to spend money, get caught up in the rush and stress of the holidays, have weekends booked with events of some form for weeks on end and lastly try to take a break to enjoy some of this time with our family and be thankful for what we have in our lives.

So a lot has been going on but I keep forgetting to update my blog and write out the craziness of life. With the holidays approaching there isn’t a slow down in sight and then of course the baby coming in May is going to keep us on our toes as we progress through the new year. Last but not least there’s the ever so adventurous toddler that rules the house, who wouldn’t allow us to slow down even if we wanted to!

ALL of our holiday shopping was finished early after my Black Friday shopping trip. I can tell the little man is going to be thoroughly spoiled this Christmas (mainly by everyone else but I will admit to a small part in it). We decided early this year that the almost $1,000 plane tickets out were well our present to ourselves in some sense and then there’s the new king bedroom set we bought at the end of the summer and toss in a PSP slim that Patrick got for his business traveling trips and we exceeded the budget a bit! It’s amazing how many presents you end up buying people when you have a large family, it gets to be overwhelming to say the least and we set ourselves up a certain $ / person limit early on and had a number in our heads that we’d end up at. We pretty much were right at that number to my surprise! I’m just glad the shopping is done and we can stop watching the bank account go down. Well, I did go FINALLY buy some maternity clothes last night and spent money on myself! We got kiddo his holiday dress up clothes for KC visit too but I’m just very hapy to have new clothes that fit and are comfy + cute. I found way more things at the motherhood store then I should’ve and had a hard time narrowing my decisions down. Thanks to a very patient mother in-law we spent a long time trying on nearly every shirt in the store. I walked out with shirts, a DRESS!, some slacks and the lovely new bra that I was dreading having to buy.

Now onto some Braysen stories or funnies (he’ll be 21 months on the 23rd of December):

He is addicted to Tigger and Friends Super Sleuth, he “bounces” just like Tigger around the room. Both of his feet off the ground and all hopping from here to there. If Tigger ends in the morning, he tells me “Tigger go bye bye”. (he watches from 8:00-8:30 before I take him to daycare so I can finish getting ready!)

He came running in the kitchen the other day and tackled our cat, Xaria. She started meowing of course and he starts going “meooooooowwwww” really loud after she would cry out. I had to get him off of her but she is very tolerant and lets him pick her up (or attempt to) and tackles her on a regular basis. He also tells her “down kitty” when she’s up on the counter or “bad kitty” when she’s up there. He’s also quite aware of her litter box in the laundry room (that is gated off from him) and points to it then says “kitty poop”. If he is looking for his kitty he walks around with his hands shrugged up and says “whereareyou kitty” (all one slurred word) and then makes the clicking sound with his tongue like I do when I call her.

For some reason he has a thing for the word “broken”. If anything isn’t working the way it should be or doing what he wants it to do it is “broken”. He comes running in the other day to tell me “broken broken broken” and he has the little Pooh window clings I bought for him to put on and off the windows. Apparently he took it off the window and couldn’t get it back on so it was “broken”. If the huge ball won’t fit into the tiny container like he wants, it’s broken. Where does he get this stuff?

We haven’t had any major cuss word problems…yet. Patrick said something was “crappy” the other day and Braysen started saying “crappy” but that ended after about 30 minutes and we have yet to hear it again thankfully. He is a little Parrot though and will repeat

He’s got a slew of new phrases.
“I see snow” after Patrick showed him snow Sat. morning for the first time. He says “I see…..” all the time and it’s so cute. Again, where did he get that phrase? LOL
“Go boo boo house” means we are going to grandpas house. For some reason my father in-laws name is “boo boo”. I can’t even try and list all the words he has honestly. He can pretty much point to and say each name of the objects in his picture books without much problem now. The kid has diarrhea of the mouth now a days and is nonstop talking.
(more random braysen ahead) Read the rest of this entry »

I’m cross posting because this is an insanely huge post full of links to the kiddos bday pics!

Spamming a sh**load of pics here for those that wanted to see his bday pics and yes, I know there’s a lot but it’s hard to pick out my faves!!! Plus, this is only a smidgen of the insane amount of pics I do have from this weekend.

where did time go?
my fave pic

edited out the pictures because of host change