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.

Moving Into Summer

I can't believe I haven't updated this since Spring break. Sometimes I wish I was a stay at home mom so I could spend all the time in the world with Ben and have time to do things like this. There's no way we could afford that, though. I didn't live up to Madonna's "Material Girl" song ("only boys that save their pennies make my rainy day..."). I married for love, not money! Ha. Anyway, let me update with Ben stuff...
Ben can walk by himself anywhere, everywhere. He's a pro. I was chasing him in the yard earlier and he started to run away, but he's definately not a running pro yet. He did a face plant into the grass. When I picked him up I had to brush the grass off his face from the impact. It was funny (to me, not him). He eats anything, though he definately has his likes and dislikes. His favorite food right now are the toddler mini-raviolis, cheese filled. He also likes to share ice cream cones with mama. And the best and easiest breakfast in the world is a nutrigrain bar. He LOVES those. The picture above was how Ben eats a poptart. He plays a lot with his food. He's also gotten very good at copying what Chris and I do and say, so we have to be careful.
Ben also had his first trip to the Emergency Room a few weeks ago. He was coughing so hard he could barely catch his breath. Of course he started this at about 5pm, so every doctor's office was closed. Chris and I couldn't stand to listen to him coughing so hard (he was even throwing up a little from gagging), so we decided to take him to the ER just so they could at least tell us what was wrong. An hour and a half later, we found out that he had bronchitis. Poor guy. He's totally fine now, but I'm glad that we took him because it could have developed into pneumonia. If you look at the X-Ray, you can see the cloudiness near his sternum. That's the inflammation of his bronchioles, which is bronchitis. If the cloudiness went all the way to the outside of his lungs, that would be pneumonia. That's what the doctor told me, anyway.



Last year Ben was fine going into a swimming pool. This year he's more opinionated about it. He cried almost the entire half hour I had him in the pool last weekend. I think it was too cold, but I know that he's going to throw a fit when we go to put him in it again tomorrow, despite the fact that Troy and Jamey's pool is now up to 86 degrees. He'll have to get over it. I'm not allowing my baby to be a water wimp! :)