought about going back and blogging for every month, but the thought of doing that much blogging scares me away from the computer for another few days, so I need to just pick up the pieces .  But there was lots of excitement in those months - in July we went to St. Martin for a month, where we:

Played on the beach

Played in the pool

Played with cars

Found out we could color on the white tile floor and wipe it off easily (which meant our floor was full of roads and we didn’t have to buy paper for Troy) (we are thrifty )

Took our inflatable kayak (and our screaming Troy) to an island about a ½ mile off the coast of St. Martin, where the sand was WHITE and the water was so crystal clear – I felt like we were in a commercial.  It was beautiful.

Ran up some crazy hills.

Went to the “airplane beach” twice (Maho Beach), which was very cool.  Troy loved it, and now calls almost every beach the “airplane beach”.

Ate delicious French pizza.

Ate delicious expensive French food.

Learned a tiny bit of French (not as much as we should have!)

Met some awesome people who were tourists like us.

Hiked to a few beaches.

I think that’s the bulk of it…I probably missed a lot, but that’s what happens when you don’t blog every month!  

LATELY, we’ve been hanging out here, back in Ct, where the leaves are almost done changing and falling already!  I love fall.  I love the apple-picking, pumpkins everywhere, the combination of cool weather and sunshine, leaf-jumping, fires in my parent’s fireplace, hot chocolate, and I love the holidays that are coming.  I also love how well the heat works in our apartment .  I think that pretty much sums up our fall!  Dusty went on a bike trip a couple of weekends ago while Jen, Troy and I explored a little of the western part of Ct.   Unfortunately it rained that weekend so the giant vat of popcorn kernels at the farm we went to (specifically for the popcorn kernels, how fun is that?!) was closed.  But they did have a petting zoo, which Troy really appreciated .  And we stayed at TWO hotels that had pools, and thankfully hot tubs, too.  We had a blast.

Here comes some more picture-overload :).  

June!

And we begin our summer adventures! We left for the land of potatoes in the middle of June, actually, but stayed a month until the middle of July when we left for the Caribbean. So most of June's post is dedicated to Idaho, and July will be St. Martin. looking through our pictures from June, i just realized that we actually did a ton in the first part of june, too.

Recap...we went to the Forest Park Zoo, the Ct Science Center, Dusty's sweet mom came to visit us for a couple days, we went to Elizabe Park's rose garden several times, and we played at Memere and Pepere's house with friends and cousins. Pictures:

And ghen we left for Idaho!

(Watching airplanes)

And i just decided that idaho is going to get its own post :) (also i dont know how people post long blogs who have kids...)

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May 2014

May!  We:

Played with cousins,

Played at Memere and Pepere's house,

(Troy discovered his new love of DIRT in Pepere's backyard)

Troy had his first sleepover at Auntie Mish's house - he did great!  He did take over his Aunt and Uncle's bed...which I think just shows how comfortable he was :)  (sorry Mish!)

We went to Mystic Aquarium.  Moms got in free on Mother's Day weekend, and we are all about the discounts!  

We visited Elizabeth Park's rose garden and also went to Farm Day, where we all got to see a sheep being sheered, plus lots of other animals.

We kayaked on the Farmington River, then found a place to swim.  But....it was MUCH too cold, so Troy was happy just throwing rocks in the river.

We went to the Bronx Zoo with Mish, Penelope, Piper, Zoe, and my uncles Tom and Bob.  It was so much fun!  The zoo is HUGE, and I think we saw about a quarter of it.  Which just means we'll need to go back :).  Troy especially like the mouse house and the bird house.  

 I love this little boy so much.  I love being his mom!  He is so curious about everything, he explores all day long, he sings and dances all day long, and he is so happy.  He reminds me to laugh at everything and snuggle every chance I have.  He is patient and encouraging - one day Dusty was fixing his bike and Troy was "helping" him.  After awhile Troy started jumping on the couch and Dusty was getting frustrated with his bike because it still wasn't working.  I was making dinner in the kitchen and every time I heard Dusty mutter and I knew he was having a hard time, I heard Troy say, "It's ok Daddy!  Just keeping working!"  In his sweet sing-song voice.  He must have said it 20 times :).  And guess what - Dusty fixed his bike.  Troy saw that he was done and said, "Oh!  Good job, Daddy!" 

He is excited about everything, but will let you know when he's not so excited, too :).  If you ask him if he wants to do something and he doesn't, he'll just say, "No thanks" and smile at you.  Or he'll throw a tantrum like only a 2 year old can throw...well he IS 2, so that's forgivable.  

But tantrums or smiles, I love this kid to the moon and back! (And another round-trip for good measure)

April 2014

April was a good month- I love spring!  Troy and his cousins got to play in the water at Memere and Pepere's house for the first time.  Pepere grumbled but got the kiddie pool out for us :)

 These were some happy kids!

I love every holiday I get to spend here with my family- holidays seem to just mean more when we are with family :).  Troy was so excited to hunt for eggs this year and really got into it.  He loved getting all his eggs out at home for the next few days and dumping everything that was in them out (mostly jellybeans and crabby patties...yum) then he'd go get the vacuum and want to clean them up.  Then we'd put everything back in the eggs...slowly the jellybeans disappeared.

The pictures above (and to the right) are Troy's "slippery" dance- he does it ALL. The. Time.  And thinks he is hilarious.  Well, we think he is pretty hilarious, too :). Just picture his body going all jelly-like, his eyebrows up and him saying, "whoaaaa, whoooa!" Over and over again.  Then he falls and cracks himself up.

My mom and brother, Matt, ran the "color me rad" 5k- Matt's first 5k ever!!  Woohoo!  I'm so proud of my big brother :). I also had signed up for the race, but have an injured back and couldn't run it. I felt like such a nerd, hobbling over to the sidelines, wishing against all other wishes that I could just being running this race!  Ah well- I'm so in the next one.

Also not to mention my amazing sister-in-law, who sat beside me on the sidelines, carried my toddler, then had a baby a few days later (with no drugs!)!  A BEAUTIFUL baby girl, I just love my new little niece to pieces :)  Emeryn McKenzie Wargo:

Troy is even starting to warm up to all these baby girls :). The other day we took Ellie to the park and Troy insisted on feeding her her bottle, and kept bringing her toys to play with to keep her happy. Of course, he was replacing her more desirable toys with ones he didn't want to play with, but hey, it's a start!  And we had the "we don't force-feed the baby" talk.  Never really thought that would be a "talk".

 Lately I seem to take a lot of fuzzy naked jamming pictures...just seems to be what we're doing a lot of these days!  I tried to keep it modest for you, folks.

March 2014

See?  Eh??  March!  I know it's almost the middle of April, but really - does time actually speed up when you have kids or is it just me?!  

March was a good month - we saw the last of the snow (knock on wood)!  And we are FINALLY enjoying spring!

Arianne and I started our Thursday library tradition:

It started out as a story-time tradition....but after a few weeks of being too late and missing it for one reason or another, we decided maybe we just aren't cut out for story-time...but luckily, the library welcomes us any time!

And here are some random pictures I love.

Because who couldn't love those two on the left??  And Piper is one of Troy's favorite people lately, he is always asking where she is, or where we went.

The last of week March/first week of April was Dusty's spring break, and we drove to our old home, Florida!  It was so wonderful.  The green, the sun, the people, I loved all of it.  Except the drive home - I hated that.  Not that we were coming home, I just literally hated the drive - we started at 1 in the afternoon on Saturday, and lets just say we will never ever do that with a kid again.  Mistake.  

The green:

We LOVE the springs :)  Troy was so so excited about every little thing outside, it was adorable.  I loved seeing him enjoy nature so much!  He was a little confused about all the Spanish moss - he kept trying to put the moss that had fallen back on the trees:

And what's Florida without a few close encounters with the alligators?

I don't know why it looks like I'm trying to feed Troy to this one...I swear I'm not!  Just trying to get a  good pic, I guess.  Troy looks like he's the only one who realizes the danger...

The people:

I miss these people!!!  The Coopers had a dinner for us Sunday night with all my old YW girls, and our old neighbors made us a true southern breakfast the next morning (Troy wouldn't eat the grits, but he was all about the fried vienna sausages).  And the Sims were so gracious to let us stay with them for a couple nights, even when I kept Rachael up talking WAY past both our bedtimes :)  Her freezer happened to break while we were there - we had to finish off that cheesecake.  Wouldn't want to it go bad.

We also got to stay with my Uncle Lee and Aunt Kit, and managed to not get any pictures of them! They did get some great ones of us, though (they are the best!)  

Troy did SO good swimming!  He loved the springs just as much as us.

We ended the week with a couple of beach days :)  

Then right before we left, we noticed a tick in this cute boy's eyelid - yes - EYELID!  Right in the lashes - poor kid.  We were at a spring and asked the park rangers for a pair of tweezers but we couldn't get it out on our own.  We drove to the nearest fire station about 10 minutes down the road and the firemen helped us - they were awesome.  It took 3 of us to hold Troy down and it was so sad to hear him scream :(.  But they got it, and Troy got this nifty frisbee!  He calls it his "circle".  He also got to sit in the fire truck, which he was pretty excited about until they turned the sirens on and he freaked out.  But hey, the kid just had a tick pulled out of his eyelid - he was on edge.

But overall - we had a great time!  And we came back to CT with 60 degree days - not bad :) :)

February 2014

Hello there! Long time no see, or write...sorry about that. New resolution: I'm going to post one blog for every month. I can't promise it will be during that month, but hopefully it will be pretty darn close to the last day of the month. So with no further adieu, February!

Troy turned 2 years old- holy moly!! We had a semi-train themed party at my parent's house for him, made some homemade pizza (well, it was store bought crust, which was much easier), smoothies, and not one but TWO train cakes! All of Troy's favorite things :) Plus, my parents have swings in their basement and for a two-year-old, it doesn't get much better than that.

Trains are pretty high on Troy's list right now, right along with cars, gee-tars, drums, airplanes (recently added), and dancing and singing his little heart out. He is so energetic, so loving and sweet, and so funny- I feel so blessed to be his mommy! He loves dragging Dusty or I out of bed in the wee hours of the morning (I'm usually the lucky one) to line up his cars, build a train track, or put some music on and dance. He gives us our guitars, and lately we also need to be standing on a book (?). I'm always surprised at how many words he knows and how smart he is. He knows almost all his colors and he counts like this, "two, three, two, three?" Or "four, five, four, five?" Always with the question mark. And this morning as he walked into the kitchen and the light from the window blinded him he said, "Oh! That's shiny!" He has finally started going to nursery without screaming (knock on wood) and I love picking him up and seeing his face light up when he sees me, seeing his scribbles (I have some of them framed) and hearing him telling me about nursery in his little voice. He mostly just says, "Nursery! I go nursery!" He is a major mama's boy, sometimes I love that and sometimes I hate it...but he is branching out to Dusty. He calls his daddy "Dusty" at times and wants to do everything he does, but he keeps me in sight. Lately he wants to sleep on the couch if Dusty is sleeping on the couch at Troy's bedtime. But he always has been SO excited to see his daddy when he gets home from work, and I think he looks forward to it all day because he asks for him, or where he is, periodically.

(Don't worry, that top left picture isn't poop- it's kinetic sand!)

Troy's new love of airplanes was inspired by a trip to the New England Air Museum- it was pretty awesome!

February was the month of snow days for Dusty! We loved getting to have him home with us, it was a nice and needed break for Dusty and me :). But now we are anxious for him not to get anymore- we want a summer vacation, too!

Michelle had her baby- beautiful baby Zoe Violet! She is perfect. She looks so much like Penelope did when she was born, without the dark hair.

And I have officially started working on building a business! An etsy business, that is. And I guess it's not actually official yet, seeing as how I haven't opened shop yet, or thought of a name...but I am making things to sell! That's the most important part, right?

Must...drum...
This is how I feel right now, except it's more, "must...blog..."