new pet.

logan TEMPORARILY has a new pet. i stress temporarily because as soon as mr. tadpole grows legs he's outta my garage for good. steve & his mom went fishing last weekend, and steve caught a couple tadpoles for his cousin, Dalee, who is the biggest animal lover/vet in training that i've ever met. steve thought it would be great to let logan watch the transformation from tadpole to frog. yes, great, whatever. i hate frogs. so the slimy creature that currently looks like a giant sperm is residing in our garage. i even had to go get seaweed/gunk from a pond to put in its container to make sure he survived. the things mothers do for their children...

1st camping trip of 2009; i hate Portrait Innovations

I haven't posted any updates for a long time, and figured i'd better get on it before the complaints start to roll in.

Summer has officially begun for us. One camping trip down, (hopefully!) several left to go. This was our first trip to Black Hawk State park in Lakeview, Iowa. It was gorgeous, and we couldn't have asked for a better time. Our campsite was right next to the lake, so it was more windy than i would have liked, but we would gladly take wind over rain any day!

Logan's gramma Donna bought him a portable DVD play for the trip to help keep him occupied on road. It was a lifesaver! Any time Logan was bored, or just needed a time out from everything he hopped in the truck to watch a movie. It will be perfect on long trips too! (COLORADO!)

We did plenty of fishing. (actually, steve did the fishing, i mostly did the magazine-reading and picture-taking) Logan wasn't interested in fishing, but loooved playing in the sand and water. I got lots of great pictures and have been having fun editing them on Picnik.

One of our favorite parts of camping is the cooking. Last year we invested in a camp stove/oven, and its been GREAT. we can cook anything similar to being in a real kitchen, and deff. speeds up cooking times to give us more time to relax.

I always get Logan's birthday pictures taken at Portrait Innovations at Jordan Creek. I've had good experiences up until now, with the exception of last year-- after they snapped over 70 pictures the memory card went bad and ended up losing them all and having to start over. The pictures didn't turn out the best because Logan was super annoyed with having to re-do everything, but I really didn't blame them, it was a fluke thing. Well...I called at the end of April to make an appointment for June 19th. At that time they told me they couldn't schedule appointments further than 30 days ahead of time, and told me to call back. Okay, it must be a new policy because i've never had any trouble before, and I always schedule things ahead of time. I called back on May 20th (exactly 30 days this time) and was informed they couldn't make appointments further than 2 weeks in advance. WHAT?! The girl was a real peach on the phone, acting like i was crazy for wanting to make an appointment a month away. Its a month, not a year, and i really didn't (and still don't!) think that is too much to ask for. I am a working mommy, and have to go out of my way to schedule things, ask for time off, etc. So, i vented my frustrations on Facebook, and ended up booking an outside/indoor photo shoot with a guy i went to high school with's wife. Im VERY excited, since this will be Logan's first professional outside pictures, plus everything will be edited, re-touched, etc. The convenience of getting pictures back in 30 minutes at Portrait Innovations will be missed, but i'm willing to wait for better pictures. He's getting time taken June 10th & I will post them as soon as i can.

Hope all is well with everyone!! Love you all, take care!

preschool pictures!

Logan had spring pictures taken at preschool a few weeks ago. He was less than thrilled with the shirt he is wearing, thanks to his dad. Steve jokingly asked if i bought the shirt in the girls department, because it thought it looked kind of girly. well, Logan over heard and threw a huge fit because he didn't want to wear a girl's shirt! (Keep in mind this is also the same kid who spilled apple juice all over himself at Raidan's house and had to wear some of her clothes while his dried. He picked out pink velour sweatpants & a white and black rhinestoned shirt.) Anyways, his bad mood from the morning apparently carried over until picture time, his smile isn't quite as big as it was in the fall. He's still adorable though :). Hopefully I can get his class picture scanned and posted too, its a classic - Logan is not smiling AT ALL, the kid next to him is making an incredibly silly face. One little girl is on the verge of tears, and another girl is apparently trying to hide her face behind the teacher.

spring is ALMOST here!

i've realized that i'm serisouly lacking on my motherly blogging duties, so i thought i'd just give a quick update on Logan.

we're SOOOOO happy its finally starting to warm up so we can get OUTSIDE! we've spent the last two evenings at the city park & in our backyard, and Log has been loving every moment of it. i'm finding myself all but dragging him inside at night, while he's telling me "i never have any fun inside" or "i want to stay outside foreber and eber!"

Mr. Snowman

Saturday was beautiful (for a winter in Iowa) so Logan go to spend sometime outside, and built his very 1st snowman, which he named, Mr. Snowman. He was quite upset that we didn't have a carrot for his nose, but I managed to talk him into subsituting with a hotdog. His snowman was completed with a straw hat, a Thomas the Train scarf, a gravel smile, and 3D glasses left over from seeing My Bloody Valentine. He looked fantastic, and Logan was soooo proud of him!

Yesterday when we got home from a Super Bowl party we noticed Mr. Snowman had been knocked over. After putting Logan to bed Steve & I went outside to pick up the pieces, and we discovered that Mr. Snowman was killed intentionally. There were two sets of footprints leading from the street directly to Mr. Snowman. serisouly, who goes into someone else's yard to wreck a snowman that obvisouly belongded to a CHILD?! steve is completely furious and wants to build a new snowman and then set up a trail camera to capture a picture of any future snowman attackers. i think we'll just tell Logan the wind blew it over and build him closer to the house, hopefully the attacker won't be brave enough to get closer to our house.

Finally, logan tried to add a 3rd stick to his snowman, besides the two sticks for arms. The picture should explain more...

Whatever You Say, Son...

Logan: Do you know what snow turns into when it melts away?
Me: water.
Logan: NO! it turns into milk! snow is white and so is milk.
Me: are you sure?
Logan: mom, i know what i'm talkin' about.

Kids Say the Darndest Things.

One of my favorite parts of being a mom is listening to my son. there are times i wish i could strap a video camera on his head so i could record everything and never miss a moment.


during the summer we are always spending time out on the deck bbqing and spending time with our closest friends. one evening we had just sat down to eat, and logan asked for a glass of milk. i handed it to him, and without any hesitation he looked at emilie and said "is this breast milk?" you could tell he wasn't trying to be funny, he was asking a completely serious question. i was completely caught off guard, so of course my first reaction what "what did you just say?" great, christina. ask him to repeat something he probably shouldn't have said in the first place. instead of repeating what he said, he apparently thought he had said a naughty word, so he sheepishly said "boob milk?" obvisouly he was spending too much time listening to the grown-ups at daycare...

the three of us love camping during the summer. i suppose camping just wouldn't be camping if something didn't go wrong on each trip. the 2nd time we went camping with Logan, which was Labor Day weekend, 2007. Logan was a little over 2 at the time, and just learning how to explore absolutely everything he wasn't familiar with. which included the grill. sure enough, in a split second logan walked right up to the hot grill and put his index finger on the outside, and burnt the crap out of his poor little finger. he handled it much better than i did. it blistered up, but after hanging on to a cold can of soda for awhile his spirits healed up, and his fascination with his new "owie" started. every 5 minutes we heard "look at my owie" or "i have an owie." not only did steve & i hear about it for MONTHS, but so did every other person logan was around. including train conducters when we rode Thomas the Train, and grochery store clerks, and perfect strangers. He was pretty shy about talking to new people, but it was a completely different story when he came to sharing his owie. this went on, litterly, for months. long after any traces of his owie remained. even to this day if we talk about not touching grills or anything hot he'll say "you can't do that cuz you'll get an owie, like this one.... right here...."

some kids are storytellers, some kids act things out, some kids sing. logan sings. he won't sing on command, but he loves to sing when he thinks no one is listening, mostly when he's in the bathroom. most are normal preschool songs, Twinkle Twinkle or Row Row Boat, and not-so-normal songs for a toddler. Like "Brand New Girlfriend" by Steve Holy & "Whatever You Like" by T.I. Logan absolutely loved listening to "Brand New Girlfriend", to the extent that I actually made him his own copy of a cd with nothing except that song on it, so he could listen to it over and over and over. He can't sing the whole thing, but its just as cute to hear him sing "i godda bran new girlfriend, we really jumped down the deep end...hoochie cooo..." i asked him once if he had a girlfriend yet, and he said "no, not yet, i still gotta get one." "actually, i'll probably get a whole bunch, like this many (holding up 10 fingers)."



and last but not least, proof that my innocent little boy isn't a baby anymore... (he's going to be so angry with me when i show this picture to EVERYONE when he graduates!)