Two Southern Boys

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Southern Boy Visits a Southern City

Happy 8 Months Landon!!

Can you believe how fast he's growing!?

Our drama queen has moved past gagging on every new food we offer him. I must admit that I do miss the over dramatics because it could be quite funny, but at least when we're out in public people will no longer assume we're trying to kill our child. His absolute favorite is avocado. When he starts to have a slight tinge of green, it's not because he's ill. It's because he's eating his weight in avocados. He was also very adventurous in the new food sector while we were in Charleston. He tried grits, sweet potato pancakes, and melon. He loved all of it!

After being house bound not once, but twice in a month's time we were both itching to not only get out of the house but to escape the crazy city so we made the little jaunt to Charleston for the weekend. It was so nice to just spend some time together where work, or the usual daily tasks weren't hanging over our heads. We had great weather the whole weekend so we were able to spend our time walking around shopping and enjoying the park that overlooked the water. Not to mention that Landon was the talk of Charleston, being the mustache baby. Landon, much to our delight and entertainment, happily sucked on his mustache pacifier while we were out and about and every single person who walked by commented on it. "Did you see that baby's pacifier, it's a mustache!" "That's hilarious, that baby has a mustache!" If we would have had a dollar for every time we heard someone make a comment we could send him to Harvard for free.

He wasn't impressed by my scarf tent on the drive to Charleston.

We loved spending time with Aunt Mallory!

The mustache man!

Loved the water front park.

Best friends.

The boys were enjoying a serious conversation.

Mesmerized by the fountain.

Carlos Mustachio

Rocking his new sunglasses.

Landon has inherited the gift of gab from his parents and has now expanded his vocabulary from just bababa. I had high hopes that we would skip dada and conquer mama first, however I am saddened to say that Kevin won that battle, and believe me, he's not shy about rubbing that one in my face. Landon also enjoys saying yeah yeah yeah, and if his brother is feeling particularly spunky and is barking a lot, you'll hear Landon mock him in-between barks by saying "woof." NEWS FLASH Landon, I was the one that carried you around in my body for nine months, not your brother or your dad. Feel free to show me some love too.

While Landon isn't crawling per say, he is VERY mobile and has now created a new method of movement. It's like an inchworm fused with an army crawl. Put something he wants out of his reach and he'll get there. It's hilarious to watch, I think that actual crawling will be here sooner than we're ready for it. Our next project is to install baby gates, and I'm really dreading having our house look like an ad for baby gates.

Heart Breaker.

I don't think I have enough friends on here with me.

Cutest mama's boy I know.

Oh, you mean this isn't mine?

The ol' switcheroo

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb

All snuggled in.

Painting Daddy a Valentine's Card.

Just a little messy.

Oh hey ladies, like my GQ pose?

Happy Valentine's day!

Real men wear bows.

Snuggly baby.

Thursday, January 30, 2014

"Snowedout Atlanta"

I have to admit, when we heard there was a chance of snow in Atlanta and the whole city was FREAKING OUT, we laughed and thought boy, these people are afraid of 2 inches of snow? They should move to Boston or Cleveland where 2 inches is a light dusting. The grocery stores were packed; water, bread and milk were gone. (I still wonder, what they hell are you going to do with milk and bread if you have no other food in your house? It's such and odd combination. I personally would stock up on pizza and wine.)

The snow started around noon on Tuesday. Thankfully my boss had texted me in the morning and told me to not come into work that day, I was slated to start at 3:00 and work until 5:30. (I doubt at that point I would have even made it into work, but if I had, it would have most likely taken me 12 plus hours to get home.) So now free for the day, Landon and I hunkered down for the "blizzard." Kev had a meeting in Alpharetta, about 12 miles away from our house at 11:00 and was finished around noon. He called me on his way to another meeting and said the roads were a parking lot. At this point we assumed that there was an accident and things would start to pick up for him. He obviously never made it to his 2:00 meeting and headed straight home. 4 hours later, Kevin made it.

The snow continued and when it finally stopped around 5:00, we had a whopping 2 inches. Now, normally, like I said, I would have found this hilarious that the city was falling apart at the seems over this snow. A fair amount of the people living in Atlanta are transplants from the north, they should know how to drive in this. However, I can say that in all my years living in the north there were very few times I've seen the road conditions as poor as they were here. We simply are not equipped to deal with snow. There are 30 snow trucks for the entire city, and Atlanta is a big, big city.

So, couple the fact that everyone left work at the same time, and the government officials did not pretreat the roads, you had a massive disaster. Several of our neighbors had to abandon their cars and walk home several miles because traffic was just not moving. People slept in grocery stores, strangers homes, children at school! As of last night I believe there were STILL people trying to get home. It's one of the craziest things I've ever lived through!

Here at the Freaney household, we enjoyed some extra family time both yesterday and today. Landon saw snow when he was in Ohio but we never really let him experience it. So of course, I put him in his snow suit and took him out on the porch. Vedder was a seasoned pro, so much so that he reverted back to his Boston ways and peed on the back porch. (Thankfully, he doesn't attempt that when there is no snow or we'd have some real problems.) It was an early lesson to Landon about yellow snow.

The beginning of the snow.

Vedder's investigating the situation.

Hmmmm, what is this stuff exactly?

Are we going in yet?

I'm not really sure what the big deal is here.

Snow angel! (He wasn't happy about this.)

The roads all looked like this on Wednesday morning. A sheet of ice.

Sunday, January 26, 2014

A Fella On The Go

I've created a monster!!!!! For those of you fellow Atlantans, you know how terrible traffic is here. For those of you who aren't, be thankful. Because the crazy rush hour traffic begins at 3:00, I can't just run errands when ever I please. So, couple errands with trying to work around a baby's nap schedule and you've limited your time as to when you can get out of the house. With all this being said, we run all errands in the morning. Someone, who shall remain nameless has become very accustomed to being on the go in the morning and if we aren't on the move… there is hell to pay. We tried every usual calming method, the swing, the vibrating chair. Nothing worked. So, I tried something that I thought would never work... I put him in his crib for a nap, and wouldn't ya know! Someone feel asleep after a few minutes of crying! This has since created problems with our afternoon nap, I'm sure it'll all sort it's self out in due time...

Kev's celebrated his 32nd birthday on the 17th, (he's really lucky to be married to such a young, spring chicken. A lady in her 20's, he's really robbing the cradle!) Although his day at work was less than savory, I think the boys and I made up for it in some fantastic presents and a nice dinner out to his favorite restaurant, Murphys. I was a bit nervous as to how our little ball of joy would behave in a nicer restaurant, and I'm thankful to report he was better behaved than the small children at the table next to ours!

Seven months! We're on the downward slope of year one. Thanks to the addictive website, pintrest, I have already began plotting out Landon's party... Yikes.

We're still introducing new baby food flavors to Landon, some of our favorites so far are peas, squash, and carrots. Besides the baby food, we've began offer Landon small pieces of bananas, pears or sweet potato while Kevin and I eat dinner. He's been slow to warm up to the concept of "real" food, and by slow I mean he makes these over dramatic gagging sounds and usually forcefully spits out the piece of food. As of the past few days, he's moved on from spitting food at us, to putting the food on the left side of his mouth and "chewing" it and eventually swallowing it. This has only been successful with bananas and sweet potatoes.

I don't want carrotttttsssss

For as uninterested as he is in trying to eat solid food, he's equally interested from drinking from cups. Everything that has one open top- an open box, a toy with an open top, anything with an open top is a "cup." I told Kevin about this earlier, how babies place objects into categories that they know. For example, because we have a dog, Landon will assume everything furry with four legs is a dog- cats, tigers, bears, etc. (I'm brushing the cobwebs off the things I learned in college… hey, at least my college education isn't going completely to waste!) Well, in this house, everything is a cup, and Landon is just SURE that all these "cups" have liquid in them. Since the doctor said it was okay to let Landon have small amounts of water, we've introduced a cup with water to him and he LOVES it. Most of the water doesn't actually makes it down the hatch, but he thinks it's cool who are we to deprive him!

Kevin and I tried a couple of little adventures with Landon, and I can hardly say they went off without a hitch. In fact, I'm sure this child thought we'd lost our damn minds. Our first "adventure" was to take Landon to the small playground in the park next to our house. We thought, surely this child will LOVE to swing. He loves to jump and swing around in his jump-a-roo, this is going to be amazing. It was a big, fat, flop. He gave us a stern look of irritation and we promptly scooped him up out of the swing before we ventured into full on meltdown. His brother didn't help the situation by barking at him as he swung past.

Get me out of this thing!

Adventure number two was the bathtub. Landon loves to splish and splash around in the tub we thought surely he's going to love to "swim" around. So, my ingenious idea was to fill up the big tub with water and have Kevin put on his swing trunks and play with Landon in the tub. He acted as if nothing was new and he wasn't in a giant tub with his dad. I, personally, think it would have gone much better had Kevin let me fill the tub up with more water. I also think I imagined the tub to be much larger than it actually is. This child probably thinks we've absolutely lost our minds.

We have our first "word." Landon decided that he didn't want to be Switzerland and instead of saying mama or dada, went with good ol' baba. Maybe he's just also a fatty that likes to eat. He just loves to randomly start screaming BABABABABA. It gives us quite the chuckle. We're starting to test out "gaga." Hasn't caught on just yet though. I'm sure the next word will be "mama." It sure would be a great thing to rub into Kev's face. ;)