Christmas 2008

Little J made out like a bandit this Christmas! We are in serious Thomas & Cars overload!! (Ok, I'm to blame for most of it, but I can't help it!) We spent Christmas morning at our house. Jacob opened a couple of gifts and his stocking before we went to Mass. He was very good at church, knowing there was a whole stack of presents awaiting him at home!


Here I am trying to get a picture of him in front of the Christmas Tree on Christmas morning. I do this every year, but only his first Christmas did he really listen. Ever since he's been a moving target! And this year, he insisted on sitting ON the gifts - which you can see he's about to do here:



Opening his stocking. A toothbrush! How wonderful!




Opening "Toby's Windmill" - a destination for his Thomas trains.




Later we went to my parents' house where even MORE gifts awaited:

Opening what looks like more Thomas stuff. FUN!

Digging a gift out of a gift bag:

Playing with his new train table that his papa made for him:

Stopping his play just long enough for me to take this photo:

Christmas Eve

We had a really nice Christmas Eve. Too bad I only took 2 photos, and they're both of Jacob playing with his new present from Grandpa & Aunt Heather. The "Handy Manny" truck. He's hysterical with this thing. It talks and Jacob has been picking up some of the sayings. He'll say things like, "Mommy, we need to flush the radiator." LOL!!!

He calls the tools, "two-lows." Or at least that's how he pronounces "tools."

In addition to the Handy Manny truck, he also received a Thomas water tower, Henry the Green Engine, and a "baby" Percy & James. (The take-along ones are smaller so he calls them the baby ones. hee!) He also received a Little Einsteins Rocket from his cousin Charlotte. You can see the tip of Rocket near the front of the truck.

All in all, a good time with the Baez family!

Christmas Cupcakes

Jacob loves cupcakes ... and loves "helping" in the kitchen. So I really thought he would enjoy decorating cupcakes with various Christmas candies. (He LOVES candy too. Quite the trifecta we had going on.) So, I took Jacob to the store to help choose the candy we would use to decorate our cupcakes. That was fun .... sort of.

What I failed to realize is, he found frosting the cupcakes much more interesting and fun than decorating them with candy. In fact, he didn't really "get" decorating them. He just wanted to frost, and eat the candy separately.

Here he is frosting a cupcake. You can see that I had frosted most of them already since I thought he would be decorating them.


He really tried, but wasn't so great with his technique.

Finished product!

First Self-Portrait

Someone loves playing with mommy's camera. I discovered this (along with pictures of the wall, close-ups of his pants, etc.) later. Too funny!

Painting Christmas Cookies

As soon as Randy suggested painting cookies with Jacob, I knew Jacob would LOVE the idea. (We used to do this fairly often when I was younger, but we haven't in a few years. It was fun to do again!) Jacob loves art & loves cookies, so this was a big hit with him.


Here he is getting a little pre-instruction from Daddy:



Here he is painting his Christmas tree cookie:




Getting more frosting:

Concentrating hard! (Whenever he's working/concentrating on something, he sticks his little tongue out. It's so cute!!)

Here I am trying to get him to display his finished product to me:

Papa needs to help - but the cookie turned out great! (one of many, naturally) I think Jason did that red garland though ;) As you can see from the picture above, THAT Christmas tree cookie (with the pile of M&M's in the center) was all Jacob.

Overall, he had a blast! Though his poor bruised eye created confusion. Both my mom & I would look at him and think that he had painted his face. It was just the bruise :(

Decorating the Christmas Tree

Jacob LOVES to decorate for the holidays. He got a big kick out of putting up our Halloween decorations, and would point to the ones he put out and say, "I made that!" So, I knew he would have fun decorating the Christmas tree. I put it up and put the garland on while he was napping, but let him handle the ornaments.

Here he is before we got started. He was really into standing behind the tree for some reason.


Here he is admiring his Mr. Potato Head ornament. Actually, I've had that one for years (bought it for 75% off after Christmas one year) and often wondered why, since I never put it on the tree. Well, it along with a random Toy Story 2 ornament that I used to think was ugly, are now "Jacob's" ornaments. There WAS a reason I bought those things so many years ago!

Ok, this ornament really IS Jacob's. I bought it this year, just for him. It's a Fisher-Price Little People Farm. The doors open & everything.

Decorating behind the tree ... (either that or pulling off ornaments!)

Our finished product! I thought it turned out quite nice, but we never did find the star. Jacob was disappointed about that & wanted me to buy another one. (I ended up finding it when I was putting the tree away. LOL.)

Jacob's Bad Fall

Poor Jacob had a terrible accident at school. He was running in the outside play area towards the sandbox and tripped just before he got there. He landed face first on the wooden edge. :( The school called Jason to let him know what happened and that they were icing it (the fall happened right before lunch) and they'd call us if anything changes. After he woke up from his nap, it was so swollen, they called to have us pick him up. When I arrived, I felt SO BADLY for him. His eye was so swollen, he could hardly see. When I entered the room, Jacob looked grim (not his usual excited self) and his friend Mackenzie came running up to me yelling, "Eye! Eye!"

This picture doesn't look so bad because you can't tell how puffy it was. It puffed out what seemed like at least an inch.



As you can see here, his spirits were fairly good, though he knew he had hurt himself.




The next morning, it looked worse :( In this picture, he has both eyes wide open. His bad eye had swollen up so much, it would hardly open at all. We had frequent icings ....




But I got him a special ice fish to put on his eye. We iced it for 3-4 days in a row. It was BAD. He dug the fish though. (After this incident, any bump or bang, no matter how slight, he said, "I need my fish!")

The eye took a long time to heal - about three weeks before the bruising went away. And the bruising changed colors making it look terrible! The good news is, his actual eye was fine, and no damage was done. It just looked awful. Poor little guy :(

Thanksgiving

We had a nice Thanksgiving this year, though at age 2.5, it was kind of lost on Jacob. We celebrated with Jason's dad and family this year. Jacob would hardly touch a thing. Boo! I knew he would like the sweet potatoes, but he refused to try them. The mashed potatoes too. He ended up eating yogurt & a few bites of turkey. Maybe next year!

I bought him this Little People Mayflower play set. Obviously he doesn't have a clue of what the Mayflower is or its significance, but he played with it for a while. He called it his "pirate ship."

Pardon the red eyes. Forgot to use the red eye reducer.

Pumpkin Patch

First of all, my apologies for the photo quality in this post and the previous Pumpkin Party post. I was a bad mommy and forgot my camera (horrors!) and had to use my BlackBerry instead. However, it didn't take bad photos for a phone.

With that out of the way .... there are two, yes two, pumpkin patches between Jacob's pre-school and the freeway on-ramp. So every day since about the first of October, he's been pointing out the pumpkins, the giant Tigger, the giant Pooh Bear, the ponies ("I like ponies, mommy." LOL), and anything else he can see out the window. Finally this week he said, "I want to go." So I used my mom's best line, "I don't have any cash with me, sorry. Maybe later." (Jacob's favorite word is "later". If not now, Later?) But that Jacob. He's too smart. When I picked him up from school the next day, he said, "You get money? I go to pumpkin patch?" Crap. I did tell him later. And if we didn't go today, we couldn't go at all. The next day was Halloween. So, off we went.

Here we are at the pumpkin patch! There was TONS to do. We stayed for over an hour and even then Jacob didn't want to leave. I had to bribe him with candy and even though that worked, he still cried.

They had those dorky little rides that you feed quarters into that for whatever reason, kids find irresistible. I'll bet I fed $2 into this one. (Crap. I just deleted the picture of him riding the other dorky ride. I'll upload it somewhere else. I haven't figured out how to place pictures where (( I )) want them in Blogger.)

Ok - the random picture up top of Jacob riding an elephant? Yeah, that's supposed to go here. Oh well. Even though that was the slowest, lamest ride in the universe, he thought it was "Dumbo" and therefore - fun. Ahhh, to be two.

The pumpkin patch had wagons available to pull pumpkins around in. Jacob thought that was great fun! He pulled this wagon ALL OVER the place. For a loooong time. Notice the bottle of juice in the wagon? There were some people from Honest Tea there taking pictures of kids with their products. My not-so-cooperative Jacob wouldn't hold the bottle while pulling the wagon, so they took a picture of the product in the wagon next to a pumpkin while Jacob pulled it. No baby modeling for us!

We also went for a pony ride. Well, he did, not me. It was expensive - $5! And of course he wanted to go twice. Sheesh. He did have a great time though, and wasn't scared at all. One time the horse whinnied & Jacob laughed and said, "My pony's making funny noises, mommy"!

But the most excitement came when one of the horses' pooped. Jacob talked about that for the rest of the ride. "My pony went poo mommy?" "We have to stop and change diaper?" (No, that pony went poo. Ponies don't wear diapers, they poo on the ground.) Then it was, "That pony went poo mommy?" The pony ride operators thought this exchange was pretty funny.

We did purchase a pumpkin that we plan to carve tonight. Stay tuned for pictures!

Pumpkin Party

Yes, the pumpkins and parties continue! On Wednesday, October 29th, Jacob's school hosted their annual Pumpkin Day. Jacob's class visited the pumpkin patch out in the school's courtyard, he selected his own pumpkin (we had to pay $5 in advance - there is no such thing as a free lunch), and later the festivities started.

Here is Jacob's fantastic artwork! I didn't even notice any orange paint on his clothes, which would be first. Here we are at Pumpkin Party ....

Daddy helping Jacob carve his pumpkin. I'll have to take a picture of the completed Jack 'o Lantern. It turned out pretty good!

This is Jacob's first "If Daddy says no, ask Mommy" moment. It turns out earlier (before I arrived) Jacob asked Jason if he could play in this tree planter. The tree is fairly large and had a bunch of smaller pumpkins hanging from it & he wanted to run around the tree and hit the pumpkins. Jason had said no. Jacob's first opportunity to get me alone, he asked me if he could, so I carried him to the tree so he could touch the pumpkins. He was too smart for me & wiggled away. Soon he was running around the tree, whacking the pumpkins. I asked him to get down, but he was fast. And the tree planter is large & round - so he was always out of my reach on the other side. Soon I was like, "whatever." Then Jason walked up. And Jacob was caught.

Here is a photo of Jacob being scolded by daddy.

Jacob was putting this pumpkin bucket on his head & shouting, "I can't see you mommy!" and then pulling it off and saying, "There you are!" He thought that was hilarious. It was kind of funny.

Jacob & his teacher Ms. Amalia playing a game.

Playing a bean bag toss game. He didn't quite get that you were supposed to toss the bean bags one at a time. He hoarded them and then tossed them all at once.

Playing a pumpkin magnet fishing type game ...

Jacob's classroom (the Bunnies) display. Their pumpkins were on the side. (See first photo.)

Overall his school did a nice job with the party and Jacob had a lot of fun!

Trick-or-Treat Party (Part 2)

Well, it seems I burned up my camera over at Disneyland and forgot to get it out as much at the Trick-or-Treat party. It's just as well. Disneyland was much more fun. The Trick-or-Treat party was super crowded, and not much of a party. It was really just California Adventure Park with trick-or-treat stations. Trick-or-treat stations with really long lines! We didn't even bother with half of them.

The decorations and ambiance were great though! They had Halloween music playing the whole time (although we noticed we heard the same remake of "Superstitious" at least 3 times), Disney villians taking photos (you usually don't see those characters) and lots of decorations.

Here's Jacob posing out in front of the pumpkin sign. I think that's some candy he's got in his hand ...

He wasn't into the trick-or-treating. By the look on his face you'd think they were giving him poo or something!

Here we are checking out some ghosts

Well, that's it from the Trick-or-Treat party. We'll be skipping that one next year. I'd rather spend the money & buy my own candy & decorations!