new bed!

as our christmas gift to nathaniel, julia and bought him a new bed.  our goal was to get him used to sleeping in it as much before there was going to be someone else in his crib as possible.

like pretty much everything else, he took to it pretty easily.

the first night was a bit of a struggle (for us) because he was no longer contained in his crib.  he didn’t feel that it was time to go to sleep, so he kept getting out of bed.  we remedied this by letting him mostly fall asleep laying down with me on the couch and then we moved him back to the bed.  all went well, until a little before midnight when julia and i awoke to something running down the hall yelling “i’m scared!  i’m scared!”  he woke up again around 3:30 and ended up spending the rest of the night sleeping with us.

the next day i went out and bought a bunch of nightlights to place around the house, and one for his room of course.  that night, he slept until about 4 – and then ended up in bed with us.

the next day?  he just slept and everything was a-ok.

yeah, he sort of likes wow wow wubzy

since then, not counting the minor argument about it not being bed time and then demanding stories be read, everything has been going very well.  he’s always been a morning person, and on occasion he even lets us sleep until 5!  usually, pregnant julia who’s asleep by 6:45 some nights is awake with him anyway letting me sleep (a trend which i honestly and truly hope continues well into the future).

and now, another funny conversation with nathaniel.

nathaniel has been pretty big on sharing lately.  at least we’ve been trying to drill that into his brain.  he was snacking on pretzels the other day and decided he wanted to share them with us.

n – ‘here’s a pretzel daddy’

a – ‘thank you’

n – ‘you’re welcome dad.  mommy wants a pretzel too?’

j – ‘ok.  thank you nathaniel’

n – ‘you’re welcome.  baby pepe wants one too’ (at which point he tries to shove a pretzel into julia’s belly button)

j – ‘ nathaniel, that’s not how baby pepe eats.’

n – ‘oh?’

j – ‘he eats something when i eat something.  that’s how he gets his food.’

n – (sits thinking about it for a second) ‘that’s silly mommy’ (and he starts laughing and stuffing more pretzels into his own mouth)

julia and i had a pretty good laugh about that one.

can't sleep, clown will eat me

is getting frightened by dumb cartoons.

for some reason, over the last few weeks, dora the (hearing impaired) explorer scares the crap out of him.  not so much dora, but other characters on the show.  he was frightened by swiper the fox for a while but he seems to mostly be over that one.  then he got scared by the bridge troll and i had to point out he had on bunny slippers (one time at least) so we laughed about how silly his slippers were.  now he’s scared of the witch.  i wasn’t home when this happened, but i received a text from julia letting me know he was more or less in tears asking her to put on wow wow wubzy instead.

believe me, nathaniel, i’d rather watch wow wow as well.

has anyone else noticed that dora yells EVERYTHING SHE SAYS?  oh my goodness what an awful pile of garbage that show is.

little pillow

nathaniel also has discovered pillows.

we have this little yellow heart pillow that says ‘hug me’ on it – or as nathaniel would say “ooh a heart!  thump thump.  thump thump.”

one day when nathaniel was telling me that upstairs was scary (because it was dark up here – he’s real hit or miss with being afraid of the dark or not) i turned on the light and took him upstairs to see it wasn’t scary.  while discovering it was not nearly as frightening as he thought, he also found the pillow.  since finding it, it has been commandeered.

it is now HIS pillow.

so we figured this was a cute argument and gave it to him to use.  he carried it around for a week or so.  he played with it for a week or so.  he’d use it while laying down drinking juice for a week or so.  now it’s in his bed.

as part of his christmakah gift (our our christmakah punishment) we’re getting him his first big boy bed. somehow, he ends up in our bed between 4-4:30am every morning (julia or i give up on hoping he’ll stop calling for us saying “i’m wet, mommy” get out of bed, change himself, get back into bed and go to sleep so one of us has to do it and just brings him back to bed with us).  something tells me once he’s in his own bed, he’ll pretty much just get there on his own.

it's not fair. it's just not fair. there was TIME now!

it’s a little bit unfair.  this morning i was up when my alarm went off at 5:45 and shuffled off to start getting ready for work.  shortly after i heard julia get up and start making herself some breakfast.  after a little while we realized that the house was real quiet and we hadn’t seen nathaniel or pickles.  the reason?  those two little jerks we still passed out on OUR bed. i mean, the nerve!

those two wake us up (or just keep us up) all the time.  next time, i’m going in with an air horn.

walking the bridge

so in an attempt to combat the massive energy bursts we started taking nathaniel to the tumble-bee gym on saturdays.  the first time he was there, while he participated in what everyone else was doing, he mostly wanted to run around and do his own thing.  now, he’s much better at keeping with the group, but at times, he still does run off to go crazy on a trampoline.

climbing the mountain

the day starts off with everyone able to use whatever they want to use, when everyone is trickling in the doors.  the only thing they can’t use is the castle with two giant slides (they open it up later for the kids to use during class).

this works out nicely, but there are a few, i guess i should call them ‘less-than-attentive’ parents whose children pretty much just do whatever they want while their mother’s play on their cell phones.  after i had to help one girl out of the ball pit twice, i decided i was just going to leave her there.  at some point someone else had to have gotten her out because she was running around somewhere else at some point.

on top of the mountain

when the actual class starts up, the girls who run it set up a bunch of discs in a circle for the kids to sit/stand on and they do some stretching type things.  once the stretching is over they play a couple dance-y songs that the kids do a lot of shaking and jumping to.  once that’s done, the real insanity starts.

usually there is some sort of bridge type obstacle course that they start off on.  this past week the had to climb up a wedge mat, walk across a bridge, jump onto a mat that’s inside some ring, climb out of that and onto one of the tampolines to jump his way down to some other bouncy circular mat that they jump down until they finally slide down another wedge mat only to run back around and do it all over again.

stretching my legs

after that the kids got help doing hand stands, and then moved on to the balance beams.

keep in mind that when the kids are not the ones doing the activities with the teachers, they are using whatever equipment is available, sometimes even with parental supervision.

after the balance beams the giant slide castle was opened up.  pretty much the kids go in the door on the side, disappear for a few minutes as they navigate their way around the maze inside and end up at either the big or the small slide, slide down and repeat.  it’s funny how the kids will sometimes end up at the smaller slide, decide that’s not what they wanted to go down, head back inside and emerge at the taller one.

when that was all finished up, they moved on to what could only be described as nathaniel’s favorite thing ever – BALLOONS!

OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG!

once the parachute came out, and then the balloons came out, nathaniel went a little bit crazy.

he had the biggest smile on his face pretty much the entire time the balloons were out.  surprisingly, when it was time to put the balloons away, he actually helped put them into the bag instead of trying to keep them.

the best part about the entire time there?  nathaniel passes out for a super long nap afterwards so julia and i can get stuff done* (when i’m not at work).

*getting stuff done usually involves watching american horror story and ringer while eating junk food.

always with the hands on his face

so as we are nearing the 3rd trimester of baby pepe’s gestation, everything is going pretty smoothly.  since julia had a few complications the last time, we have the pleasure of going to the doc for sonograms every four weeks.  it’s actually a nice thing, because we’re able to track everything a lot closer than going every two-three months.   also, we get to see baby pepe forming into hopefully, a much calmer child than nathaniel.

apparently nathaniel has now decided that baby pepe should be named ‘baby’ when he’s born.  i hate to admit it, but that was at the top of my list as well.  now if i can only get pickles to commit, julia can’t filibuster the baby naming and we can push it through.

ready for turkey!

nathaniel, as always, is adorable in his dress clothes.  when i was trying to take this picture, nathaniel was trying to watch ‘wow wow wubzy,’ and was getting annoyed i kept trying to get his attention.

a familiar sight

anyone who has followed this blog or has seen any of my various bbq posts knows that if there is one thing nathaniel loves, it’s ice.  here he sits with his aunt jackie (mostly cut out) watching football eating a cup full of ice cubes.  it’s ok, he wanted to eat more ice, so i ate his plate of turkey too.

plotting with his cousin

when his cousin brianna arrived, of course, the two little ones had to get together and figure out how they were going to destroy everything in the house.  (actually, they were very good together – there was no destruction to be had)

exploring the stroller

the two of them had to do SOME exploring and they spent some time spinning wheels on her stroller.  fun was had by all.

iPhone!

aunt jackie was nice enough to let them play alphababy on her iphone.  nathaniel giggles a lot when he plays this game (which basically is played by tapping the screen and a new letter, color, shape or number pops up and it says what it is – but jackie recorded nathaniel shouting out what some picture are <foofa, jackie, nathaniel> and that’s when he laughs the most).

end of the day

after all was said and done, nathaniel was sure tired (though not as tired as julia and i were because we had to run around with him and don’t have the energy of a two year old anymore – especially after turkey) and got himself set up on the couch to end his day watching ‘wonder pets.’

i'm going to be a big brother, i have to DRESS like a big brother

just realized i never mentioned on here that we are expecting baby #2 this coming march.  nathaniel, of course, is pretty excited.

for the first month or so after we told him, no matter what we said, he wouldn’t believe anything other than the baby was in MY belly, not julia’s.  that, and he wanted to name baby #2 ‘elephant.’

when we’d ask him if he wanted a brother or a sister, he’d say ‘sister’.  if we’d ask him if he wanted a sister or a brother, he’d say ‘brother.’  when we told him he was going to have a baby brother, he was upset with us and told us ‘NO!’ and made a raspberry.  i’m not sure why, but he was pretty upset about not having a sister.

he has since gotten over it, and is looking forward to having a baby brother.

he regularly kisses and hugs julia’s belly and says ‘i love you pepe.’  (which is our in utero name for baby #2)

i asked him if he was going to share all of his toys with his brother, he said yes.  i’m going to hold him to that.

just chillin', yo

getting dressed

this year, nathaniel’s god mother and pseudo aunt jackie told us she was going to take care of his costume (after seeing one of his favorite characters from one of his favorite tv shows).  it was pretty fantastic having nathaniel dress up as brobee (from the tv show yo gabba gabba), but i think it may have been even MORE fantastic to have jackie dress up as well (as foofa from the same show).

one thing we realized was that so far, in the 3 halloweens he has been alive for, he has been a monster of some sort for all of them (which makes my idea for our costumes for next year so much more awesome – in my eyes at least).

this year nathaniel was pretty excited to go trick or treating, bizarre weather not withstanding.

foofa and brobee

since the crazy snowstorm that happened the saturday before (on the day of my sister’s wedding – which i’ll get to once i have some decent pictures) power was knocked out all over the place.  one of the people hit with an outage was one of julia’s friends jen.  the town she lives in more resembled downtown fallujah than dumont new jersey, so she brought her two girls over to join in our trick or treating fun.

watching two 4 year olds and a 2 year old go door to door was pretty amusing.  it wasn’t just ringing a doorbell once, it was ringing a doorbell 10+ times.  it wasn’t just taking one candy from the dish the person was holding, it was taking 3+.  one thing i’ll say about them, is that they did say “thank you” at most every house.

also, nathaniel didn’t take candy out of his bag and try to give it to the person at the house like he did last year.

somehow, the herd of cats all looked at me at the same time

once we finished up with the candy hunt, we all went back to our house for a pizza party and some playtime.

now, if having 3 young kids trick or treating was amusing, having the same 3 kids playing (well, destroying) our house was equally as funny.  they played a little football, nathaniel pushed them on his bike, they took turns hitting each other in the head with a spinning buzz lightyear toy, they jumped on the couches, some fell off the couches – and no one got seriously injured, so it was a total win/win situation.

looks like i need to start getting the madmartigan and willow ufgood costumes ready for next year.

gyoza? yes please!

while making a recent run to mitsuwa for a few things, we decided to just eat a quick dinner there, instead of heading home first.  after trying to figure out what nathaniel would or wouldn’t eat, we settled on some gyoza.  this kid absolutely wolfed it down.

i love the fact that he will pretty much try anything we put in front of him.  if he is the slightest bit apprehensive, if we pretend that we are real excited to eat it and don’t want him to have any, he’ll take it from us and eat it (probably because everything is ‘MINE!’ according to nathaniel).

he is also taking after his father, in that he loves electronic gadgets.

he managed to grab my phone the other day while i wasn’t looking, opened a camera app, reversed the camera so it was facing him and then snapped his own picture.

this is the result

since he was very little, he has always watched every little thing we have done.  as soon as he could crawl, he was taking dvds out of the player.  he understands what the tv remote does, and while he doesn’t know what channel number to put on, there have been times when i was watching something but he decided it was time to watch wow wow wubbzy, picks up the remote and starts changing the channel trying to find it.  he uses an ipad at daycare for flashcards, so he’ll walk up to my ‘puter’ and start trying to move things on the monitor or my laptop screen.

he’s part of a generation that is growing up with some technologies that were barely imagined when i was growing up (and i grew up with computers my entire life), but this was just too much.

heck, maybe next time i’ll just let him write the blog post.

enjoying the walk

so this past sunday we went apple picking with nathaniel and some friends.  it was an early start to the day, but getting to the orchard just before they opened was definitely the way to go.

we arrived shortly before 9am and after trading a few quick texts and a phone call we met up with  the second car in our party and started to make out way through the orchard.

now, let me start off by saying that two things nathaniel has been practically obsessed with lately are apples to snack on and the trees when we go for walks.  when he saw all of the trees he got very excited, then when i told them that they all had apples growing on them his eyes grew so large with excitement i thought they were going to outgrow his face.

i held nathaniel up so he could pick an apple himself and he clutched that thing like his life depended on it.  that is, until he saw i had a bigger apple in my hand and he wanted that one.  pretty much the day went on like that for a while, at one point nathaniel had at least 3 apples in his arms.

with mommy and my apple

after we shared about 10 apples while we were picking them, we managed to fill up a bag with an awful lot to bring home as well (of which he has eaten many more since we got home).  we took a walk through the country store where nathaniel wanted to take jars of the various apple products with him as well.  that’s when we could tell someone had missed  his naptime.

before we left, we grabbed ourselves a quick lunch (of pizza; his other new obsession) and an apple donut (which he practically ripped a piece right out of my hands to eat) and spent a little time just hanging out with everyone.  also, we noticed that in a couple hours we were there, not only was every single lot filled, but there were dozens of cars trying to find parking all over.  let this be a lesson – anywhere worth going to, is worth going to early.

nathaniel passed out within about 5 minutes of us being in the car.

thanks to the lawtons, ferraros, jeff and stacey for an enjoyable day at the orchard.

what? i like bread!

can it seriously have already been two years since nathaniel was born?  in a way it seems like he just showed up a few weeks ago.  in another way it feels like i’ve been exhausted forever.  either way, i can’t even remember what it was like without him around.

actually, on the rare occasion i have the house to myself, or it’s just julia and me at home, we do a lot of napping.

in honor of his birthday, we decided to do something special – we went to the bronx zoo.

i want to see a dragon!

after we spent the morning with nathaniel playing with all of his new toys (which he received at his little birthday party on sunday afternoon at our house) for about 10 minutes before moving on to the next toy, nathaniel decided to fall asleep for a nap around 9:40.  we had planned on leaving for the zoo around 10 so this was an issue.  we decided that our game plan would be to get everything packed and get ourselves ready before we woke him up, got him changed and into the car.  everything went without a hitch, and nathaniel fell back asleep by the time we pulled out of the driveway.

of course, the day you want the drive into NYC to take a little bit longer than normal (for napping purposes) is the day it takes us about 15 minutes to get across the GWB and off the cross-bronx about 5 minutes from the zoo.  nathaniel woke up at some point around when we were getting off of the bridge because he was excited to see the trucks in the city.  as we were in line to get into the zoo parking lot, julia and i were prepping nathaniel for what to expect.  he mostly ignored us as he saw the animal pictures and was shouting about what animals he saw.  when we told him he was going to get to see real animals, he didn’t seem to excited.

choo-choo!

we finally got in and managed to find a terrific parking space pretty much back on the bronx river parkway and set off for the zoo.  this was the conversation nathaniel and i had while julia used the bathroom -

a – “do you want to see the elephants?”

n – “nah”

a – “do you want to see the lions?”

n – “no”

a – “do you want to see the giraffes?”

n – “no daddy”

a – “ok, it’s you day, what do you want to see?”

n – “daddy, i want to see a dragon.”

a – “a dragon?  really?”

n – “uh-huh”  (julia comes out of the bathroom)

a – “julie, he wants to see a dragon, nothing else.  i don’t have the heart to tell them they aren’t real.”

well, we didn’t manage to see a dragon when we were there, but he sure loved the animals.  when we got to the tigers, he was more excited to see the fish in the water than he was the tiger (which was sleeping).  actually, an awful lot of the animal were asleep.  the worst part of the day for us all, was when we decided to go on the wild asia monorail.  the line wasn’t too bad when we got on it, but of course there are no strollers allowed so nathaniel was just standing with us.  when he saw the first train arrive, he got super happy, practically jumping up and down about the choo choo train.

and then the train pulled away.

i have to lay down like daddy

nathaniel was not only confused by why we weren’t on it, but also completely crushed it was gone.  luckily a new train would show up every 5 minutes or so.  unfortunately that new train would leave with us still on line.  we went through the full range of emotions from elation to despair and over again for about 35-40 minutes while we were on line.  when we got up to the front of the line, it looked like we weren’t going to make that train either.  luckily, they asked for groups of 2 or 3 people because there were empty seats.  julia and i both shouted “we’re 3!  we’re 3 people!” and were ushered up and onto the train.  nathaniel was super excited, as were we, that he was done with his tantrums.

we didn’t get a chance to see everything at the zoo, but we managed to do about 2/3 of it in about 4 hours.  with a two year old that you have to keep taking out or putting in to his stroller depending on what you were seeing, we think we did a pretty good job.  next year, we’ll probably head to the right from gate B instead of to the left to see the other animals first.

over all, it was a pretty good day – and we didn’t even feel the earthquake that hit virginia but was apparently felt from atlanta to toronto.  maybe next year for that too.

OH MY GOD A CARS CAKE!!!