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!

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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.