What To Do

As I sit in my dungeon, er, basement, waiting for work, I am thinking of the things I could be doing, should be doing, and would rather be doing. Sleep is at the top of my list and I believe could fall into all 3 categories. Ben just went down for his nap and I'm thinking how nice it would be to get my banky and my stuffed animals and sleep. I just have to note, I love how easily he goes to nap in the morning (afternoon can be a different story). He was getting crabby, so we went upstairs, found his blanket in the living room where he dragged it earlier, and he picked it up and walked to his crib and waited for me to put him in. I can only pray the rest of his life he's such an easy kid.

Anyway, I think my "nesting" phase is over. I think I've done all I can to rid this place of junk, as some of it really does have to stay. I never did get to my basement shelves, but as I look at them now, I don't have the ambition. And I would just be putting stuff in boxes only to leave it where it currently sits. That's a project for next spring.

I now have the urge to start packing a little suitcase for Ben in case we need to rush him to someone's house, packing my bag for the hospital. I'm ready to set up the Pack n' Play even though Jon can do that while I'm in the hospital. I think I would scare him if he came home and found a suitcase by the door, so I will refrain.

And now we wait.

Now We're Talking

Ben can now say daddy and he is very proud of that. Though he knows who daddy is, everything is daddy. He'll just walk around saying dad-dy, dad-dy. He also says hi in a very sweet little voice and banky. As everyone knows, banky is almost as important as daddy.

Ben has always enjoyed opening and closing doors and drawers. He is now working on pulling doors shut. He just has to learn how to turn the handle. Hopefully that will take a while. It's been quite difficult lately to just walk out of the bathroom or bedroom because he's right there to close the door for you.

He is also a little climber. I'm not sure how he did it, but he climbed on our bed yesterday. He likes to climb on the coffee table when he thinks we can't see him. He likes to try climbing up the footboard and headboard of the bed.

Ben is also enjoying walking. He loves to just walk around the apartment, sometimes at full speed to his own detriment. He will carry a toy in each hand as he walks around, or his wolf, which he can't quite handle yet. As I write, he is wandering around the basement with a golf ball in each hand. He also plays fetch with himself, as he is doing with the golf balls. I'm glad he so easily entertains himself. That's one less thing to worry about when the baby comes.

What a joy it is to just watch him play and learn. We're not sure what we did for entertainment before we had him.

Relearning to Walk

I bought Ben some shoes yesterday. As you may guess, he was not very excited about them. He took maybe 2 steps and just stood there looking around. I believe he was silently protesting me. So after making wonderful progress in his walking, he will have to learn how to walk with shoes on. I hope he does well with this, because I already bought him boots. Maybe I should start those now...

I'm Still Here

Hi if you're still reading this. Though Jon posted pictures recently, I still feel like I should write something. I get disappointed when people whose blogs I read haven't written in a while, so here I am. I have been very busy lately with work. All I've done lately is work and run to doctor appointments. It's rather ridiculous. The weather has been unseasonably hot lately and I've been freezing out my boys running the air conditioner. Poor Ben. I dress him in sweat pants because I put the air on as soon as Jon leaves for school in the morning. In my defense, it gets quite hot downstairs and even Jon enjoys coming home to the air conditioning.

I have been spending some time trying to clean up and rearrange the apartment (Ben has been counteracting my efforts) to try to make room for the new baby's clothes and be able to put up the Pack n' Play and actually have access to baby stuff when I need it. I realize I have a couple of months, but I'd rather do it while I know I have the time and still have the ambition. I had an ultrasound a couple of weeks ago. Baby is measuring a week big but that's apparently not big enough to change my due date. I will have one more ultrasound, so there's always hope...

Ben is doing very well in his walking. He's still wobbly and goes too fast for himself sometimes, but it's so fun to watch, especially when he's walking to me. He prefers to hold my hand to stay up longer. He loves being on the couch with me, going from side to side and bouncing around. He's climbing on the coffee table and tries to climb up the headboard on our bed. Just a little monkey. We're immensely enjoying our baby boy.

Belated Benjamin Birthday Blowout Bananza

Here are some pictures of the various birthday gatherings that Benjamin celebrated with the family back in Minnesota

Ben's First Haircut

Benjamin has gone from a Baby Mullet:



To A Proper Young Boy (i.e. he got his first hair cut).

Yay For Air

I was so excited, I just had to share with everyone. We just got a brand new air conditioner installed. Even though it's like 70 degrees out, if that, I have it running. It's a bit humid out. The guys thought I was funny for having them leave it on. It even has a remote so I don't have to stand on a chair to change it. So that's my excitement for the week. What I can't believe is that Ben slept through it all. He is one tired kid. He's been waking up around 6:00 lately and then taking an early nap. He woke up for a while but then went back to sleep. What a life. Now only if mommy could do that...

Back In Grand Rapids

And we're back. We had a mostly uneventful trip. We almost got stuck in Mitchell, SD, but the car decided after about half an hour that it was ready to head home, and we didn't turn the thing off until we got to Edgerton. As we were leaving Worthington Sunday morning, we had another delay. But Dad worked some magic and we turned the car off as few times as possible on the way home. So we returned to a bloody hot apartment. It is about 90 degrees and our air doesn't work here, so figure my body temperature right now feels like 110. Aside from the little stove inside me, Ben has been very clingy, adding to my discomfort. Gotta love pregnancy.

We spent a day going through the Tetons and Yellowstone. We also went through Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho. It's basically a bunch of rocks from volcanic eruptions thousands of years ago. It was very eerie to drive through. I think my favorite part of the trip, though, was going through the Big Horn mountains. It was a beautiful drive. We had a nice trip overall. This picture kind of sums up Ben's trip. He is such a good traveler, especially with 3 straight days in the car seat and not a lot of time to get out and move.

Anyway, we had some nice birthday parties. Ben has been enjoying his presents thus far. I think three-quarters of our back seat on the way home was Ben stuff, presents or otherwise. We had 2 parties and he got his fill of cake. He's taken his first wobbly steps now, just a couple at a time. He actually spent a lot more time yesterday with his Christmas presents than he did before we left. He's growing so fast. I packed up his little winter clothes from last year, and it's so hard to believe he's 1 already. The year has just flown by.

So my next goal is to rearrange closets, throw away whatever we can and just try to organize more to make room for the new baby and all the baby stuff I have to haul out. I did this before Ben, but I have a feeling it will take more time now since I tend to have a lot of extra help with my tasks now. The hardest part is getting into a closet without getting the door shut on me.

It is nice to be home again. We have these big tree-type things that grow from under our deck that I usually trim once a week in the summer. They had gotten a few feet high, so Jon spent time trimming them and pulling tree-type things out of our garden. I think we dusted every surface in the house also. It's kind of interesting to see what 3 months of dormancy brings you.

Jon has his first day of classes today and I am back to 7:00 wake-up. We will get into a routine and life will settle down just in time for us to have another baby and disrupt it:) But life would be boring otherwise, right?

Our Last Day

Well, here we are, the last day in Sunnyside. We had a wonderful potluck dinner after church and a lovely farewell. We received a frame with some beautiful scenic pictures of the area. We are also taking home a quilt for us and a quilt for Ben that were hand made by some ladies in church that we have been using all summer.

Yesterday was spent cleaning the house and doing laundry. I got Ben and myself mostly packed up along with a bunch of odds and ends. We have one more service tonight and then will probably scramble to get everything else together. Despite any worries, it always seems to come together when it needs to.

So off we go into the sunrise tomorrow.

Pictures

Looking for shells
















The road less traveled









Ben's first Twins game

I Beg To Differ

So I noticed the little baby monitor thing to the right here says that the baby will mostly sleep this week. I beg to differ. This one is already competing with Ben for activity. I think I may have my hands full with these two...

Our Trip

I realize it's been 2 weeks, yet here I sit with an AWOL camera cord, thus no pictures to post for you even though I'm finally finding time. I thought I should put something up anyway. We took 3 days with Jon's parents and brother and toured Washington. We spent August 4 driving the Columbia Gorge and up to Mt. St. Helens. We stayed on the shore that night and took a leisurely walk on the beach in the morning. We spent August 5 going through Olympic National Park and a road less traveled, i.e., a bridge with 2 steel beams to get across. (We didn't actually cross it, but don't always trust your GPS.) We spent that night on the north shore of the Olympic Peninsula and took a ferry in to Seattle on August 6 for a Twins/Mariners game. We walked many streets of Seattle and through Pike Place Market, where you can buy fresh fish, fresh produce, jewelry, and pretty much anything else you can think of. The Twins pulled off a win to make it a very good day. Ben enjoyed his first cotton candy, the first bite of which he promptly wiped on his grandpa before he figured out it was for eating. We had plenty of room, so he got his own seat and made the most of that. He seemed to have a lot of fun. This was all much more exciting than it sounds, made better with pictures. Hopefully I'll get some up in the next few days.

We are in our final week here in Sunnyside and are preparing to leave next Monday. I'm not sure where the days have gone this summer, but we seem to have filled them up one way or another. So we have another 3-day trip ahead of us. We will be going through the Tetons and Yellowstone on our way home. We're both looking forward to one more nice long trip before we get back to GR and settle back in for a few months. Ben has been such a good traveler this summer and has made our many trips so easy. Just one more to go...

Stairs

Ben has figured out he can actually get up the stairs. Usually when one of us goes up, he will hang around at the bottom and go up one step but won't try to go any farther. Maybe we scared him last time he started up. The other day I went halfway down and sat and coaxed him to come up to me, which he did with absolutely no problem. So yesterday I went up and pretty soon here he was, cruising up the steps. He did it later when Jon and I were both downstairs. The gate promptly went up. I'm happy he can do steps, but he doesn't know how to get down yet, and that's what worries me.

Just for an update, I did finally get my puzzle done yesterday. It's nice when daddy's home during the day.

Puzzles

So I started the Mt. Rainier puzzle a couple of days ago. I got it out and Ben decided he needed to help. So he sat on my lap and tried to eat 2 pieces. Once he figured out that wasn't going to fly, he found a fun game of drop 2 pieces on the floor, pick them up and put them on the table, and get back up to mom's lap. This was a fun, exciting game for him and it went on quite a while. I had a sore back and very slow progress. Once I started getting chunks of the outside together, Ben decided he had to pull them apart. As any good mom would do, I finally gave him a couple of inside pieces and started throwing them a bit farther from the table so it would take him longer. At one point he tried to run away with them. That was enough of that. Yesterday I went back to the puzzle while he was otherwise occupied, but he again found me and had to help. By now I had started on a section inside. This time he had to help by putting the pieces back into the box-the exact ones I was working with. I tried to give him others but he somehow knew exactly which ones I wanted out. When he tried dumping the box, it was time to quit. Needless to say, puzzles just aren't the same with children around.

Mt. Rainier Part 2

Friday was our big day out last week. I got done unspeakably early with work, and as we sat around debating about a movie, Jon proposed we go back to Mt. Rainier. It was a beautiful day. We packed a lunch and drove. What an amazing difference compared to a month ago! There was still snow, but so much had melted and flowers were growing. The only obstacle we had to contend with was a bit of road construction in the park. It was nice and cool up there. We drove along with the windows down. We had lunch in a nice little picnic area and stopped at Paradise to see the view, which is very close to the mountain. We also bought a panoramic puzzle of Mt. Rainier, a tradition we started way back as a somewhat useful souvenir of our trips. We figure we won't stash it in a drawer and never look at it again. Below, Ben's not sure what to think of snowballs.