An Interview With a Three Year Old

Recently, Jack turned 3.  Did you know that he also turned into a little man?  He says thinks like “that’s unfortunate!” and “How in the world did that get there?”  His vocabulary is incredible, and I love having conversations with him. 

After catching up with my favorite blogs in my Reader, I saw that a bloggy friend’s daughter just turned 3 this month as well.  She did an interview with her daughter and plans to do this every year to see how things change.  I love that idea, and I’ve seen it around other places and have been meaning to do this before.  Here is my interview with Jack, my just-turned-three year old.

1. what is your favorite color? Green

2. what is your favorite toy? John Deere

3. what is your favorite fruit? Grapefruit (really? it’s not the blueberries or strawberries you ask for EVERY DAY?)

4. what is your favorite t.v. show? John Deere or Winnie the Pooh (I asked it twice, and got two different answers)

5. what is your favorite thing to eat for lunch?  grapefruit (again, really?)

6. what is your favorite outfit? John Deere pj’s  (he doesn’t own any)

7. what is your favorite game? Marbles (he just finished playing a magnet marble game that he never plays)

8. what is your favorite snack? fish crackers (I never buy these, but he knows about them!!)

9. what is your favorite animal? fish or zebras (I asked it twice as well, and the answers were different each time)

10. what is your favorite song? I can’t say

11. what is your favorite book? Otis (By Loren Long is currently on loan from the library. It’s about a tractor)

12. who is your best friend? Roo (from Winnie the Pooh)

13. what is your favorite cereal? Frosted Mini Wheats (he likes to eat just the frosted part)

14. what is your favorite thing to do outside? play in the mud (we don’t play outside all that often)

15. what is your favorite drink? milk

16. what is your favorite holiday? Christmas (I’m surprised he knew what holiday meant)

17. what do you like to take to bed with you at night? Pooh

18. what is your favorite thing to eat for breakfast? Frosted Mini Wheats (really?  Not the pancakes you ask for EVERY DAY?)

19. what do you want for dinner on your birthday? No answer

20. what do you want to be when you grow up? A TRACTOR!!!

The final answer was my absolute favorite answer of all time.  I love my little tractor boy!

Jack is 3! (And a Few Growth Chart Moments)

Jack had a birthday last weekend.  I can’t believe my little guy is 3 already!  Here is a collage of his 3 birthdays

We had a very small celebration the morning of his birthday.  Rick and I had decorated the kitchen after Jack was in bed, and we laid out his many presents for him to see when he came downstairs in the morning.  He was surprised, that’s for sure. 

We don’t do a big Christmas – only three presents each – but we love to do big birthdays.  Actually, I should rephrase that. We don’t do a big Christmas for JACK, but do do big birthdays for JACK.  When it comes to us, we still do birthdays pretty low key. It’s so fun to lavish Jack with presents!  It’s also hard to resist the toys in the toy aisle when everything you look at shouts “Jack would LOVE this!”  So, we over did it.  I’m not worried about it.

The other big part of Jack’s birthdays is the cake.  We love being ‘creative’ with his cakes.  When I had a minor computer crash last year, I lost very few photos.  We were really lucky.  But the one set of photos that we did loose were last year’s birthday pictures.  So, if you want to see our AMAZING (well, impressive perhaps, but amazing, I’m not sure) train cake from last year’s birthday, please check out last year’s birthday post.  We were pretty proud of that one. This year I found a cake on Pinterest that I knew had to be Jack’s birthday cake this year.  The original is so much prettier than mine, but ours turned out much better than I thought it would.  This was a super easy cake to put together!

The fun part was that the inside was a surprise- it was construction colors.  If you go to the original link, you can see how much better hers was.  And you can see a picture tutorial on how to make the diagonal cake design from one of her links. 

The best part is that Jack loved it.  He wanted to help the backhoe dig up the cake.

Jack’s such a big boy now.  He’s completely potty trained – even at night.  He talks up a storm, using words and phrases like “I realized I had the wrong one..” and “I’ve been thinking about ….”  He uses utensils like a champ when he eats .  He listens to chapter books at bedtime now (Magic Treehouse). He wants to do everything himself and he’s usually pretty good about doing it right.  He helps us cook and even puts the toothpaste on his own toothbrush without smooshing too much out on the brush.    We’re very proud of him and hope we haven’t ruined him yet in his first three years.  Hopefully he’ll get a little brother or sister this year.  That was our hope last year, but it looks like this year will be more likely.  Fingers are crossed!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JACK!

Birthday Dinner Or How I Traumatized My Son

Because it was my birthday yesterday, I got to pick a restaurant for my husband and son to take me out to.  It meant I didn’t have to cook OR CLEAN last night, so I was happy with anywhere.  But after giving it a lot of thought, I picked a local Japanese steakhouse.  Rick and Jack had never been to this place, and I love their food, especially their Yum Yum sauce.  YUM!

It was a lot of fun to watch him cook and do all the fancy flipping and chopping and banging with his knives.  I’m always amazed at how huge the tower of butter is when they come out to start cooking, and how much butter they use in their cooking.  That could be why it all tastes so good.

Jack kept asking if he was putting syrup in the food when he’d use one of his squirt bottles.  I did have our syrup in a squirt bottle like these for a  while, sot I thought that was very clever of him to figure out. The food was very yummy.  I splurged and ordered a shrimp and steak combo.  It was my birthday after all!

Now, Jack was a well behaved boy the whole time, charming the ladies at our table with his grin and peek-a-boo antics, but when the guy came out and turned on the grill, I knew we had picked the wrong place to eat.  As soon as the flames started to tickle the ceiling, Jack hid in my armpit.  He covered his eyes and stayed that way almost the entire time the guy was cooking, banging, and clanging.  At one point, he even put my hand over his eyes. He only cried once, but I think he was too terrified to cry while the flames from the ‘volcano’ (where they stack the onion rounds up and light the center) were climbing ever higher.

He didn’t eat until the chef had been gone for a good long time, and then he only ate a few pieces of onion while sitting on my lap.  The bad thing about these types of restaurants is that as soon as they finish serving you, and the chef leaves his place, they come out with the checks.  They try very hard to move you out quickly.  There is no time to sit and enjoy your meal or conversation after the pyro techniques are over.  So, when Jack finally decided to start eating, we were being kicked out.  Needless to say, we have a great lunch planned for today.

The worst part of the whole night wasn’t just when Jack was hiding from the ‘bad guy’ chef, but that he woke up a few times last night shaking and asking if the fire was done.  He had a few nightmares, and I ended up sleeping with him most of the night.  Poor guy.

Needless to say, I felt like the worst mommy in the world for even considering taking my child to such a place.  The only thing that kept me from total self loathing was that as we were walking out the door, there was a cute little girl no older than Jack sitting at another table.  So, I’m not alone in being the worst mommy in the world.

Birthday/Memorial Day Weekend

Not only was this Memorial Day weekend, but it was also my birthday weekend.  Actually this was Rick’s and my birthday weekend combined.  His birthday was back in the middle of the month, but I’m a kind wife, so I share my birthday weekend with him.

I have to show you the card my mother got me this year.  How she ever found it, I don’t know, but it’s perfect!  (except for the 200,000 part.  Mine is more like 20)

We spent Saturday at my sister’s place in the country.  They have a little pond that the boys enjoyed paddling a rowboat in.  This was Jack’s first time in a boat.  He didn’t want to get out!

It was a lot of fun for Jack to find snakes, turtles, catfish, geese, ducks, and bullfrogs.  I was a little worried for this one’s safety.

My sister and brother-in-law are great hosts.  We had such a good time relaxing and playing at their home.  We hope to spend a lot more time up there this summer.

The big hit of the afternoon was the badminton game.   Jack loved playing with the ‘fish’ (shuttlecock) and ‘net’ (racquet).  He was running all around the court trying to steal the ‘fish’ from our game.  Everyone kept saying “he’s going to sleep well tonight!”  (he did) But I think Jenn was the one who was really going to sleep well that night! She was often left playing by herself against the other team because Jack had stolen my racquet.   

Of course my mom came up for the day too.  Jack loves seeing his Gramma Donna.  I think the feeling is mutual.

I loved my brother-in-law’s glasses, because they had a mirror reflection.  I made him sit really still while I took this picture.  Sitting still and not talking is next to impossible for this man, so it’s good that I have documentation that it can be done.

A little self-portrait love.  Here are the birthday kids! Not so much Kids really as Old People.  One is 39 and one is 34, but I’m not going to tell you which is which.

Thanks for the wonderful weekend, Jenn and Rod!  We had such a great time with you guys.  And thanks to all the men and women who gave their lives to make this weekend celebration possible.  Happy Memorial Day!

Foto Friday: Out of Place

Remember when I showed you the before and after pictures of my laundry room?  I’m proud to say that I’ve kept it clean!  I even added some colorful labels and a colorful tub to corral loose items. 

When I went into my laundry room yesterday, I saw something that was out of place. 

Can you see it?

No, not the spatula sticking out of the tub.  I use that to push down the diapers into the water when they’re soaking. 

There it is.

Mater wanted to help out with the laundry yesterday. 

Thanks for your help, Mater!

(Don’t forget to visit Mom Tried It and see other Foto Friday submissions for today’s theme Out of Place.  You can see last week’s theme BLUE here. )

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On a completely unrelated note, I wanted to share with you that I lost my hard drive two weeks ago. It was rough, but God saved all my pictures, so I’m not crying as hard as I could be.  I also figured out how to get my music files back onto my computer from my iPod, so I didn’t loose my 2, 250 songs!  So, in the scheme of things, it wasn’t that devastating. 

One thing I did loose that is more of an annoyance than anything is my Live Writer.  That’s the program I use to write my blogs.  All my posts are saved online with Blogger, but Writer had all of my posts listed in it’s storage so I could easily link to a previous post with no fuss.  I had even started a post on my Girls Trip 2011 but lost it in the crash.  Oh well.  I’ve since downloaded Live Writer again and it will store all of my posts from here on out.  No biggie I guess.

I hope you all have a great weekend! We’ll be celebrating Rick’s birthday with his folks coming down to visit tomorrow.  Happy Birthday Wonderful Husband!!

The Train Cake

In January (yes, three and a half months ago and I’m just now getting around to posting about this), Jack celebrated his 2nd birthday.  If you missed it, I did a quick picture montage.  Boy, I love that kid.

Last year for his birthday, I made a cupcake shaped ‘healthy’ cake.  It was a carrot and raisin cake with cream cheese icing.  He really loved it, but no one else liked it at all.  Luckily I made regular chocolate and white cakes for the adults. 

This year, Rick and I decided to be brave and create a train cake. Jack LOVES trains.  He loves all planes, trains, cars, trucks, and construction machines.  We decided to go with a train cake because he seemed to love those the most (that week) and the idea of how to make it happen was in both of our heads. 

First, I must tell you that there are much easier ways to make a train cake.  The smaller you make it, the easier it is. We did not make it small.  No way.  We took the BIG BOY TRAIN route.  Here’s what we did:

We used a coffee can for the boiler part of the engine and cake pans for the engine cab and coal car. The coffee can we used had a lip on it, and by luck, I found that the Pampered Chef can opener took the lip right off so the cake could slide right out.

 

 

 

 

 

We used rice krispie treat for the bed or gravel part of the tracks.  It took about 2 and a half batches.  Then we laid the black licorice ties down.

We started assembling the cakes on the track, but we found that the yellow cake we baked didn’t cook in the middle, so we had to throw that out and bake another cake instead.  We were up pretty late the night before his party baking and assembling this thing.

Finally, we started assembling the train.  (One of his toy trains –my toy from when I was a child- was the model)

We cut one cake in half to make the base of the engine and the coal car.  We then placed the round cake on top of the cut cake.  It sat there perfectly, so I didn’t secure it with anything.  We also added a cow catcher in the front with a scrap piece of cake.

Then we sat another rectangular cake upright behind the round cake as the cab.  We secured that with skewers.

Then the icing went on.  It was a lot of icing! We added an Oreo and mini marshmallow on the front as the light.  At this point, we added the rails to the bed. 

Finally, we added donuts and more Oreos as wheels, Whoppers as coal, and we piped some detail to make the train come to life.

We used an ice cream cone as the smoke stack.  I put an Oreo on the top to hide the inside of the cone and some white icing to represent smoke and to keep the cookie glued on.

When Jack woke up the next morning and saw the cake, he yelled “TRAIN!”  He loved it.  After all the hours we spent on that cake (and little sleep we got because of it), it was totally worth it to see how happy he was to see his cake.  He could name every part of the cake that we knew was important to have on a train cake – smoke stack, coal car with coal, cab, wheels, and rails.  He really loved it.

It was a big hit at his party too.  Everyone oo’ed and ahhh’ed over it.  We were very proud of it.

After everyone had been served, we ended up only having to cut into the coal car.  The rest was left over for us to eat throughout the week.  It was a good thing too, since the round cake might not have been cooked all the way through after all.  Of course, that didn’t stop Daddy from eating it!

Jack ended up not eating anything but cake for lunch that day.  And the smoke stack was his very favorite part. 

2 Years Old

Jack turns 2 today.  My how time flies.

We love him more than we ever thought it was possible to love another human being. 

Happy Birthday, Jack!

3 days

3 months

6 months

9 months

1 year

18 months

2 years

We can’t wait to see what the future holds for you, little man.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JACK!!!

Today my son turns one year old.  One year ago, at 12:38pm, I was in the hospital having an emergency c-section.  My platelets were dangerously low, my blood pressure dangerously high, and the pain from my liver enzymes being out of whack was worse than the contractions I just started having.

Rick wasn't even allowed in the delivery room.  It was a scary time, and it was also the most emotional time in my entire life.  I hope to do it again someday - sans the preeclampsia and HELLP syndrome. 

I'm trying to put together a post that looks back over the first year of Jack's life.  (I hope to have that done before he turns two.)

I love you, Jack!  I can't wait to see what your second year brings!