Fun with Jeremy, Brandy & Traber

Breakfast at Rudy's

 My brother, Jeremy, sister-in-law, Brandy and nephew, Traber, came down for a visit last weekend.  We had a great time together, and the boys, Luke and Traber, provided some great entertainment for us as we watched them interact.  While they were visiting, we took a trip to San Antonio and joined thousands of IBM employees and their families for "friends and family day" at IBM. Drew works at IBM and got a great discount ($27) for admission into the park, parking (which normally costs $15), a buffet meal, and even free admission for another time this season.   What a deal!  The only problem with this is that thousands of others also took advantage of this deal.   Regardless, we had a great time there!  The boys were troopers--we were there when the park opened at 10am, and stayed until 8pm.

watching the Shamu show

Luke wasn't so sure about the splash park in Sea World... Here, Traber tries to comfort Luke. 

Brandy and Traber watch as people feed the dolphins

Here, Drew and Jeremy race down the waterslides in the water park at Sea World...

First Drew came down slide #2

and then Jeremy shot down Slide #1

The boys had fun, but were all tuckered out after the long, very hot day at Sea World.

While Jeremy and Brandy were here, we also hung out at our house, and did some fun stuff around Austin.  It was fun watching the boys interact, since they are so close in age.  The Bob Bullock Museum (Texas State History Museum) has a free admission day on the first Saturday of the month, so we thought that would be a good opportunity to check it out.  Being a State History museum, it was not too exciting for the little ones, so they created their own fun.  Here, they decided to have some pacifier tug of war:

We also did a little shopping.  Ikea is always a fun place to shop:

We also did a little swimming at our neighborhood pool...

Luke thought uncle Jeremy was pretty funny!

It's Been A While--well, at least in baby time!

Although I believe it has only been a couple of weeks since our last post, a LOT has happened around our household.  I am really starting to learn that baby-time goes by more than twice as fast as adult time.  One day, Luke is a rolly-polly, the next day he is a crawler, and then, LITERALLY, the next day he is pulling up and then cruising around the furniture!  So now, I wish time would slow down just a little bit--my baby is turning into a little boy!!!

I am finding that he is either in an explorer stage that nearly every baby goes through, or HE IS AN EXPLORER for good.  I am pretty sure he may follow his daddy and become an engineer someday.  He likes to really study things, like he is trying to figure out how they work.  Of course, he is also attracted to everything that he is not supposed to touch or play with! Here's an example...  Luke has learned a new speed of crawling....I'm calling it Luke's hyper-crawl speed.  He is very cunning, in that when he decides to pursue something he is not supposed to, he uses great skill and tactic.  He first lures us away by getting us to follow him in some other direction.  Then, he turns around very quickly and makes a bee-line towards the object he is not supposed to be around.  We are going to have to take some video of this, because it is hilarious.  Lately, he has been fascinated with plugs and outlets.  He wants to pull the outlet covers out and would love to stick his little fingers into the outlets without covers--not good.  Why can't he be more interested in blocks, or something that is safe?  He also really wants to go DOWN the stairs.  When playing upstairs, he often distracts us while playing so he can move into hyper-crawl mode to go towards the stairs.   And, he is so fast, that, although we were playing right beside him, we barely grabbed him in time before he went down the stairs.  Scary stuff. 

What else is he up to?

• So, Luke is also LOVING that he can cruise around the furniture.  He has even gotten brave enough to stand without hands and even transfer from one piece of furniture to another.  
• His favorite words right now are mama and dada.  When he is REALLY happy, his favorite words are "eeeeeeeeee" and "ya ya ya ya."  When he is not so happy or is frustrated, his favorite word is "na na na na na"
• He loves to sing and clap.
• He is TEETHING like crazy!

Our little boy has 5 teeth and an additional one that is peeking out of the gumline and will probably be completely out within a couple of days.  So, another one of his pastimes is chewing on anything he can put in his mouth.  I discovered today that this includes his bed.  Drew normally goes upstairs and gets him around 5:30am when he wants to eat and then I feed him.  So, it is dark when he picks him up during those wee hours and he hasn't noticed the bite marks that Luke must have recently put on the bed.  Luke must have secretly gotten up in the middle of the night and done this (and recently), because we have a video monitor and didn't notice.

Other than keeping VERY busy with Luke and with work for both of us, we also had the pleasure of having visits from family the past two weeks.  We love any opportunity that we get to have visitors to our house--especially family.

Two weekends ago, my parents visited us.  We had lots of fun with them, both running around town and just hanging out at the house.  Here are some pics:

Then, this past weekend, Drew's parents came for a visit.  We had lots of fun with them as well.  We did some shopping, eating out, and also just hung out at home as Luke entertained us.  Here is a great pic of them on Sunday before they headed back to Sugar Land.

Some new Sears Photos..

We had some new professional pictures of Luke taken last weekend, and thought we'd share with our blogging community.  Enjoy!

Our Trip to San Antonio

We took a long weekend trip a couple of weekends ago to spend some time in San Antonio with Drew's side of the family.   We had a wonderful time and the resort we stayed at--Hyatt Hill Country Resort and Spa--was amazing!   There was enough to do there that we didn't even have to leave!  But, we decided to go to Sea World on the first day we were there--Friday. 

Mitchell conquered the 2nd roller coaster of his life...:                       

and Drew and I rode with him.

We loved the penguins...                              

Luke found some new friends.

Here are Mitchell, Mimi & Papa at the end of the log ride:

Drew and Luke watching a water skiing show.

Drew and Mitchell AFTER a river tubing ride.

The dolphin exhibit was my FAVORITE exhibit there.  We got to feed them and I couldn't believe how close we were able to get to them:

We had a GREAT time at Sea World and are looking forward to going back in a few weeks with my brother Jeremy, sister-in-law, Brandy and nephew, Traber!

Here is a group picture at the end of the day:

On Friday night, Drew and I had the pleasure of playing a round of twilight golf with Papa, Andy & Mitchell.  The course at the resort was AMAZING:

Then, on Saturday, we went to the San Antonio Zoo.   It was very warm, but blue bell ice cream always makes the heat ok.  :-)

Here are some cute pics of our nieces, Lauren and Audrey, playing in a really cute childrens' area of the zoo. 

The children's area of the zoo even had a sandy beach and pool area where kids could play.  It also had an indoor interactive area with an air-conditioned nursing room (this, I have found, is a very rare thing).  That definitely came in handy around Luke's lunchtime.

 I thought this picture of Erica was cute!

We spent the rest of the weekend at the Hyatt Resort Grounds.  There was SO much to do there and the grounds were beautiful. They also had many family-oriented planned activities, such as a photo scavenger hunt, and, my favorite, smores at the fire pit nightly!  As a matter of fact, on Friday night, when we played twilight golf, our round finished at 8:59p.  I was very concerned, as I knew the smores fire-pit was going to shut-down at 9pm.  But Drew saved the day--he drove the golf cart VERY quickly over to the fire pit, so that I could make sure I got one.  :-)  YUMMY! 

One of the best features of the resort was their lazy river.  It was so relaxing to float at night--the entire "river" was tree covered and really did seem like a river--so peaceful!  Below is a picture of one of the pools, which is connected to the lazy river, during the daytime.

On Sunday, before we headed home, we checked out the pools at the Hyatt's sister time-share resort across the street.  Here's a picture of Andy and the kids having fun in the sand on the beach of its lazy river:

Thank you to the Sugar Land division of our family for a wonderful time in San Antonio!

Happy 4th of July & Happy 9-month birthday to Luke!

Happy 4th of July to everyone!  We have lots of reasons to celebrate today.  In addition to being thankful for our freedom as Americans, we are also celebrating Luke's 9-month birthday.

We are pleased to say he is officially a crawler now.   He has been pretty mobile prior to these crawling days; but, we were beginning to wonder if he would just go straight to walking.  He would roll over to where he wanted to pull up, and then pull up.   We have begun baby-proofing the house, as we realized that these stages are started to go by faster and faster.  Drew moved the crib down to the lower level after Luke tried to escape one morning.  We also bought some edge-protectors for our fireplace, but they don't work very well.  We're sure he'll pull those right off and, in fact, they actually seem to attract him to the fireplace.

Here is a video of Luke crawling:

With these new stages, we are finding that Luke is very similar to his mommy in that he always wants to be on the move.  He wants to be in on all of the action.  So, on Saturday, we bought a Sherpani backpack baby carrier that was advertised on craigslist so he can join us on hikes.  We also thought this would be very handy on our upcoming vacations.  We tested it out on a short hike near Lake Georgetown on Saturday.

We also visited a great restaurant while we were in Georgetown, called Monument Cafe.  Everything we ate there was DELICIOUS and we will be back soon!  We even splurged for the freshly squeezed cherry limeade and the coconut cream pie--YUMMY!