Family Weekend Approaching! And other ramblings.

There are few things that can distract me as much as a family weekend coming up. We're hosting our family Christmas this weekend! We like to play a little "off season" because I have 2 older sisters and a younger brother. Each of them have significant others and some of them have kids. So it's harder to divide family time over the holidays and we're all happy to do it this way.

That means I have a million things to do... not the least of which is getting my house in order! It's going to be chaos! But the good kind.

I've put together a grocery list for this week so that we'll have the food we need for our meal (Mexican night, hello guacamole!) and get paper plates and cups because the dishwasher can only handle so much.

Nolan is going to be evicted from his room for the night and we'll keep him in our room so that his room can become a guest room with an inflatable mattress... which I just bought and looks really sweet.

 Speaking of little man, I finally got a picture that captures how he eats:

See what he's doing there? He goes in from the side of the banana. Who does that? If you can picture it, that's also how he eats pizza. He's got the right idea though if you think about it. The toppings are the best part and he's saving his calories for a real treat at the end of the day. I'm just kidding, I actually have no clue what's going on in his head as he never really enjoys carbs in general. Only recently has he started liking toast and other bread-esque foods.

We had a good weekend. I went a little overboard and bought him a ton of cute clothes from Carters. And in true Easley form, I bought a size too big for him so that he can wear it while it's saggy on him and until he grows into them. But the cloth diapers help hold up those pants so it totally makes sense.

I finally got him the vest I've had my eye on for months!

The best part of going shopping in the winter is when you see spring clothes. The winter is ending and it's almost...

#neverforget #jerseyshore #notevenembarrassed

Sleeping Soundly

I think the biggest change since becoming a mom has definitely been a lack of sleep. I heard once (and maybe even blogged about it) that during the first year of life, a parent can lose as many as 44 DAYS worth of sleep. Not just like 44 x 8 hours of sleep = 352 hours of sleep, but 44 x 24 hours in the day = 1056 HOURS worth of sleep.

Now we're finally catching up. On a good day I'll go to bed before 10 and sleep til 6. I couldn't be more thankful that Nolan is sleeping like a baby (who comes up with these phrases?)

Nolan usually goes to bed before 8:00 every night. So that gives me a precious 2 hours to prep something for me to eat for lunches, clean up, but probably most often I capitalize on that time to watch mind numbing TV. Before going to bed though I make sure he's cozy under the covers and last night I got to see him like this:

Those tiny arms!

slightly different angle, totally important to understand how cute this was

So there he was, totally asleep and just so precious. I moved him towards the center of the crib hoping that he won't wake up with every fiber of my being.

This is why I cry tears of happiness... my heart just overflows and it comes out of my eyeballs. I see my little man just cozy in his comfy bed covered by the blanket I used as a baby (thanks Rachael!). I pat his little tushie which promptly shoots back up towards the ceiling and his knees towards his chest. I know that he's a happy boy and that we're going to keep on the track to giving him all that he needs to make sure that he stays happy.

Seattle Bound

This blog post is a long time overdue, but I wanted to congratulate my lil bro on getting engaged to someone I can't wait to call my sister :)

Christian listening to Emily tell the story of how they got engaged, I really like this pic of them!

So basically the exciting thing is that they're getting married in Seattle and that gives all (in my family) all the long overdue excuse to fly to Seattle for their wedding together! Instead of getting hotels individually we're renting a house for a week. From the pictures we saw, it looks like a really fun location and lots of stuff to do. And we'll have a kitchen so we don't have to go out to eat for every single meal!

Sure beats the Motel 6, amirite?

Since the gears have started turning, I have been just so excited to start planning... so naturally I had my eye on a certain flight for a few weeks and just the other day I swiped up 4 tickets in the front most rows, with an aisle seat preference. Brian, Nolan, my mom, and myself included. All flying nonstop from MSP to SEA!

Their wedding isn't for another... 200+ish days.... yeah I'm a planner. BUT I CAN'T WAIT!

Congratulations to Christian and Emily!!!

18 Month Old Tinker!

Can someone please tell me what happened to my little newborn baby? He's doing this thing where he's getting bigger and bigger and I want to cry because I can't smush those little newborn cheeks of his anymore but then I want to cry again because he hugs me so hard that I can tell neither one of us want to let go.

When I dreamed of being a mother I never really thought about how him growing up within the first 18 months of his life would honestly move me to tears.

Yup, that's a different ladder there folks. No photoshop required. Nolan insisted that a ladder was how he wanted to remember his 18 month birthday and when we hid the white one he found the yellow one and tried (unsuccessfully) to move it to the photo shoot spot. Putting him without the prop simple meant that he left the photo shoot to run to the prop to climb it anyways, so yeah. That's what happened there. :)

Going forward you can expect that we'll have a family picture in the summer time around his birthday every year or maybe we'll try to shoot for early fall when the leaves are changing colors. Either way, I absolutely love our photographer and would recommend her to anyone.

Whenever the next kid comes around, I promise that I'll do the same sessions because I want any future kid to get equal representation of their childhood! 

Traditions

Do you have any holiday traditions?

I have always held a few traditions close to my heart when it comes to celebrating the holiday! With Nolan starting to come of age and show his personality and everything, it gets me super excited to continue them with him.

Just One Present
I always loved the charade of convincing my parents to let us open JUST ONE present on xmas eve. It always seemed like a struggle to get them to concede and allow us the one present but I think in the back of their minds it was the plan all along. So we'd spend all day salivating at the thought that we'd get to open on present. We were never structured on the time of day, although it probably was something we commonly did right before bedtime. Of course santa had our wish lists and we'd think of the top item on that list and hope that the present we selected to open was that big one! Whatever it was, it was always exciting to "break the rules" and open a present the day before we were supposed to. Probably because on xmas morning we had to go to church and spend like 4 hours there before coming home then having a huge meal with like 50 family members wait for everyone to finish eating and cleaning and THEN we'd get to do the actual unwrapping of everything else. The struggle was real!

Bonus X-Mas
The premise was that we'd open our presents that morning and then just totally be hyped up getting our new toys out of the packages and playing. While we were distracted in the basement or whatever more gifts would be put under the tree. I particularly remember my sister, Rachael, coming down the stairs and going "Santa forgot a bunch of presents, we have more stuff to open!" For context, my sister was probably old enough to know that santa wasn't real and was just playing along with it because she knew how fun it was for us to believe. But me and my younger brother basically flipped our lids hearing this. We'd fly up the stairs to find more presents with our names on them! OMGOMGOMGOMG we were DYING to open them. I don't believe we did this every year, but when it happened it was pretty darn phenomenal. And I 100% recommend doing it for your kids if you have any.

The Treasure Hunt
One of my favorite traditions of all was getting a group gift... usually something small and in a light box that was addressed to all of us kids. The gift contained a clue which ultimately became a whole house treasure hunt. Clues like "go the the place where the cookies are made" and we'd run to the oven where a clue like "flush away your holiday sorrows" or something cheesy like that would lead us to the bathroom (but which one!?). It would lead us to the BIG present. One year we got an air hockey table that was kept under our deck. Screaming ensued. What made this one great was that we had to work together to find the next clue and we'd be running all over the house to find it.

You better believe that these traditions are going to be practiced in my house.

What traditions did/do you have? Please share in the comments!