Happy 2013 - A look back (and a night at the zoo)

There are a bajillion "year in review" memes out there, so I thought I'd try one that amused me. I'm skipping all of the links I should put in, but feel free to check out the archives via the calendar over on the right-hand side here.

For those of you who aren't interested in random highlights, I'll throw in some pics from Zoo Lights. To fill in the pictures: 1) If you go to Zoo Lights, wear lots of layers (we knew this, note the obnoxious hat I stole from Ray). 2) Parking by the museum to get into the Zoo isn't that bad, since it's a lot easier to get out from there (I think some of my relatives will understand this). 3) If you see a long line at one side of the pavilion and noone on the other side, perhaps that's not the line for tickets, but the line to get in. Somehow we ended up inside without anyone taking the tickets that were part of Laura and Brad's Christmas gift. 4) Giraffes are just goofy.

Now, 2012 in review, per some random meme I found with a few extras thrown in:
-Number of full nights of sleep: about 6 since mid-July
-Longest nap on record: 4 hours for E?
-Number of bottles washed/diapers changed: Few bottles, but if you estimate 7 diapers a day since T was born, it's about 1200. E had a few diapers at the beginning of the year, but that highly traumatic transition is now forgotten. Really.
-Number of baby teeth erupted: 0
-Number of date nights the new parents have had: 3, but all were afternoons
-Hours logged at park or playground: So many. Fortunately most were with our neighbors at our playground, which makes them vastly more fun
-Greatest consecutive number of steps taken: T: 0 E: 8 bajillion, while reenacting an in-progress football game
-Number of airline flights survived by parents: 3 with 2 in tow
-Boxes of Mac + Cheese prepared: 52 meals worth of Annies, which is probably about 75 boxes
-Teeth lost/tooth fairy visits: 0
-Shows the parents watched all of due to disrupted schedules: Dance Academy, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy (you can guess who watched what)
-Weirdest music video our children have been forced to dance to: Gagnum Style (or Tigh-ey Style) (no they haven't SEEN it, but a baby doing the horse-riding move cracks us up)

Number of time T has been somewhere E would never have been at this age just because we wanted to take E: many, oh so many (Yes, that's T sleeping in the stroller in 18 degree weather, inside his spacesuit and one of my coats.)

Number of children who lost their ability to ham for the camera this year: 1
Most significant event this year: The arrival of one TR, of course
Other significant event: E potty trained and went from "toddler" to "boy" sometime this year (sniff), E started swim lessons, we converted the mudroom and redid the family room floor, we built vegetable gardens... yeah, this year has been largely about survival

Speaking of survival: Again, giraffes are just weird (what else fills this niche elsewhere??). E is now in love with them because this one started stomping and the zookeeper said she was mad because she was put in timeout earlier. E sympathizes.

Anyway, it has been an interesting year, and I'm sure 2013 will be much more eventful overall (although Ray is hoping for less terrifying individual events)!

We hope you all have a wonderful new year!

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all of you! Here are a few highlights from our Christmas season.

CLICK FOR MORE CUTE

Octopus

I'm a little proud of this one.
I had a picture I really wanted for the boys' rooms - E decided he got the planes and t got this one. But the original was 8"x10", and I needed BIG for the empty wall opposite all this orange.
So I made my own.

And I think it came out pretty darn well!

Iphonography October

More from the phone that sees all - and sees that I am WAY BEHIND.


October brought the end of our harvest (including the sole butternut squash)...
...the end of swim lessons (the last set essentially private due to E's solo enrollment, and ending with a pretty impressive little challenge course)...

... and the beginning of T's time as second child, stuffed in this snowsuit (ask Ray for the pictures of E towing T about on a sled!).

E discovered that raking is worthwhile if you get to jump in the leaves (I'm not sure if that pile ever did get raked up - you can see it in the Halloween pics!)

I went back to work full-time and so did Ray, which means the ipad and Facetime became key to family dinners.

I mastered the art of the sharpie jolly roger tattoo (originally on my leg for work, then on E).

And E mastered the art of making Thanksgiving just as fun as Halloween. Gobble!

Images of (a few moments stolen from) lake runs

I've been running around our lake (actually, as I type this I've been not running for two weeks due to schedule and bleh - must fix that). The time change has made it harder, but it's worth trying to get out at first or last light. These low-quality pics don't even do it justice - so gorgeous!

Thanks for this, Apple

I was looking through faces on iphoto when I saw this pairing. No question whose kid this is.

(apologies to T for using this picture where he is clearly concentrating on eating his dinosaur and not on mugging for the camera)

Five months

T turned five months old yesterday.

He just keeps getting cuter. And a little more stable.
Sadly, he was a little under the weather this weekend, so he was low on smiles, and heavy on shots like this...

He's doing well, though - he has more abs then E ever did, E regularly congratulates him on his neck strength ("Aw, buddy, you're stable!"), he's pretty solid on flipping from his back to his belly (via his left side, anyway), and he is working on his skydiver maneuver.

He has never been as roly poly as E and only recently noticed his feet (but shows no interest in eating them or performing nasal excavations with them). He passes his toys back and forth to find the best angle for getting them to his gums. He's happiest under anything new that he can check out (the bottom of the futon thrilled him for half an hour yesterday). He's probably behind E in the rolling/sitting category but ahead in the head lifting/abs category, for whatever that's worth.

He has some pretty cute giggles that come out for E most evenings, he'll babble with anyone who smiles at him, and he wants to eat with the big kid - thus far he has gummed on apple and broccoli, but he shocked me by successfully eating the first piece of corn I offered him a week or so ago.

He's still pretty inconsistent on sleep. He's not a huge napper, but does this hilarious thing where he gets really mad that he's awake and yells then suddenly passes out. Some nights he'll sleep all night, most he wakes once, some he wakes twice or more - so much for letting me find my rhythm! But the most amusing thing is that he has found his own self-soothing in the rings hanging in his crib (safe, I swear). If he's having trouble falling asleep, he just grabs one on each side and talks to them until he's down. Very cute (and much less difficult than mr. pat-me-until-I'm-asleep-and-army-crawl-out).

By the home measurements, he's 27" and 16.8 lbs. He's starting to be more long than chub, although I did realize yesterday that he actually has something to hold up his diaper, unlike the other males in this family (anyone know where to get 28x34 men's jeans?)

One last shot, because it reminds me of this.

(Yes, I did get his arm unstuck and he was much happier.)

RAWR!

Mom, I sense something amiss... 



EEK, it's a dinosaur!

Do T. rexes usually have chocolate chip breath?

Lashes...

...we have them.

Iphoneography September

More from the phone that sees all...

Cutie Full-pants

Hey all!

You sure are persistent, coming back to check out our exploits.
Mom just wanted me to point out how cute I am! See?

What, you want more? I'll dance for you!


I do that dance, do that dance.....
......fill my pants!
Oops, could somebody fix that? Thanks.

Giggles

T has been giggling when he was tickled for about a week, but tonight he burst into giggle for the first time because he found something funny. Hilarious, actually. Not surprisingly, it was E, bouncing up and down on my lap like a crazy person. Ray and I enjoyed it for a while before trying to get a video, so this is what it looked like after things started to spin down. Warning: I'm shooting with E still bouncing on my lap, so the camera work is vaguely akin to that of an unsteady monkey in the midst of being attacked by a friendly labrador. However, seconds 10-15 are pretty much the best sound ever.

MN car trip 2012 part 4

I did get a few other pics at Clarks. Like the huge colony (?) of turkey vultures, of which I only got half:

And Ray stealing apples on the way out - he should have stolen more, they were AWESOME (thanks Brian and Tiff).


Then it was back in the car for the drive home, and some Americana.

Bi-cycle

This is an experiment (trying again, if you looked at this last night). Also, the first day that E decided to try to get on his bike and riiiiide.
The password is E's name.

Whee! from Baumzinger on Vimeo.

MN car trip 2012 pt.. 3?

From Lessingers we went on to Clarks so that T had someone to socialize with.

Actually, we all had lots of fun at Clarks, but most of the pics I took inside can be summed up as "blurry three and five year old". So you'll get pics of our day out in Stillwater instead.

MN car trip 2012- Pics from Jen

As I said, Jen was kind enough to take some pics for us. I'm not linking the actual pics, but if you click you'll get Jen's site to get ahold of her if you'd like them!Email jen@jenlessingerphotography.com. We put Jen under some tight time/childcare/physical constraints, but I still love these. If you want to see previous sessions, click here.







That last shot is an ode to this, and I'm so happy to have one for each!:

MN car trip 2012 pt 1

Yes, we did it- one car, two kids, about 2000 miles (total). For my own recordkeeping, we left at 5 AM on Sept. 16, the day after our trip to Washington. I packed the car while everyone else was at our neighborhood block party. I reallly wasn't ready to hit an airport after two days of flying already that week. I'd stink at Ray's job, apparently.

Anyway...

An artistic view of driving into Nebraska. For some reason we had no 3G service until we left Nebraska, which is when our families saw this pic.


Fun at the rest stop. Not sure why we thought the poles were SO fun, but I think 200-odd miles had something to do with it.

Survival - just before the kid starts to whine, suggest a show.

Eamon learned to climb trees at a rest stop in Iowa.

Ok, not really, but that pair of pics cracks me up. We did have a good long stop to play frisbee and make E run in circles. Ray had the genius idea of bringing a cooler of food, and being able to grab food we wanted whenever really did make the stops more relaxed. E was a trooper in the car, and T did well - but had a 240 mile limit that was amazingly predictable. Case in point, on the way back Ray was putting T in the carseat and told him he had to wait until the west side of Lincoln for his next stop. I was driving and realized eastern Lincoln would be 240 miles, western lincoln would be more like 280. Guess where we should have stopped? Guess which town had a lot of construction and  closed exits...

Anyway, first actual stop: Lessingers.

These two get along so well. I also love how concerned T is about the situation.
However, T got in plenty of his own fun and relaxation.



Perhaps too much relaxation?


Ray and the twins played a lot of games of "melting", which was basically hide and seek for stuffed animals. I tried to get decent pics of the game, but three active 3yo= blurry. I did get these, though, and they don't show the game but I love them:
]

Speaking of pics I love- Jen was kind enough to take a few pics while we were there. Next post!