Well last night Joey woke up to a 101.1 temperature so I knew I was staying home today.

So today I woke up and he never acted sick at all. Go figure. I knew he was probably coming down with something by the way he's been acting the past few days.

Today I was in the middle of doing something when I heard a CRASH and glass breaking. I ran running into the office and Joey wasn't in there.

Then I went running into the living room, and he's standing back by the bed. I turned around to find where the glass noise came from and I found it. Joey threw a plastic barrel (thanks Melissa - it's from that train set you gave me - I blame you - haha just kidding!) at the curio cabinet and it shattered the glass.

He had no clue he did anything wrong. I was surprised at how calm I was! I even had enough calm in me to run and get the camera so I had it all on film! He actually laughed a little after that. This photo though was after I told him that he was bad, and this was not good. His face says it all. Well this curio cabinet is OLD and kinda rocky and I've been kinda afraid that it was a little unstable anyhow for Joey.

I called my dad and he said to just get rid of it. I was ready to throw it out when I thought, well I'll post it on freecycle and see if anyone wants it. This is what the post said:
Offer, Curio Cabinet. This is probably 50+ years old. One of the panes of glass needs to be replaced and one of the doors needs to be fixed (just glued together I believe). Will need new knobs. Other than that it's in good condition. It's dark brown and it stacks. Has 4 or 5 levels. I have a photo if you are interested in seeing it.

Believe it or not I had about 15 replies! I sent the lady the photo of the cabinet and she came and took it away today. I LOVE freecycle!!!

So we took our good items that were in the cabinet and put them on our shelving in our office and it actually looks really nice. Now I have a bunch of displaced stuff that I have to find room for. I hate that. It's like on Christmas when you get all this new stuff and now you have to find room for it all!

So after all the fiasco of me cleaning up the glass, Joey runs over to our bag to go to Grandma's house that has the outgrown and too big clothing in it that needs to go into storage. Well Halloween is over so I put his costume in the bag. Joey ran to the bag, dragged out the costume and tried to put it on. This was the first time he's tried to dress himself so I helped him put on his lion costume and he wore it for a few hours. I got some photos of him in it today too. He's so cute! It's still wayyy to small but he still likes it!

On a different note, Joe's new thing is airplanes. When he looks outside, he tries to find one. Today he was sitting by the window and saw one outside that I even hardly saw! He sees them in the car. He finds them outside. In fact, he even knows the ones that you can't see but you see the puff of white smoke behind it! Amazing!

T0day we were outside playing ball and we would both run towards the ball. He would yell, 'I got it!!'. I never thought I said that around him so he must have learned that at daycare. It was so cute.

Today is picture day!

I told daycare that I would come in and take photos of all the kids in their costumes. So around 9am I fed Joey some breakfast, and then we got ready to go to daycare. I helped around with their snack at first. They were eating bright orange frosted cupcakes. All of these kids are under 3 years old, so you can only imagine the mess that was made - and I got it all on camera!! Mostly it was just a big orange cloud around their mouths, which made them strongly resemble clowns.

After cleanup it was time to take photos. Some of the kids were so good. Some were not happy (like my child). Here are some of my favorites that I took. I do know for next time that I would like to get another few yards of the fabric that I bought, and sew it together so I have a WIDE backdrop. Sometimes I thought my backdrop was too skinny to get adequate photos of the kids. I had kids hanging all around me the entire time, including my own. It made it kinda difficult but I got threw it and Dena (the head of the center) was sooo happy with the results.

I left Joey at daycare and I got my teeth cleaned. Yeah, how exciting is that?

I went back up to daycare that afternoon around 3pm when Joey woke from his nap and he did not want to leave. Now this is the second day in a row that my child has not wanted to come home. He's having such a good time at daycare with all his friends, that he doesn't want to leave. I guess that's good. I know he's getting good care if he likes it that much. So I stayed a bit and let him play with his friends and watch the Wiggles and dance. Finally I asked him if he wanted to leave and he did. One of his friends, Andrew, came up and gave him a hug and a kiss. Then he gave Paige a hug and kiss. Then Ben and another kid all came up to give him a hug and a kiss. It was sooooo cute. They've never done that before and it was soooo precious!! I met a lot of mothers today. They all said 'WOW, you are Joey's mom? He is SOOO big! My kid is (insert age here) and Joey is so much bigger than him!'.

That night I cleaned up the house. Our house has been a disaster since last Thursday night when I got all those toys from Melissa. Joey has been playing with them and they have been all over downstairs. Plus all of the stuff we had up north was thrown into the living room upstairs so I needed to do some tidying.

Finally I put dinner in the oven (remember my premade dinners from this weekend that I froze?). I put the meatloaf in and let it go. I made some rice and put some beans on. Joe ate dinner. I got all the candy ready.

At around 6pm we started to get a few people. Joey was upstairs playing with his Thomas trains. I had to go up there three times to tell him there were people at the door and to come see. So he comes down and he's sooo fascinated by the costumes. We had a LOT of kids come to our house last night. The funniest thing is he would NOT leave our candy alone. He kept trying to eat all the candy. I finally decided when Joe got home he was going trick or treating for his OWN candy!

When Joe finally got home (traffic was bad because everyone left early) we both ate a quick dinner and then I took Joey out trick or treating to the neighbors while Joe manned the door with the candy. Joey did so well I took him around the block. He was soooo cute. I carried him between houses and then let him walk up their walk to the porch. He said really softly 'trick or treat' but it wasn't really clear, because he can't really say it yet. He would even be walking up to the house saying it the whole way up the walk. Then I had him say 'Thank you' and 'Good-bye' to everyone. He did a great job. He loved seeing the dogs at the houses and had to stay to pet them. Everyone LOVED his costume. Said he was soo precious.

We finally rounded back to our house and I told Joe to turn off the light. He was going with us to take Joey trick or treating. So we went around another block. Joe had a blast watching Joey go trick or treating. He said to me that this is an experience that's going to stick with him forever. I don't think you ever really appreciate Halloween until you take your children around. It sure was rewarding for us!
Joey wanted all the suckers to himself when we got home. I this cutest photo of him hiding in the corner, holding onto three suckers, with his mouth wide open in happiness. He's sooo funny. We gave him a sucker and he was on cloud 9!

Here are a few of my favorite shots from today...

This was like the 4^th weekend in a row that we went up north. Many of my friends and family are frustrated because we go up north all the time. They want to do things with us, but we can’t, because we are going up north.

Let me explain – Joe’s grandparents raised Joe from a pretty young age. His mom and dad divorced when he was around 3. His dad only lives about a mile away and he stayed with his dad every other weekend.

His mom’s second marriage wasn’t very good. They fought more than she liked and he wasn’t a nice guy. Joe’s mom thought it would be best for Joe to stay at his grandparents house (her parents) so he wasn’t involved with any of this.

So years went by and Joe lived with his grandparents. His mother worked hard. So every night Joe stayed with his grandparents and they would get him ready for school in the morning. He went there after school. When his mother got home from work, he went to his mother’s house for the evening and then went back to his grandparents for the night.

So this is why Joe is so close to his grandparents. When we go up north, we stay at his grandparent’s house. They have an extra room that we stay in and Joey has a crib next to our bed. We have been doing this ever since we started dating. I guess our parents are pretty lenient.

But this is WHY we go up north on the weekend.

1. We really don’t care for the city life. In a perfect world, we would live in the country. Our reality is we have great jobs in the city, and we moved about as far away as we could stand and are in a small town, but it’s not country. When we go up north on the weekend, there is no crazy traffic, no idiots blaring their stereo, it’s just a nice, relaxing weekend!
2. We LOVE seeing Grandma and Grandpa and Joe’s mother and Joe’s dad’s side of the family. It’s like an all in one shot when we got up there since they all live in a ½ mile radius.
3. We love spending time with family. We are family people and we would rather spend time with family than party. If you were to ask me to go to this kick butt party or go see grandma and grandpa, I’d pick the latter.
4. I want Joey to remember his grandparents and remember they are good people. The way to do this is to have him be with them as much as possible.
5. It’s just relaxing. That’s about all I can say. I can scrapbook, I can cook, I can just relax. It’s great.
   

So that is why we go up north and we go up north so much. Many of our friends have family that lives close by. Joe’s family doesn’t live that close and his grandparents can’t travel that long to see us, so we go to see them.

So that is the story behind that.

So this weekend we went up to see our grandparents. It was a great weekend! Today is Sunday. Last night I got two scrapbook pages done and 4 happy birthday cards! I like how the pages came out too! I did a page on my birthday celebration at work from 2002 and a page about my brother and I called Siblings. It used pictures from 1984 and I feel good about it. Sometimes it is so hard to scrapbook older photos but this paper worked great!

I finally decided that I can’t cook at night anymore unless we want to start dinner at 8pm. So grandma and I spent a few hours in the kitchen this morning preparing 5 meals and getting them ready to freeze to cook later this week! I can’t wait to see how this works out because this was so much fun to mass cook a bunch of meals and then have them ready for later this week. My friend Caroline hired a personal chef that does the same thing for her and her husband. The lady comes in and cooks a bunch of meals for them, and then freezes them for them to prepare later. At WW this week Jinny also said that I need to cook ahead and freeze. It seemed to be a thing people have been saying and so I figured, I can do that too. I’ll let you know how it works out.

I took a nap when Joey finally went down at 2:30. I always take a Sunday nap.

When we woke up we went to his mom’s house. She had a small pile of leaves in the front yard she showed him how to play in. Then Joe and Char decided to go ahead and rake up a BIG pile of leaves in the back yard. We took Joey in back and threw him in and he went underneath! It was so funny. He would only go in after Joe went in and then he was fine with the leaves. He loved it.

Before we left, he kept saying CoCo. That’s the horse so we took him to see CoCo and Charlie and I got photos of him petting the horses. At home he goes around saying CoCo. It’s so cute. The horse he was petting here is Charlie and he says Charlie too.

I do a lot of photography with the 50mm fixed lens I have and I LOVE it. It blurs out the backgrounds and makes for very very nice images. That is what all of these were taken with today. I’m so happy I bought this camera lens!

Will write again this week!