Such a silly little man!

With Brandon's new found vocabulary has come quite a few funny conversations! For example:

The other night when Richard got home from work, Brandon was just waking up from his nap. Richard opened up Brandon's door to let him out of his room, but Brandon wouldn't get up from his bed. Richard sat down on the bed with him and asked him what was wrong. Brandon, in a very dramatic voice, said "I just can't take this anymore" and laid his head back down on the bed.

Then last night Brandon was cuddled up with me being all sweet and lovey. Trying to be sweet back, I said "are you mommy's big boy?". And here's how the rest of the conversation went:

Brandon: "No"
Me: "Oh? Are you mommy's little boy?"
Brandon: "No"
Me: "Are you Mommy's baby boy?"
Brandon: "Nope"
Me: "Are you a girl then?"
Brandon: "Yep Mommy, I'm a big girl!"

Guess we'll have to work on that one. =)


He made us laugh again tonight when he randomly came up and asked me if I have DirecTV. I think that means that we should probably stop watching so much TV. lol

Homemade fun!

I stole this from Dana's blog- I thought it was a fun idea! I've kind of been feeling crafty lately, so you never know what you might get. *wink*


Homemade Fun!! The first five people to respond to this post will get something made by me! My choice. For you. This offer does have some restrictions and limitations: 1. I make no guarantees that you will like what I make! 2. What I create will be just for you. 3. It'll be done this year. 4. You have no clue what it's going to be. Who knows? Not you, that's for sure! 5. I reserve the right to do something extremely strange ! The catch? Oh, the catch is that you must repost this on your blog and extend the same offer to 5 people! You know, keep the cycle going!So the first 5 people to leave a comment, and post this on their blog, win a FAB-U-LOUS homemade gift by me! *Oh, and be sure to post a picture of what you win when you get it!*

A much needed reprieve...

I think I've been so stuck in my own little world, that I haven't been a very good friend lately. I seem to have let Dr.s appts., school meetings and Brandon's therapy take over my life. So when Britney called me up to get together for lunch on Wednesday, I was ecstatic! Britney, you are awesome, and you have no idea how bad I needed someone to help me get out of my rut!
She made an awesome lunch for us (thank you, thank you, thank you!!!), our kids got to play together, and best of all I got to slow down and spend time with my dear friend that I've missed very much. So, I concluded that I need to take time to find identities other then just being "mom" all the time, and that I need to put more effort into my friendships (oooooh, 2 lessons in 1 day, yay!).
Wednesday also happened to be the day of our anniversary, and a friend of ours offered to watch our kids so we could go out. It was our first date since Oct. 2007! Sad, I know. We were planning to go to Olive Garden, but decided on Chapalas last minute, and I'm so glad we did. When we got there, there were only 4 other people in the whole place. I think we spent 2 hours there just talking and reconnecting. We had both been looking forward to our night out, and it was every bit as wonderful as we had hoped for.
After we left Chapalas, we weren't exactly sure what to do (really, what do adults without kids go do???), so we opted to just go wander the mall for awhile. It sounds lame, but it was actually a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the mall does have to close at a certain time, so we had no choice but to say goodbye to our night out. We did resolve to make date night a regular occurrence at our house after we realized how crucial it is on our marriage.

This is what happened 9 years ago...

It was 9 years ago today that Richard and I got married. It's kind of funny, now that I think about it, how our marriage started. We were young, too young maybe? And in love, and we couldn't wait any longer to tie the knot- even though we already had a church reserved and a wedding date of June 10th picked out. My wedding dress was picked out as well, but wouldn't be altered for another 3 months at least. I don't really know what we were thinking, but on a whim, we decided one night (Feb. 10th, 2000 to be specific) that we would just go down to the court house the next day and have a judge marry us on our lunch break, then we would go back to work, and then spend the weekend looking for an apartment to rent, you know, so we could actually live together. Well, we did go to the court house on our lunch breaks, with 1 witness in tow, and found out there would be an hour wait and a $50 fee for the next judge to marry us. We decided to go for plan B and have a friend of ours marry us that night instead. So we made some phone calls, found a church that was available and went back to work. That night after I got off work, I made a mad dash to the store that had my dress reserved, and luckily found out that it would fit well enough for me to be able to wear it that night. Then I ran home and had my room mate, Kirsten, try to come up with some way to style my newly cut, very short hair. We couldn't come up with much, so she just put it up in 2 braids- kind of tacky, eh? I wasn't in the right mind set to safely drive, so Kirsten volunteered to drive me across town to the church. When we got there, I discovered that somebody had called all of our friends (luckily they did, because we forgot too! Woops!) and there was quite a crowd waiting for us. We still don't know who made all the phone calls for us, but we are eternally greatful for it!
So our friend that was going to marry us had one condition for us before he would acutally let us take our vows, and that was that 1 of us would have to call 1 of our parents to tell them what we were up to. I was too scared to call my parents, so Richard called his- and happily they were elated for us. I knew mine wouldn't be so thrilled, so we opted to tell them about a week after we got hitched, which is not one of the better decisions I've made in my life time (sorry about that mom and dad). Anywho, we went through with the ceremony and it was short but beautiful. We were surrounded by our friends and fortunately at least 1 family member, my husband's brother. We had a short, low key reception after that and then we were on our way to West Yellowstone for our Honeymoon (actually we stayed at a very nice hotel in Boise for the first night, thanks to arrangements made by my BIL). I won't go into details about our Honeymoon, because it's an entirely different story, but I will say that it involves strep throat, a blizzard, 4 tornadoes, a 5 hour long power outage, and nearly being fired from my job.

It's funny to look back on this now. This was remarkably out of character for me at the time, but now I think that it sums us up pretty well.

An update

Brandon's Dr. appt. was on Thursday and it went really well. He was officially diagnosed with autism, and the Dr. thinks that it's severe enough that Brandon will need special ed. We went in thinking that he would be diagnosed with something else, like ADHD or just a sensory disorder, but Dr. Felix said that it's 100% autism. In all honesty though (I hope this doesn't sound heartless), having a diagnosis like that won't really change anything for us. He's still our sweet guy, and we already knew that he had a learning disability, so we'll just continue working with it. We are hoping that he will be accepted into the developmental preschool here, and we'll be meeting with them in Feb. to find out if he qualifies. Keep your fingers crossed for us. =)

Rylee also had a Dr. appt. this week, for her 1 year check up. She weighs 21 lbs (60%) and is 28 inches long (35%). She's just a little tiny thing to me, but I love that she can actually wear her clothes for a good amount of time before she grows out of them. Brandon was wearing 2T and 3T clothes by his first birthday, so I'm not used to this at all.

I was worried about the possibility of Rylee being autistic, but our pediatrician reassured us that there's only an 8% chance, and that Rylee is right on track for normal development. I was thrilled to hear that!