Merry Merry Happy Happy

The name of this blog should be called the once a week greind 🙂 Ha. I have big intentions of blogging more regularly and both growing and making this blog more integrated with social media in 2015…

A  new favorite place in our house has been in our bed, specifically inside my awesome nest of a pregnancy pillow this is Ben’s favorite spot (sick or not-photo below is of him  and Fisher the devil kitten watching his favorite and only movie he will sit through and actually watch, Planes, Fire and Rescue-during last weeks bought with a cold). Turns out our queen size bed has a pillow fit for a queen, but seems not to hold the entire kingdom-its a bit tight to say the least when we all pile in for a snuggle. but cozy. cozy is good. This pillow is great. I have no idea how I survived without one when I was pregnant with Ben.

We have been baking Christmas cookies and giving them to neighbors and our favorite mailman and eating way too many ourselves…We made sugar cookies-one of my least favorite thing the whole world to do is frost sugar cookies (isn’t that so not mom like!) So I made these (no bake) amazing chocolate, coconut, peanut butter balls-they are SO good! and left the baking the frosting to Ryan and Ben. I think Ben is going to turn out like me-not loving the whole cookie baking/frosting thing….we do enjoying eating them though~hey, maybe they will “help” me fit into these maternity pants I broke out today-they are a wee bit big and I have had to pull them up all day long but boy are they comfy…at 17+ weeks my jeans were starting to get tight-but not tight enough to wear falling down prego pants…where’s the chips and dill dip (my craving! along with Schuler’s bar cheese and crackers and ice water with limes) maybe that will help me fit into these oh so comfy pants. Just kidding. That is not the goal. I actually have been doing really good continuing to work out a few times a week since we joined the YMCA and they offer free child care that Ben loves (bonus!). I also have a 5k to run that I am signed up for (in my mind-registration is not open yet) called the Harvest Stompede the first week of September 2015-which will be just 12 weeks after I have this baby-so maybe I should lay off the chips and dill dip… and Christmas cookies 🙂 but then again….

Ryan and I had a little date night last night. My mom and dad took Ben overnight so we could wrap up Christmas here at Casa Del Greiner-mostly get everything out and see what we had…we ended up thinking that while it looked like an awesome Christmas, we needed to “top it off” with just a few extra things. So we ran some cookies to a sweet neighbor, went out to a quick (and delish) Mexican dinner and then hit up the toy isle one last time. We ended up with some small things and a nice big awesome sled. His face will be sheer delight this year-I can’t wait. We came home and wrapped all the presents while watching Elf 🙂 Boy is it a lot of work to separate the Santa gifts from the mom and dad gifts and get them into their own wrapping paper. This is the first year for that-the whole Santa Paper thing-all the past years he wouldn’t have noticed, but he is way observant so we went there this year.

Here is Ben waiting to see Santa (he had his face painted that morning with a Reindeer nose at a toy donation we had just come from-hence the nose glitter). He was so excited to tell Santa about the Legos he wants. It’s ALL about Legos at our house this year!

I hope you have a Merry Merry and a Happy Happy holiday! And that you get that one little glimmer of a chance to relive the magic-I certainly am with Ben’s over the top excitement and I love it! 4.5 is a great age for Christmas magic!

xx

Stephanie

 

Happy BBB Day!

Happy BBB Day! What’s that you say? It’s Thanksgiving!? What the heck is BBB Day? Let me explain-and while we’re at it Happy Thanksgiving!

BBB Day was Saturday, November 22nd. It started on the Thursday before, when we told our son Ben that we had a surprise for him on Saturday. We told him it was BBB Day! We asked him if he had any guesses as to what BBB Day was, or what all those B’s stood for. Being only 4.5 years old, he did get one of them correct “B is for Ben” he said…and he was right!  Do you know what the rest of those B’s stand for? Drum roll please…..They stand for Ben is Going to Be A Big Brother! Yes, you read that right, we are going to have a baby!!  Ben will become a Big Brother Benjamin the very first week of June, 2015. We are thrilled to be expanding our little family of 3 to 4!

Another baby has always been in the plan but ever since having Ben enter the world in the dramatic (and frankly traumatic-to me anyway) way he did I just couldn’t wrap my mind around actually having another baby. But finally, as my baby started to slip from babyhood to toddler hood and now into a preschooler (soon to be Kindergartener!), somehow it just seemed right. I feel like we gave him a gift of both being an “only child” for the first and very formative years of his life and now an even greater gift of having someone to commiserate with when he gets older about his crazy parents and to hopefully spend holidays with down the road.

Here are a few photos of BBB Day. I searched high and low on the interwebs, even Pinterest for creative ways to tell your child they will become a big brother (or big sister even) and I couldn’t find anything really worth wile…So, I took it upon myself to invent BBB Day. We started the day with balloons lining the stairs to his room-of course I sharpied big B’s and the words Happy B B B Day on to them. And followed it up with B shaped Pancakes for breakfast. We talked a little bit about what all those B’s might mean, looked through his baby book and then told him we were going to visit Santa (Santa was flying in and landing at our local Great Wolf Lodge on a Coast Guard Helicopter-not to be missed if you are 4) and that after visiting Santa we had a special surprise and a gift for him-and that we would tell him what BBB Day stood for.

When we arrived home, I was excited. I tried to keep my expectations of his reaction kind of low as he is only 4.5 and may not be all that excited about sharing his mom and dad with someone new. (I may have even cried a little the night before envisioning the worst…) So to ensure a happy ending after buying a book the day prior (I had to search high and low for a book that didn’t tell him we had a new baby but we were going to eventually have a new baby-I came up with the book Mummy, Mummy What’s In Your Tummy?) I also ran out that night and bought him a firetruck Lego set as a gift to him from “his baby”. So, we read the book first and then gave him his gift (he saw the wrapped gift that morning in my closet-little snoop)…here is a link to a cute (kinda long-7 min) video of the whole thing. *I’m pretty glad I bought him the Lego set from the baby because that is what he tells everyone and that is what he thought was really “cool”. In the weeks leading up to telling him, we slipped in books from the library about becoming a big brother-like Froggies Baby Sister and The Bearnstein Beans New Baby-both of which he seemed to love…we also talked about if there was anyone he knew that was a big brother or a big sister and what he thought about that.

We ended the day by taking him to our favorite restaurant Pearls-I had been craving their Crawfish Enchiladas for days! He loved the restaurant, ate all of his Bayou Burger and even made me cry during dinner by leaning over and telling the baby he loved it, right into my tummy. Ryan caught it in these photos 🙂

Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family!

xx

Stephanie (Ryan, Ben and Baby)