Here are some overdue pictures from a few weeks ago. During the first week of June, Grant and I went down to Moody Gardens' Palm Beach area with a few friends. I bought a season pass.....kids under 4 are free, and I only have to pay $25 for the entire summer. What a good deal! Moody Gardens is about 35 miles from our house, so I end up using about 4 gallons of gas to get there and back (which these days is pretty expensive!). But I'm going to try to go once every two weeks with him.....we already made our second trip last week, and I think we'll go when Dean takes a few days off around July 4.

The place is really neat.....it's like a water theme park designed especially for little kids. They have a couple of big pools, plus an area with slides and another area with all kinds of things that splash water all over them! Grant has been a little apprehensive when we first get there each time. And he's still not crazy about the slides, but last week he got to the point where he would just run out into the pools with no fear. Yikes!

Playing with Daddy on the couch later that night.......he fell while we were at Palm Beach and scraped up his nose pretty good (it will be more obvious in later pictures from our trip to AL).


My parents came to visit the following Monday, June 9. Grant entertained them for a while (it usually takes him a few minutes to warm up to visitors, but then he gets into show-off mode!). Then we went to the pool that afternoon. I don't have any pool pictures, but he had a great time and really enjoyed sitting in his float.

Afterwards, we came back to the house and Grant found my dad's shoes. He figured out how to put them on and was busy walking around with them on for the next ten minutes. Ever since, he has been enamored with shoes! He takes ours out of our closets and tries to put them on. It's especially funny looking when he grabs one of my strappy heeled shoes and attempts to wear those!!






My mom took videos of him, and he got very curious as to what she was looking at!

So proud of my little boy!

I am so proud of Grant.....he did wonderful in the nursery all week! His teachers were two ladies he's never stayed with before (Laura and Tina), and every day they said that he was "a joy to have". Wow!! We've never heard this comment when we've dropped Grant off before! He always cried the first few minutes, but then was able to calm down. I think a big difference was that this week, he was actually in a class with kids right around his age (and not 5-6 months younger, who aren't walking or are just starting to walk). So they went outside a lot to play, which was probably a good distraction for him.

Yesterday I accidentally spotted him (and he spotted me) while my VBS kids were in music time, and his class was taking a buggy ride. I went out and stood with them for a few minutes while they watched music. Tina (his teacher) told me that he had been a social butterfly.....he waved or pointed to people he recognized as he rode on the buggy. And when the songs played at music time, he'd shake side to side in his little seat.....this is his version of dancing (he doesn't do much more than this when he's standing up!).

At the end of every day, after I picked him up, he wanted to take off running around the halls. He'd try to walk in classrooms, push buttons on the elevator, and had so much energy even though it was almost 1pm and he hadn't slept all day! This alone was a sign that he had a good time.....usually he's so upset in the nursery that he's exhausted and doesn't want me to put him down for even a second.

Yay!! Hopefully this means he will do okay in mother's day out when I put him in (I'm trying to decide if I should do it in the fall or wait until January......).

Some pictures

Here are a couple of good "before" pictures, taken a few days before his haircut:
It's a little hard to tell on this sized picture, but his hair was SO long and straggly! This was after a trip to Galveston last Thursday, so that's why it was particularly bad looking! Margaret loaned me a bunch of her pregnancy clothes, and here Grant has decided to turn over the entire container onto our bedroom floor. That was fun to clean up!
After the haircut.....what a nice-looking boy! We made a cake last Sunday, and lucky Grant got to lick the spatula after Daddy finished making the icing! He likes to say "mmmm!" when he tastes something yummy these days!
I got my haircut too.....much shorter than I expected, but I love it (and it's very easy to fix!).

Pregnancy shot taken on Sunday.....just after Grant turned towards me and sprayed me with the hose!

Watering.....still his favorite activity.....even more than swinging!
As I think I said before, Lita (who cuts our hair) is like me and doesn't like for little boys to have super short hair. She was careful not to cut it too short in the back, so that it can still curl up a little. Here he's watering one of our roses.....this rose was almost dead a couple of months ago, and now it has a lot of flowers!

Small victory in the nursery!

Today was my first day to work at Vacation Bible School at our old church. We left this church a couple of months ago, but I still do a lot of stuff up there.....I have my Right at Home moms study there, and I'm planning on enrolling Grant in their Mother's Day Out in the fall.

Anyway, I wasn't really looking forward to today because VBS lasts from 8:15 to 12:30. Grant usually takes one long nap these days, but he's usually getting really tired by 11am or so. So I assumed he'd have a major meltdown in the nursery (he still doesn't do great in the nursery on a regular basis anyway). I told his teachers repeatedly to page me if he cried or needed to be held continuously after 11am.

While our group of kids were in music, I took a walk down Grant's hallway (I know, this is exactly what parents are NOT supposed to do!) to see if I could hear him crying, or to see if they were outside or on a buggy ride. This was at around 11:15....and sure enough, they were coming down the hallway in the buggy. I guessed wrong about which way they'd turn, and he saw me for a second and started crying. Thankfully he stopped a minute later as they kept walking! At 12:30 when VBS ended, I went to pick him up (and apologized profusely to his teachers for being a nosy parent). They said he did very well the entire day! He played a lot, ate snacks, and was very good! He was standing at the doorway, not crying or fussing, when I came to pick him up. Wow!!!!

Hopefully this will continue tomorrow.....we have Wednesday and Friday still to go, but I was so encouraged after today!

Pregnancy picture

A few people have asked me to post a pregnant picture.....we haven't taken too many yet, but here's one we took a couple of weeks ago, on June 5 or 6:
Grant loves to lift up my shirt and press on my belly! I haven't even mentioned the baby a lot to him, because I figured he wouldn't understand what I was talking about. But while we were in Alabama, he was pressing on my belly and laying his head on top of it. Dean's mom asked him where the baby was, and he pointed to my belly! So I guess he does understand.....people say that kids have a sixth sense about that kind of stuff, and maybe I believe it now! I figured he might begin to understand right before the baby is due, when my belly is huge. But I thought the changes would be too slow and subtle for him to already notice.

Grant and I went yesterday to get our hair cut. It was Grant's second visit with Lita, and he wasn't quite as keen on getting a haircut as last time! He wouldn't sit on my lap like he did before, so Lita cut it while Dean was standing with him. She gave him a few lollipops (he didn't care for them too much), and we were able to distract him enough for her to finish. And I got my hair chopped.....it's shorter than I expected, but I like it! I will try to take another pregnancy picture in the next few days and post it soon.....