First Flakes

Every time we've played in the snow this winter it was usually when Jack was napping inside. Today we decided it was time for him to brave the storm. He loved it at first but after a while he got a little cold which we suspected would happen.

I loved watching the flakes hit his eyelashes. Can you imagine seeing snow for the first time? How fun to be a baby and have everything be a new adventure. Chase and I love watching Sadie and Jack experience their "firsts." It's like initially doing it all over again:-)

Who needs a snowmobile? I love that in these winter months we still use our California gear including our boogie boards. Chase had the brilliant idea to hitch the board to the back of the scooter and it worked swimmingly!! Don't worry, we drove like 2 miles an hour. Sadie LOVED it and we even gave Jack a little ride. For about an hour our poor scooter gave each of us a little excursion down the road and back. The speed bumps made for an exhilarating ride.






I know I probably brag too much about my kids but seriously...look at that face!!!! I am bursting!! I don't know how I can handle all this cuteness. I want to SQUEEZE him WAY too much and those cheeks drive me bonkers. I love my kids. God made them cute because he knows I struggle being a mom sometimes (who doesn't?). I find myself having a lot more patience with them as long as they're dazzling me with their bright eyes, rosy cheeks, and sweet sounds.

Jack Jack and more Jack

My sweet little Jack is 8 months old. He's changed a lot this month. In fact Jack has become quite a little fire cracker. My mellow, sweet tempered little guy has now developed an opinion and he wants it to be heard...NOW!! I've noticed that he's been chewing on his fingers and crying a lot more. He's teething...of course...which explains the bad mood.


Chase and I handle him so differently. There's something about the "mother son bond" that persuades me to cuddle, sooth, and kiss him all the time. Chase thinks I need to roughen him up a bit. Jack has a serious attachment to me and has just started crying a little when Chase holds him. He looks longingly over Dad's shoulder at me as if to say "are you kidding me Mom...what is this!!?"
We play the game where we see who Jack will go to when we hold out our arms and of course he dives into mine and nuzzles into my chest when Chase holds out his. Jack will even scramble up my chest with his feet while almost perching on my shoulder whenever Chase comes into the room. He also does this when he's really excited (like when I first pick him up in the morning or when I pick him up out of his high chair). I think it's cute, but Chase of course is a little offended. Don't worry Chase, you're definitely Sadie's favorite and will probably be Jack's too.
Jack still sleeps through the night but with these new teeth coming in naps have been harder to come by. I can usually get a really great 2 hour nap in the morning but afternoons are quite the challenge. For a while he would sleep for just a half and an hour. However, I can always count on him sleeping soundly from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. unless he decides to surprise us with a 5:30 a.m. scream like he did two days ago.
He is sitting up great and crawling even better. His crawl is pretty "army inspired" but I often see him rocking on all fours mustering up the courage to try it out. He usually ends up on his tummy which makes him spit up. I'll be excited for the actual crawling but I have to say this mobility has really thrown me for a loop. We have two sets of stairs and no gates. I just haven't had time to retrieve any. That's on my list of things to do next week...I probably won't get around to it like many other daunting tasks. We've been using big boxes and tricycles to keep him from falling down the stairs but the only place I really feel he's safe is in his crib and it's the only place I can leave him and get anything done!!
He's pretty wild. Being held is so "last month" for him. All he wants to do is be on the ground crawling everywhere and getting into everything. He loves rocking back and forth on Sadie's tricycle and is obsessed with bathrooms. If we forget to close a bathroom door, he instantly notices and will always surprise me with his speed towards the toilets. Just today I realized he can stand up by himself if holding TIGHTLY to his crib. This is great but I think it's time to lower his mattress.

Feeding Jack is hilarious. He'll often shout out to remind us that he's TOP PRIORITY. At dinner he and Sadie will have shouting conversations. It's actually really cute. Short abrupt sounds come from him mouth in between each bite and if the spoon isn't there fast enough, the shouts get LOUDER!! He eats really fast. Chase will feed him at top speed and is still lagging behind for Jack.





He's a little dream and totally cracking us all up. Sadie and he are kind of at the point where they can entertain each other. If he's crawling on the floor and she runs past him, he'll always let out a big burst of laughter. This, of course, makes my job much easier and WAY more fun.

Neutral Nemesis

I don't know if they have a name for a person who wears either black, gray, brown or white every day, but for now lets just call it an "Abby." I don't know how it happened but I don't wear anything unless it is one of these colors. Can we even call these "colors." When I buy clothing, I am immediately drawn to the neutral tones. The East Coast has not only turned my skin extremely pasty but has turned my style rather drab as well. I used to wear polka dot shoes for heaven's sake!! Where has Abby gone?

The other day I went to H&M with Nick and Brooke when they were in town for the night. I went in wearing a gray sweatshirt and left the store after buying another gray sweatshirt (it was a zip hoodie unlike the pullover I was wearing), and a bunch of brown elastics. Do you think this reflects the kind of mood I'm in? I have to admit these winter months do make me rather blue (or gray..I should say) but I wouldn't call myself depressed or anything like that. I think the weather has not only made me dress warmer but has toned down all my color. I wish I could get someone from a talk show like Oprah to help me get out of this rut. I need a makeover!! My other issue is that it's hard to find shirts long enough to cover my torso (which has become even harder to cover after two kids:-). So when I shop I am initially looking for anything LONG and for some reason, everything long that I find is a boring color. The gray sweatshirt came in an electric blue as well but I just don't have the guts. What's happened to me!!!

I think most of my colorful energy goes into dressing my kids. The contrast between Sadie's closet and mine is hilarious. How is it so easy for me to shower her in pinks, reds, and yellows when I can't even put a colored elastic in my hair? I have a lot of fun dressing Sadie and I've even find it fun dressing little Jack. I'm taking advantage of these younger years when they wear what I tell them to wear before they turn out like their mother and look like they're mourning every day. In my defense I bought a navy blue trench coat the other day. HELP ME!!

Howdy

I know it's not Halloween but I found these silly accessories and surprised Sadie and Chase with our adorned little guy. I love that he's smiling behind the binky. When I was pregnant with Sadie it was either Uncle Curtis, Heber or Chad that gave us this teeth binky in our stocking. Thanks guys! It's been a family favorite for years now. I wonder where my teeth are. I haven't worn those in months! I do however, wear that fuzzy robe every day, all day long if I stay indoors. I got it from Connie for Christmas a few years back and it's another one of my favorites things. Even if I'm dressed for the day, the robe usually ends up over my outfit. The weird thing about our house is that when the heat is on it comes out of the vents feeling almost like an air conditioner. I have to turn the thermostat to 75 degrees to get any heat around here. I miss San Diego....more than you'll ever know!!

Sadie Mommy Date

 When Jack was born my sister gave me the advice to always have a little time with Sadie that's just for us every day. I try to read books every day while Jack is taking his morning nap but I love taking her on a little date when Chase is home. I took Sades to Princess and the Frog this Saturday. It's so fun going to movies together. She snuggles right up to me and looks wide eye at the screen. When there was a scary part I asked her if she wanted me to cover her eyes and she reponded.. "I want to be brave." She didn't want to miss a second of the movie. She couldn't stop talking about how BIG the movie theatre was. I love how exciting everything is to her. Wouldn't I give her have her enthusiasm sometimes. She definitely brings it out in me. Afterwards we went to Cupcakes Actually (cute name) and got a $3.00 cupcake...ridiculous I know, but where else can you find a Pinkalicious cupcake like that. Sadie was in heaven and so was I watching her devour just the frosting. She left the cake for me.

Rules don't apply

You know us Cannons ... serious rebels!! Jack is so funny when we put him in this stroller. He has no expression. I wonder if he had fun. It's easy to see Sadie was delighted!!

I can always get a smile from this kid no matter what!!

Mom points

Salt dough...$1.00, Vinegar...$3.00, this face full of joy....priceless!!On cold winter days what else can do do but make a "bolcamo" with the kids. I got some serious smiles from this one. Sadie's new obsessions are the volcanoes. She watches them on you tube and we used almost an entire bottle of Costco vinegar and food coloring watching our own volcano explode. We finally had to throw it away after the vinegar ate away the volcano into a lump of wet salt dough. Sadie never ceases to amaze me with her interests. I've never met a kid who loves cars, trains, and adorns them with jewels from her jewelry box. She goes crazy over hot lava and could stomp in puddles all day long. I love this little girl!!

Little helper

Lately Sadie has wanted to be helpful. She loves to help clean the dishes and when I make dinner she's right there beside me wanting to sprinkle the cheese or fill the enchiladas. My mom always had me cook and bake with her. I am amazed at how much patience she had. I find myself wanting to do it all myself because I know Sadie make a mess. My mom let us go to town baking our own cookies, pies and cakes. I need to take a lesson from her and let Sadie get some flour on the floor. I've one thing to say about the dough...I always let Sadie eat the dough:-)

I asked for it!

This is what happens when you leave a chocolate chip cookie out the night before and Sadie gets a hold of it before breakfast. She came into our room EARLY and we wanted to sleep. In desperation, I remembered the cookie and sent her down knowing that it would take her at least 15 minutes to eat around all the cookie to get to the chocolate chips. She looks like a squirrel when she eats a cookie, nibbling around the edges and cutting out all the chips with her teeth while discarding the rest. I was right. Chase and I got another 20 minutes of shut eye. But this is what I dealt with after Chase went to work. Sadie was HYPER!! From now on, oatmeal will always come first!!

7 months

I always end up posting his month marks about two weeks late. This month I'm only about a week behind. If there's one thing I've learned these last 7 months it's that I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this little boy. There's a bond there I had no idea would exist. He's my little man. I love that his eyes twinkle and light up when he sees me. I love that Sadie is the only one that can REALLYmake him laugh. I love that when Chase brings him to me in the morning he almost leaps out of his arms to get to me. I am obsessed with this kid!!

His latest traits/accomplishments are:

1: He no longer wants to be swaddled. We just wrap up his legs so he can roll over if he wants to be on his tummy.

2: He still LOVES to eat. I could feed this kid ANYTHING and he would devour it. We tried yogurt this month and he chowed down but only after I realized that plain yogurt is just too disgusting. I had to mix a little vanilla in there to keep him from shivering every time he took a bite:-) He's still a little guy and only weighs 15.9 pounds. I thought with such an appetite he would really chuck up. The Doctor says that as long as he's still gaining it's ok. He's about 20th percentile which is exactly where Sadie was. My kids are so little!!

3: He is sitting up and crawling. I wouldn't say he is strong at either one of these but he can do them both. His crawl is more like an army crawl and he sits up until he sees something on the floor he wants and then crashes down to retrieve what Sadie eventually swipes away.

4: He takes AWESOME naps. He wakes up around 8 and has breakfast. He then sleeps until about noon, has lunch and after heading back to bed around 2, he sleeps again until 5!! I hardly ever see the little guy. After dinner he's down at 7:30-8 and it starts all over again in the morning. I usually nurse him before I go to bed around 11 but he usually sleeps through the whole thing.

5: He loves his monkey blanket. Sadie has a similar one we all know as "bah" which is a lamb. Jack's is a brown monkey blanket and when I kiss him goodnight he usually holds up his monkey to me so I will kiss him as well. Jack always gets a silly little grin on his face when I give him little kisses on his cheek. He's so easy to put to bed. I just give him his monkey, kiss his chubby cheeks, and walk out. I don't hear a peep until three hours later!!

6: He's a wiggler. Changing his diaper has become a real challenge these days. Dressing him is even worse!!

7: He's very good at retrieving his own pacifier in his crib and putting it in his own mouth. I've noticed that he always gets it in right side up. What a smart little guy.

8: He's really developed a cute little sense of humor. We've commented on the fact that for such a happy baby, he rarely laughs. This month he proved us wrong. Almost everything is funny. If I nibble on his fingers, he laughs. If he's thrown into the air, he laughs. If I walk by his exersaucer, he throws his arms in the air and grins from ear to ear with a little chuckle in between.

I ABSOLUTELY ADORE THIS LITTLE BABY!!!

There was a little "Merry" in Christmas

I realize my last post was a little negative but it had to be recorded so I can laugh about it next year and use it against myself when I want to travel home again. I also realized when I returned home that I hardly took any pictures. The ones I did take help me to remember that even though I was a walking zombie, I did have a lot of fun and so did the kids. Here's Sadie with Ruby and Andrew Olson.



My mom arranged for Santa to come to their home one afternoon before Christmas. It was so fun to have Santa all to ourselves. She planned to read to the kids and have Santa come in as a surprise. Sadie screamed when she saw him walk through the front door. It was just too exciting!!

However, sitting on his lap was not so exciting. Jack decided to all of a sudden have an opinion and cried the second he looked at that big white beard and glasses. Sadie didn't want to be "brave" anymore, but took one for the team. I love that she's holding Jack's hand to comfort him. I actually think it comforted her as well:-)

Christmas eve dinner at the kids table. I don't thing any of the kids really ate anything and I didn't really care at that point. Sadie and Ruby both have the "picky eaters" gene.

Sadie and Ruby played angels in our nativity. They danced all over the living room and thanks to Grandpa, they flew all over the living room too.


I love these pictures of all the kids waiting on the stairs Christmas morning. SO hard to wait!!!

Here's Jack opening his first ornament. Santa gave him a little bear with a bear suit because that's been his uniform these last two months. I just LOVE those cheeks!!

Sadie of course got Chick Hicks and King. You can imagine her excitement. We're all glad Santa received his letter at the North Pole.

It all started...

....when the snow came and it came with a vengeance. It snowed continuously for 24 hours and trapped us and everyone else in their homes. We were devastated when our flight was cancelled and Southwest told us the earliest we would be able to fly to Utah would be the following Wednesday which was another 4 days away. We decided to try and fly stand by anyway. We should have read all the warning signs around us that this was a BAD idea.

So Sunday morning we raced out of the house and onto the unplowed roads on our way to BWI airport. On our way we found even the 495 beltway hadn't been plowed in some of the middle lanes. As one plow truck was going over an overpass we were going under which dumped huge slates of ice on our car nearly shattering our windshield and breaking our wipers. This should have been the last indication for us that we were fighting with mother nature to get to Utah.

Once we arrived at the airport the line just to check in was going to take 3 hours (we were told) and after trying to use skycap outside (the line was around the entire airport outside) I had the brilliant idea to go inside and say my flight had been cancelled (which it had). They put us in a brand new line which looked very short but ended up taking the three people in front of us nearly an hour to reschedule their flights. The lady at the desk venomously told us we would very unlikely get on a flight today but I told her we had been waiting all morning to fly and she was going to give us a pass through security NO MATTER WHAT!!

We decided to try anyway and get on any flight that would take a family of four. We realized that if we could just get out of Baltimore, we could make it to Utah. One of the highlights of the trip was while going through security a man pointed to me and said "Sir, you can't go through with a baby strapped to you like that." Definitely the first time I've been called "Sir" before. Once inside, with the chaos behind us, I found a quiet place to nurse Jack while Chase finagled his way onto a flight going to Louisville, Kentucky. There were empty seats so we jumped on. We thought we were home free because this plane went to Chicago, which eventually went to Utah.

Then, as we were being taxied out to the runway, our plane got stuck in the snow!!! We ended up sitting on the ground for another hour while the pilot and everyone below us tried to figure out how to get us out of this drain surrounded by ice. Finally we emerged after the pilot got enough guts to nearly run the plane into the airport. Once in the air, we felt pretty good, but worried that we would miss our connecting flight in Chicago due to our little rendezvous with the ice in Baltimore.

By the time we got to Louisville, we were starving after devouring our "big" bags of peanuts and pretzels. They wouldn't let us off the plane because we were due to take off any minute once we loaded the last passengers. They announced that there were a few people who were trying to make this flight but still hadn't arrived, we would have to wait for them. This reassured me that Southwest would wait for us in Chicago if they were going to wait for these people in Louisville. An hour passed and I couldn't believe we were still waiting. When the passenger finally arrived I wasn't perturbed anymore after seeing a man in uniform enter the plane. He was heading home for Christmas from Afghanistan and definitely deserved an hour of our time.

Once in Chicago, we found our flight had been delayed...HOORAY!! We had time to get some dinner and chow down before we headed out again. The kids were champs the whole time. Jack just ate, and slept while Sadie watched CARS on her DVD player. The last leg, they both slept in our arms. I was so jealous of Sadie all sprawled out with her head in my lap. It was 3 a.m. eastern time once we landed in SLC. We were exhausted and upon hearing that they had lost our luggage I didn't even care. I just wanted to get everyone in bed!! So without pajamas, toothbrushes, and my chapstick we went to the Cannon's house for what we thought would be a great sleep. Jack decided to party for another hour once we got home.

That night set us back for a few days. I don't do very well with out sleep so after losing my voice and more nights of interrupted sleep from Chase's younger brothers who came home at 2 a.m. every night, I completely snapped. Chase and I didn't get to sleep until 3 a.m. Christmas eve due to the "elves" walking around the house above us. I ended up sleeping in a chair Christmas morning while everyone opened presents. I was so riled up and sleep deprived that I couldn't sleep, even if I had the "quiet" opportunity. I was supposed to come home the 6th of January but decided to come home with Chase the 27th. In my nearly mental state of hysterics the thought of taking care of two kids without Chase was unbearable. I needed to go home. We got to Virginia at 3 a.m. again!! Another late night but totally worth it because I knew my bed was waiting for me and I knew no one would be waking me up!!

The funny thing is, we planned the trip going to and from Utah with direct flights. That snow storm really changed everything!! We should have read the signs and stayed put. Now I know why some of our friends don't travel home for the holidays. It took this experience to knock some sense into my nostalgic, homesick brain. NEVER AGAIN!!! If anyone wants to see us next Christmas, you can come to Virginia!! Merry Christmas!!

Dumped!!

D.C. received it's biggest snow storm they say in a century. Of course we were thrilled but annoyed that it came the day before we were supposed to fly to Utah. We still had a fun time shoveling our way out the door. These pictures were taken in the morning. That evening it had snowed another foot or so. It was definitely "Utah worthy."

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

We bought this fake tree in San Diego for $30 when we first got married. It's been good to us. One day when I feel ambitious, we'll get a real one.










Chase's Grandma gave every grandchild this sweet nativity. No matter how many times I arrange it the way it's supposed to look, I find it's been rearranged by Sadie a few moments later. That kid doesn't skip a beat. I finally got around to making Christmas cookies but never got around to delivering them. These ones were left for Santa.


Sadie had her own little tree this year. We decorated it with popcorn, little ornaments and made our own little star out of salt dough.

My favorite thing(s) about this picture is Jack looking at me like "are you kidding me Mom?", Sadie in a blur because she never stops moving, and the reflection of Chase in the mirror trying to get them to smile.