Chuck E. Cheese

We took Ben to Chuck E. Cheese's today. Chris and I were more excited than Ben. I haven't been to Chuck E. Cheese in a LONG time. The pizza still tastes the same! I became a member of the Chuck E. Cheese club so that I could get good coupons before we went. We saved a lot of money, but we also spent more money on tokens than we should have. We had so many left that Chris and I were just kind of trying to spend them as quick as we could because it was 12:30pm and it was getting crowded. We ended up with 480 tickets and got Ben a cute Chuck E. Cheese stuffed animal. We had to pay the difference, but oh well.



When we first got there, Ben was very apprehensive about things. He's never been to a place like this before and I think it was just a lot to take in. It wasn't crowded at all when we first got there, which was great. We ordered cheese pizza and some fruit punch, both of which Ben loved. Ben did not like the kiddy rides at first. They scared him once they started moving. He kept saying "all done!" and trying to get us to pick him up.

He liked this motorcycle cop one more than the bug car thing. There was a little screen he could watch to chase down bad guys.

I thought this clock ride was going to go all the way around, but it didn't. Ben still didn't really care for it. He was more about watching other kids spaz around and play.

One of his favorite things to do was to bring all of the tickets Chris and I (sometimes Ben) won and bring them back to Mimi. She mostly stayed at the table, watching our cameras and purses. Thank you! One time Ben had two long strings of tickets, one in each hand, and was dragging them back to Mimi. A few women laughed at how cute and determined he looked on the way back to the table to give them to Mimi. He was on a mission!

This is one of those simulator rides that you can choose a roller coaster or a flying thing, and the screen makes it seem like you're in the rollercoaster/fly thing. The seat also moves. Ben was more interested in watching the kids play air hockey. Chris seemed pretty into it, though.

I can't figure out how to flip these pictures (the blogger flipped them this way for some reason). Anyway, if you put a token in the booth, you can get your picture sketched! It was worth it. Ben looked at the camera right as it took the picture. The entire time before that he was looking away.

Chris got a good nostril shot. Ben was getting fussy and Chris accidentally pressed the button before they were ready. I still think it's a funny picture.

Kim and Jeremy came with a child from Ben's school, but I don't think I'm allowed to post pictures of him due to confidentiality? I'm not sure. Better safe than sorry! Anyway, they had fun and it was good to see them there. Tiffany was also there and took some cute pictures. I'm excited for her to post them!

Slide

Ben got his first slide last week (bed-head pic above). Mimi bought it for him. It's kind of big, but we're keeping it in our living room until it's not over 100 degrees outside and until the mosquito population drops a little bit. So, it'll be in our living room for a while. Ben loves it! At first he was a wuss about it, then fell off the ladder a few times so he started to get a fear of it, but then I went down and "wheeee'd!!" enthusiastically a few times and Ben decided that he wanted to have fun, too.

We have to put socks on his feet because sometimes he loses his bravery and tries to stop halfway down, using his feet. If he does that he flies forward and lands on his face at the end of the slide, so we just decided he can't do that anymore. We keep a padded playmate at the end of the slide because sometimes he has rough landings, but he's getting very good at Kerri Strugg'in it and sticking his landings.

Sometimes he can't quite position his feet at the top of the slide, like one foot gets stuck under his butt. At first, he would scream/cry about it until we would help, but Chris and I decided to put an end to that and now when he gets stuck, he just looks at you and says "Please?" while signing please. I pretty much give him what he wants when he says please, it's so cute!

July Really Sucked.

These pictures are the only July pictures that are worth posting. They're from the Fourth of July in Hot Springs. :)

I haven't updated because July was much busier than I would have ever wanted it to be. I had two grad. classes going at once and the amount of homework I did was unbelievable. Chris is awesome and pretty much raised Ben by himself for a month. I had to lock myself in my bedroom (away from prying little boy hands that slam keyboards and rip papers) so I could get my work done. I turned in my last summer class assignment today, so I'm very excited to take a few weeks off from homework before my next class starts.

Lets see...Ben has been...destructive? Accident prone? Pretty much all boy. I've come to not stress out about the amount of injuries he gets while climbing the couch, sliding down his slide, and playing around the living room. This past month Ben has managed to injure himself (not severely) multiple times. It's a good thing he's got a thick head. I think he's built like a pachycephalosaurus, the dinosaur with a thick skull used to ram things. Ben bounced himself off the couch and landed on his head on the hardwood floor, then when I picked him up he was spitting out blood. I calmed down slightly once I realized it was just a tooth bleeding and not brain matter leaking out his mouth. That happened on our 3 year anniversary. Friday at school Ben fell off the teacher's computer chair he wasn't supposed to be climbing and reinacted the couch incident, crying hard and spitting out blood. Awesome. At one point he somewhat fell into our open vent on the bathroom floor (we leave it open because it's SO HOT and the vent actually prevents a lot of air from getting through) and cut his toe on metal. It was just his left leg that fell in, but still. He was trying to close the bathroom door on me because he knows he's not supposed to be in there, so he kind of deserved it.

Speaking of the bathroom door, Ben also locked himself in the bathroom by opening a drawer right next to the door and placing a plunger in it so the drawer couldn't be inched closed. By the time I got into the bathroom (using a puzzle board to push the plunger out of the drawer through the crack in the door), he'd spread out all of his tub toys on the ground, a toilet wand, and of course the plunger. All of these incidents happened on my watch. I'd just like to say that I'm allowing Ben to explore his environment and learn his boundaries. :)

Chris and I are going to Branson this weekend to celebrate my summer grad. classes being over. I'm very excited! Hopefully we'll have some good pictures to post.

Happy Father's Day, Chris!

As I hear people complain about their husbands all of the time, I always realize how fortunate I am to have married Chris. I'm the luckiest girl to have ended up with him and I've never been happier in my life. Chris is just as great a dad as he is a husband. I knew he'd be a great dad, and I'm always right. :) He loves spending time with Ben and they have so much fun together. Someday Ben will realize just how lucky he is to have a dad like Chris. HAPPY FATHER'S DAY, CHRIS!! I love you!!!

Favorite Things

I should specify that this blog exists mostly because of my procrastination of homework. You'll see. Also, I want to have a few of Ben's favorite things documented on before he ruins them. He's getting rough with his toys, so I fear this will be soon. Okay...

This is Junie's favorite toy. Ben calls it "ball" which is close. He throws it for her and she about kills herself to scramble after it on our hardwood floor.

Obviously our cat's favorite thing EVER. Baloo's favorite thing, I should say. And it has to have gravy. We have to call it "F.F" at our house because if Baloo is in a dead sleep and hears the words "fancy feast" he wakes up meow-screaming and rubbing against our legs for it.

Ben's favorite living room book. We have a set of books we keep in the living room and a set in the bedroom. It's just easier to always have a book handy and we're usually in one of those two rooms. It's 4 pages long and features pictures of items that start with the letter B. Like BALL, which I should mention is THE most important word for Ben right now. Ben can look through this book and touch every picture of a ball (or a circle) and say "ball?" It's so cute. My baby's a genius, by the way.

This is Ben's favorite bedroom book. He can also find every ball or circle or egg in this book and say "ball?" He's starting to imitate animal sounds. He says MMMMMMM for a cow, and BA BA BA for a chicken (like, bock bock bagock!) How the heck do you spell out a chicken noise? Anyway, he tries to do the impression that I do of a chicken and it's fairly good.

This is Ben's favorite page in the farm book. Chickens! BA BA BA!

This is my favorite purchase of the last month. My shower curtain from Target. It's got squirrels and owls and trees, everything a shower curtain should have! I LOVE it! It's my favorite thing to look at while using the bathroom. Who needs a magazine when you have a good shower curtain pattern to entertain you?

Of course, these are my absolute favorite things...my nerdy boys!

I asked Chris what his favorite thing I could put on the blog was, and at first he held up a Star Trek DVD, but then he thought about it for a second and said me and Ben. Awww, somebody wants a good Father's Day present. :)

Soap and Wizards

Chris was giving Ben a bath the other night and he called me in there. He wanted me to watch how funny it was when Ben was trying to hold the bar of Dove soap. Of course, it kept slipping out of his hands and splashing back into the tub, which was funny. Then, by some miracle, he held it steady long enough to bring it up to his mouth and take a big bite. This was the face he made.



I could see him moving his tongue around his mouth and making worse faces when it collided with his bottom teeth, so I knew he had soap stuck to his teeth. So I stuck my fingers in his mouth and scraped off a big chunk of soap.

Once it was out, his face returned to normal. But in true Ben fashion, he doesn't just leave things alone....so he grabbed the soap and took another bite and started the process all over again. He really is a little trouble maker, getting into EVERYTHING he's not supposed to. His favorite trouble time thing right now is going into our bathroom and shutting the door while he's in there. The handle on the bathroom door is relatively low, so he could definately manipulate the lock if he tried. Chris and I practiced unlocking the door from the outside in case Ben ever locked himself in there, and we discovered that we would have to take a screw driver to take off the handle if that ever happened, so we've been very strict with Ben going into the bathroom and shutting the door. I tell him, sternly, "sad, sad day!" and then he says "da da daa" in the same tone. He's gotten very good at trying to repeat words and phrases we say, so it's already time to start being word careful.

Two nights ago I was in the bedroom doing homework and Chris brought Ben in to show off his outfit. Chris had put his shirt on Ben and he looked like a little Harry Potter wizard. It was so sweet to see how proud Ben was of wearing daddy's shirt. He even dragged it around the house after he was done wearing it. So cute!

I love my little trouble maker!

Kiddy Pool!

Chris and I thought it would be a good idea to buy Ben one of those hard plastic kiddy pools so that he could practice his skillz. With a z. It needed to be the hard plastic kind so that Junie could be forced to join him.

Ben trying to "Vogue". He's not doing it right.

His initial enjoyment of the water. Water that was pretty much the same temperature as the air. It was WARM. Overreactor.

I tried to take his mind off of being in the pool, but he wasn't really having it.

He finally got over himself and enjoyed the pool for about three minutes. Then aunt Tiffany and I got selfish and decided it was way too hot outside. Time to go in!

Picture Texts

Alright, so I was playing with my iphone and looking through different texts that I had saved and I realized that I had quite a few pictures that I would be sad if I never saw again. If my phone ever died or was destroyed, I'm not sure that it'd be easy to get these pictures back, so I decided to post some of the pictures with their texts so that they're at least on my blog. All of them are Ben pictures (why send a picture of anything else?). Some of these pictures have been posted before and some of them are new. They are in absolutely no order.

To Melissa and Reid: "Ben sleeping on the plane."

To me...this was just proof that Ben doesn't hate the water (taken today).

To Tiffany: "Look at how cute this baby is!!"

To me (from Tiffany): "Has Ben ever been through a carwash? Because it's about to happen....A little scared for the first time it passed over, but ok after that."

To me (from Tiffany): "I turned the vibrations on and he laid back and relaxed. This seat has been a huge hit. I just got it out to get his little cash register in the closet."

To Troy and Jamey: "Nerdin it up in his sweats."

To Chris and Tiffany: "A beautiful baby girl."

To Chris, Tiffany, Julie, and Maleia: "Ben enjoyed his birthday cupcake."

To Melissa, Chris, Tiffany: "Quasimodo needs you to come help him down from the bell tower."

To Chris, Tiffany: "This is the way he brushes his teeth."

To Chris, Tiffany: "This is the mess going on here right now."

To Chris, Tiffany, Troy, Jamey, Melissa: "Ben just took his first steps!!! This pic was after the real first steps."

To Melissa, Chris, Tiffany: "Beep beep! He's' concerned with the breeze hitting him."

Working at the Car Wash...

Today was the first time in a long time (and I mean LONG time) that I didn't have work to do after work. So, of course, I felt guilty that I wasn't working. I needed to feel like I accomplished something, and since my car had enough bird poop on it to make one question what color my car actually was, I decided to wash my car. Ben helped. I had to let the water run for a while before it wasn't boiling hot (before this picture was taken). It seriously stung my hand it was so hot. I guess we're a lot closer to the sun or something. Hose water isn't even that cold at it's coldest in the summer. If you run sink water in the house, it stays luke warm, so you have to put ice in any glass you want of cold water. The pipes just stay warm. Anyway, Ben was testing out the water. He was tentative at first, but then realized that it tickled his hand when set on the "cone" setting.
This hose nozel is a pain in the butt for anyone with weak hands. I did have one little 'throw the hose down and call it stupid' fit, but Chris came outside to give me the helpful "squeeze harder" advice. Thanks sweety.

It was 94 degrees today, so we were more than happy to get a little wet. Ben kept eating the soap bubbles off the ground. Chris got irritated that I was letting him do it, but in my defense, I thought he would realize that it tasted bad after the first 3 soap tastings. Oh well, I've pulled chunks of cat fur out of his mouth, so I know he's eaten worse. The weather channel is forecasting our temperature to be 99 degrees this weekend. It's June. Yay.