Gunnar is 9 months old already...

I can't believe how fast he's growing up...Gunnar was born 9 months ago today! He is getting so big and he is so stinkin' cute! In the past 2 weeks he has learned a few new tricks. He learned to wave bye-bye and he does it all day long. I love it! It's too cute. He also learned how to pull up on the couch last week and now he pulls up on everything. He's so proud of himself too when he does it! And he can crawl up the stairs now! If we're downstairs that's his favorite thing to do...crawl over to the stairs as fast as he can and try to climb a few before we can catch him. We obviously have a gate at the top of the stairs, but didn't have one at the bottom because when Ashton was this age, our basement wasn't finished so we never went down there or had any reason to block it off. Luckily when my Mom & step-dad came down on Christmas they brought the gate that they use at their house when we're there for us to borrow. He still LOVES to eat anything we offer him (or anything he finds anywhere), loves to roll around on the floor with pillows or stuffed animals, loves splashing in the tub, being outside in the cold air...he gets so excited...

LOVES Ashton, and of course Mommy!

Yes he loves his Daddy too, but he's still a total mama's boy...which is fine with me :)

He absolutely HATES getting his diaper changed and getting dressed...I swear he's worse than Ashton was! And of course hates getting his face wiped and getting in his carseat.

Otherwise he such a happy, happy baby...still with so little sleep!

I just can't believe he'll be walking before we know it...I say it everytime he turns a month older, but it just goes way too fast!

I love this sweet little boy!

Merry Christmas!!!

We had such a fun, fun day yesterday! It's so nice to be able to stay home and wake up at our own house on Christmas morning now that we have kids. And especially one that understands it all so well now. Ashton was sooooo excited! Lars was off on Christmas Eve, so I cut his and Ashton's hair, then unfortunately had to go do some last minute shopping in town and get groceries for our Christmas dinner. (I will never put things off so long again!!!) I've never shopped on Christmas Eve before that I remember and I don't want to ever have to do it again! Anyway after I finally got home it was time to get ready for church. We were SO proud of Ashton! Usually church is somewhat of a nightmare with him...he just still will not be quiet and acts up pretty much the whole time either talking really loud or pestering Gunnar or just being obnoxious, but that night he entertained himself really well and even went up front when Father called all the kids up to listen to a story. I had to go with him and sit by him, but he was actually quiet and listened (to part of it). Gunnar did pretty well too...he's getting really squirmy these days now that he can crawl, but he was entertained most of the time eating his cheerios.

(looking so cute in his black sweater) Can you tell he's soooo sick of getting his picture taken?So after church we came home and ate pizza, then opened up our Christmas Eve pajamas & a couple of new books for the boys. I loved the look on Ashton's face when he opened his Super Mario Bros. pajamas! He was so excited...he totally loves them! Then we baked some cookies to leave out for Santa.Last week Ashton told me that "Santa doesn't really like cookies, he actually likes donuts", so on the way home from church we stopped at the gas station and picked up some donuts, but when we got home, Ashton decided that he would rather eat the donuts and make cookies for Santa! In the end we left out 3 cookies and one donut. Then Lars and I both read Ashton's new books to him (which is a treat for him since he usually only gets one of us). And he went right to bed. If only he would have slept all night...he was just way too excited! He woke up about 3 times wondering if it was time to wake up yet. And of course Gunnar was up 3 different times just because he's Gunnar and that's still what he does most nights. Ugggghhh.

So after Gunnar woke up for the last time around 6:40, I decided to just stay up and get somewhat ready for the day (yes I am that person who wants to have my hair and makeup done on Christmas morning), and then I went down and turned on the Christmas tree lights and got the video camera ready to go. Ashton was up by 7:00 and couldn't wait to get downstairs to see if Santa had come. He immediately saw the big playmat with new cars & trucks on it at the bottom of the stairs that was for him and Gunnar, then walked over to see if Santa had eaten his cookies and donut and said

"He even drank the milk!"
Then he looked around and said

"Wow...Santa brought us everything".

Too funny! The only other thing Santa brought for him was the "Pixos" he wanted. When he saw them he said "I told him I wanted these!!" (Santa came to his school last week and the 3 things he told him he wanted were Pixos, tattoos, and Baby Alive) Yeah no such luck on the Baby Alive...besides the fact that Lars thinks one doll is enough for him...I noticed that the Baby Alive's are like $70!!! Oh well...he didn't ever notice that Santa didn't bring him one. For Gunnar Santa got this cute Tonka ride-on toy. (That I knew Ashton would play with a lot of the day). And he did...but Gunnar LOVES it too. Ashton also went over and saw that the baby Jesus had been placed in the manger and thought that was pretty cool. Then it was time to check out his stocking...that was full of tattoos, pens, a notebook, double-sided tape :), M&M's, tic-tacs, a spin toothbrush, a Meet the Robinson's pez dispenser, and I can't remember what else!

Gunnar was happy to play on the playmat with his cute new red car. We'd get to his stocking later. (which had a new bib, sippy cup, teething toy and a toothbrush).

Then I was starving...so I went upstairs and put the cinnamon rolls in the oven (no, not homemade...are you kidding???) and Ashton was excited to start a pixos project while we waited for Grandma and Grandpa Harry to arrive from Wyoming. They braved the storm and horrible roads to come spend the day with us. I'm so glad they made it safely to our house and safely back home last night!

Thanks for coming and for all of the great gifts :)

We spent the next few hours after they arrived tearing into the rest of the gifts. I can't even begin to name everything...I just know that we are all spoiled! It was lots of fun!

Ashton and Gunnar playing with Gunnar's new toy from Grandma & Grandpa in Texas. Gunnar with his new "Big Head Bear" as Ashton called them.
They each got one from Aunt Shelley. She made them with an old pattern and material that Lars' and Shelley's Grandma used to make them with. Gunnar loved rolling around with his on the floor and Ashton just kept laughing at him.
We ate our Christmas dinner of Rotisserie chicken, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, rolls, deviled eggs, stuffing, & jello salad about 2:00. At least everyone besides Ashton. He stopped long enough for a few bites of chicken, then he was done. Way too much other fun stuff to do than eat~! Then we just hung out the rest of the day till it was time for Grandma and Grandpa to leave a little after 5:00. Sounds like they should have stayed! The roads and weather were even worse going home than they were coming down!

I have to mention a couple things Lars got for me...he's been asking me for awhile what I want for Christmas and a couple times I've said that what I really want is a good night's sleep, so he got me a night's stay at a hotel in town and I plan to take all of my scrapbooking stuff and try to catch up a little and get some sleep one night in the next couple weeks (by myself of course!!) I'm so excited! Hopefully once I'm there I can actually sleep. And he got me a gift certificate for a massage at a place in town. That will be so nice too.

He didn't have much to open since he got himself some much needed new waders, but I did make up this little collage of some of our pictures and got it printed for him to take to work. Surprisingly he said it and a picture of me I had printed too were his favorite gifts :)awwww...how sweet!

At the end of the night when it was time for Ashton to go upstairs and get ready for bed, he looked around the room and said "Santa is a very, very good and nice guy." He cracks me up!Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas too!

We got our pictures back!!

I got the disc with our family pictures on it today and I'm so excited! Some of them turned out so good...This was the session I won with Brittany Cascio to take the boys pictures, and we decided to just get family pictures done as well (since we haven't had one done since Ashton was a little older than Gunnar is now). Anyway it was a lot of fun (at least for me:)...and she ended up getting some great shots of the boys as well as some fun ones of all of us and a few of just Lars and me and even a few of me while Lars was warming Gunnar up. They were taken on December 6th, it was a beautiful day...had we waited a few more days we would have been out in the snow! We had lots of fun with Brittany...Ashton was even asking to sit by her in the truck on the way home by the time we were done...except she made me feel really old when I asked her how old she was and she replied "23"!

That's how old I was when Lars and I got married!

Lots of talent and so young!

Here are just a few of my many favorites (okay more than a few)...let me know what you think. Also check Brittany's blog

www.casciophoto.blogspot.com

for a post of our pictures soon!

Positive Peer Pressure...

So last Thursday when I picked Ashton up from preschool he told me that a little girl in his class had brought a toy for a little kid who didn't have any presents to open for Christmas. I had completely forgotten that his school was contributing to Sub for Santa. So I asked him if he would want to get something for a kid who might not get presents for Christmas and he said yes...he wanted to pick out some pajamas for a little boy. So this past weekend I took him shopping and he picked out some superman pajamas and took them to school today. I was so proud of him! I love to see him learning...and also learning to give, even if he doesn't learn it from me...it was good for him to see another child give and want to do what she did!

We still have our daily struggles, but he's such a good kid and I can see a difference in him since he started school. He's doing great there and really learning how to interact with other kids better.

I had to laugh at another cute thing he said the other day. Gunnar has these cute little dark brown shoes with green frogs on them and he had them on as I was pushing him in the cart at Walmart and Ashton was walking along with me, and pretty soon he started trying to get Gunnar to laugh by kind of smacking his shoes and I noticed he kept repeating

"frogs in chocolate" over and over and Gunnar was laughing at him.

I love how creative he is!

That also reminds me of another funny thing he said to Lars the other day. Lars is getting him all geared up to go ice fishing (he's so excited...Lars I mean). So he was talking to him about it and Ashton kept saying "So Daddy how do we use that frog digger?" And Lars couldn't figure out what he was talking about and he said, "Ya know the thing we dig the holes in the ice with"...(which is called an Ogger), and yes I know that's probably not spelled right hunnie, but whatever...anyway I was laughing so hard that he was calling it a frog digger!

This age is so entertaining!

Recent Ashton comments...

Yesterday we were running errands in town and we had gone into TJ Maxx to return something and when we came out I told Ashton to grab my hand to cross the street because there were lots of cars driving by and he could get hit. He always loves to tell me that cars won't hit him because he's way too fast and he'll just run from them. So I told him that he could get ran over and if he did it would squish him as flat as a pancake. (Yes I know I shouldn't tell him things like that, but that's what came out.) So in reply he said "If I get squished flat, how will they fatten me back out?" I love it! He is so literal, so I'm sure he was picturing in his little mind what he would look like flat and wanted to know how he would get back to normal.

When we were getting to Price the other day he asked me, "Mommy, does God have a switch to turn the sun on?" And yesterday he was asking me if it's very shady in Heaven and if the angels have to close their eyes when they look at the sun like we do. Lots of questions still about Heaven and dying...He even starting crying on the way home yesterday out of the blue saying he never wants to die. I usually just try to tell him that it won't be for a long time.

He was also cracking me up on the way to Sam's Club. He loves Taylor Swift and so do I, so we've been listening to her new cd lately in the car (thanks Aunt Kelli :) and our favorite song is Love Story and he was singing along so cute!

"I'll be the prince and you be the princess...it's a love story baby just saayyyyy yeeessss!"

He also does this hilarious "slow" dance. I've got to get a video of it and put it on here.

Mr. Personality that's for sure!

Catching up...

I think this is the longest I've gone between posts since I started my blog. I just can't get around to it lately! I never find the time till 9:30 or 10:00 at night and by then I'm just too tired and I feel like I better hurry and get to bed before Gunnar is up. So I guess I'll catch up real quick. Since my last post we put up our Christmas tree and decorated it and the rest of the house. Ashton was soooooo excited and loved every minute of it. He was so cute to watch putting all of the decorations on the tree and explaining to us why he was putting certain ones in certain spots. Gunnar had fun too...and surprisingly he only pulled a couple off and has pretty much left it alone since!

I love this picture of him looking at his reflection in the gold ball! We got our fake tree (and all of the ornaments, etc..) when I was pregnant with Ashton. This year we're going to start an ornament tradition (Lars and I got eachother ornaments one year, then never kept up with it), but I'm determined to keep it up now and get each of the boys a new ornament each year representing something from the past year, and we'll decorate our 3 little pine trees that we also have downstairs with all of those ornaments gradually as we collect them. I was telling Lars that we need to really start some of our own traditions now that we get to celebrate Christmas as a family at our own house especially since Ashton really understands now. We were talking about what we remember most from our own Christmas's growing up. Some of my favorite memories were of always watching "Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas" (it has such a great Christmas message) with my brothers and sister (and Mom and step-dad) and laughing and laughing at certain parts of it, as well as going to midnight mass (at least when we were a little older) and getting home at 2:00 or so in the morning, then still being so excited to wake up on Christmas morning and looking in our stockings that my Mom had made for us years ago. Then when we would go to my Dad's house we always had pillsbury cinnamon rolls before we opened presents. Anyway my point was that I didn't really remember certain gifts so much as the time spent with my family, and I want Ashton and Gunnar to have certain things that they always look forward to each year. We're also starting a new thing with them (that was a gift from my Mom last year) where we'll have a little manger sitting out with a bunch of straw in a container next to it and each time one of us does something nice for someone else we'll put some straw in the manger in order to make a nice soft bed for the baby Jesus and by Christmas Eve it will be full of the straw and on Christmas morning Ashton (and Gunnar even though he has no clue) will find the baby Jesus laying in the manger. I really want to teach them the real meaning of Christmas...of course I know that for kids a lot of the excitement is the toys, but I want them to know that it's not all about what they get. We took our sub for santa gifts out to the church today and I was trying to explain to Ashton why we had gotten gifts for another family, and why it was a nice thing to do for someone else who might not have enough money to buy their own gifts this year, but I don't know how much I got across to him. He said "I have plenty of money...lots of quarters to buy my own gifts for myself." Oh well I'll keep at it...

I'm sure after the next couple of years he will look forward to buying gifts for other kids.

We got our first snow that stuck to the ground this week. It was only a couple inches, but Ashton put his new snow suit and boots on by 8:00 am and was out playing in it. Of course he was back in the house in about 5 minutes because it was still so cold that early, but he sure looked cute out there! Thanks Mom for bringing his new boots to us on Saturday :)

Which reminds me...we had Lars' work Christmas part Saturday night, so my Mom came down to stay with the boys. Ashton was so excited for her to come play with him... she brought all the ingredients to make cookies with him, so they had fun making ginger snaps

(brown cookies as he calls them).

Anyway after I had gotten dressed and ready to go to the party, Ashton came up to me and said "oh Mommy you look like a princess". I thought...how sweet!

Then Lars told me "he's just saying that because the princess on the Mario Brothers movie he's been watching has a scarf on like you do!

Oh well...I'll take it!

That morning we also got the boys pictures taken as well as family pictures taken. It actually went really well and I went and looked at them yesterday and some turned out really good! I'm so excited to get my disc with them on it. Stay tuned...

A pretty good day for a Monday...

Do you ever just have one of those days where everything seems to go right? Okay a lot of times lately I don't, but today has been a great day! Especially for a Monday. A lot of my Mondays don't start out so great...just because I have to get up and stay up when Gunnar gets up for the day (not like on the weekends when Lars lets me go back to bed!) and Ashton usually starts out wondering where Daddy is and is upset when I tell him he's at work, then he's in a bad mood for the first hour, and I just have a thousand things to catch up on after the weekend. But today was different...well I guess it kind of started last night because I think I got the best night of sleep I've gotten for about 6 months. No Gunnar didn't sleep through the night, but he did sleep from 8:00 till about 2:30 at which point he just kind of whimpered and went back to sleep till 4:30, then I fed him and he went back down till about 6:00. Then Lars got up with him so I could go back to bed (thank you Hunnie!), and at about 7:00 he went and laid Gunnar back down and he and Ashton both slept till a little after 8:00! So I actually felt almost rested! I could get used to a schedule like that.

Then both boys woke up happy and Ashton actually ate a bowl of oatmeal and a waffle nicely, then got dressed nicely and got in the stroller nicely for our walk, didn't get too whiny and obnoxious on our walk, and even played nicely by himself while I got showered for the day. Then Gunnar took an hour and a half nap!!! (yes this is unusual).

So I got to play with Ashton while he slept for awhile.

Then as I'm messing around on the computer this morning, I got an email from a girl who I had met a a few weeks ago at a boutique I went to (her name is Brittany and she is a photographer) anyway that night she had given me her business card so I checked out her blog and she was having a "Cutest kid on the block" contest where people could send in pictures of their kids and possibly win a free photo session with her.

So of course I had to send in a few pictures of Ashton and Gunnar.

Anyway today she emailed me to say I won!!! I'm so excited for her to take their pictures. You can check out her blog @ www.casciophoto.blogspot.com and see the post from today with pictures of Ashton and Gunnar saying that we won!

Plus check out some of the pictures she's taken...she does a great job!

So now I just need to give her a call and set up a time and pray that Ashton & Gunnar will cooperate!

I've really been wanting to get some pictures of them done together and some of Gunnar at this cute stage, before he gets way too busy to look at the camera. So this will be a great opportunity. I was so excited when I got her email :)

Then awhile later, my friend Aurora called to see if we wanted to get together this afternoon and take the kids down to the river trail to ride their bikes. It's such a nice day here today, so we met up with them around 1:00 and walked the trail, then let the boys play in their little "fort" for about half an hour. It was great because they got along so well today and no one got hurt, and I got an extra walk in for the day!

Ashton, Dante & Julius

And they even left relatively nicely when we told them it was time to go.

So we just got home awhile ago and Ashton went over to play with a friend and Gunnar went down for another nap.

(Which gives me time to blog!)Now Lars will be home in an hour! Oh and I had a good hair day! That never hurts :) I love days like today...they have to come around sometimes don't they? Not to make it seem like most other days are bad, but they just don't all go sooo smoothly! Maybe we'll even get around to decorating for Christmas tonight!