We watched some interesting movies this weekend. We had started Man of the Year with Robin Williams and Laura Linney while we were on our cruise. One day it was shown over and over on this one channel and when we were in the room for Brenden’s nap time we caught part. Then when we went to bed we caught some more, but we couldn’t stay awake to see how it ended. So we put it on netflix and finally saw the rest. It was pretty good. The premise is that a Jon Stewart type comedian ends up running for president and winning but it was a glitch in some software that allowed him to win. The political commentary was great, but the movie seemed like it couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a comedy or a drama and there were a few things that didn’t get set up very well.

We also watched Elizabethtown with Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst. It apparently bombed when it was in theaters, but I really liked it a lot. Orlando Blooms character is having a pretty rough time and the way he plays it reminds me of Christian Bale in American Psycho. There are some parts that are kind of akward. Kirsten Dunst character is a little looney. The message of the story is that even though painful things happen in life, if you allow yourself to see them, wonderful things also happen.

This weekend Brenden decided that it was absolutely hysterical if I told him no. Don’t play with wires. Ha ha Mama. Don’t get all your clothes out of the dresser and try to pull the dresser over on yourself. Ha ha ha. Don’t stand up in your chair. This one actually turned into a game before I realized it. I’d tell him no.He wouldn’t sit down. I’d go put him on his butt. He’d laugh and then stand back up. So I took the chair away. Ha!

We went to see our friend’s new baby on Saturday and Brenden was very intrigued. That is the first time he’s been around a baby that was any more than maybe a month or so younger than he is. He kept stopping to look at the baby. He seemed to think the baby was pretty cool until I went to hold him. That was not so cool.

We also got to spend some time with Brenden’s great grandmother which was very nice. Brenden especially liked the idea that most things in her house seemed breakable and were at his level!

One night this weekend the silly boy decided it would be fun to climb on Daddy’s back. And it was even more fun than he originally thought, so he had to keep doing it! And laughing.

Today he learned how to put his fake coins into his piggy bank. He got it for his birthday and up until now has not been able to figure out how to get the coins turned the right direction to fit in the slot. I’ve been sticking them in the slot where they sort of catch and letting him push them the rest of the way in. But today he figured it all out and was doing it over and over. He was so engrossed in doing it that he even ignored the ringing telephone, something he never does!

I took Brenden for his first haircut today. It is something he’s needed, at least over the ears, for a very long time. I took him to a place that does only kids cuts. I think the lady we got was on her second day. As far as the cut goes, I’m pretty sure I could have done as well, but considering how much he moved his head, I think she did great! He got to sit in a little car and watch Nemo while the stylist did everything she could to entertain him. He did great! I’ll have to get a better after shot, the one I’m including now is the one that the stylist took for us. The rest I took during the haircut.

Brenden has learned to climb since we’ve been home. He has been interested for a long time and we could see him lift his leg up but he never knew were to go from there. While we were on our cruise the bathroom had a huge step up to get into it and Brenden started to practice on that step. When we got home, he was all the sudden able to climb up into his little chair that we bought him for his birthday. He really hadn’t shown much interest in it before and then all the sudden he could get in it. And then he discovered he could climb on the fireplace too. Once he gets up he beams a great big smile of pride. When he sits in his little chair sideways and pretends he is talking on the phone he looks like he’s hit teenagedom very early!

Brenden ate chicken and drank REAL milk from a sippy cup!

It’s not actually as hard as I thought it’d be, but it is still a fun game! There are two pictures each of Patrick, Brenden and I all mixed up.

I know my site is slow to load because of all the pictures. Patrick had helped me fix that once before, but I guess it got messed up and I wasn’t aware of it until recently. I’ll get him to help me fix it again, probably after next week when our semesters are over. Until then, sorry for the slowness.

yesterday and I thought I’d share my findings.

I am:
26% Girly
28% Normal (that little, huh?)
72% Grown up and 28% Kid
47% American
and the best one….

80% tortured genuis

Oh, and the perfect European city for me to live in? Dublin!

I know, every parent thinks that, but really, I have proof. Brenden got a little toy drum for his birthday and we were playing with it yesterday. I gave him one of the sticks while I played with the other. When he put his down I picked it up and was playing with both. I put them down, and smartso picked one up, picked up the other, used his little hand to transfer the second one to the big hand and went to town playing with both sticks in one hand. I personally think that makes him a genius. He played them that way again today too, so it wasn’t just a fluke. There’s a picture below.

And if that isn’t enough for you, today when we were waiting forever in the doctors office Brenden grabbed my cell phone. It was closed and he had it up toward the back of his head on the side facing away from me. I thought he was just rubbing his head because he was tired, but then I was watching his face and his shoulder, he was talking on the phone! He was making funny faces and trying to use his shoulder to prop up the phone!

And I bet you are wondering about that 12 month checkup, right? He’s up to 22 lbs 11.7 oz and 32 inches long, not a lot of growth since the 9 month checkup, but the doctor seemed to think that was all normal. We get to make the great switch from formula to milk and turn his car seat around. Doctor said everything looks great, we just need to start feeding the boy some meat so that he can be a true Romanski-Burleson baby.

Today was the big 1st birthday party. I think things went really well considering we had 16 kids here in a wide range of ages. Brenden’s nap lasted a little longer than we’d planned and he slept through the first half of the party. When he woke up and entered a room full of people he was not suprisingly overwhelmed, but he quickly got used to the people and turned on his usual charm.

I’d always been hesitant about giving such a small child cake, but we went ahead and gave him a tiny little piece. Turns out I really didn’t need to worry about the sugar content, he was more intersted in eating the plate. He did make a huge mess with the frosting, and the space between his eyebrows may be permantly blue, but I think he had fun. By the way, we took his shirt off before he ate the cake, which is why he doesn’t have one on in any of the pictures.
We’ve picked up everything and opened and assembled all his toys already while he took his nice long nap. He is going to have so much fun playing with everything, thanks everybody!

I have to say that we were patting ourselves on the back for a successful party, I hope everyone else had as much fun as we did!

Last weekend Patrick, Brenden and I went to another Rangers game with both sets of Brenden’s grandparents and a few other relatives. Below are some shots of the hot and tired baby. Don’t forget that any time I post a picture it can be clicked on to make it larger.

Poor little guy was hot, thirsty and tired!

Patrick’s Dad and Stepmother, Mary. Brenden was perfectly content sitting with them until I got in his line of vision to take this picture, which is when he started crying.

My Mom and Dad. He wasn’t asleep yet, but soon afterwards.

Today we went to a picnic in the park for Patrick’s work group. We were all hot and tired when we returned. Our neighbors got a pool last summer and kindly offered to let us  use it today while they were out running errands so we decided to take them up on it for a few minutes. As it was Brenden’s first time in a pool, we had to document! Pay no attention to the ghost in the picture, we are sending the photos to Time Life books to have them analyzed further.

Despite the fact that Kelli and I watched “Twister” more times than I can count when we lived together and that I can recite the whole movie (as evidenced by my subject), I am not a fan of storms. Tonight that is a rather inconvient fact. The weather is horrible. It has been raining all day and on my way home from dinner tonight it started to get pretty hard to see through the rain to drive. I was trying to remain cool even after it got worse when I got home. Then Kelli called and wanted to know why I wasn’t watching the storm news on tv because tornados could form with no warning. After asking her what good it would do me to watch the news if they could give me more warning I got off the phone and Patrick and I looked up weather on the computer. We were indeed in the red, just as Kelli had said. I got nervous. I asked Patrick if he thought I’d be crazy to move Brenden into our room. He did, but I did it anyway. If you’ve not seen our house, Brenden’s room has one whole wall that is all window. Not what I want my baby in front of in a storm.

I think my fear stems from going through a tornado in Paris when I was really little. It didn’t hit our house, but a house down at the end of our road was distroyed. Our living room had a bunch of windows in it and I just remember everything being this eerie green color. I’ve been scared of storms ever since. I’m trying not to pass that fear down to Brenden, but I don’t know if I will be successful or not.

When I was little, every night before I went to bed I tried to think of where all my valued possessions were in case there was a fire in the middle of the night. I’d try to think how quickly I could grab my barbies, my favorite stuffed animals and my picture book and get out of the house. I was sort of doing the same thing tonight during the worst of the storm. Where are my bankcards, checkbook, child, animals and damn I wish I had a flash drive with all my digital pictures on it so that I could just grab that and go. I know it’s not rational. And usually I’m not that much of an alarmist, but I don’t like storms. You know those stupid surveys that people forward around that always ask, “storms-scary or cool?” Definitely not cool!

Brenden has been very affectionate this week. He has learned to come up behind me, wrap his arms around my legs and just cling. He has also been showing some love to the dogs and his goldfish crackers. Take a look.

Brenden gives Sam some love. Before this picture,  he was standing with his back to Sam, drinking his bottle and leaning his head back on Sam.

He wanted to hang onto the bag, so I let him. Then he was clutching it to his chest like a blanket and did not want to let it go, even so that I could get some more goldfish crackers for him to eat.

I’ve been saying forever that I’d get a video of Brenden walking on here soon. And it isn’t that I have been procrastinating, I’ve really been trying to get some footage, but everytime I pull out the camera, the walking stops. I was finally able to get a little bit recorded on Easter though, so here it is. You’ll notice that I have left the original sound in. The reason for that is threefold: 1) Brenden makes some cute sounds 2) It is always fun to hear Patrick and I make fools of ourselves 3) We worked hard to get this, and you need to be on the journey to appreciate the end result!

[youtube]Hk6YRWYJCuo[/youtube]

On Saturday after a lot of working on finding what we wanted, Patrick and I booked our first ever cruise. We’ll be setting sail May 13 for seven days as an early 5-year anniversary present to ourselves. I felt like we should really do something big this year, 1) because we just went to dinner last year (Patrick requests that I insert here, that it was because we just had a baby) 2) because 5 years is a pretty big milestone in this day and age! Neither of us have ever been on a cruise so this should be a lot of fun!

We are leaving from Galveston. We’ll stop in Montego Bay, Jamaica; Grand Cayman and Cozumel, Mexico. The only time Patrick has left the country was when we went to Canada, and the only place I’ve been besides that was London. So this is a good way for us to get a couple of places in at once.

We decided that we wanted to take Brenden with us wherever we went and that really limited things. We are hoping we aren’t crazy to take him on a cruise, but the way I look at it, it won’t be a lot of hauling him all over some city. We will get off the boat three times. So the thing I’m most worried about is what if he gets sea sick…but babies are in fluid in the womb, so does that translate to an ocean? Who knows. We don’t need his passport to take the cruise, but Patrick pointed out that if something happens and we have to fly back, we will need it. So I went and did the paperwork to have it expediated on Tuesday.

We found out today that Patrick is most likely going to get to go to NC for work the day after we get back. At least it is for something fun. It is a retreat that teaches you how to focus and balance life. I think it will be really good for him to go to, so I hope that traveling two weeks in a row doesn’t get to him.

Here is an extra photo from having Brenden’s passport picks done. The guy at the post office was great, he took it in seconds and even got Brenden smiling.

We had a nice low-key Easter today. We went out to the country to celebrate with Patrick’s Dad and family. Brenden got to hunt his first Easter eggs after lunch. I can’t say that he was too into it though because, well he’s 11 months old for one thing. But we had also waken him up from a nap to go out there. He’d taken forever to fall asleep for his normal naptime and only ended up getting about a 20-30 minute nap instead of an hour. He eventually got super fussy after the egg hunting and wouldn’t not fall asleep there, so we came home where he took a wonderfully long nap that allowed Patrick and I to get more homework done. So I actually got every scrap of my ten tons of homework done on this weekend that I expected to be non-stop busy. And it was, just in a different way than I expected. Now if only I could find some more Cadbury Creme Eggs, I’d be a happy camper!

Here are some pictures of the day. Chilly day I might add.

His Easter Basket is a monkey. Haven’t you always wanted a monkey!

Post long nap

Yesterday I got a sunburn on one leg—yes, one leg— while I weeded the yard. Today I got windburn while I turned into a popsicle with my parents, Patrick, Andy and Andy’s cousin John at the Rangers Opening Day game. It is April in Texas. How can it be cold. That is what tons of people were asking themselves today as they made a run on the shops to snatch up whatever warm items they could find. We’d all dressed in long sleeves, but thinking that it would be ok with the sun, we hadn’t done much more than that. My Dad had to buy an extra shirt for himself, a sweatshirt for my Mom and blanket for all to share. Of course the boys were fine, despite Andy and John being in short sleeves. I won’t mention that they lefted early! But we toughed it out until the bottom of the 7th and the Rangers went on to win 2-0 in what must have been one of the shortest games ever…2 hrs and 15 minutes or so.

Here is Brenden enjoying the game!

Brenden seems to have made it through his mom and dad’s first trip away from him. My parents said he was subdued the whole time we were gone, but not sobbing the whole time which made me feel better. Until my mom said that at night he asked for “mama and dada.”

Patrick and I had a great short little trip. Our flight there started off on the wrong foot though. Apparently they cancelled our flight at 2:45 that morning and it was only sheer luck that Patrick checked his email to find that out. We’d been put on the next flight which left an hour later. That really wasn’t a big deal—except that I would have loved not getting up at 4:30 in the morning. I’m not a morning person. But since I woke up before the alarm for some crazy reason, it was ok. The problem was that whoever put us on the new flight coded it in such a way that made it look like we’d just booked the flight and we got tagged for extra security screening.

Now I think I’ve mentioned before that when I pack I use every ounce of space to its fullest capacity, leaving only one way that things will be able to fit back in.  So I was not happy when the security people took every last thing out of every piece of luggage we had, which lucky wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to be annoying that I had to stand in the airport and repack my underwear and such.  They lost a few more points when we boarded and Patrick had the audacity to ask if he could hang our garment bag in the closet. The lady looked at him like he was crazy and then pointed for him to open the door and put it in there. Thanks! Our other flight attendents were just as helpful.

But really, none of that was that bad, just annoying, and everything was fine from there. We got to NYC and checked into our hotel, ate Patrick’s favorite street meat, where the man had stayed open just because someone told him Patrick would be in town, and then got ready for the wedding reception. It was a very nice reception held in a restraunt that over looked Jersey City, which we especially enjoyed. We had a lot of fun seeing all of Patrick’s work friends.

After staying out late and having little sleep the night before, we had the best night sleep ever! The pillows and comforter were fluffy and cozy. There was miraculously no noise. No cat sleeping on my head. No dogs scratching and jingling their tag, no baby crying. So we slept in. When we got up we headed to Chinatown, where we bought the kind of things they lead you through back streets and down the locked stairs of dark buildings, where you wonder if you are about to die. No, not whatever bad thing it is you’ve just thought of, just purses and watches. Then we ate in our favorite restraunt (the one where we had the “short table” on my birthday the one year) because it is tradition.

Then we headed home. We had to go through the extra security screening again, but they didn’t unpack a thing! The flight attendents were very pleasant and we even made it back to DFW half an hour early!

We were very happy to hear Brenden make a noise from his bedroom where he was supposed to be sleeping when we got home. Even though I knew it wasn’t the best idea, I went and sprung him from bed and we all played for a bit. When I went to put him back to bed I thought he would pitch a fit, but he layed right down and went to sleep, happy to have everything right with his world again as my mom said.

Brenden will be 11 months tomorrow! He is working on lots of little words, though he only says them when he feels like it, not when prompted. He can say, kitty, doggy, ish (for fish) and mamma and dadda. This week he learned two new ones. I yelled “no” at Bailey pretty loudly because she was being a pain and Brenden very distincly followed me up with his own loud “no”. The next day he was sitting looking out the back door and I was sitting beside him and he turned and looked at me and said, “Hi”.  He is getting at least two more teeth, which will bring him up to 6. He can now make a crunching noise when he chews and it very happy about that. He’s getting so much better at walking; he can make it across our living room now. Not that I have that recorded yet! Soon. I promise.

He loves to dump all his toys out of their little container, especially these legos, and then just sit in a big toy pile. Tuesday he had a lot of fun opening his dresser drawers and taking all of his clothes out. He then sat in the pile and just picked them up and dropped them one by one. Fun for neat freak mommy, let me tell you! But he loved it.

Brenden is having the craziest couple of weeks. He is all off his schedule because I was on spring break last week. He got used to me being home and his sleep schedule got messed up a little bit because we got out of our routine.
This morning he woke up at 4:00 and wouldn’t stop crying. Once I realized he wasn’t going to cry himself to sleep I got up and changed his super wet diaper and took him into the dark living room and gave him a bottle.  He seemed like he was going to go right back to sleep so I put him back in bed, where he promptly started to cry. I thought he’d cry it out, so I went back to bed. But he didn’t stop crying, so Patrick took his turn. Brenden kept almost falling asleep on Patrick’s shoulder and then jerking himself awake. Patrick thought he would go to sleep if he put him down, but he was wrong. So up I went again.

By this time it was 5:00 a.m. I sat with Brenden for an hour rocking and shushing and letting him use his bottle as a lovey. Finally  he went limp with sleep and I was able to put him down and go back to sleep. I should mention that I had stayed up late studying for a Spanish midterm that I had today!

Patrick had jury duty, and by the time he got out, it was too late go downtown to work, so he came home. That really threw Brenden off! He only had one nap today and was a bit tired and cranky, so we tried to put him down for a late second nap. He slept for a little bit but then woke up screaming with tummy trouble.

And this weekend will throw him off even more. Patrick and I are going to have our first overnight away from him. We are headed to NYC for basically 24 hours to go to a wedding reception for a friend of ours. Brenden will probably be fine with it after an initial upset. He’ll be here at home with my parents, or at least my Mom, who will watch him and the dogs for us. I however might be a different story! We’ll see. But I’m looking forward to seeing NYC again, plus, I get to wear a pretty new dress!  And when we return home, somehow we’ll get back into a routine…at least until this semester ends in May.