FOLLOW THE LEADER; Or rather, I AM THE LEADER

We took a sibling class with Tivon at the hospital. Talk about a joyful time--I mean, my heart was full. I was 39 weeks pregnant (they recommend taking the class by the 34th week but let's all be realistic, there was no way I was going to have this baby early.) Anyway, Ti ATTACHED himself to the teacher. On the tour, he actually walked backwards and mimicked the hand motions of the teacher. He didn't want to leave the teacher. You'd think this kid didn't get any attention at home.

Learning to swaddle the baby. . . bear, that is.

ACL FESTIVAL
Yep, Josh drug a 3 year old and 6 month old pregnant lady to the outdoor festival. Ok, maybe we were willing participants. :) Ti seriously loves music festival. As we were going to a restaurant last week, he said, "Is there going to be music at this restaurant? I want to go hear some music." Oh will he be in for a surprise if we move away from Austin.
Ti getting a guitar tat. He's that cool.
















Posing with his neon green 'hawk.












The rain poured for the festival and made the entire grounds muddy. I mean, serious mud. I mean, could have had a monster truck competition mud. Here's ti before the mud.











Later that night. . .







It got much worse too but we finally put the camera away because we didn't want it covered with mud too!

It's time . . .
Ok, I've been finding all kinds of excuses to start blogging again--time, pregnancy, little baby, school, etc. The list goes on. Even as I write this, Kaia may be waking up. BUT I'm committing to blogging at least a little every week. I promise I won't neglect my children but I can certainly neglect facebook or tv a bit. :)
Here we go. . .

And my favorite picture . . .
We went to see the movie Where the Wild Things Are. Tivon insisted on wearing a costume. Crazy enough, we didn't even have to buy a new costume. We just had to simply look through his closet.

Time for an uploading frenzy of pictures!
Tivon has become a bit of Star Wars junkie--grandma made this jedi costume that he was totally psyched about it!
Tivon is also a Wizard of Oz junkie--Dorothy is his favorite.
Picking strawberries at the strawberry farm.
Tivon and Daddy at the Austin Triathalon.

BISCUIT BROTHERS!

Ok, this boy is a little obsessed with Biscuit Brothers now. They are a kids musical group that has a show on PBS although we are never up early enough to catch it. Tivon has two of their dvd's and LOVES them. They live on the EIEIO farm for animals and instrucments so he calls his cowboy hat an "eieio hat". Seems easier to say cowboy hat, but who wants to take the easy way! He is also convinced that Farmer Macdonald lives at McDonald's--this doesn't bode well for avoiding McDonald's! We have gotten to see the Biscuits live in concert since they live in Austin (and one of them is a friend of mine). You should check them out if you get a chance! I tried to get a video of tivon

BIG BOY BED!!!
So a week ago, Josh woke up and said, "We should make Tivon's bed a big boy bed now." I said, "Um, we haven't talked about this at all. Don't you think this will freak him out. Remember, tivon takes after me." So Josh took off the side of his bed and Tivon was okay, not great, but okay. Well when nap time came, Tivon freaked out and wanted his bed "fixed". "Broken, fix it!" So I put the side back on.
Fast forward five days. We go into get tivon in the morning and he demands. "Tivon needs big boy bed. Rail off." Okay, so we did as we were commanded and voila, Tivon sleeps in a big boy bed through the night without a peep. He has figured out how to get some cars that are stored under his bed to play with in the morning before we go in. I love his sheepish, prideful look as we discover that he is playing with something in his bed. Dang cute.

A Tensegrity Climbing Structure

Don't ask me to explain how this works--something about everything being in tension and compression at the same time. But Josh has been obsessed with creating a climbing gym for Tivon. Personally, I think it was a bit of an excuse to "play" with some ideas. Of course we could have bought something (clearly, not as cool) for much cheaper, but that's not the point. :) Here's the climbing gym hanging in Josh's workshop area. Tivon of course is helping as Bob the Builder.

Here are all the peices. Pretty simple concept, not so many materials but man, what a price tag. Here's Tivon pushing the gym into place, before Josh removes the braces.Here's the final prodcut. It really is pretty cool--no rod touches another rod, it's all head together by a steel cable. Josh is looking forward to doing the final touches this weekend so Josh, I mean Tivon can play on it.

Making his daddy proud . . . yoda costume, light saber in hand, fast asleep on his anakin pillow.

One final MERRY CHRISTMAS!!
So we can be cheap sometimes--Josh found this bike on a trail when he was out running. It was broken but he thought he could fix it. So he did and we gave this to Tivon for his birthday BUT his legs weren't long enough to ride it. Sooo, we hid it away for six months and whalah--we already had his Christmas present. In the picture, we asked ti to show his "surprise" face.

For those of you that think this boy has every been neglected with not enough toys or clothes, well, here's his stash from this year's Christmas. We proceeded to do a MAJOR clean out to donate to goodwill. I mean, our house is HUGE compared to NYC but still, it's only 870 sq ft. :)

MERRY CHRISTMAS, AGAIN!

Then we headed over to nana and grandpa's house for family and fun. Word has gotten out that Tivon loves to dress up like a fireman--so there were a few fire-themed gifts heading his way. He also enjoyed making everyone "Stop, drop and roll!"You can't really see the ears and eyes on the towel but it is a froggy and tivon fully embodies the froggy every time we are done with bath time. The first night we were back in Austin and took a bath, Tivon pulled the towel off his hook, hugged the towel and said, "I LOVE it!" Very cute.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!
We had a fabulous, whirlwind Christmas in Indiana. We got to spend some quality time with most of our family. Tivon loved hanging with his cousins--he also loved riding a horse as a reindeer. Not sure why that makes sense but hey, this is clearly a boy who loves anything more if it involves a costume.
This couldn't have been more fun for Landon and Tivon! Josh prepared a bubble bath in grandma and papaw's bath. Then for a little fun, he turned on the water jets (which, btw, your not supposed to do!) and the bubble machine began. They were COVERED in bubbles and laughed non stop for an hour. I'm not we can ever top this bath time!

Tivon loves stickers. That's all. No story, just a statement. :)

Chrisis coocoo's

That's right it Christmas cookie time. It may be a little known secret that I have only starting cooking/baking since having Tivon --mostly due to all of his allergies. But now, I have to say I do enjoy making new recipes, experimenting and having some family favorites.

Well, I thought we could start a tradition of making Christmas cookies and taking them to the neghbors. I should have considered my aptitude, or should I say inaptitude for making cookies.

First, I don't keep "regular" flour in our house. I make our bread and are used to wheat or white whole wheat flour--surely this is the same as plain white flour? Then I attempted to mix our cookies with a mixer that is missing one of the whisky things. That doesn't work so well. I tried to hand mix them with a fork. Again, a losing battle. But at least Tivon could "stir" too. So the dough did not look that good but I thought, hey, it's butter and sugar, what could be wrong?

So we continued. We chilled the dough and then Ti and I rolled it out. This actually went relatively well. Good mama/titi time. We cut out snowmen shapes. Very cute. Then baked them. Finally it was time for icing them. I had purchased this icing a week ago in anticipation. In my defense, it does say "Vanilla Frosting". Doesn't that mean white? I thought the picture of green icing was showing the potential of making many colors of icing. Nope. It was green icing. So here's a picture of our pathetic green snowmen. There actually kinda creepy looking. Oh, btw, they don't taste very good either.

So we may need to think of a new tradition.

HELP!!

Speaking of obsessed, Tivon is a little obsessed with "helping". I know, I know I should complain. Except he knows that Firemen help people sooo when he hears a fire truck outside (we live a few blocks from one so that it pretty often); it's like a firehouse here. Tivon runs around gathering his fire coat and fire hat and yells, "help, help! Ti ti help!" Then runs outside to wait for the truck to pick him up. I'm not kidding. I have witnesses to this charade. It's pretty cute except when it's bed time, or meal time or any time you'd just prefer to not run outside and wait for the truck.

Well fortunately, he got a chance to help last weekend when a neighbor was pulling some heavy rocks in a wagon. I seized the opportunity. I said, "ti we should go help her with the rocks." And off we were, Tivon donning his fireman regalia pushing the wagon to her house. She was so thankful, she decided to take a few pictures of us. Enjoy the helper. I know I do.

Beeeeeeeeeees. . .

Needless to say, Ti is in the stage where you introduce him to something and he clings to it for days. We rented the Bees movie since we have had a cold front here (dropped into the 40's brrrr!) and Tivon now wants to dress up like a bee all the time. Well I didn't want to go get a bee costume so we pieced together this number. He doesn't know the difference and flies just the same as if his antennae were black.

Ahhh, Christmas Time. It took a lot of convincing but Ti is finally excited about Christmas and has moved on from Halloween. I think finally giving him a Santa hat (a costume) and that worked. We are also doing our own version of an advent candle. Tivon prays, "Thank you papaw, grandma, mama, dada, nana and ti ti. Amen!" Pretty cute. Sometimes Shalosh even gets a shout out. He mostly likes blowing out the candle. The first night we did it he sang "Happy Birthday to 'ee-uh' (Olivia)". Cracks me up.

Blue Santa Parade! Tivon was so excited about going to the Austin holiday parade.He LOVED the big balloons . . .

And was practically giddy with excitement to see Star Wars characters, Elmo, Chinese dragons and of course marching bands. He seriously marched right along with ALL the bands.

This is his "surprise" face. He had actually been surprised by seeing Darth Vader and I missed it on camera so I asked him to do it again. This is the face I got. :)

This is the Biscuit Brothers. Tivon loves their music and quite honestly, so do we! They are a local band that plays on PBS and around town. We try to catch them whenever we can.

Here's the Blue Santa--pretty cool because it was all about giving toys. So at one point in the parade, all the floats stopped and all the parade goers walked over to pickup trucks and filled them with toys. Pretty cool idea.

Josh is soooo proud. His son likes Star Wars. I will say that Tivon watched one episode (I dont' even know which one) and we play Star Wars but don't watch the movies anymore. Josh was nott too happy about this. I asked Josh when he started watching them and he said, "Well, seven." I said, "Perfect. Tivon can watch them again when he is 7." :) Tivon has picked up some skillz though. It take two light sabers to ward off Tivon's "force".
Even Uncle Brandon got in on the action. Seriously, they look sooo much alike. Ti the little padawon learner.