Things that have happened

This poor little neglected blog. Between chasing around a toddler all day, searching for jobs, and settling into our house, who has time to blog?

I will say that I've even written a few posts, but decided they were moot or unimportant, which is most of what I blog about anyway, but I just haven't felt the fire lately.

I've learned the art of online grocery shopping. Coupled with daily stops by the local market to pick up a few things, I am finally feeling like I can cook for my family. I even started baking my own bread and making our granola, that's how square one it's become around here. Scary, even for me. I used to want to be this way, and now here I am, making my own bread, and cooking beans in water. Don't worry, I still have the cans of beans because who knows that they want beans for dinner 8 hours in advance? Not me.

I hung up a gallery wall that I like 80%, which is enough for me right now. Once I figure out a way to hang up this world map, and once we find a rug, the living room will be complete. I still need to paint our bed, hang up a few pictures in the hallway and in Henry's room, and oh speaking of Henry's room it has sadly become somewhat of a storage area since our storage solutions here are non-existent.

Speaking of Henry, he is a little angel. We've been spending most mornings in our pajamas lately, and we watch a little choo choo with breakfast, then it's play with cars and trains, music/dance, reading, we play hide in mamas room, read in mamas bed, snuggle, eat lunch, then it's naptime and I zonk. It's been raining a lot lately, mostly in the mornings, so we play inside in the mornings, then we go outside for a walk after he wakes up.

This post is also boring, but wait! There's more!

Henry turns two next week and I'm so excited about it. I've been teaching him about birthdays for the past couple weeks. We read books about birthdays, sing the birthday song, practice blowing out candles, and we even watched a birthday party on youtube. Because I refuse to have a repeat of last year when he wanted nothing to do with cake and wished his first birthday had never come to him.

I'm really happy how Henry is turning out. He is so well-mannered and polite, I laugh about it often. I will pour him a glass of water and he looks at me and says "Thank you! without prompting. He says hello to new people and asks to run everywhere, except the way he asks to run is "Three?" because Mark plays this game with him where they count to three, then run. His vocabulary improves every day, and it's seriously astounding to watch it all happen. Today we re-read the book Romeo and Juliet a million times just because he wanted to point out "Juliet!" and "Wo-wee-wo". I think he gets his memory from Mark - he truly remembers everything and wants me to repeat it after he says it just to make sure he got it right. He dances when a song comes on, loves to sing and do the motions to Wheels on the Bus, Twinkle Twinkle, and Popcorn Popping. I spend all day with him and I can tell he's just getting smarter and more confident each day, and it makes me so happy and proud to be his mother.

For anyone interested in a good bread recipe, this one really killed it for me the other day (and who doesn't want bread in 90 minutes?)

Also, chocolate beet cake. If for some reason you have lots of beets laying around (we did!), it's a good way to use them up and a sneaky way to feel like you are eating healthy cake (you are not.)

I promise the next blog post will have pictures, don't you worry. So much catching up to do around here.