I sound like my mom...

"My baby is TWO!" I sound like my mom. It's okay. I don't mind. I love my mom. She's a cool mom.

I can't believe that Colby's two. Actually, I can. He is exerting his independence in the way that only a two year old can. However, as if on cue, he became my favorite version of himself tonight at dinner. He was impish - silly, bending over in his seat to look up at Steve in a sort of sideways upside down way and he just giggled. That was after he stuffed his face with a taco (although he did hold his own taco (and successfully I might add) for the first time tonight). He's glad to proclaim that he's TEWWWWWWWW if you ask him although he'll show you five fingers at the same time. Ha! Steve and I had a miscommunication about whether or not he was coming home between work and dog training tonight, so I didn't have our gifts for Colby wrapped. He did get to open gifts from both of my aunts, though, and was THRILLED to receive a bus and two dolls. He's big into "ooooooh!" (I SO wish everyone could hear him) these days and he was quite impressed with his gifts!

We finished out the day with a haircut for him and as he giggled his way through it and scrunched up his neck I was reminded again how much I love him. He doled out birthday hugs to Kailin and I before they went to bed and it was all I could do to let him go. How I love that boy! Kailin, for her part, sweetly called him "birthday boy" all day. "Come here, birthday boy" "Do you want some help, birthday boy?" It was pretty cute.

My boy is a silly, loving, gentle little guy and I love everything about him. He's definitely testing his independence right now and letting me know that although he's gentle and tender he will not be walked upon!! (literally or figuratively) He's changed so much in the past 9 months. I just can't wait to see what kind of changes we'll see in this next year. I took some cute pics of him today, but my camera isn't compatible with Vista (being that it's an archaic five years old (according to Vista)) so the pictures will have to wait til I can transfer them to my flash drive on our desktop and then to this computer.

dubya dubya dubya

You thought this was going to be a political post, didn't you?! I guess it kind of it because "Dubya" is a bit of a curse word in this house... ha ha ha.

Actually this post is about my son crawling up in my lap yesterday and saying something that sounded like "Dubya dubya dubya MommyDaddyBubbeeTobyMommyDaddyBubbeeTobyMommyDaddyBubbeeToby" as fast as he could say it. I'm not sure what the Dubyas were about, but the rest of it is our family of course and it was so stinking cute I had to make a post about it.

I'll snap a picture of the birthday boy later and post it. Hard to believe he's already TWO!

Xin Nian Kuai Le

I'm sure I messed up the spelling somehow. Anyway, Happy Chinese New Year! (a day (or so) late and a dollar short - as always!). We celebrated first at Kailin's Cricket School with some very yummy dumplings, mandarin oranges, almond cookies and a fortune cookie (and the classic Chinese beverage- Capri Sun (ha ha ha)). Then we watched a dragon dance and headed off to the Mitchell Park Domes with our friends the Klopfs. In addition to the Chinese New Year festivities there, the show dome is all set up with trains and the kids went wild! Kailin's teacher, Miss Ping, was there and Kailin informed her that this is the year of the camel. Lovely. There is no camel on the Chinese zodiac, of course, and we've talked about it being the year of the ox more than once. Selective memory, I guess. We finished out the day having the Klopfs over for a play date and dinner.

I made sweet and sour chicken, napa cabbage salad, and steamed veggies with ginger sesame sauce. It was a great dinner and we had Sharon's mandarin orange trifle for dessert. Colby REALLY enjoyed himself with that one! Monday we had sesame ribs and broccoli for dinner to celebrate the actual day. It was a fun Chinese New Year!

Now on to Colby's birthday! I'm dying to cut his hair, so tomorrow can't arrive soon enough. We're going much less Asian for his birthday - he adores tacos so that's what we're having. Stay tuned for pictures of that mess...er...meal.

Is there an echo in here?

Colby is still increasing his vocabulary mostly using the parrot method - repeat back anything anyone says to you. Expect your parents to repeat back anything you say to them. Sometimes it makes me laugh- and sometimes it makes Colby frustrated (mostly when we don't understand what he's saying).

Anyway, the real reason for this post is what happened last Thursday night. I was putting the kids to bed. Both of them are INSANELY ticklish right before bed. I didn't need to tickle Colby, though - he made some noises and I thought I'd parrot them back. He erupted in peals of laughter! PEALS!! More noises - more repeating - more peals. Then he put his hands on my neck. I tried to put my hands on his (uber)ticklish neck. He laughed so hard he snorted! We carried on for quite awhile before I decided we'd better settle down or he'd never go to sleep. I know I haven't done it justice here - words just couldn't, but I wanted to remember this little mommy moment. It was one of those really simple, silly things that shouldn't have been any big deal, but I'll remember it for a long long while to come.

Oh Christmas Tree

Today was the day. I could wait no more (and also the pick-up is tomorrow). Our Christmas tree - the giant, full, fill the room beauty is now a dried up shell of it's former self. It does, however, have about a million times more needles on it than our tree last year which yielded about 3" of needles on our carpet in less time than this one's been up. This year's tree also remained on the roof of the car and remained standing - a feat we've not seen since we moved into this house. I'm hoping it's the sign of a new era in Gannaway family Christmas trees. Only time will tell. I do know that this year's tree served us well - it lit up our room and gave us joy. (it also gave us frustration as the kids and dogs tried their best to strip it of it's ornaments daily) It was a gorgeous tree and it looked beautiful - but it looked good naked, too. It made me a little sad today to take everything off - both because it signals the true end of our Christmas Season, but also because it was such an event to put the decorations and lights on and it was such a non-event to take them off. I took a little time to think about our Christmas and about where all of our ornaments came from and that seemed like a fitting tribute to the tree. Yes, perhaps I've waxed a little saptastic here (no pun intended), but the Christmas tree really is a huge part of Christmas for me and I'm always sad to see it go. I can't wait to see what our tree will look like next year!!

Breaker breaker...

We noticed a puddle at the street end of our cul de sac this morning on our way to church. Not a good sign during a cold Wisconsin winter. The puddle was bigger when we got home and there was a front end loader tooling around. Not good signs. We monitored the goings on and sure enough at 11:40 the doorbell rang and it was a public works guy coming to tell us that they were going to turn off the water at noon to fix a water main break. I asked about how long the water might be off. He estimated most of the day. We hurried around and filled some containers with water - some for drinking, and some in case we needed to flush the toilets more than once. It was no crisis by any means (although the dishwasher left us in a bit of a quandary as we'd just started it before the man came to the door and we weren't sure how many cycles of water it would need....in the end we waited for it to drain and then stopped it, but that caused a litany of beeps to emerge from it - one every 4 seconds or so - for the duration. ), but it did give me cause to think about how much we take running water for granted. Clean running water. What a simple thing, but what a difference it makes in our daily lives! Thankfully our run in with drought lasted less than 2 hours and I was able to restart the dishwasher. Now to find something to do with the water sitting on the counter so it's not wasted....

Baby it's cooooooold outside!!

I know it's really cold today. Not because the weather man told me that all the schools are closed and that the temperature (at 6am) was -11 and the windchill was -30. I know it's really cold today because I watched our (usually) beloved foxhound mix attempt to poop on TWO legs. TWO. He first managed on three and then thought he'd try to lift that last back leg up. It didn't work out so well for him in the end, but he did get the job done and sprint to the door. I wish I'd had my camera out there for the show - but a. who thinks to take a camera out with them when they take the dogs out to go and b. it's so cold it probably would've frozen anyway.