Walking around Albany

Albany was really cool! Well, more like freezing, but we had a lot of fun on our brief walk to see the capitol of NY. As you can see Sam wore his little snow suit to keep him warm and it's probably a good thing he had it on since it was rather cold.
This is the actual state capitol building. Yup...that's about as much of it as we saw but it was fun! :)
Marie is in this picture but a little hard to see ;)
This is kinda funny. Its some kind of administration building for a university. It was HUGE but looks cool. (This is only a picture of part if it. It's atleast 2 if not 3 times as big as what you see here)

Airport

So we spent a bit of time in the airport on our trip to the US so I thought it would be good to share some of the pictures from it.
I know it looks sunny outside so you might be wondering why Sam is in his pajamas but since it was the middle of the night for him and we were hoping he'd go to sleep we decided to put them on him. He also had a lot of fun carrying around his teddy and the monkey leash. He wouldn't put them down for quite a while and it was really cute.

So this is what happened when he did fall asleep finally on the airplane. We got off and put him in the stroller and he actually slept for a bit longer! Yea!

It's a good thing we got our stuff at the gate. It would have been sad to leave this behind...

One more randomeness...

Ok, so I almost forgot this one...He won't eat mushrooms but he loves mustard???

Drool and other randomness

Ok so there is a lot of randomness in this post but there is a lot of it at our house so here we go... hope you enjoy! :)
Starting with drool...WHAT??? The last time I saw a 2 month old drool (Sam) the baby had 2 teeth before 4 months and at 4 months 4 teeth... I'm not sure I'm ready for this. Too bad I didn't get a picture of the initial HUGE drool that came first.
I love this! I have a son who LOVES trains and a husband who is quite the artist. So we get this on a regular basis whether on paper or the front porch.
Happy Valentines Day? Maybe it's too late for that but it's a cute picture anyway! :)

You'd think this kid loved chocolate and nutella...What do you think?

Sam has found a love for hats recently. He found the cut off end of some jeans I had made shorter and this is what he decided it was... and of course Teddy needs one too :)

Ok, so now for a funny story...

The other night I had just put Sam to bed and was trying to get Marie there also. However they had a different plan apparently. Marie screamed, probably due to a burp, and woke up Sam. She then calmed down. After about an hour I finally got Sam back to sleep. Yea! And Marie started screaming again. So Sam woke up again. She calmed down and went to sleep so we put her down in hopes of getting Sam back to sleep again. Sam started making a huge fuss over everything and being quite noisy about it. I was getting really frustrated at this point and was not ready to have this going on all night so I very sharply told him to be quiet. He then looked at me as if to say "huh?" and this conversation followed...(or something very close to it)

To fully appreciate this you have to know that he regularly answers yes, no and silence (when he doesn't know) to things correctly. He really does.

Me: "Sam, Are you doing this to drive me crazy?"
Sam: "Yea"(very innocently)
Me: "So you and Marie are doing this whole tag team screaming on purpose?"
Sam: "Yea"
Me: "Is someone paying you for this?"
Sam: "Yea"
Me: "They must be paying you a lot..."
Sam: "Yea"
Me: "I know, you and Marie are paying each other?"
Sam: "Yea"
Me: "Great, so are you trying to save for retirement or something?"
Sam: "Yea"

So at this point you can guess that the frustration had left and I was pretty much laughing...How do they do it???

And finally, One thing I never thought I'd miss but really do now that I'm here in Germany is Cambell's soup...I don't even remember how to spell it. I especially miss the cream soups, mainly mushroom. Now I don't like mushrooms but this soup is handy in making a lot of things. When you don't have it and want to make something you improvise...I tried replacing it with a german version unsuccessfully. I guess my little boy who eats everything, including blue cheese, doesn't like mushrooms...

Life happens...

So my sister reminded me that I haven't posted in a long time...oops! I did (2 posts back) commit to doing a post every day to get all caught up on the whole holiday to current that hadn't been posted yet. However I think I'm a little behind and I might have to do a few days of brief catch up at some point but what can I say...Life happens... today I'm just going to do some pictures of one of the most amazing people I know! (and my cute kids :)

So here she is... For those of you who don't know her, this is my Grandma Bastian.Ok, so maybe I'm biased but I think she's the greatest Grandma in the whole world. She's the most kind, loving, spiritual, faithful, amazing, patient, wonderful, hardworker, stubborn(...I should probably stop now) person I've ever known. The list could really go on forever.
If these two pictures don't show you how loving she is then you'll never see it. She raised 9 of the most wonderful people I know and if that doesn't say some thing then nothing does. I've never met kinder or happier people than my Aunts and Uncles. They are all as amazing as she is and I'm sure they would be happy to say that they learned it from their parents.
And here is another one just because it's fun. We had so much fun spending time with her and I just wish we could do it more often.

And here is a picture of a picture of her other half. I admire her so much since she's been without him for 13 years now. That's where the stubborn is admirable because she's still going strong for someone in their mid 80's!

And I'm not sure why she has this because I don't think her house is ever a mess but I definitely feel like I need one here for my little tornadoes...

I know this doesn't do her justice, or my Grandpa for that matter, because they make the best couple in the world. I hope to someday be even a fraction as wonderful as they are. If I can get there I'll be a very happy person indeed! :) Love you Grandma!

Important...

Hi everyone. I thought this might be an easy way to let a lot of you know about something a friend sent us. I think it's really important since I showed it to my Dad, who is a paramedic, and he said they had several infants drown last year and was excited about the program. So I hope we can all avoid that experience and here is a good way to go about preventing it. The first is a video that shows what they teach. I think it can be found on their website too but the second is a link to the website for any of you that want to know more.

http://www.childdrowningprevention.com/index.html
http://www.infantswim.com/home.html

I had no idea this was possible and if it was available then I would take advantage of it...unfortunately living in Germany it's a bit harder...I hope we can do it soon but we'll see.

Marie's one month checkup and Sam is almost 18 months!

Ok, so our little Marie is growing and I just didn't know how much. It always amazes me how fast they grow.

Weight : 4450gm
Height : 56cm
Head : 37.5 cm (she gained more here than in height!)
Cuteness: 12 (Watch out for when she turns 16)

These are pictures taken today of Marie in a little dress that Grandma Julie brought for her.
I thought I'd better include this one since I don't post many pictures of myself. The lighting is a little funny but hey it's not bad other than that. :)

Sam is making leaps and bounds in everything lately! He seems to be taking off and growing up a little too fast. He loves to read and has me read to him regularly. On of his favorite books is an ABC book which we sing the ABC's with. He does that atleast once if not 20 times a day and will even say some of them along with me. There are some books with numbers in them and he doesn't know which one is which but he'll see numbers and go, "Da, do, dee..."

He knows most of his body parts and you can ask him where his hand, feet, head, etc are and he'll smile, giggle and point to them. It's the cutest thing to watch. He also randomly says what they are, like this morning when I got him dressed he reached for his toes and said, "TOES!!!" and smiled at me. His vocabulary has expanded so much in the last couple weeks that I'm not even going to try and write all the things he says now but it's amazing to watch. I thought he might be slow since he's doing 3ish languages but it's really taking off all of a sudden and I have to keep up since his words change so rapidly and become better each day.

Last but not least is the fact that he has decided that he needs to put himself to sleep at night and for nap time. Part of me is really grateful for this because he is such an easy child in the realm of sleeping and this just makes it easier with an infant. However part of me is sad, very sad to have my little guy growing up and doing things on his own. Mostly with this because he's such a good little snuggler and I really, really miss my Sam snuggle time. But on the other hand it makes life easier when I have a baby that wants to be held while he needs to go to bed. He still likes me to sing a few songs but then it's time for Mommy to leave (he starts saying,"Bye,bye") and he goes right to sleep without complaint. Now if he would just cooperate when he's awake that well, life would be a little too perfect and I wouldn't know what to do with myself.