St. Nicks Day

A little over a week ago was St. Nicks Day. It's a special holiday that my family has always celebrated where children put their shoes outside of their door with a letter in it to Santa and then Santa comes along, takes the letter, and leaves candy in the children's shoes. I always had a ton of fun when I was little celebrating St. Nicks Day and I wanted to share that fun with my children.

So the first thing that we had to do was write a letter to Santa.

And then we went downstairs to put the letter in Gabriel's shoe we found out that Santa Claus had already come! He even left candy in Mommy, Daddy and Uncle Christopher's shoes! Though, some how Oma and Opa never get candy in there shoes from Santa... I wonder why?!?!

Gabriel was kinda too cold to be too excited about the candy in his shoe.

He just grabbed his Santa tube of Reeses Pieces and wanted back inside.

Because I never got to put Gabriel's 'other Santa stuff' in his shoe that I had secretly worked out with Santa (wink), we came back inside and I gave him his Christmas ornament.

He was pretty excited about his Winnie the Pooh bulb!

Then we gave him a taste of his yummy Christmas candy!

And that was our St. Nick's evening! Gabriel has played with Santa Claus tube of yummys ever since!

hair cut

Gabriel got a hair cut! If you look very closely in these two pictures you can see that Gabriel has a little bit of a mullet thing going on. His hair was actually over 3 inches in some parts!

Now it's like we have a whole new boy! I think he looks so different. His hair is only about an inch now.

How handsome is he? I just love my chubby cheek little boy!

At long last... again!

At long last I have come back to blog again. I really have no excuse for not blogging, it's not like I didn't have things to blog about. Really it just came down to dreading getting pictures off of my mom's camera so I had pictures to show you (my camera died so I was using hers)... so really, I was kinda lazy. But I really have to try to justify not wanting to get the pictures off of my mom's camera.

See, my mom never ever downloads her pictures from her camera to her computer. I really do mean never! I think every time it has been done it has been one of her children doing it. Well when I went to check on how many pictures she had on her camera it was 915, apparently nobody had taken the pictures off since June. So, one, my computer won't even register a camera that has that many pictures on it because it's a rather old computer. Two, because my computer won't take that many pictures from a camera at one time (and I didn't really want all of them) I needed to first download them all to her computer. Three, then I needed to go through all 915 pictures to decide which ones I wanted and then burn a disk to get them to my computer so I could blog. So maybe you can understand why I was dreading getting the pictures off of my mothers camera, even if in the end it still came down to laziness.

Anyway. Things have been going pretty well for Josh and I. We are still living at my parents home. The job that we kind of moved back for (not the only reason we moved but a big one) ended up falling through, so we are still jobless. Josh did have an interview with another company and we are still waiting to hear back from them. Hopefully we will have something soon.

Gabriel is doing amazing! He is talking more and more everyday. It's so cute. It's not like he couldn't talk before, he really just never had interest in talking. We used to be able to get him to say words, even big words but he would just say them a few times and loose interest. We figured we wouldn't really push it on him and just let him go at his own pace. Now it seems that he things words are fun and useful now! He still doesn't say a lot, he's figured out pretty well how to get the things he needs and wants without words. Some of his words are:
Mama and Dada (of course!)
Moe moe - more
Ah Da - All done
Ba ba bum - bump (you know? when you make a fist and bump someone else's?)
No no no noooo - No
Na tach - No touch
Hop - Hot
Ni Ni - Nighty night (he doesn't say that one too often, he's usually to upset over the fact that he is going to bed)
Oma - his Oma of course!
and a few more I can't think of right now!

My pregnancy is going pretty well too. I am getting a little more sicker then I used to. It's still not bad though, I just really need to make sure to eat every few hours. The problem is nothing really sounds good and if it doesn't sound good I have a heck of a time getting it down. The foods I really do crave aren't in season, like strawberries, raspberries, cantaloupe, peaches, and plums and those are the only things that sound good half the time so sometimes I really feel like I'm at a loss when it comes to eating. I do have a picture of my belly at 12 weeks though!

I'm 14 weeks now and my belly has 'popped' a little bit since that picture. I think I plan on taking pictures soon, maybe around 16 weeks... we'll see, that is the plan but plans always change! I finally get to go to the doctor tomorrow! I'm so excited! I just want to hear the babies heart beat or if I'm lucky I might get an ultrasound, either way I can't wait!

No no no no nooooo

Gabriel has been the funniest thing to watch lately. He walks around and points at all the things he's not supposed to touch and says 'no no no no no'.

My parents just got their Christmas tree up and the first time he saw the tree, he looked up at it for about a minute without moving and then looked at me and pointed to the tree saying 'no no no no no'. Then he was afraid of it for a few days:) Today though, my mom put the lights on the tree and the whole time Gabriel kept telling her 'no no no no' because he thought she wasn't supposed to touch the tree.

Now he's not afraid of it though, it's got too many pretty lights on it to be scary. So now, well, he walks over to the tree saying 'no no' all the way there, pauses for a second and then reaches out to touch it where of course Mama has to say something. Then once Mama has said her words his little hands whips back and looks and me and then says 'no no no' all the time he walks away. It is not the most commonly heard word around this house, all coming from Gabriel!

He also will randomly point to the oven/stove or a persons cup and say ' hotch' (hot) with his hand up and slowly back away:) Oh, and he finally learned how to give a bump but he does it with both hands instead of just one:) It's so cute to watch him learn!

Last of Korea...

These will be my last pictures of Korea. Then we can finally get to life here in Minnesota. Some of the pictures are rather random but I still wanted to show them to you.

So, first our wonderful friends in Korea threw us and Chris (the man sitting on the step in the black coat) a going away party. We had a ton of fun that night BBQing and talking. We also surprised our friends that night and told them that we were expecting baby number 2 but they needed to keep it quiet until we got back to the USA.

One day, when I was sick and totally not feeling well, Gabriel took full advantage of my lack of awareness and got ahold of my kleenex box and proceeded to empty every last one of the onto my kitchen floor... stinker:) I caught him in the very end of his sneaky act!

This is Gabriel, just being cheeky!

We had our last full day in Seoul shortly before we left. It ended up not being very fun like we had planned, but our favorite part of the day was the beginning when we went to COEX mall, got Gabriel a Christmas present and found a TGI Fridays to eat at.

This is my husband with his first large alcoholic drink in 7 months... hence the crazy eyes....

Continuing our last day in Seoul, our little munchkin fell asleep on Josh's back in the wrap. I was rather surprised that considering the funky angle his head was at the entire time he actually slept for about an hour.

From COEX mall we had gone to Itaewon which ended up being a huge waste of time. We had seemed to have forgotten that Itaewon is a super crummy place for tourist and went and ended up walking down both sides of the street and were completely bored and frustrated. We did need a break after walking around Itaewon so we stopped at Baskin Robbins and got a cup of ice cream to share. We gave Gabriel his own spoon which he thought was pretty awesome and then kept stealing mine as well, doubling fister:)

Then from Itaewon we went to go see this palace. Only to have a super hard time finding it and then to find that it closed at 5PM instead of 7PM like we had read online, so we never got to go inside, this was all we saw of really any palace in Korea. Kinda sad since there are so many...

So that is the end of our pictures from Korea. Now I can put up Minnesota stuff and not feel guilty that there are a ton of pictures in my iPhoto begging to be put on my blog from Korea.