Funny Moments

The following is a random collection of funny moments that have happened with William. Now that he talks so much, he just amazes me with the things that come out of his mouth. Reading this, you may not think it's quite as funny as I do and that's ok. This is another one of those "diary" entries where I want to look back and remember....

* We were eating lunch with the TV on in the background. Someone on TV said something about $100. William said, "100 Dollars... I need some money!" What? you're 2! How do you even know that $100 IS money?

* Driving down a hilly road,the first time we went down a hill William said "Weeeee!" Next hill, "Weeee again!" Third hill, "Weeee Threee!"

* While potty training William was 'exploring' himself, shall we say. I came in and he looked at me and said (in his big man voice) "Whoa! Look at that Beeg (big) one! Thas a big penis!!!" (He's gonna kill me for this one.) (AJ might too)

Meep = sleep
Cabub = Caleb
Maggich = Magic
Mugit = Music
Staggic = static
Washing Sheem = Washing Machine
What yah? = What's that?

* William was throwing quite a large fit and couldn't have something he wanted (I don't remember what it was and it's not relevant anyway.) AJ said "I know, Life's not fair." And in an angry scream William yelled. "Life IS FAIR!!!!" What great insight for a 2 year old!

If I'm forgetting to include any stories that I might have told you about, please comment and let me know. Love to all!

Videos

I'm dedicating this post to my sister (Debbie) and my mother. Here are your videos! Now get off my back!!!!

Hee hee, just kidding. I've been meaning to do it so your nagging was just getting it done faster. Here are a couple of videos for your viewing pleasure. The first one is of William being a soccer stud and Caleb scooting around the house in his pre-crawling days. The second is of Caleb crawling!!! Yay Caleb! And the third is a short video of Caleb's first claps!

Well that sums up my update really, but I'll go ahead and give further detail. Caleb is crawling now! It started about 2 1/2 weeks ago (8 months old.) He'd been getting close for a while, as you'll see in the first video, but hadn't quite made it forward. Well, one day I took to the playroom with my lunch in hand to join Caleb. I put my sandwich on the floor beside me. As soon as Mr. Caleb saw that sandwich, he took off for it! Literally! It was the funniest thing I'd seen. He just crawled his little cute adorable crawl heading straight toward my plate. He had such determination in his eyes. I kept thinking, "The things a man will do for a sandwich!" He's also a clapper now. That was special because it was during breakfast on a saturday so AJ got to see it. He actually saw it first! William is doing great poo pooing in the potty. He has a 3 day in a row success rate, but then has a setback for a day! He's really grasping it good now and although he doesn't like giving up control and fights his way to the potty some days, he's doing so well and is so proud of himself!

Until next time... enjoy the videos!

Big Potty Day!

William pooped on the potty today! The first time with actual intention, not just me throwing him on their hoping to make it in time. He did great and was so proud of himself. I'm so proud of him too!

But, It's been a long week at the potty and I'm too 'pooped' to write anymore. I'll do pictures soon though... promise!

Ok, so I've been pretty bad at keeping up my New Year's Resolution. I've got lots to cover so I'm just going to dive in. Caleb's Baptism was a most wonderful event. However, it was a day late due to the crazy snow storm that TN faced that weekend. To come celebrate the occasion with us were my mom, dad, Debbie, Vance, Lynn, Archer and Chance. It was held in the same church where William was Baptized and Caleb did great! I think he even liked the water being poured on him. That weekend was also my 30th birthday weekend! The snow storm interrupted some plans but we had a nice dinner with family and it was great. My lovely husband had blind-folded me and brought me to a jewelry store. Before he took off my blind-fold, AJ handed me a stack of money and told me to pick out what I wanted. The only stipulation was that it had to be gold since it was my 'Golden' birthday (30 on the 30th.) It was amazing and such a fun time. I picked out a beautiful ring with clear and black diamonds and I love it! Great job hubby!

Well Mr. Caleb is accomplishing so much lately I don't even know where to begin. Oh wait, yes I do... he said "Mama"!!!! He was copying my sounds on Friday and he repeated me perfect! I'm very proud since he said that before 'baba' or 'dada!' I knew he was a mama's boy! He's also very close to crawling. He gets on his tummy every chance he gets and is a pro at going backwards and spinning around. He gets up on his knees and rocks back and forth, so he'll be moving forward any day now. Also, on Sunday he clapped his hands for the first time, deliberately! He was saying his "m" sounds and I got all excited again... and so did he because he just started clapping! It was at breakfast and AJ and William were there to witness it too. Caleb is also sleeping much better at night these days. It's (finally!) a rare night when he wakes up in the middle of the night and now he's sleeping until about 6:30 on a regular basis. Thank you Lord! It was wearing me down... all this getting up in the middle of the night.

William is doing great too! He's the smartest little boy I've ever met. He truly amazes me with the things he says, the words he knows, and his very clever imagination. I'm very proud of the little man that he is becoming! We continue to work on potty training. He's doing good, but we've got a long way to go. He's comfortable peeing in the potty at this point, but just doesn't want to use it every time he needs to go. And he refuses to poop in the potty. I've been using pull-up diapers, but I've now moved to cloth training pants. Hopefully this will be better... I'll keep you posted.

AJ's is just finishing up his second to last class for his MBA... YAY! His grades are incredible and I am so proud of all his hard work... although, I may not show it all the time. I'm glad that he will get to rediscover sleep and I'm happy that we all will have weekends again! Most importantly, the boys will be able to spend more time with Daddy! He also has some new things cooking up at work, but no details yet. He's on fire!

As for little 'ol me... I have taken the plunge and started a jewelry business. I was not wanting to leave my babies and go back to work, but I was desperately needing something to get me out of the house once in a while. This may make me sound like a terrible mother and it's not to take away from the joy and love I feel when being with my boys, but my days were the same with nothing to look forward to and I felt like I was losing myself. Not only that, but we have this new house and I really want to decorate it. I heard about this opportunity and just had to do it. It's super flexible and I can put as much or as little time as I want into it. I've been doing it for a month now and it's going really well so far. (And of course, if anyone is interested in a catalog I'm happy to send you one.)

I think that about sums it up. I'll post pictures in a separate post soon. I just wanted to go ahead and get updated here. Love to all!

Caleb's Baptism Info

Hello,

As promised I am updating this with Caleb's Baptism information. It will be held on January 30th (a most wonderful day!) at 10am here in Nashville. We'd love for all family to be able to attend, but I understand if it's not very feasible. It was kind of last minute, but I didn't want to have to wait until after Lent was over to have him Baptized.

I attached another video of Caleb below. This is the start of a wonderful musician, I think. I'm still trying to get the super funny video to upload, but I may need to edit it a bit. This one is still quite amusing for sure... Enjoy!

Happy 2010!

It's January 9th and I'm updating this so my resolution is semi-successful. 2009 was a very busy and great year for us. The year was happy and sad, fun and stressful. It included career changes, career growth, saying goodbye to our first house and hello to our new house. We brought a new baby into our family just days after losing my grandfather and we had a lot of family visitors travel to come see us. I can only pray that 2010 is a great year for us, but I'll be ok if it's a little less eventful! :-)

Well, in this installment of the Nashville P's I'll be talking about the holidays. In a semi-spontaneous fashion we decided to make the trek to NY to spend it with my family. Potentially the last time all the Bilak's will be together on Christmas for quite a long time - but definitely the last time all of us will be in the house that was our home for 20 years. The ride up was long but pretty uneventful. The boys did wonderfully for the whole trip... granted we drove through the night, but we left at 5pm so they were still up for a while. While there, we just stayed at my mom's house and let the boys get to know their family. It was so great to see William running around that house, greeting everyone and getting to know his Grandpa and uncles, whom he rarely sees. This was a first for Caleb to meet them too and I'm pretty sure he likes them - hee hee! We arrived Christmas Eve morning and were pretty exhausted. Baba and Auntie Debbie hung out with the boys while AJ and I caught up on some sleep. Then it was off to church. William did pretty well. For those of you that attended our wedding, you'll remember that our church is pretty small and there's no nursery area so I was nervous. As I expected, he provided entertainment for the surrounding church-goers, by smiling, waving, and saying adorable things. Caleb was perfect and quite content being held by AJ, Debbie, and myself. After that it was home for our phenomenal Christmas Eve meal. It included all the family plus Jeffrey's girlfriend, and our dear family friends Bernie and Cathy. We had the usual dishes - fish, salad, kutya, pyrohi, and my mom's super yummy homemade rolls. We all felt fat and happy after that meal for sure! After cleanup it was time for our tradition of "procrastinators or whatever other excuse you have this year's" time for gift wrapping. Debbie, mom, and I sat around the table wrapping all our gifts as we do every year at the last minute. I hope that tradition ends this year though, since I'm always so tired I can barely stand to wrap anything. Then comes Christmas morning! It was wonderful to spend Christmas morning with my boys (AJ included in that.) They are my life and to see the look on their faces when they opened the gifts was amazing. Since we were with my family and did all of our traditions for most everything, I wanted to incorporate one of AJ's family traditions for Christmas morning. Instead of openening our gifts all at once, we did each gift one at a time. It was nice and you'll see from the amount of gifts in the photos that it did take quite a while! Again, all my family was there too and it was great to be able to spend a Christmas at home again. I loved being with them! The rest of our stay was very low key, but entertaining. William played with all, I mean ALL, of his toys and the adults played games at night. "Things" was the big hit game this year. I highly recommend it, as we laughed our tails off playing it... especially the first night.

Then it came time to leave. We had great plans to stay the night in Cincinnati in a great hotel downtown, until we were about an hour away and it started snowing snowballs out of the sky. It was a nice little winter storm that Buffalo was getting and our 3 hour drive out of NY turned into an almost 6 hour drive just to get out of NY state! The furthest we made it was to Columbus, OH where we stayed the night. The following morning we were back on the road with much better driving conditions. Although we saw a ton of accidents that day, we were luckily not involved in any of them.

We finally arrived home to a frozen tundra of a house. 'Somebody' thought it a great idea to turn our heat off completely in the dead of winter while we were away so it was a whopping 44 degrees in here. Gizmo was a bit frozen (but ok) and our poor boys had blue lips and shivered for quite some time before finally warming up in time for bed. Our house thawed out and since AJ had a few more days off from work and school we just hung out and relaxed most days. On New Year's Eve, we had our friends Heath and Samantha come over for game night. We had a blast and it was a fun way to ring in the new decade!

Monday came and it was back to business as usual, me home with the boys - seemingly busy all day, but not getting much work accomplished and AJ back to work and school. Caleb had his 6 month doctors checkup on Tuesday of this week. He remains a big boy at 18 lbs 8 oz and 27 1/4 in. tall. He's in the 70 and 75th percentiles for his height/weight. The doctor says he's looking good and appears social and interactive. Although, he didn't get to see the Caleb that I know. He was pretty reserved and unsure of the doctor, but maybe because he remembered that the shots would be coming soon. And they did... 4 of them! My poor baby was so sad and even William appeared concerned when Caleb let out his cries. I assured them both that all was well and we went on our merry way.

The next few weeks has a bit of business in store for us. I'm planning on running the 1/2 marathon here in April and I'm working real hard to carve out training time. It's VERY difficult with two little kids, but I've been able to run on a treadmill at the gym where they have a sitting service (a God send!)(Did I mention that before?) So my challenge is to really get on a good schedule where I can get myself ready for this feat. AJ continues on with school, which has a lot of work for him this month, and Caleb has his follow up eye appointment at the end of this month. I will also be planning Caleb's Baptism over the next few weeks and will keep you posted on the details as I have them. William doesn't have much going on, which is probably a first. Just being a super adorable, wonderful (limit testing - hee hee) little man. OH, actually he'll be doing some serious potty training soon so that's a big step to mention. And finally, the end of this month is my Golden birthday. Yes, on January 30th I'll be..... uh... I can't say it... but you can figure it out. I should not be bothered by it, but I can't help but dread it. This officially means my youth is gone! Even at 29 I could still say I'm in my 20s and at least seem young. 30 just sounds so grown up and I don't feel like I'm old enough. I'm working on changing my attitude on that, but it's a work in progress. I really have no choice though 'cause ready or not, here it comes!

Below is the slideshow from Christmas. I didn't really weed out any similar pictures so you could really get the feel of our time up in NY. Also, I am including a video of Caleb. You HAVE to watch it! It's hilarious... at least to me and AJ. I think you'll enjoy it too! Happy New Year! (ok, so actually the video is not loading, but I'll keep trying so keep checking. Hopefully I can get it up soon.)

So much has happened...

It's been a long time since my last update - 2 months! Well, it's not because I've been lazy that's for sure. I have about 5 minutes to myself during the day so I must decide how I need to spend that. Unfortunately, it's been spent cleaning or just checking emails, or if I'm lucky - just sitting and trying to destress. I suppose night time should be when I think to update, but by that time of day it really just slips my mind. So my apologies to anyone who's been checking this and waiting for my update (including Uncle Charles, since I've been told you check this often ;-)) My New Year's resolution - get better with updating the blog in a timely fashion!

So, here we go! This will by far be my longest post yet, so maybe grab a cup of coffee first... ha! Since my last post we have moved and settled into our new house! I was sad to leave our old house, but honestly I didn't have too much time to think about it. My memories of that house are of a simpler time. We've just been so busy since we've been here, but it's all good busy. We've been working hard to get settled in the new place, but that took a while. Our closing process was a bit of a nightmare, but we did finally close and made out a little better than expected. Our agents were just as determined and happy to close as we were. We got to the office at 4pm on a Thursday and swore we wouldn't leave without being the rightful owners of the house. Of course, it was still not a smooth process as things were popping up last minute, but while we waited our agents broker went and bought us all a 6 pack of beer to have while we signed the papers... finally! I mention all this because I have pictures included below of how we turned the closing office into a pseudo-daycare. The broker was reading to William on the floor while we signed papers drinking a Blue Moon! It was a good day that was long overdue. The next thing we did after closing was to buy a refrigerator! We had been living out of a cooler and a 2-ft fridge for about 3 weeks. The day the truck pulled up, I nearly had tears in my eyes. It felt like Christmas and I was giddy! I had to laugh at myself for being so excited about a fridge, but when you're living without one for that long and trying not to eat out all the time it proves very difficult. I think the delivery guys thought I was a bit silly too - but I don't care! We have a fridge! So now, we have a house, a fridge, new family room furniture and are settled in for the most part. We have lots of updating and fixing up we'd like to do, but that will come in time. We can finally relax in here now and that's what's important to us.

What next? Then came the housewarming party. It was a combo housewarming - AJ's birthday party which was a surprise to him. His parents along with Debbie (my sister,) Kevin and Steve Gore (our best man at the wedding and his dad) came up to surprise AJ. I was so happy to be able to arrange this since we couldn't really celebrate his birthday on the actual day due to school. I felt terrible (more upset than him I think) since it was 30! That's a big birthday and we had such a low key evening. But the party was a great success! He had no idea what was in store. We had a beautiful poker themed cake for him (delicious too) and friends and family to 'warm our house' and celebrate his birthday.

Now, that about catches us up to date on the big events. Christmas is this week and we made a last minute decision to go to NY for Christmas and spend it with my family. We were reluctant since we had really been looking forward to spending Christmas in our new home with our boys, but this is probably going to be the last Christmas we will all be together for a long time. My mom is expecting to move here next year and it's unlikely that my brothers/dad will be able to come down for all the holidays. It means a lot to her to have us all together for a last Christmas in the house we've been in for 20 years so I'm doing my good daughter duty. I'm expecting that this will bring me good karma and when my boys grow up and have their families, they will come to see me on holidays (wink, wink.) It should be fun though. Well... the drive up, probably not so much, but the time there should be. I understand they've gotten a lot of snow and William will have a blast playing in it. AJ and I will too!

Now the individual updates. William is still the sweetest boy on the planet. He has a great sense of humor and I crack up at him daily. However, he's going through a screaming and hitting the dog phase which has me at my witt's end some days. His vocabulary is strong and he's becoming such an athlete. He was attending a mother's day out program, but he stopped last week since it's too far to drive now and defeats the purpose of me getting some time. It was sad to me because he really loves it there and they love him. He talks about it all them time and when he does something or sings a song he'll say "do THAT school," meaning, I do that in school. It's precious! I had him go through December because they do a great Chrismtas program with the kids. I have pictures below and I will try to post the video I took as well. It was so adorable and I only teared up a little. Caleb is doing wonderful also. He's getting so big! 75/80 percentile for his weight/height. He's giggling a lot now and is so close to sitting up on his own. He's a very touchy feely baby as he loves grabbing for his toys and touching everything. William was like that a little, but never seemed to grab at toys as much... at least at this age. But once he could crawl, watch out! Anyway, back to Caleb. He loves being in his jumper and being held. Those are his favorite things. He's such a cuddle bug with a happy disposition. I'm so blessed to have such happy babies! He's begun eating baby food and is slowly becoming a pro at it. I did have to take him to an opthamologist because he has some eye "hopping" that his ped. noticed. The eye doctor diagnosed that as nystagmus cause by ocular albinism. Basically meaning his eyes hop because he has only slight pigment in his retina. I have since learned there are 2 types of albinism, 1) ocular and 2)oculocutaneous. The latter is the kind you hear of most often with the albinos that have white hair and real pale skin. Luckily Caleb doesn't have that! So the doc said that its a real mild and that he's at the high end of the vision scale, but will need to do more tests to check how it's affecting his vision. He seems to be seeing very well to me (hence the reason I pointed out how much he grabs for toys, etc.) so hopefully it truly is mild. We will know more at the end of January.

AJ is still in school and just finished his most intense class of the program. Although he's thinking January's class is pretty intense too... we'll see. But he only has 4 more classes left! Yay!!!! I can't wait to have my husband back! Being an MBA widow is taking it's toll and I know the kids will be happier when Daddy's around more. And I'm quite sure AJ will be more than happy to have free time once again. He's been working so hard and has gotten an A in every class thus far. I'm truly so proud of him! I've just been doing mommy things. Cooking, cleaning (well - maintaining I should say,) and trying to keep my hair in. I feel so busy, but I can't really tell you what I've been doing.. ha! Is that normal? I will admit that things were more than stressful when we first moved in. The boys were resisting schedules and being out of sorts with the new house. I think we're all on track now and doing ok. I've found time to start sewing again so I'm working on a few special projects then I'll start making some inventory to sell. I've also started running again. At our local rec center they have a sitting service (truly a Godsend) so I've been able to drop the boys off and run a few miles. It has been a HUGE help in regaining sanity and I feel so much better now that I get some exercise. Although, I'm having some serious foot pain that's preventing me from running anymore this week, so hopefully that goes away!

So while I've slacked on updating the blog, I have not slacked in the picture taking department. I have a lot of different shots in the slideshow below... Enjoy!

Merry Christmas!!!!

P.S. I just saw that I had a post in my drafts and never published it when we first moved in. I wrote it on 11/02/09. I put some pictures with that one so see the post below this.

P.P.S It's been over 2 months and William is still calling it "New House."


William is in the front row 3rd from the right. They 'sing' 3 songs.



Go to this link for more pictures from William's Christmas Program.
http://picasaweb.google.com/isabeljohannes/EmmaSChristmasPagentDecember2009?authkey=Gv1sRgCNOxxYKik4j7zQE&feat=email#