Dad does bath time

He texted me this pic when I was out to dinner with some girlfriends and he said..."Guess what he is playing with, and it's not plastic." Oh boys.

Check out my hole

Lookie, lookie we have a hole!! Pervs get your minds out of the gutter... I'm talking about the hole that they just dug for the foundation of our new house! That's right we broke ground!! David Weekly (the builder) promised us that it would be in the month of November, and they just squeaked in on the 30th, but kept up their word nonetheless. John asked if he could drive the backhoe for the groundbreaking; and unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) was not allowed.  So, Our David Weekly sales coordinator, Liz, of course took this as an opportunity to tease John a bit and instead bought him a bright-yellow toy backhoe...Ian will enjoy it!

So without further ado, take a peek at our fresh hole...

Ain't she a beaut!

A view down the street 

And soon enough, we will have this....

Well, not exactly this (this is the builder rendering of our model),
but our paint, brick, etc aren't the same colors. 

In the meantime we've picked out all of our finishes, which was quite a feat. It only took us 3 meetings at their design center instead of the standard 1 (maybe 2). Thankfully our coordinator, Shelly, at the Design Center turned out to be a friend of a friend so she was super patient, and even got John a beer mid-way thru our first meeting when he about choked over the cabinet numbers.  It's funny, I could pick out finishes all day for my clients without thinking twice, but for myself it is so stressful. I find myself analyzing every decision. When push came to shove there were very few things that we went with the "builder" options, and somehow we did it within our max budget that John determined.  Come to think of it I think the only places we went with the builder finishes are Ian's bathroom (he doesn't care, right?), and the laundry room. I'm thrilled though because that means that our place will be unique. When we met with our superintendent, Scott, for our final builder pre-construction meeting and he was going through the list of things for our place he must have said "huh, never done that before" at least 10 times. 

The one thing that I learned in this process is that I am not the only one in this family who wants to be a designer. John, was VERY into picking everything and absolutely had an opinion on just about everything. He kept pushing me to pick colors.... I'm a typical designer...we live in shades of grey,  but I won, and we won't have blue counters much to John's dismay.  We are going for classically modern and sophisticated. 

John getting busy picking tile

I'll upload pictures of the finishes and selections we made in another post very soon. It's exciting to see it all come together! 

Thankful & Holy

For Thanksgiving we traveled to Omaha... we opted to fly versus do 7+ hours in the car. The flight out there could have been better; we were off to a good start and then about 20 minutes into the hour flight all hell broke loose and Ian decided he wanted down/off the plane immediately and he was going to let everyone know it. He squirmed, he yelled, he slammed his arms. Refusing to be those parents who just sit there holding their screaming baby without really doing anything to help the situation, we were jumping through hoops... pulling out anything we could find to entertain him in addition to walking up and down the aisle. I was particularly surprised because on our previous flights with Ian he has been an angel, but I should have know better because he's a busy man now and doesn't want to be confined. Well, we made it... and John gave Ian an F- for his performance on the plane....threatening that if the return flight wasn't better that he wouldn't be allow on any future vacations.

My parents hosted the feast, and my Aunt Barb and Uncle Paul also stayed at my parents. My cousins Linda and Paul and their families also attended the festivities. I love when we can get a big group of the family together...seems like the older I get the more I cherish these types of things. It was a great day of family time and overeating. Yum Yum!

The Turkey! 

My little turkey

The"Adult Table"

Auntie B, Mom, and Sister

Ian and BFF "dog" 

A little feast complete with toys

The Saturday following turkey day we had Ian baptized at my parents church. Being honest...we don't belong to a parish here in Denver. And in order to have our child baptized they would require us to join the church, belong for 3+ months, attend some baptism classes, etc. After a combined (between John and I) 20+ years of Catholic schooling, in addition to us both being baptized, having our first communions, confirmations, and being married in the church (also requiring catholic pre-cana classes), it seems beyond ridiculous that they would require us to continue to jump through hoops to baptize our child. You think they would be thrilled that we are looking to bring more people into their church. Don't get me started. However, since my parents are pretty active in their parish the priest there said he'd do it without us having to do a thing other than showing up. Done deal...let's make this easy. We know that having Ian baptized was important to our families, but with us all in different cities it was going to require someone to travel no matter where we had it if our parents wanted to be there. In this case, John's mom came to the big O on Saturday morning for the baptism. She also brought our niece, Eva, along too. We were thrilled Eva could come; especially since this was the first time Eva met Ian.

"Dad, what are they doing?"

"Um... excused me what are you putting on my head?"

"What in the hell?" - Ian 

Nana and her grand babies

g'mom

Great Aunt B, Uncle Paul and Baby I

Pops, Dede, and Holy Ian

Ian was actually a total hoot through the whole baptism... he would hit his head and give questionable looks at the priest throughout...it was actually pretty comical...even Father Val was laughing. I'm telling you, this child is an old soul.  After the baptism we had some time to hang out with our mom's, my dad, sister, Todd, and Eva, which was a nice little bonus to the holiday weekend. On Saturday night my mom, sister, and I had Debbie teach us how to crochet... Debbie made Ian 2 beautiful afghan's that we use all the time, so we thought it would be fun to learn how to make them. Especially since my grandma (my mom's mom) Sadie was always knitting or crocheting and unfortunately never taught any of us before she passed away. The type of crocheting that Debbie taught us is called hairpin lace - while it was bang your head against the wall frustrating at first, once I got the hang of it I became a grandma-like crocheting psychopath and I haven't stopped since. I suppose I take after my namesake, grandma Sadie. John says it is because I have an obsessive compulsive personality, which is probably also true... I'm an all or nothing type of girl...and therefore I will have my first afghan complete before Christmas (and I'm hoping to have more than one by then). And, my mom and sister have not touched it since that Saturday night, yeah, I might have a problem. 

We stayed in town until Monday, and had planned to go to the Omaha Children's Museum with Eva and Ian (don't worry I was able to pry myself away from the crocheting). Unfortunately when we got there it was closed. Fail. So we ended up checking out the Zoo instead (which we had originally ruled out as an option because it was freakin' freezing). However, we were able to hit up a handful of indoor exhibits and made the visit worth-wild. The highlight was the aquarium; both Eva and Ian loved it.

 From there it was onward to the airport. We were stocked with lots of reinforcements to hopefully keep little man from getting another F-. I'm proud to say that he was quiet and super well behaved on the way home....our little secret was blueberries. That's right, blueberries. Ian love, love, LOVES blueberries so we brought a carton with us on the plane and doled them out one by one...it was a huge time suck and kept him happy. So happy, that  he ate the entire carton (imagine that diaper! Oh yea, blueberry blowout the next day). He was on target to get an A- post landing (the minus was due to some slight fussing when the blueberries weren't coming fast enough), but John dropped him down to a B+ when he started to fuss during the taxing in (and the berries were gone). Quite an improvement though! And he will be allow to vacation again, whew, because with Christmas around the corner he is due for more travels.