He's feeling much better!

Tate woke up this morning with a smile on his face. He hasn't had a fever all day and has been one happy (though snot covered) boy! We had so much fun just playing today and hanging out at home. He still isn't eating much at all, but he's drinking plenty and acting like himself again!

"It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!"

We put up the Christmas tree this afternoon when Sean got off work. It's starting to feel so much like Christmas time. It's snowing and it's actually accumulating now. Our tree and the sounds of Christmas music definitely are putting me in the spirit! :)

Tate enjoyed helping Daddy put the tree up...

Sean's favorite thing to do is put up the lights...and untangle them...and make sure they all work. He LOVES doing that...HA.

Tate was very excited about the ornaments.
Tate loves pointing at the ornaments and telling us what they are...here he is pointing at Mickey.

HOT...and not in a good way...

Tate has been burning up this last 24 hours. It breaks my heart when he's sick. Last night at 2:30am, I was awakened to the pitter patter of feet in the hallway heading towards the kitchen and a little sicky voice saying, "mommeeee". He was scared and didn't know where I was and when I picked him up, it was like picking up a HEATER! Sean woke up when I went out into the hallway and got Tate and he got him some medicine and then took over since I had to work in the morning and he didn't. He rocked our HOT little boy for a few minutes until he fell back to sleep and then put him back down. He was burning up again this morning and I could hardly bear to leave him when I went to work...it broke my heart! Sean said that he did pretty good today between his feverish times. He and Daddy did a lot of laying on the couch and cuddling. He has been drinking just fine, which is good, but hasn't eaten since breakfast. Poor baby. :( He was acting okay this evening until about 8:00pm when he started burning up again, he cuddled in about that time with a new dose of Tylenol to watch the Incredibles for a while. He fell asleep in my arms and I layed him down, still hot. I hope his fever breaks and he sleeps through the night and feels better tomorrow. Seeing your child be sick and uncomfortable is just about the worst, most helpless feeling! It's not fun for any of us. I wish I could just take it away from him!

Every Few Months...

We sit on the same spot on the same couch and take a family photo.

Many of them look similar to this...

And we're usually lucky to get a halfway decent one like this...

These are some of my favorite pictures that we have. It's really neat to see how much Tate changes with each family picture. I am so thankful for my little family!

Our Thanksgiving...

Our Thanksgiving was great. It was so nice being able to spend time with family and we ate a ton of yummy food! Pat and Linda made us roast beef and mashed potatoes and then we had the traditional Thanksgiving dinner in Marshalltown at the rehab center where Sean's Grandma is at with Sean's extended family. It was delicious! And my Pumpkin Mousse Trifle turned out DEVINE if I do say so myself!!! :) I will definitely be making it again...possibly at Christmas.

So here is our evening in pictures...

I can't tell you how much this picture makes my heart go pitter patter...I get butterflies thinking that I can call these boys MINE!

And Tate wants to be just like Sean...here he is crossing his legs while leaning on the wall just like his daddy.

Tate thought these colored carpet squares were a game. He had fun playing on them.

And he made some friends with some of the patients.

It was a great day, but unfortunately when we got home, Tate came down with a fever and was not acting right. He had thrown up in his pack and play right when he woke up from his nap, but he acted fine after that so we were hoping it was a fluke. I don't think it was. Though he didn't eat great at supper, he did eat okay and hasn't gotten sick since. He does have a nasty cough though and we thought maybe that's why he threw up because he was coughing so hard. I don't know, all I know is that he is not well and he fell asleep on Sean while he was rocking him before bed and that NEVER happens. I hope whatever it is, it's short lived. Poor baby. :(

Who cries while watching the Dancing With the Stars Finale???

Me. And I cried like 4 times during it too. Seriously, what is wrong with me?!

Thankful

I can't believe it's Thanksgiving in 2 days! The weather definitely makes it feel like the holidays, but it seems like just yesterday we had the air conditioner running. We are going up to Colo tomorrow to celebrate Thanksgiving with Pat and Linda and Linda's side of the family. It will be nice to see the extended family as we do not get to see them very often.

We have so many things to be thankful for this year...our health, family, friends, a roof over our heads, food to eat, clean water to drink. We truly are blessed. God is good.

Today I bought the ingredients to make this...

It's a Pumpkin Mousse Trifle. I (unfortunately) don't have a trifle bowl like this so I am actually going to make individual servings in little disposable juice cups that I bought today. I plan to bring them to our Thanksgiving dinner we are celebrating in Marshalltown with Sean's family. I hope they are good. If they are, I may make them again for Christmas!

Awesome!

I found out tonight that the word "awesome" is no longer an "in" word to say. And apparently in saying it, one is showing that they are old. I was informed of this by a very knowledgeable 13 year old who knows what words are "in". I don't think I can break the habit of saying this. I am old I guess. Apparently one is to say "tight" instead of awesome in order to be "with the times". Ugh.

We're lovin' the new bed...

Tate DID get out of his bed today a while after I layed him down for his nap. He got out about 20 minutes after I layed him down when he still hadn't gone to sleep. When I heard him and went into his room I realized he had a poopy diaper. When he saw me walk into his room, he had a look of fear in his eyes and he darted back into his bed SO FAST! We gave him a talk last night saying he wasn't to get out of his bed and he knows that he shouldn't do that. After I changed him, I explained again that he was NOT to get out of his bed to play. He crawled into bed, said, "Tate seep" (aka Tate sleep) and covered up and a few minutes later he was snoring away. Now, 3 hours later, he is STILL snoring in there. I think he likes his new bed! And so do we! :) Here's to another good night in his new big boy bed!

I can't believe how easy it was...

We took the front off of Tate's bed tonight.

He was so excited!

And so proud!

And this is a paranoid Mama's solution to making sure her son has a soft landing if he falls out of bed!

Tate went to bed normally and never got out. He talked for a while in his bed before he went to sleep, but he's snoring away now. He did such a great job! Now, we are just hoping he doesn't fall out tonight. We're going to be anxious to see how he does when he wakes up in the morning too. Hopefully it will be a good night!

Our Little Picasso

Tate LOVES to color...he loves art!

He went a little crazy in the tub with a crayon...

Just kidding...they were his new bathtub crayons! He loved them!

$10 Friday at Water For Christmas

Go.
Today.
Donate $10.
If we all just sacrificed $1o today, we could make an unbelievable change in the world. That's it. Just $10 (or more if you feel so inclined!). Let's build a well today and save the lives of so many of our brothers and sisters who would probably not survive if it weren't for our small donation. Go HERE now.
Click the red donate button.
It's such a small sacrifice for such an amazing difference in the world!
Make a difference!

I can't think of anything exciting to blog...

So this is what you get...our plans for the next few days and just some ramblings.

I love Thursdays because it's the first day after 4 long days that Sean doesn't work until 10pm. So tomorrow, we can be together...as a family. I love it. Since this schedule, I just feel like every evening we have I need to cherish and want to do "family things". Tate loves it when we're all 3 together. He doesn't seem unhappy during our evenings alone and I love that one on one time with him, but he definitely knows it's special and needs to be cherished when we're all together.

So tomorrow, after dinner I am going on a MUCH NEEDED grocery trip. Honestly, we have been digging deep in the cupboards these last 3 days to create meals. It's been interesting to say the least. It's just ridiculous how much we have in our cupboards that just sits there, so we decided to eat our cupboards and fridge dry before we headed to the store. We have nothing else left now, so I will go tomorrow.

I cannot believe Thanksgiving is in 1 week! That is the start of all of the holiday craziness. Soon it will all be over because it always flies by and then Sean will be in his last semester of nursing school!!!! Oh. My. Goodness!!! I get butterflies just thinking about it! I can't imagine how HE must feel!

Last weekend was momentous with a few "firsts" for Tate. From first big boy potty to first haircut and first movie, it was quite exciting. We MIGHT switch Tate into a "big boy bed" this weekend. I don't know if I'll be able to talk Sean into it, we'll see. I don't know if it's necessary...I guess I am just feeling like I should...like it's time. I don't know.

That's all for tonight. :)

Ditto...

Here is a post from Cassie's blog about Water For Christmas...I had to share. It's true, she wrote it well, read it and maybe you'll get inspired. I have been inspired from the beginning, but reading things like this really make it touch even deeper...

I'm consumed. Every single time I brush my teeth, take a shower, wash my hands, do a load of laundry, a load of dishes, fill up a glass with ice, I think about those who don't get to do that. Those who would give anything to be drinking that water that I'm flushing down my drain. It could have been me. It could have been my kids. I do not deserve this water any more than the woman in Africa, I just happened be be born in America. Bono's quote keeps running through my mind,"Where you live should no longer determine whether you live." I've been listening to a podcast series from Mosaic Church. I have quoted McManus several times on this blog and I love so much of what he stands for. Mosaic is his church and I love to listen to their messages. ANYWAY...the series I have been listening to talks about "What if everyone...". Last week it was What if everyone CONNECTED? What would the world look like? And today I listened to "What if everyon SERVED?" What would the world look like? I found it so interesting that they first talked about relationships. It has become so obvious to me that movements are built on relationships. We cannot do it alone. We cannot knock out the water crisis single handedly. But suddenly our relationships come into play. I'm so excited about this. And suddenly my mom is so excited about this...because she loves me and she has felt my excitement through our conversations. And suddenly, Melissa, on the other side of town is excited about it and wondering if she can implement it at her place of employment, and then Jennie gets excited about it and decides maybe we don't need to do that $10 white elephant gift game. And then Kelly from Phoenix emails and says she wants to implement it somehow in her classroom and suddenly the word is spreading to Arizona. And then Lisa sets up a table in her deli in Seattle and Kelly's dad is setting up a table in Nebraska. And Larry's wife in Baltimore "is like an amimal", setting up tables all over town. Courtney in Virginia is selling shirts and Christa, a college student in Missouri, has designed shirts and is selling them and Taylor and Joanna have designed water bottles in Pennsylvania and Jill and Josh from New Zealand set up a facebook group that quickly grows to over 1300 memebers and Naomi and her mother in Colorado set up a gift wrapping station and on and on.
Relationships.
Water.
Friendships.
Water.
I'm amazed by this. And reminded how important we all are to each other. And what a difference we can make if we all band together instead of working against eachother.
Colorado, Iowa, Missouri, Virginia, Maryland, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, New Zealand. All for water.
We are all connected.
All brothers and sisters.
And it keeps ringing truer and truer in my ear...
"Where you live should no longer determine whether you live."

It only took 25 months, but we finally did it...

We decided to give Tate his first haircut!

He did SO GREAT! I was actually surprised. He wasn't terribly happy in the beginning, but he got better throughout. Be prepared...LOTS of pics! :)

He didn't like the cape at first.

Then he just accepted the fact that he had to get it cut.

Then he kind of started to think it was fun.

He did so well, I was even able to get those little stubborn hairs behind his ears that sometimes are hard to get on kids.

He was getting pretty proud towards the end because we were praising him the whole time.

He LOVES his hair stylist! :)

Here he is seeing it for the first time in the mirror with Daddy...he thought I did a good job.

Such a BIG BOY!

the movie was a success

Tate did great during Madagascar! He loved it and sat through it the whole time. The only problem was he kept getting folded up in the seat. He wasn't big enough to hold it down so Sean and I had to hold it down the whole time. We were so proud of what a big boy he was!

The last 15 minutes he sat on Daddy's lap. This was after the movie ended, I didn't think that it would be very nice of me to take a picture with a flash during the movie.

He seriously ate about half of this large popcorn and I am not even kidding. He chowed handfuls the whole time!

What a big boy he was!

trying to go potty

We got Bode's old training potty this evening and Tate was ecstatic! We first tried to put him on the big boy potty so he could sit on that. He enjoyed that, but then we decided to try it as just the training potty. He REALLY liked it that way. He insisted on taking his shirt off and we spent a good half an hour getting on and off the potty, learning to make sure his "penuth poothed down" (penis is pushed down) so he doesn't make a mess when he pees. He was obsessed with showing Sean and I that he could do that. Right now it's just fun for him, he really doesn't "get" it yet. Although multiple times a day, he'll walk into the room I'm in with his pants at his ankles saying, "go potty?!" He's funny.

Essence of Tate

I couldn't think of a better picture to represent Tate these days. Snot running out of his nose, food all over his face, messy rats nest hair, drool running down his chin, but still tso cute I can hardly stand it! (click on the picture to enlarge it and you'll get a better idea of what I'm talking about.)

Tate Update

So I thought I would post some things new about Tate...

Tate is recently REALLY into books and reading. He has an Apple book that he got from our apple picking trip last year that he LOVES to read over and over, but tonight, when I was cleaning up after he went to bed, I picked up 17 books that were strewn all over that he had been "reading".

Tate also loves to sing. It's kind of a ritual that we rock and sing before bed at night after reading a book. He says, "bible?" because he wants to sing Jesus Loves Me and he likes the part that goes "for the bible tells me so" and stresses the words bible and so in that line. It's pretty sweet. He'll sing that song over and over. He also loves the ABC's, Itsy Bitsy Spider, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Jesus Loves the Little Children. He is very picky though and if I start to sing something that he doesn't want to sing, he'll say, "NO ABC" or "NO PIDER (spider)".

He's starting to recognize his colors. He knows yellow and purple the best though.

He can count to ten...if he's in the mood. :)

In the last couple of days he has suddenly decided he wants to sit on the potty. It's not really an easy task though because he needs his pants completely taken off or he doesn't want to and he prefers to take his shirt off to. What's with that? Then, he doesn't want his diaper back on when he's "all done". Which isn't good because he's lately been obsessed with his "parts" and points at it all the time and says, "penuth". When he's naked, he likes to pull on it and make sure I see that that is his "penuth". I kind of hope he's not doing that at daycare. Ugh.

Another thing he does now when he has an "owie" (which seems to be all the time...he's a bit dramatic) is he wants us to kiss it. It works though, whenever we kiss it, he says, "bedder".

Also, he has a deep hatred of shoes on his feet. It's a problem. We can barely get them on and he's taking them off saying, "soos off"and then usually his socks come off after that. I don't know what it is, but he doesn't like things on his feet.

He is still completely obsessed with Handy Manny. He loves all of his Handy Manny stuff he has and LOVES the show too. He's pretty much over Mickey Mouse Clubhouse although he'll watch it a little bit.

He has a very limited diet. He loves Mac and Cheese, Ravioli or Spaghetti, Fish Sticks, PB sandwiches or PB & J. He LOVES beans and corn, string cheese, cereal bars, fig bars, waffles and french toast, bananas, peaches, pears, pickles, cottage cheese, grilled cheese, hot dogs, mini corn dogs and CHUGS milk and water. That may seem like a lot, but it's really not when you have to figure out what to feed him that isn't the same thing he's had in the last couple of days. He won't eat any meat aside from what I listed. Other veggies are hit and miss.

He desperately needs his tonsils taken out. They are HUGE and he has sleep apnea and snores like a grown man. He drools like a 6 month old and when given food that doesn't break down well (like meat), he can't swallow it. We are waiting until after the first of the year, but really he should probably get them taken out ASAP because we just know he'll be so much happier and a different child once they're out. I am not looking forward to him having to be put under though. I don't even like to think about it. :(

As far as talking goes, Tate is super chatty (usually moreso when it's just Sean and I around), I think he may be a bit shy in that category around others. In the privacy of our own home though, he never isn't talking it seems. We have conversations and they just crack me up. He is too funny. He can say anything, but a lot of times can't find the right words. When I help him say what he wants to say, it's amazing how it sticks and he remembers what to say the next time that topic comes up again. He's such a sponge!

He is so amazing and even though it seems that I couldn't possibly love him more than I already do, each day I seem to love him more! I love him so much it hurts! I love this age, just as I've said about almost every age, I think it's my favorite. That is aside from the tantrums and naughty spells...and boy does this one know how to do a tantrum right! He might be an actor some day because he is total drama! :)

a movie and a crappy work schedule

I won a couple of free movie tickets from a contest at work a couple of days ago. We decided that we are going to attempt to take Tate to his first movie, Madascar 2 - Escape to Africa. We love the first Madagascar and Tate likes it too (although not as much as Nemo), so we figured we'd give it a try and if we have to leave because Tate is not into it, at least we're not out much money. We'll see how it goes. We're going on Friday evening all 3 of us. Tate loves popcorn, so I'm thinking with the big screen and some yummy popcorn (and maybe some M&M's :)), he may just do okay. The movie is only 89 minutes long, so that's not too bad either.

I am sitting here alone. Tate is in bed, it's 9:15 pm and Sean won't even be home for at least an hour. If I want to see him even for a moment today, I will need to stay up and wait for him. I am tired, but I want to get at least one minute with him. I am not adjusting well to this new schedule. He gets home and says hello, grabs his books and heads down to the basement to do homework. He's lucky to get to bed before 3 a.m and is up with the birds to study more, go to class or take care of Tate while I go to work until he goes to daycare. I don't know how he does it...really. It's like each semester things get a little worse. I am SO ready for him to be done with school...I can't imagine how he must feel! He amazes me every day. Only 5 1/2 months to go and he'll have his BSN! It is going to be such a great feeling for him and I am already so proud of his dedication and hard work.

Let's talk water!

So I'm not sure if you remember my post about Water For Christmas, but it's catching like WILD FIRE, and it should be! This cause is something that we should all get excited about. What a difference we could make! There are people dancing for water, there are now Water For Christmas tees (check the side bar button), there are bracelets, there are ideas for teachers to use with their classes, there are designs created to make posters and items to create a fundraising table, there are just so many ideas. Check out the website water4christmas.com. And today, the water bottles. They are aluminum, they are BPA free, they are SO BEAUTIFUL, they are $15, order one...or 10 HERE! :)

In case I am forgetting something, go to Jody's Blog and click on the Water tab at the top of her web page and you can check out all of the links and tools and things you can do to participate in helping get clean water to all who need it! Please do whatever you can. Every little bit can make a big difference. If we all just did a little, imagine the huge impact we could make...imagine if we all did a lot!

not a lot to say.

Tate is sick...he has a constant stream of green snot streaming from both nostrils. I want nothing more right now than for him to learn how to blow his nose. Seriously, it would be SO HELPFUL if he just would blow. I'm trying to show him, but it's not working. Poor thing is snotty and hacking up a lung every night. Luckily, he hasn't been feverish though. Hopefully he will get through this yuck without getting a fever.

Sean has started his new work schedule and it's good and bad. He is enjoying his new position more than the one he had previously, but his schedule pretty much stinks. He works until 10pm every Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. He is off by 4 pm on Saturdays now though which is good because he was working until 6 pm on Saturdays with his old schedule. We'll manage...I keep telling myself this is all temporary.

So that's all for tonight. Sorry, not very exciting.

We're Home

And we're hoping that we will not be attending anymore funerals for a long time!

It was so wonderful seeing so many family members that we don't see but every several years because of living so far away.

The Stewart Clan

My mom, my sister and I

Tate was T-I-R-E-D yesterday because of the lack of a nap. Here he is at the beginning of his meltdown before bed.

And as you can see, he was quite discheveled this morning from a bit of a rough night.

We're happy to be home. We are EXAUSTED and not ready to start the work week tomorrow. We're feeling so grateful for all of the family and friends we have in our life and this last week, we have been made to realize that we need to cherish every moment spent with them because that time can be gone in an instant. Even though our grandparents were not well, losing them was still so very hard and we will miss them so much!