Jackson's 1st Birthday Party!

This past Saturday we hosted Jackson's first birthday party at our house, a swim party for about 30 of our closest friends and some of Jackson's buddies too! We had great weather, and everyone had so much fun. The party started at noon, and we were saying goodbye to our last group of guests at about 8pm! We even ended up ordering 5 pizzas for dinner that night to feed our friends and ourselves since we were eaten out of house and home with the BBQ we served for lunch. There was not a morsel of cake, cupcakes, or even 1 of the 100 #1 cut out scratch sugar cookies Jon and I made and frosted on Friday night! I could not believe it, but hey, we were not stuck with leftovers, in fact late in the afternoon I was scraping my pantry to get an assortment of snacks to put out to refresh the hungry swimmers! I will send a link out for all of the party pics on snapfish, here are just a few pics. Hope everyone had a great weekend and has a good upcoming week!

Happy Birthday Jackson... where has the time gone!

On this day one year ago Jackson was born

Here are some pictures from our little one year old!

getting ready to take a bath.......

Just watch how my baby runs from me......naked as a jay bird!!!

Walking Better and Better Everyday

This is the most recent video of our little one on the prowl...

4 years tomorrow!

WOW........tomorrow Jon and I will have been married for FOUR years......it's funny because we were talking about this the other day and at the same exact time we both said "it only feels like about 2 years"......so I guess that is good. We also BOTH separately and independently emailed our babysitter Jesse on the SAME DAY within an hour of each other and asked if she could babysit for a few hours tomorrow night so we can grab dinner together to celebrate! She of course thought it was funny, but its just another sign that I guess we are really in sync and thinking alike these days.......we need that to tackle all that life throws at us and to keep up with the best thing to happen to us, JACKSON:) What a year this has been! Today Jack and I arrived home to find hand crafted wooden window boxes on the front two windows of our house, over-flowing with freshly planted colorful flowers, and 4 bright colored pots near the front door also brimming with freshly planted colorful flowers. I have no idea how Jon had time to coordinate this but I loved it! What a nice surprise and no better time to do this becuase we are having a MONSOON rain storm, it has been raining for three days straight basically so the plants should do well. Here are some pictures from our special day 4 years ago, and of the present I came home to find today!

honing his skills........

Jackson is honing his walking skills and getting sturdier and sturdier each day. Today is the first day that I can honestly say he is 99% walking all the time and very much LESS weeble wobbly! It completely throws us to just see him walking all over the house after a year of having to carry him around. We absolutely MUST get the pool child safety fence installed in the coming weeks now that he is really mobile and also MUST install the cabinet and toilet locks this weekend (sounds like a fun holiday weekend is in store for us)! He is like a silent but deadly predator running all over the house......he makes NO noise as he walks (he can't walk and talk at the same time yet) and if you take your eye off of him for one second he is doing laps around the dining room table and eerily close to my crystal and china etc. or sneaking off to who knows where! He finds all the nooks and crannies in the house (and there are not a lot of them or so we thought)!!! I am SO thankful right now that we do not have stairs to worry about, but the pool more than makes up for that. For now we are just keeping the slider doors to the porch locked and also locking the porch door that goes out to the pool for extra precaution. He did take a nasty spill at school today and has a huge goose egg on his forehead........everyone said this would happen and it has. In one week he has a goose egg on his forehead and a scratch on his cheek...good thing we post-poned the one year pics another week or so because we just have too much going on! Hope everyone is having a good week, pray for the safety and balance of our little walker.

Jackson Walking

Here is some video of Jackson walking. He started doing this last weekend but we were so busy all week, we could not catch him on tape! Enjoy:) It's a typical mid-May weekend in Florida, sunny, hot= day on the boat with my co-worker and her family. We had a great time, The Emmons have two kids, Morgan who is 6 and Jacob who is 4 and they loved tubing, lunch on an island, and a nice long boat ride. Jackson loved to watch the other kids and wanted to walk all around the island we stopped at and the boat (very difficult when it is in motion0! He is not content just to sit on mommy's lap anymore.........except on the way back to the dock when he was so tired he fell asleep in my lap!

The Jackson Chair...

Birthday gifts have started to arrive for Jackson a few weeks early........the first was a BIG box from pottery barn kids containing a LARGE overstuffed personalized chair just for Jackson from Mimi, Papa, Jay, the Burrows and the Ehrmins.......thanks everyone, here are some pictures of the soon to be birthday boy trying out his chair! We also received a big boxes of wrapped gifts for Jackson from Grandma and Grandpa that we will wait to open on his birthday:) It is HOT here this weekend, over 90 and just HOT. It feells like August, or as one of Jon's co-workers put it the other day "it's AFRICA hot".

Anyways......due to the heat, we got the pool cleaned up and a new float for Jackson since he outgrew the "mommy and me" float and we are hitting the pool this afternoon! The float even has a cover over the top for shade for baby J...pictures later or tomorrow. We have 2 couples coming for dinner tonight and we'll have a relaxing mother's day at home or the beach tomorrow! Hope everyone has a nice weekend!!

Mid week post

It's almost mid-week........I am on my lunch break now and since I have so much to do I did not go out of the office today to run errands or anything. I thought I would give updates on some of Jackson's newest "tricks".

This 11th month is the month of making crazy sounds with his mouth and mimicking everything we do! He LOVES to take his finger to his lip and make sounds, and even funnier, loves to take his finger to our lips and make us make the sound! He also says "giggle giggle giggle" when he rolls his tongue between his gums, and pats his mouth like an Indian and says abababab. The funniest though is that he figured out how to sniff last week with his nose and now he will constantly sniff and then look to me or JOn to do it and absolutely CRACK UP. I have got to get a video of this sniffing to post.....he scunches his whole face up and really gets into it and it is HILARIOUS. I keep telling Jon I need to update the baby book this week and write down all of this silliness and infatuation with strange mouth and facial sounds!

When he is not making silly sounds or scrunching his face to sniff, he is walking along everything, even letting go from object to object and taking a few steps completely on his own to get from one piece of furniture to the next, full on walking is close, we are sure. He is also resisting EVERY single diaper change. I don't quite understand the fuss since it DOES NOT HURT. He hates it though and it is like a wrestling match to dress him or change him, not fun. It has gotten so bad that at night, after his bath I wrestle him into his diaper and then shut his bedroom door and play with him and let him walk all around his room and just play in the diaper, then when he is good and tired and wanting his bottle and to go to bed, I coax him into the pjs!

He loves loves loves ANY music. He can be in the middle of playing with a toy, or walking in the walker, or crawling across the floor and if he hears music he immediately starts bopping his head and wiggling his whole body to the music.....it is funny to see! His favorite shows with lots of music are Handy Manny and Mickey Mouse ClubHouse which we have on while we are getting ready for work and school in the morning. He also loves the pool and swimming...good thing because it is getting hot down here and he swims ususally both weekend days for a bit and some week nights after work!

Words.....he clearly says mama, dada, and duh for dogs and he will make a "woof woof" sound if I ask him what does the doggy do and he talks to Nicco when he sees him as if he is meowing, again, it is pretty funny! He cannot say their names yet, but if I say "where is the dog" or "where is the cat", he will look and locate them.

He will be one in just a few weeks and we're already planning a big pool party and BBQ to celebrate with friends. I started writing out the invitations last week. What a year this has been and each day it gets more fun.

first haircut!!

Today we are back to our normal routine of quiet weekends......we are still busy though doing things like haircuts, dogs to the groomer, cleaning our house, switching from winter/fall bedding to summer bedding, etc. and we are going to a double 30th birthday/cinco de mayo party tonight! Tomorrow Jon is golfing and Jack and I are going to lunch with two of my friends......enjoy some pictures, before and after his haircut:)