Petting Zoo and Pumpkin Patch...All kinds of Fall Fun

Since Grandma and Grandpa were here visiting for Noah's birthday weekend we decided to take advantage of the nice fall weather and head up to a local pumpkin patch called "Tanglewood Farms". I thought it was mostly going to be a pumpkin patch with a hayride, a few farm animals, etc but it turns out I was confusing it with a different pumpkin patch I had been to (there are so many up here!). It was actually primarily a small animal petting zoo with a few pumpkins....oh well. Noah actually enjoyed it more this way. Unfortunately Grandma-"I love children not animals"-Fitzgerald wasn't too thrilled with her close brush with the cattle but she survived and was a very good sport. "The things you do for your grandchildren" she said on more than one occasion. Sorry Mom! The family farm was great for kids and they gave you food to feed the animals. They had goats of all sizes including miniature goats as well as full size goats, sheep, chickens, ponies, horses, calfs, pigs, llamas, huge rabbits, and I think I even saw a donkey. Oh and of course they had a few farm cats--Noah's favorite for sure. I'm so glad we paid $9 each to take him to a place so he could spend the majority of the time screaming "KITTY!!" and petting the cats...something he could do anywhere. Oh well. I think he had fun anyway and wasn't afraid of any of the animals, even when they were invading his personal space trying to get to the food in his hand. I on the other hand, jumped about 2 feet in the air when I felt the large, cold tongue of a pig licking my bare toes which were hanging out of my sandals. All in all it was a fun day and we got some great pictures which always makes me happy!


I can totally see why a 2-year-old would end up in Jail...



This must be a minimum security institution with good food and cable TV because he sure does look happy.



I'm pretty impressed with myself for getting the sheep to pose like that

Noah turns 2

Saturday (October 11th) was Noah's 2nd birthday! We can hardly believe 2 years have gone by since that day we brought our little 6 pound, helpless peanut home from the hospital. We opted not to have a huge birthday party for him...we weren't sure we were up to twenty 2-year-olds invading our house! So we had a small (mostly family and a couple very close friends) come over for a family dinner and some Elmo birthday cake! Noah actually did better than we thought with opening the presents. Grandma and "Papa" Fitzgerald (a.k.a. "the man who hung the moon" in Noah's eyes) came up from FL for his big day. Aunt Shelly and cousin Samantha got to be here and Aunt Amy & Uncle Eric came over with cousins Christian, Cameron and Lauren who are now 9 months old and both crawling! It was a fun day! The Elmo birthday cake turned out great (not that I can take any credit for it!) As cute as the cake was, however, I will try to never get a birthday cake with solid red icing ever again! I have to admit parts of our house still look like a crime scene...





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The Birthday Boy! We were surprised he actually wanted to wear the party hat!



And our big boy even blew out his candle...



Sharing some red icing with Daddy



Posing for a picture on his new climbing toy



Can you tell he's on a sugar high from the cake? I thought so...



Cousins Cameron, Christian and Lauren



The kids enjoyed playing all over Noah's birthday present



Noah's "Aunt Amy" with cousins Cameron and Lauren

First Haircut

Well, here we are one week shy of Noah's 2nd birthday and we FINALLY decided Noah had enough hair to officially get his first haircut!!! What a momentous milestone, huh! It's funny how things change when you have kids. A few years ago a "big deal" on a Saturday for me would mean a spur of the moment road trip to a SEC football game, some tailgating, partying, etc. Now, a "big deal" Saturday for us is taking Noah to a kid's themed hair salon and waiting in line for 30 minutes watching all of the other 1 year olds scream at the trauma they are going through only so we can do the same thing to our precious child! Actually, the experience went WAY better than we ever expected. Noah doesn't exactly cooperate with things being "done" to him (just ask his doctor, any nurse at any of the various children's ERs we've had to unfortunately visit with him or any local photographer for that matter). He was such a champ and "kim" his "barber" did an amazing job. They really know what they are doing with kids there! There are special chairs, toys everywhere, prizes, TVs at every station, all kinds of distracting devices and it is quite the event. I think they even do birthday parties there! Noah didn't cry once--not even when he saw the little boy next to him sobbing and sobbing. And Kim didn't even make any comments about our "homemade" attempts at hair trimming we had tried at home (hey, the economy is bad...trying to save some money). All in all, the $17.95 we paid for a perfect haircut, smiles on the pictures, a "first haircut certificate", his red "nuggets" of hair they saved for us and NO TEARS was well worth it. I'm just glad he had a positive first experience so I don't have to DREAD every haircut with him...like I dread every MD appointment and portrait session.

The weather up here is so gorgeous this weekend so after his haircut we walked over to "Johnny Rocket's" for a fun lunch complete with jukebox music and a dancing wait staff. Noah actually refused to sit in a high chair and sat in a booster seat at the booth with us, ate almost an entire kid's meal and insisted on having his "grown up" drink instead of a sippy cup. It's like he went from baby to little boy right before our eyes today. I just can't believe in a few short days we will officially stop counting his age in months and start saying "we have a 2 year old!" My, how time flies!



Doesn't he look thrilled?






I love how he is sitting with his legs crossed



"Hey now, don't make fun of my mohawk! Talk to the hand!"



Doesn't he look handsome? NO smiles....but at least no tears!

Take time to stop and smell the roses

With everything going on in the world lately and with the financial disaster facing our country, I find myself letting my brain be consumed with so many things. I am obsessed with the election and worried about who will be running our country; I am consumed with this financial crisis and how the horrible state of the stock market may impact my family; I’m consumed with my house being on the market and worried no one will ever buy it due to the horrible state of the housing market; I listen to the news and become disheartened at the state of our world instead of thanking God for allowing me to have such a blessed life; I spend way too much time dreading the terrible 2’s that are invading our household at the moment and not enough time being impressed and grateful for the amazing little things Noah does every single day; I am consumed with guilt for never getting around to reading the 37 parenting books sitting on my bookshelves when I ought to be only focused on reading the “one” book that matters and answers everything. All of these things have been going through my mind this week when I got an email from a friend which included a passage from her daily homily that she receives each day by email. I thought it really hit home so I wanted to post it. Unfortunately I can’t give credit to the author because I do not know who wrote it.


Don’t Forget How to See Them

Dn 7:9-10,13-14 / Jn 1:47-51

Every day we are surrounded by miracles, but we rarely notice any of them--because they are always there and we grow accustomed to them. We domesticate God’s wonders and take them as part of the ordinary furniture of our lives, and that means discounting their value by almost 100 percent.

Think of the new parents who stand in wonder over the crib of their new infant, marvelling at those tiny fingers and toes, the eyes that are barely open yet, and the cry that is so loud for such a little body. “It’s a miracle,” they say, and they’re right. But before long, living every day with the miracle becomes ordinary, the wonder fades, and the focus shifts to “pick up your socks, take out the trash, and do your homework.”

It’s the way our minds work, and in one sense it’s probably a blessing because otherwise we’d be exhausted and overwhelmed all the time at the incredible goings-on all around us. But it is a pity, because so many of our lonely feelings and our wondering if God is close to us could be eased if we retained the gift of seeing what is right under our eyes.

We can regain and reinvigorate that gift of sight, if we take the time to look at the simple things of our daily experience more closely and with a more attentive spirit.

God is visible right here to those who have the eyes to see. Take the time, and experience the joy of seeing him — every day.

Worth the wait...

In the last post I bragged about how Noah FINALLY began calling me Mommy last week. It has been music to my ears. I know he can say tons and tons of other things but it really bothered me that he flat out refused to say "Mommy". Now he runs across the room and hugs me and says "Mommy, Mommy!" and if I'm really lucky sometimes I get a "WUV WOO" too ("love you" for you toddler-translation-challenged folks). I realize how lucky David is to have gotten this royal treatment from Noah for the past...uh...YEAR!

Noah grabbed my camera the other day and turned on the video so I accidently got this video of him talking a little. Of course he is 2 inches from my face so the video is close up, to say the least. Click on the video if you care to watch...

"Over the river and through the woods...

(And around the lake and up the mountain)....to Grandmother's house we go"...This past weekend we traveled an hour north to David's mom's new house in the mountains. We had a lovely time and enjoyed the magnificent views from their home. The lake is charming and there is lots to do. I know a certain little boy who is going to have many fond memories of this place over the next few years. We packed a lot into 2 days. In addition to watching lots of SEC football and enjoying the hot tub, we had several home cooked meals together, walked by the lake, saw a waterfall, took Noah to the playground, the "beach" and the horse stables. The weather was the perfect glimpse into the fall season. I was relieved we didn't encounter any bears (which they have seen right in their backyard) but we did see many, many deer. They were everywhere, so Noah (and I) really got a kick out of that. My highlight of the weekend was that Noah...finally... started...calling.... me....Mommy!!! After all this time--all the pleading, begging, coaxing, bribing finally paid off and he quit calling me Daddy. It has been music to my ears hearing his sweet voice call "mommy" and run across the room to me. I'm trying to forget that he learned about 50-60 OTHER words before this one important one, but who's counting?
Here are a few of my favorite pictures from the weekend

Just call him Casanova...

These pictures are from about 2 months ago so they are quite old but I just now realized I never posted them and they are too cute to just let them get lost in the massive digital photo vault somewhere on the computer. They are from a couple of swim dates/play dates Noah had with one of his little "girlfriend" named Savannah. They are so cute together. Noah really likes to give Savannah kisses so I had to take the pictures for the obligatory embarrassment of him in his teen years. I can't help but have the little tune in my head: "Noah and Savannah, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!"

"Baby, where'd ya get those blue eyes?"

My friend Bridget took a couple of photos of Noah the other day and emailed these to me. Sometimes I still can't believe how blue Noah's eyes are (or how red his hair is) when my hair color and eyes are so dark. A few months after Noah was born and we figured out his deep blue eyes must be here to stay, we traced them back to his great-grandmother on David's side who apparently had deep blue eyes. I came across this on the internet today:

****"If you have blue eyes, you may be related to every other blue-eyed person in the world. Researchers in Denmark have found that every person with blue eyes descends from just one "founder," an ancestor whose genes mutated around 6,000 years ago. Before then, everyone had brown eyes."***********************

Finally, some recent photos to share

Finally I'm taking 5 minutes out of the hectic week to post some recent pictures since it's been a while. These were taken over a month ago but I've been wanting to share them. A lot has happened since these pictures (Noah started preschool, Noah visited Grandma and Papa for 5 days, learned all his ABC's and has finally stopped using the pacifier!) but I will have to post about all of that another time. We are actually trying to sell our house and move (not far though) so life has been crazy trying to get everything ready for the "For Sale" sign to go up in the yard, which it finally did this week. Now, If I can just keep a house ready to show with an almost 2-year old running around in destruction mode all the time! Should be interesting! Anyway, Enjoy the pictures and more updates are to come...



If that's not a mischievous look then I don't know what one is!




As you can see, Noah bypasses his hundreds of real toys and plays mainly with the laundry basket. He thinks he is "helping" me with the laundry when he empties all of the clean laundry onto the floor so he can play in the basket...



Look at that cute red hair!




Peek-A-Boo!





"Fed-Ex me to my Papa, please!"

Random tidbits

This post is just going to be a bunch of recent Noah tidbits. I haven’t posted in a while (been CRAZY busy but that is another blog story for another day) so here are some of the recent things going on in Noah’s life…to catch up the grandparents and any other sleep deprived friends and family who actually read this blog in the middle of the night for lack of anything better to do!

A quick recap on Noah’s “favorites”—his favorite color is still “blue”, favorite number is still “2”, favorite letter is still “L” (we don’t know why), his favorite living being is still our cat (we really don’t know why on that one—she’s hates him), his favorite TV characters are still Elmo, Curious George and Clifford and his favorite words are still “uh-oh” and “daddy”—in no particular order. Basically none of that has changed.

He is no longer such a picky eater. He has recently discovered spaghetti and her shovels it in with both hands as fast as he can. I never realized cleaning up after a meal could be such an arduous task until now. I now know why some moms strip their kids naked before they let them eat dinner. I can’t believe I used to complain that he didn’t like spaghetti. I can’t believe the mess this is causing. I fear his skin will turn permanently orange.

Instead of saying “All done” at the end of a meal now, Noah often puts both arms up in the air and yells “TOUCHDOWN!” While we as parents (diehard football fans) were thrilled at this new skill, we were so confused at first as to why he always did this in the highchair after eating and not in front of the TV while we are watching football. We then remembered the first time we tried to get Noah to say it, he happened to be sitting in the highchair at the time so now instead of associating it with SEC football he associates it with eating….oh well. At least he is learning useful vocabulary terms.

Noah’s language skills are starting to explode and he is learning more and more words everyday. I tried counting the other day the different words he knows and says and I got up to 40-50 which just seems crazy to me—where has the time gone? Sometimes we don’t even teach him the words so I’m not sure where he picks them up (who says kids don’t learn anything from TV?). Last week he pointed to a giraffe in one of his books and yelled “Giraffe!!!”. A couple of weeks ago David got him to say his first 2-word sentence and unfortunately I was there to witness the awful occasion….I say awful because MY son’s first 2 word sentence was “Goooooooo Dawgs!!!!” Gee, thanks David. That really warmed my heart. The worst thing was my parents were here visiting and they had to hear it too. I’ve never seen 2 grandparents look so appalled or downright disappointed. I’m really working on “Go Gators” with him but so far no luck. He did say “love you” the next day to me which really made me feel better knowing that “Go Dawgs” wasn’t the only sentence in his language vault.

Noah still flat out refuses to call me Mama, mommy, mom or anything related to the maternal population. Not sure why. I haven’t talked about it much in my blog because I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a sore subject with me. He is completely able to say mommy, he just refuses to. He used to call my mama and mommy all the time and then just abruptly stopped sometime in May and started calling my Daddy…all of the time. He also calls David Daddy of course. When I walk into the room he runs up to me screaming “Daddy, daddy daddy” and no matter what anyone does he only calls me that. When I point to myself and say “Who is this?” he proudly says “Daddy!” When anyone points to a picture of me and asks the same question they get the same response: “Daddy!” I really don’t get it. I spend nearly every waking hour with him but somehow he manages to forget my name 100% of the time but manages to remember the names of PBS tv show characters, the cat’s name, correct football terminology and the names of all his favorite animals and foods. He also somehow has managed to learn all of his ABC’s. My father eloquently pointed out to me the other day “Funny how you can get a 22 month old to learn all 26 letters of the alphabet but you can’t seem to teach him how to say “mommy.”
Yeah, funny.

Silence is never a good thing when it comes to toddlers

Here we go again...just a first time mom learning the hard way…again! This summarizes a list of the most recent things I've learned. When you are engrossed in doing something productive and everything all of a sudden gets real quiet and your toddler is not in immediate view,

These are the things it almost NEVER means:

Your child is almost never sitting quietly in the corner looking at a book;

Your child is almost never working a puzzle or playing quietly with a safe toy;

Your child is most likely not amusing himself with something simple like playing with the Velcro on his sandal;

Your child is probably not just curled up sleeping somewhere where he randomly fell asleep without you knowing (really…does this ever happen?…I’ve seen pictures where someone’s kid suddenly fell asleep on the kitchen floor…oh come on! Well all I can say is that never happens here)

What the silence possibly (and probably) DOES mean:

Noah…er…I mean “Your child” has somehow gotten into the guest bathroom and is playing in the toilet water, and/or unrolling ALL of the toilet paper and/or playing with the nasty toilet scrub brush;

Your child is sifting, with his hands, the cat litter;

Your child has gotten a hold of your cordless phone and is in the process of calling China;

Your child has chosen this precise moment to learn how to unscrew the cap off of a bottle of water and is pouring it all over your new living room rug;

Your child is happily sitting on the kitchen floor playing with 2 steak knives, a flame lighter and a pair of scissors that you were certain were out of his reach;

Your child has disabled the child lock on the kitchen cabinet and is pretending (thank God only pretending) to drink out of a bottle of Windex;

Your child is quietly unfolding and throwing the basket full of laundry that you just painstakingly folded but hadn’t gotten around to putting away;

Your child is in the next room attempting to eat a bug he found in the corner;

Your child has pushed over a chair to the kitchen counter and is happily pushing every button on the answering machine, erasing all kinds of messages;

Your child is standing on the middle of the kitchen table reaching up to try and hang on the chandelier (and I thought “hanging from the chandelier” was just an exaggerated phrase);

Your child has gotten into your purse and is coloring his face with your lipstick while concurrently pushing the panic alarm button on your keys.

These aren’t scenarios I’m copying out of some parenting magazine. I came up with all of these on my own…lets just say… from…astute observation. Believe it or not I actually have more things to list but I’m going to stop now. Yes, speaking from experience, it is in fact possible for all of these scenarios to occur in the same 24hour period (or less)...like on the 3rd Tuesday of every month, for example.

God bless the professional photographers of the world

While out in Denver, Stacy and I wanted to take advantage of having all 4 of our kids together so we went to “Portrait Innovations” to attempt family pictures of everyone. It was time to get pictures of Noah done anyway and I figured it would be helpful to do it with my sister--one of the most experienced moms I know. I hadn’t had Noah’s pictures taken in a while and even though after the “passport incident” when I vowed to never take him in for pictures again, I had a momentary lapse of memory and agreed to this endeavor. I even brought several changes of clothing for him to get lots of good pictures. Needless to say it was a near disaster and he didn’t get to wear any of the cute outfits. Out of the 105 pictures they took, there was only ONE good one of Noah (and that ONE took an act of God, let me tell you!) We finally got a decent shot of all 4 kids together but Noah isn’t smiling at all in that picture. He spent the entire photo shoot crying and trying to escape from the studio. I think the photographers were quite happy to see our brood leave!(especially since they weren't too thrilled to begin with when we marched in for our appointment with 4 kids including a 22 month old and a 2-year old.)

I'm mostly going to post the actual good pictures that we got (most of the good pictures are of my sister's children). This first picture is an excellent example of how the majority of the photo shoot went.



Yep, this is Noah, acting as if we are yanking off his toenails one by one when in fact all we are doing is trying to take his picture. He is most definitely emotionally scarred from the "passport incident"



When we got there we told the photographer that our main goal was to get a great picture of all 4 kids together. "No problem," she said. Ha! Noah was so difficult that out of the attempted 50 pictures she took of all 4 kids, this was THE one and only acceptable picture of all 4.




I thought this one was cute. I really envisioned a ton of good photos of Noah in all his different outfits with different backdrops, etc. Nope.



I count myself LUCKY to get this one good, classic picture of him. The way he carried on and wouldn't even go near the camera (he was hiding in the waiting area the majority of the time) I can't even believe we got him to pose for a few pictures.




Nicholas was a breeze to photograph and really hammed it up for the camera



I can hardly believe how fast my nieces are growing. It seems like just yesterday I was packing my bags and moving from FL to GA because Shannon was 2 and Alyssa was a baby and I couldn't stand being so far away from them. Now they are 7 and 9! Next thing I know they'll be off to college. They are the best kids ever.


Nic really enjoyed the photo shoot



Didn't know we had so many cowboys and cowgirls in the family




Nicholas having more fun with his cowboy hat



I made this collage just so it seemed like I had more than one picture of Noah I liked



Shannon, Alyssa and Nicholas. So sweet.