Offloading the iPhone

A lot of these were posted on Facebook but are just too cute not to share here too.

Indoor sandbox fun!

Nolan's first Bowling game.
Nolan and Cortez enjoying the morning sun.
And quite possibly the cutest rendition on the Itsy Bitsy Spider ever. This is the lesser known second verse the Great Big Hairy Spider, sung by Nolan to the spider he found on his toy box.

Springtime

Nolan has been aching to splash in our Seattle Springtime puddles for weeks. So one cloudy Saturday when I asked Nolan what he wanted to do, he simply said splash. I threw on his boots and rain coat and off we went.

He started out a little timid...

But he figured it out.

That boy loves his water!

Potty Training Interupted

Nolan has been potty training for about the last month. He started out really well. I bought him some fun cloth training pants (I had to take a picture the first time I ran them through the laundry, it was monumental in my head somehow) and after a few days of accidents he was staying dry.

We had quite the routine down and he seemed to enjoy it. He sits on the potty.

Go potty.

Wash hands.

Gets his big boy reward, 3 chocolate chips along with lots of hugs, high fives and sometimes a phone call to daddy for some extra praise. It was fun when he started yelling "chocolate chips!" when he would go pee. Super cute when we were at home, somewhat mortifying when we were in public restrooms.

I was about ready to call Nolan potty trained when we started having slip ups last week. He started having more accidents and acting out, which is not like him at all. I don't know if it was the switch from traditional diapers to the pull up kind (that we were stilling using at nighttime) or just that he grew tired of the process. Either way, I reluctantly backed off and have let him lead the way. He is now back in diapers during the day and going once or twice on the potty. I'm struggling to keep my cool on this one as we were doing so well! Hopefully in a week or two he will want his big boy underwear back on and we can start again, sigh!

Big News! A few weeks late.

I finally got around to checking out our blog and realized that I skipped this post from our last ultrasound. So here it is, almost 4 weeks late. Just act surprised! :)

We had our big ultrasound on Monday morning (March 19th) and found out that the next little Clingman will be a boy! At first he was feeling a bit modest and had his legs crossed but he eventually woke up and showed us the goods. I made her check again (and again) just to be sure. I can verify that he is 100% boy.

We went to a new ultrasound clinic and really enjoyed it. They have super high tech equipment so we got to see each little bone and even watched his heart beating over infrared technology (or at least that is what I think she called it, you could see the blood go in and out of his heart valves). Everything looked great though and we are right on track to meet this little guy in Mid August.

Nolan came with us and did really well considering we were in a little room with lots of buttons and machines he wasn't allowed to touch. Pat kept him pretty distracted but every once in a while he would point to the screen and proclaim it was "baby sister." We broke the news to him that it is actually a baby brother but he hasn't changed his tune yet, still calling the baby "sister."

The hardest part, besides that whole pesky labor thing, will be naming this boy. We have a few front runners already but Pat and I can't seem to agree on a middle name. Pat bounces between very traditional names like Matthew to very bizarre like Buffalo, seriously that was one of his suggestions. I think it's great that after 10 years together I still can't tell when he's being sarcastic or serious. He said it was after a band or something? I chalked it up to our generation gap and DID NOT add it to the list. For the record, I want you to know that if daddy had his way you would be Grant Buffalo Clingman...you're welcome son!

Baby Boy #2 Nursery

Even before we found out what we were having I was picking out pieces for the nursery, I had ideas for a boy or girl but the boy room was definitely my favorite. When I did Nolan's room, I made sure to get him furniture pieces he could have for a very long time. His crib is a lifetime crib meaning that his baby crib is now converted into a toddler bed and when he's a little older it will convert into being the head and foot boards for his bed that he will sleep in until he moves out of our home. I got all sentimental and sappy thinking of taking his bed away from him to use for the second baby as it has his little teeth marks, his memories and I want to keep them with him. It doesn't make a lot of sense and I know most people don't do it this way but I think I'm allowed to be sentimental about something like a crib, right? Anywho, his crib and dresser are espresso colored which I love, but I knew I wanted to switch things up this time by going the opposite direction with a white crib. I think my mom needed some convincing as she thinks white cribs are for girls, I'm determined to change her mind.

Side note: I'm new to making style boards on Polyvore so it's a little off center. Rather then troubleshoot for a few hours I figured I'd leave it. You get the idea...

I found my inspiration via Pinterest, through an artist named Freya. She's a poet and a painter and makes these awesome prints that I fell in love with instantly. I've had my eye on this print titled "New to This World" for a long long time (along with 4 or 5 of her other prints, check out all her stuff on etsy here).

I really wanted to incorporate pieces that this boy can use for a while. I made sure to include the IKEA shelves that we love in Nolan's room along with fabrics, a rug and storage that we can easily incorporate throughout our house if he decides he hates blue, yellow, stripes, whatever.

The best part about this is that we have a lot of these pieces already, leaving us only to find a crib, rug and dresser. Woohoo! I'm going to make the curtains and pillows and already have the fabric picked out. I guess nesting kicked in early for me this time, I can't wait to get started!

Port Townsend

While Pat moved the last of our stuff into the new house, Nolan and I met up with Gigi, Yaya, and the Revards in my favorite weekend getaway spot, Port Townsend.

Nolan's favorite part of the entire trip was riding on the ferries. Despite the freezing sideways rain, Nolan insisted that we watch the boats, so we did!

Once on the boat, he went a little crazy with excitement. He pointed out every single boat, bird, wave, and anything else he saw out that window..and made sure everyone else around us saw them too.

We took the Bainbridge Ferry so the first part of our trek was on the ferry and the remainder was in the car. I was hoping that Nolan would nap once we got off the ferry but that didn't happen. He was too content watching movies on Yaya's DVD player.

I'm not complaining though, at least he was quiet. We've had a few disastrous road trips where we all end up frazzled and crazy by the time we get to our destination. This trip was nice and relaxing and we got to Port Townsend just in time for some statue posing and lunch.

Cam, Em and Clementine arrived after lunch and the kids visited the Museum at Fort Warden. It's tiny but the kids played in there for a good hour. The next day, the rain took a break but it was still pretty chilly out. We bundled up the kids and headed to the beach for some kite flying.

Everyone got a turn!

I think I'll wait until some warmer weather to go again.

Nolan turns 3!

Nolan turned 3 on January 12th. Since we were in the middle of packing, planning a huge event and I was still feeling like pooh from my pregnancy I decided to give myself the year off of planning a big elaborate b-day blow out and save my ideas for next year.

Thank goodness I did as the morning of our quiet family party we woke up to Snowpocalypse 2012 and no one could make it over. Luckily Yaya had stayed the night so she was able to play in the snow with us, eat some cake and open a few presents.

Nolan didn't seem too disappointed with the change of plans.

Especially when he saw his choo choo train cake.

He still talks about that cake everyday. When it was my birthday he tried to talk me into getting one...we went to frozen yogurt instead. Sorry Noli!

Happy Birthday Baby Bug!

Updates

Wow, almost 2 months since my last post...sorry about that! It's not out of lack of going on, in fact I blame the exact opposite problem. It seems like as soon as January hit we were scrambling to get things done. We were juggling so many projects that I think we are just now able to take a breath, hence my ability to finally sit down and blog. I guess I should start off where I left off, or maybe a little before that.

In early December we found out about this. I'll have to type up a separate post on how i found out and how I told Pat as it's a pretty good story.

Kind of a surprise as we had just decided that the time seemed right to have another baby in the house and poof it happened. We were super excited to spread the good news when I started having complications. My hormone levels weren't right, I wasn't feeling right and it just wasn't looking very good. Luckily my Dr was able to intervene and probably saved the pregnancy by putting me on some extra hormones since my body wasn't making them. They told us I would have to keep taking the hormones through the first trimester, then at 12 weeks take a leap of faith and go off them hoping for the best. Scary right?

I followed the directions given to me even though the pills made me super sleepy (their other use is as a sedative), crazy hormonal and pretty yucky feeling all around. I went off of them and waited. After the longest 2 weeks of my life I finally had my follow up appointment to see how things were looking. They looked great and we were finally able to share our news on my birthday. Now I'm 16 weeks, or 4 months pregnant (official due date is August 14) and was able to hear the heartbeat yesterday for the 3rd time. And in another 3 weeks we will find out who has been given us all this trouble!

Along with all that "excitement" we have had many other things happening around here to keep us busy. For most of the month of January we were preparing to move out of our cottage. Pat found us a great little rental property in West Seattle that would give us this space we need now that we're adding a 4th (or 6th if you count the cats) member of the family. We were really hoping to find a property to purchase and move into but there wasn't much on the market that fit our needs so we figured we can rent for a while and save some more $$ for a bigger house down the road. We moved in the end of January and are still working on getting settled. I promise a picture tour once I'm able to unpack or at least hide the remaining boxes.

Nolan's big transition in the new house was that when he came home (he was staying with Yaya while we were moving) he had a big boy bed set up. We had prepared him for a few weeks for this transition so it wasn't too rough. We had one rough night where he kept coming out of his room but after that he was back to his regular sleepy kid routine. It's pretty funny to see what he has gathered into his bed when he gets up in the morning or what position he has fallen asleep in. On this particular morning Nolan was straddling the 5 blankets he had in his bed, along with the 2 pillows, 8 cars, 5 books and a ball. Pat said he's found him a few times sleeping on the floor with his bed full of toys. I think we have an early hoarder on our hands! We don't really care what he needs, as long as he keeps sleeping 12-14 hours at night.

The new house has all kinds of things too keep us entertained including a huge park right down the street where Nolan can feed the ducks, play on a jungle gym and run out all his energy. But the most reliable source of entertainment has been the chickens next door. There are 12 hens and 1 rooster that are a great distraction for Nolan and the cats. Our landlord warned us that they sometimes get out and so far it's only happened once. They were pretty easy to wrangle back to their pen but I was pooped out from laughing so hard. The picture above is of the great escape after I cornered them in the little alleyway between our house and their yard.

Then in mid February I once again planned the WestSide Baby Tea. This is my biggest event of the year, and this one was the biggest one ever. With 530 attendees and raising $175,000 it was a record breaker in many ways and I couldn't be more proud to be a part of it. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures as I was crazy busy orchestrating everything and staying hydrated. But West Seattle Blog was there and wore a great article about it. You can check that out here. I'm hoping to have the professional pictures soon.

After this event I of course got my post event cold and took the whole house down with me this time...sorry boys! Now that we're starting to feel better I decided it was time to dive into my biggest challenge yet, potty training! Nolan isn't super motivated to learn but I signed him up for preschool starting in the Fall and he has to be potty trained by then. The countdown is on so I picked him up a pack of training underwear (they have extra padding to help contain accidents but feel and look like regular underwear) that he's been wearing during the day. Today was day three and we finally had some success with keeping the underwear dry and went pee in the potty twice. I'm hoping we can keep this momentum up as I would be one happy mama to only have Nolan out of diapers by the time this next one makes it appearance. I'm getting ahead of myself...

Anywho, those are the reasons I've been unable to blog. I hope you can forgive me?

Holiday Happenings - The Big Day

Christmas Eve:

After we finished out last book, I asked Nolan to take a picture by the Christmas Tree. This is what he gave me.
Take away the blanket and cup and I got this.
Finally I got this gem, with the snow shoe covers on his head. Oh well!
Per usual, Cortez looked beautiful under the tree.

The next morning:

Nolan found this easel under/beside the tree.

He also got these fun light up bath toys.

His stocking had to be the favorite of the day. He found sticky toys that hung to the window.

And a reindeer Pez dispenser.

As well as many other things as seen in the aftermath.

Holiday Happenings - Pre Christmas

Wow, it's almost been 6 weeks since my last blog post. Sorry about that! To quickly catch you up, we hosted Thanksgiving at our house. Despite Nolan coming down with a 102 degree temperature the day before Thanksgiving and having to postpone until the weekend we had a great time, in fact I think a weekend Thanksgiving worked out even better! Then it was pretty quiet after that for a few weeks. Nolan continued to go to school, I worked away on all my Christmas diy projects and Pat kept busy with his pasta. Life was pretty bland around these parts.

Thank goodness for Christmas activities! First on the calendar was the Festival of Trees, we went last year and had a great time and this year our friend Heather designed one of the featured trees so we were practically celebrities! Nolan was in quite the mood so we didn't stay long. Just long enough to check out some of the other trees.

take a pic with Santa. Annabella and Nolan were still too scared to sit with Santa so the mommas jumped in.

Next I got our Christmas book advent project completed and ready to go. Each day we would open and read one of the books. It took Nolan a few days to get into it but by the end he was asking for more books.

I'm working on compiling the list of books we put together over the years if anyone is interested. Should be on Amazon's listomania soon, if I have time to get fancy, I'll post a link here too. This is definitely something we will be doing for the long term as I think we all started to look forward to our book time.

We also spent quite a few evenings driving around checking out all the light displays in our area. This is one of our favorites, the lights go along with music.

We also checked out the Christmas Ships after many recommendations. We were late and only caught about 12 minutes worth of the show but Nolan is still talking about it. So I'd say it was worth it.

The picture at the top of the page is Nolan acting like he wasn't trying to sneak open one of his gifts. He ended up holding out until Christmas day but many of the packages had proof of his impatience.