Nowadays Joey has the biggest attachment to daddy. Joe is the best daddy too. You can see the love jumping across the room from Joe to Joey when they both look at each other. Joe gets down on the ground and puts together ramps and tracks for trains and then will play with Joey for hours. Joe has shown Joey how to throw, kick and catch a ball, which Joey enjoys immensely. They are such awesome play buddies.

It’s so funny how different our roles are as parents.

I’m the lover. I love to sit and read to him. I love giving him a bajillion hug and making him laugh. I love to tickle Joey with kisses until his giggles and giggles. I’m also the disciplinarian. I’m the one that enforces Joey’s bedtime. I enforce rules for things he shouldn’t or should be doing. I have taught and enforced his please, thank you and excuse me. He knew how to sign those around one year old.

Joe is the little kid and the companion. If Joey wants to play trains, Joe is more than willing. If Joey wants to play ball, Joe is there to help. Joe also loves teaching him how to count and about money. Joey has his own bank and we give him coins to put in it. We tell him what each coin is and we count how many coins we have. Joey can now count to 5. He knows what a penny and quarter are. Joe helps enforce the rules.

Together we work well together. One’s weaknesses is another’s strengths. And that is why we are such a good couple. I love Joe so much. He’s the best husband and daddy! I couldn’t have done better if I had to create a person from scratch.

Today we were amazed that Joey told us he had gone poopy in his diaper. I was so excited that I about burst at the seams. This is the first sign a child is aware of their bodily functions. Joey had shown no signs of this before.

Joey will run up to the Christmas tree now and count each Christmas light bulb on the tree until he gets to five. It’s so cute. We have a snoopy ornament that has snoopy flying in a sled, with woodstocks as reindeer, going around his dog house. Joey loves this ornament and says Snoopy, Snoopy!

Joey also recognizes who Santa Claus is. I have seen him on a few videos and pointed him out each time. Now anytime Joey sees any Santa Claus, he yells SANTA CLAUS!! It’s so cute to see him actually put together who Santa is. He doesn’t know Santa brings presents yet, but he recognizes him as a person. I didn’t think he would be able to this young.

Today I was in daycare and they were talking about the kids eating. One of the caregivers was telling me that Joey eats everything on his plate and always asks for seconds. She said, ‘You can tell Joey isn’t starving for sure! I mean, look at how big he is!’. I thought that was pretty funny. Joey is pretty solid – much stockier than the other children. He totally takes after the Dziekan side of the family (my side) where everyone is just big. My uncles are all over 6 foot – all of them. Even my aunt is 6 foot. I’m 5’9’’. I would have been taller, if my mom’s 5’2’’ genes didn’t slow me down! LOL

These photos are from earlier this week on Wednesday night when Joey helped put HIS own ornaments on the tree. You can see the ornaments here. One is a custom made ornament from Bronners that has his name and date on it. The other is a new hallmark ornament for 2 year old boy this year from Hallmark. It’s soo cute.

Something to blog (brag) about!

Joey ran up to me tonight, said 'pee pee'. I said 'Joey, did you go potty? Do you need to go to the potty?'. He sat right down to get his diaper changed. He pooped his pants and told me about it!!! This is a big deal! The first step to potty training!! Yay!

Sorry - I have had no time to update.

Tuesday I stayed home sick. I did a few errands though later in the day when I started to feel better.

Today - busy. The roads sucked today on the way to work. Took me an hour when it normally takes me only 20 minutes to get to our other work site that I sometimes go to.

We put up the Christmas tree last night.

Tonight I went to curves. I finally got in a workout. Yay!

That's all. Busy cleaning like mad. How come my house always looks like something hit it? Augh!! Dishes, laundry and now all this Christmas stuff. I need more hours - well that and more sleep!

Alexandra's blog challenged people to post their first layout and post when they first started scrapbooking. If you scrapbook - I challenge you to post it on your blog too!

Here is my first page. Done in April 2000 at a scrapbook class. I never finished the journaling on it! I like how it turned out. My second page was a lot busier than this!

It at least gives me something to look back on and say - WOW look how far I have grown!

Here's another shot of the sunset from the other day. The colors may be a bit richer.

Yesterday was Sunday and we spent some time at Joe’s dad’s house and at Joe’s mom’s house.

We went to Walmart and picked up a few videos for Joey. We got another Elmo video – the Elmo has two ears, two hands and two feet. We got a really bad Wiggles video for Joey. It was Wiggles around the world. There is very little singing and dancing but mostly talk and Joey didn’t care for them talking. We found a DVD on trains and airplanes and Joey loves it. It was only $5.50 so we got that too. We brought them home and he’s so happy watching them.

Last night at Joe’s mom’s house I finished one of those fleece knotted blankets for Joey that has trains on it. It’s super cute.

After that I discovered that she and her boyfriend had the 90’s trivia pursuit game. I wanted to play, but warned them I’m dumb when it comes to trivia! After many laughts we found out that I am awesome at the yellow category which is related to computers and information technology. Who won? Joe and I did. Phil (MIL’s boyfriend) kept going through the center of the board. In the center of the board there are no ‘roll again’ or pie spaces so they wasted a lot of rolls that way. I told him this too and he said, ‘I’ve got my own strategy’. I said, ‘Well, your strategy isn’t working now, is it?’. He laughed and agreed with me. We stayed there until 10:45pm. Joey acted fine the whole time too!

Monday was my day off. Joe took the day off so we had a really long weekend up north at Grandma’s house. We came up Thursday morning and are leaving tonight.

This morning I woke up with a terribly upset stomach and my whole entire body ached. I just got over the flu two weeks ago! So now I’m sick again? I managed to sleep almost the entire day today. My body is aching and my wrist especially aches. I’m worried that I may be getting carpel tunnel in my wrist. If I feel like this tomorrow I’m not going to work. I did a bunch of nothing today. I wanted to get one more page done for Scrapjazz but that didn’t happen. I hardly ate anything either. I guess we’ll see if I’m better tomorrow.

I’m bummed I’m sick too. It reached 60 degrees in Michigan today and I couldn’t enjoy it! L It was raining some of the day too but it’s going to get cold and snow again so I wanted to enjoy it but I could hardly move. Wish me luck getting over this quick!