Father's Day

The week after Mother's Day, Clay's Mom went into the hospital with blood poisoning.  Well after 3 weeks at SGMC, being released and then readmitted 2 days later, she was transferred to Emory on the 14th where she is awaiting heart valve transplant surgery for the 2nd time.  Poor Clay had his hands full down here with me and my mystery illness so we were not able to make it up there until that weekend.  In fact we hadn't even planned to go then, Clay was going to go up by himself the following week, but Clay had gotten a call from his Dad that made it pretty apparent that we needed to go then and bring Gavin with us.  Praise the Lord that she made a huge turn for the better that Friday night and was in great spirits when we showed up with the our little monster on Saturday morning.  I have to say that Gavin did SO much better with the traveling than I expected and was pretty much a joy to be around in the hospital which was such a blessing to all involved. This is the only picture I got of him the first day.  He was passed out before I even got out of the hospital parking garage!  All that playing and entertaining wore him out!

We got back up early Sunday morning and made our way back to Emory to see everyone for awhile before we headed home.

Clay's Mom is at the University part of the Hospital which is really nice for many reasons but the one that is relevant to Gavin's well being on this trip is the really nice outdoor areas.  There isn't any traffic so we can just let him run around and play and get rid of some of that energy that he has been trying to release all morning while he is sitting on various laps and with Clay's Mom on the bed.

I got a couple of really cute pictures of Gavin and Clay on his 2nd Father's Day.

Gavin attempting to pick up the granola bar he just dropped on the ground.

And running from Clay because he doesn't want to give it up.

Gavin and his Aunt Susan, they had a great time entertaining each other.

Gavin showing off his new tongue tricks

Gavin and his Nanny-Ma.  She was singing to him and he just loved it, it was so sweet!!

Gavin and his Pa-pa.  They have a lot of fun together also and I know Gavin really lifted the spirits of everyone there.  I was so proud of him and his good behavior.  I was worried all the machines and funny hospital sounds and smells would freak him out, but he adjusted quite well and pretty quickly.

Poor little exhausted boy, passed out with Gerry, his giraffe.

Birthday Parties

The next day we had two birthday parties to go to.  Gavin sure is a popular boy already :-).

The first party was for a precious little girl who was turning 3, at a park close to our house.  There has been like 100 days over 100 this year so we were SO happy when the morning turned out to be overcast and not miserably hot. Gavin doesn't nap very well at school and actually doesn't even take a morning nap anymore.  Usually though, he will still take one on Saturdays but of course this Saturday he decided he would rather scream.  So we were not holding out much hope for a good attitude but he was cordial but didn't interact with all the kids very much, he was pretty much only interested in swinging and eating birthday cake.

Funny face

 This boy LOVES to swing!

Pretty sure this is as close to the birthday girl as he got





So he completely wore himself out between the screaming, swinging and playing on the playground and as soon as we got in the car he fell asleep.  We only had an hour before our next birthday party and one lesson we have definitely learned is that once that boy goes to sleep DO NOT WAKE HIM UP!!!  He will almost never go back to sleep and you will dearly pay for it.  So we decided to just go into town and go through a drive-thru for lunch and let him nap peacefully in his car seat.

So he got about a 45 minute nap and was good and rested for the next birthday party which was great because he had so much fun and needed all the energy he could muster.  This party was at the YMCA gymnastics building and they let all the kids run wild and play on all the equipment.  It was perfect and even the adults had fun!
They had this super long trampoline that the kids could jump down, Gavin hasn't figured jumping out yet, but had fun stumbling down it.

I think he was considering implementing some of those "Toddler Property Rules".  He LOVED playing with these balls!  He loves playing with balls period, but these were ex
tra special.  I couldn't believe he didn't pitch a fit when we had to put them down to go eat cake.  He must have seen the cake and been momentarily distracted.



They also had this really great foam pit, that you could slide into, jump into from a platform, or swing into from a rope swing!  Some of the adults decided that this would be a great place to have an adult birthday party :-).

Gavin thought the foam pit was alright, but he was soon out and back to chasing the balls.  Clay figured out that he could get Gavin to do other stuff by using the ball as bait.  Not sure what this says about our parenting skills or about Gavin, but I choose to ignore it.

Gavin loves to climb things at home and I thought what better place to climb than here where they have soft squishy floors.  But alas he didn't want to so we had to use the ball as bait once again.

Success at last!!

Poor little thing, so tired!

He actually laid here for a while, or at least it was awhile for him.  This boy does not lay down unless he is asleep.

So as you can tell he had a BIG time and was properly worn out and ready for his nice, long afternoon nap when we got home!

Cute pictures random Friday

I finally remembered to bring my camera to work and download my pictures a week or so ago.  I could easily download them to Clay's laptop, but for my super organized (some would use other words like anal) personality, it suits me best to have all my pictures in one place, on my computer.  So these pictures may be almost a month old but they are cute none the less.  On another note, I have lots more cute pictures from the past week but again they are still on the stupid camera, which I actually took out of my purse this morning, right before I left for work!!

These pictures are all from a random Friday afternoon/evening early this month.

Gavin's t-shirt is listing out Toddler Property Rules, Clay found it when we went to Jacksonville.  It is really cute although not exactly the lessons we want him to be learning.  There are 10 rules:
1. If it's in my hands, it's mine
2. If I can take it from you, it's mine
3. If I had it for a little while, it's mine
4. If it's mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way.
5. If I am building or doing something, all the pieces are mine
6. If it looks just like mine, it's mine
7. If you left it at my house, it's mine
8. If I saw it first it's mine.
9. If you have something and you put it down, it automatically becomes mine.
10. If I can take it from you it's mine.

Like I said, cute, but not good life lessons.

We must have been watching some nature movie on Netflix or possibly Sesame Street, because he isn't looking at the camera in one single picture I have!

These are pictures of bath time the same night. I know this is a typical Mom thought, but honestly I think I have the cutest little boy EVER!!  What a sweet little face!

Gavin has a bathtub basketball toy game and Clay and him play with it every night.  In the pictures, Clay is trying to get Gavin to "dunk" it.  

Missed this shot

Trying again

Celebration!!!

13 months old

I can't believe how fast this past month has passed by.  And how few pictures I have to commemorate it.  Our family has kind of been off our game with Clay's Mom being in the hospital and then me getting sick.  Oh well, I am sure next month will be much better!

Gavin got to attend several different birthday parties over the past month and we got some super cute pictures of him at them but of course I haven't loaded them yet, shame on me!  I do have a few cute ones from the adult birthday party that we all attended that are of Gavin and one of his many girlfriends.

I know this one is super blurry but I just thought it was so cute anyway!

Also this past month we celebrated Memorial Day.  Being that Clay's Mom was in the hospital, we decided to stick around town and have a quiet weekend.  It was super hot as usual so we got out several of Gavin's birthday presents and tried them out.  The pictures below were all taken with my phone so the quality may not be that great.

Gavin isn't a big fan of cold water and didn't last long in his little pool.  I am kind of worried how he is going to react when we take him to the lake in a couple of weeks.

The past couple of weeks, Gavin has started waking up really early which is strange because he has always been a 7 to 7 sleeper.  Now he is waking up multiple times in the early am sometimes for no reason at all and sometimes over the tiniest little noise.  Clay and I are really at a loss as to what to do to get him back on his schedule.  He really needs the sleep since he doesn't nap well at school.  I think we may have to suck it up and let him cry it out for a few mornings even though that means that we will get no sleep at all.

Gavin also started really walking just a few days after he turned 12 months.  He is getting faster and much better balanced.  He does kind of walk funny though, like a pirate with a peg leg.  He almost keeps his knees locked the whole time, it is really funny.  I am sure he will grow out of this, the more comfortable he gets with being on two legs.

Gavin has added a couple of new words to his vocabulary this month
Get it
Stop
Bye

Gavin has really started to explore and test limits.  I know it is all part of the growth process and he needs to go through this but gracious it can get aggravating.  It also is a constant reminder that Clay and I need to be super consistent with our rules and with disciplining him so that Gavin will not have any confusion on what is a no-no and what isn't.

Overall he is still my sweetest little boy and a huge blessing to his Daddy and me.  He gives great hugs and has really been into snuggling lately which I absolutely eat up.

12 month checkup

I can't believe how far behind I am or that I forgot to post his 12 month check up stats last time I posted :)

On May 19th Gavin was
Height - 30 1/2  75th percentile
Weight - 26.5     95th percentile
I can't remember what his head circumference was but I remember thinking that it hadn't grown much at all.

Jump N Jacks

Right after his birthday we took him to Jump N Jacks for the first time.  I was so excited and just knew he was going to LOVE it!!  Well.....it didn't go as well as I had hoped.  Aunt E tried to warn me that he would be overwhelmed by everything but did I listen, NO of course not :-).  We took him on a Friday afternoon about 4 which wasn't too busy since school was still in session.  But there were plenty of kids and all but one of them were WAY bigger than Gavin.  Another thing that didn't help was the noise.  All those fans running in an enclosed space make a lot more noise than you think.  I mean to an adult it wasn't that bad, but I am sure to Gavin it was super loud and scary.

I had forgotten my socks so Clay got in with him and tried to get him used to the idea.  There were only a couple of the bounce houses that were currently unoccupied so we went to the first one we saw which probably was not the most age appropriate.

This is how Gavin spent most of his time in the bounce houses, with a death grip on Clay.

We tried another that was a little more open and he didn't really seem to be impressed with this one either.

 So we decided to give it up for a while and just let him play in the baby area, which he absolutely loved!  Playing with all of those different toys and him being entertained was worth the money, for sure!!

We finally saw that the smallest of the bounce houses was open and decided to give that a try and it was much more successful.  I just thought this was the cutest picture!  Sweet little face :)

Cute video of him enjoying himself until he gets distracted by the "ladies".  I have a feeling we are going to be in trouble when he gets older :)

Another cute little girl he met at the baby area, apparently he likes them a little older.

All in all, it was a good time and we can't wait to take him back.  Next time though we will start out with the smallest bounce house and work our way up instead of the opposite :-).