Happy 2 months Old!!

Today my darling little... i mean HUGE boy is 2 months old. Seriously? 2 months already, it's true. The funny thing is, since I went back to school when he was two weeks old and he is the size of a small toddler I forget that he is that young. For those of you that don't already know, he weighed in at his 2 month checkup at 15 lbs 7.5 oz and 24 1/2 inches long. Holy CRAP! He has grown 3.5 inches and nearly doubled his birth weight. He also weighs almost HALF of what his almost 3 year old brother weighs (who is no string bean I might add...) Talk about a chunk! He held his head up for the first time when he was about 2 hours old, and has just been getting stronger and stronger since. His favorite position is sitting upright or dangling, and he was being fussy one night so we decided to try the jumper. He LOVED it, but I had to keep bouncing it for his because (since it's not made for a 2 month old) he couldn't reach the ground to kick off of. Seriously, I don't think he knows how young he is either.
Now, of course since there are two little kids we needed a double stroller. My darling mother purchased one for us as a baby gift (she's the greatest!) but up until now we haven't needed it. However, the other day I was going to hit up the mall to do some shopping, so my thoughtful husband put the stroller together for me before he left for class. It was pretty early in the A.M. so I just left it there while I got ready for the day. I got out of the shower and found that it had been turned into home theater seating. Alex sat right there and watched TV all morning until it was his turn to get ready. It made me laugh so hard I couldn't say no! Sorry about the stupid face he is making, he was real annoyed that I had the audacity to try and interrupt the Wonder Pets.

One of the best parts about a new baby, in my opinion, is when they start to respond. Luke has started smiling over the last few weeks, though mostly only at his dad. And since it is mostly only at his dad I am hard pressed to get a picture of it. But I tried, and I kind of succeeded. You can see the beginning of the smile, but that was the best of many attempts to get it. I'll tell you what, that smile just melts your heart! He's gunna be a cutie. Also, you can't really tell but so far his hair has a definite red color to it.

That's about all I have to report for now. Oh wait! Let me brag on behalf of Jeff since he won't do it for himself. Jeff was a little (understatement of the year) worried about getting into his program at school because he GPA wasn't high enough, so he went in to talk to his counselor to see what could be done. He then got special permission from the dean to waive his GPA as a requirement due to his DRAMATIC grade improvement over the last 3 years. If this were an after school special, what would the message be here kids?? Anyway, I'm pretty proud of him, and I guess I'll keep him for a little while longer.

You asked for it....

Alright, I finally got around to posting some pics. Hope everyone loves them! This one up above is for you Rozzy. You know why.... Below was a pic I just took about 5 minutes ago so you could get an acurate idea of how big he is. you can see his chipmunk cheeks, but unfortunatly due to the angle he is sitting you can't play our favorite game "Count the chins..."

This one was also taken 5 minutes ago. It's Luke's blackmail pic and, I feel, a fairly accurate representation of the brother-brother relationship.

Alex and his OCD 'garage.' What else can I say?

Soooo cute!! And you can see the double chin in this one. Love it!

Alex is pretty sure the best part about Luke is all his gear. He will sit in there and watch TV. Yet no matter how many times he does it he always forgets that it tips over backwards pretty easy.

Um.... I have no excuse, that's my boy.

Every time I leave Luke unattended for longer than 1/16th of a second I come back to a situation like this. Alex LOVES his brother.

2 out of 3 of my cute boys.

Baby Lucas

Welp, he's finally here! Lucas Cole Mayers joined our family tuesday 1/11/11 (awesome birthday right!) at 1:53 pm. He weighed in at 8lbs 12 ozs and 21" long. He's a pretty mild mannered baby so far, and really only cries when he's hungry. He had a hard time breathing for the first little while so he was poked and prodded a lot while they monitored him, but it resolved itself in the first couple days and now he's good to go. Alex ADORES him and wants to hold/poke/lay on 24 hours a day. He calls him bebe yukas and we all think it is pretty much the cutest thing ever. Sorry about the lack of Luke's face in these pics, most of the good ones were taken with my mom's camera. I'll get those and post some better ones later, but here you go for now!

When does it stop?

The answer is never. Never ever. I have come to believe that life will never be slow or boring again. In theory our lives are not busy or stressful. In reality they are both. So I sat down and started looking at blogger I realized that I had not posted in 2 1/2 months. Then I started to ponder why it was I was such a slacker. Oh right, becuase of the afore mentioned busy & stress thing. Jeff still has a rediculous amount of credits he is taking and a teacher who assigns him pretty much a book a week to read. Durring the week when he's not in class or reading he is now out shoveling cow dung (litteraly) on the Romriell Ranch. Then on the weekends he works (or tries to) on whatever car we currently have getting ready to sell and then he tries to cram in some projects around the house somewhere in between. But don't feel too bad for him yet... Sunday? He sits on his butt and watches football uninterupted all day!! And as much as it pains me to say this, he deserves it. Don't tell him I said that.
As for me, only 2 months left on making this crazy baby boy. I realized the other day that I pretty much had not even begun to even THINK about what I needed to do before we have him. So of course since then I have been stressing out about it. Which is probably good because as we all know, there is a TON to do before a new baby arrives, and I was not joking in the slightest when I say I haven't even thought about it. So if anyone needs something to do....
Alex. Crazy kid. He split his head open last week which was pretty sad and made us feel like bad parents. We opted for no stitches since it was, again, on the back of his head and the scar will be covered with hair and the bleeding stopped pretty quickly. However, anywhere else and we would'a been cruising to the E.R. It was pretty nasty, but is now scabbing up nicely and doesn't seem to bug him much. He's getting skinny and smart too. If you ask him to count for you there is no way he'll do it, but if he thinks you aren't listening he'll count away. The other day he counted 8 toys in the tub with no problem. However if you try to get him to count it goes a little like this: one, two, three, four, three, three, three, one, three, etc. Stinking kid. If you ask him where his little brother is, he will point to his own stomach. If you ask him what his little brother's name is he usually says Bruce (the shark from Finding Nemo.) But I like to correct him and get him to say Luke because he says Yuke. It's cute how he says it.
That is pretty much our lives in a nutshell. Hope everything is well with everyone, and I'll try to not be such a slacker from now on!

Ta Da!!

So here we finally are, some before and after pics. Keep in mind we still have a lot of finishing work to do (painting, trim, hardware etc.) but for the most part we are up and functional. Up above you have the main kitchen wall, which also held the only cabinets that were in the kitchen. Those were obviously removed and replaced, and you can see the false ceiling up above that we ripped out. That gave us an extra 2 feet of head room. All of my cabinets are now a full 8 feet tall, with 2 feet to spare on the top! Its a little bit crazy how much bigger that made the place look.

Down below here we have the wall directly to the right of the upper pics. You can see there was nothing on it. Also the wall to the right in this pic is the wall we ripped out. That gave us an extra 3 1/2 feet of space in the kitchen. Not to mention how much it opened it up to the rest of the house, but we'll get to that.

And here we have the other side of that wall we hated so much. We didn't have to do too much in this room once the wall was down. We refinshed the floors, textured & painted the ceilings, replaced the light fixture, replaced a broken window. Um.. what else, a LOT of paint.

Ahhhh.... the living room. This one alsowasn't too bad. Except for the electricity. This room only had one outlet in it so we added a few more (which was no small feat, just ask all the blood splattered on the walls and the curse words echoing out of there...) In here we also textured & painted the ceilings (we actually did that in every room....) removed the wall paper, replaced light fixtures, repaired lots and lots of holes, and painted the heck out of it.

So, there you have most of the main floor. We are getting our bedroom carpeted soon so I will post some pics of that once it is done. But for the most part, now you have visted our almost brand new 90 year old house!!

Holy Crap!!

Ok, so my house has been completely all encompassing this sumer, and there hasn't been a post about anything other than that for a while. However, we are just about done (with the major stuff) and I can finally point out that SOMEHOW we managed to squeeze in a little fun this summer also. So here is some of our summer in a few pics. There are more but I am having issues getting them uploaded, so I will try for more later. Here we go!

Ross Park! We went to this swimming park on Jeff's birthday and had a blast! There was a lazy river, a regular pool and a kids activity play pool where the water is only about a foot deep and there's a big play toy in the center. There was also a slide that we were hard pressed to get Rhianna off of. She definitly was much braver this summer than last.

4th of July. We had sparklers. We watched fireworks, we had a BBQ. The usual.

Alex's first head wound. He fell backwards off a chair and landed on the thread post on my sewing machine (top pic.) It took a big chunk of scalp off and we were afraid he was going to have to have stitches. However, since it stopped bleeding and the scar would be covered by hair, we opted for no stitches.

That's what I have so far. I'll post more later!

Let there be a kitchen!

Oh man my life is exciting!! I have a sink, I have appliances, I have a coutertop!! I know, I know, all of you have all these things too. However, I can guarantee you that none of you have the tremendous appreciation for them that I do! So here is a 'durring' pic of my new kitchen. Off to the right here are my full lengths. Or massive wall o' cabinet. Please notice how tall the fridge is (it's not a small fridge) then how much farther up the wall the cabinets go. A full 8 feet of storage! Down below here are just some more durring shots. None of the uppers have been installed yet, that is happening tonight. So they are sitting all over the floor and you can see Jeff's butt in the pics because he is screwing the doors onto the frames as we speak. The last pic down on the bottom is out at my dad's shop while they were still building them. Jeff is sitting on the floor doing something... probably taking a nap. Anyway, hopefully soon we can post some DONE pics!