The Splash Pad

 Hooray! We are at the Splash Park!

 Disney World does not have anything on this place and its FREE! Well at least for now that is the truth.  Colin is in love with the new splash pad at one of the parks here.  Lucky for me, one of my mom friends at library class told me about it and we went to check it out the next day.  I could barely set Colin down and he was running! I have never seen him so excited for anything.  All the other kids his age were really timid, didn't want to go in the water, and sticking very close to their parents.  Colin on the other hand was cracking up laughing, running directly into the sprinklers, and running as fast as he could away from me :) 

 The place has several different types of sprinklers including some that come up from the ground and others that are above your head.  Not all the sprinklers work at the same time so you really have to watch yourself or you may get soaked by accident. 

For some reason, Colin likes drains.  If we are not careful he will pull the drain cover off the shower and he loves to watch water go down the drain in both the sinks and bath tub.  You can imagine a place with this many drains was beyond awesome for him.  I have to admit that I also had a little fun with this because there were several times that Colin went to check out a drain that did not have any water coming out and BAM water right in the face haha.  I know I am mean but he has got to learn right?  I stopped laughing when he found the enormous drain in the middle of the park and proceeded to bend down like a dog and take a big old drink. Yuck! Everyone else in the park thought it was pretty funny though.

 When we were at the splash park on Friday there were some older kids there for a softball tournament.  Colin thought they were doing some great stuff and decided to chase them around and copy what they were doing.  One of the big kids said "Get away little kid".  My motherly instinct wanted to go tell that kid where he could go but of course Colin didn't care what he had to say so instead of embarrassing myself I let Colin keep bothering him :) Eventually the older kids thought it was funny to splash Colin with the water and Colin loved it so it all worked out.

 Another great thing about this splash park is that it is connected to another normal park.  Instead of wood chips, it has that new soft foam under the playground equipment and a park especially for kids Colin's size.  So Colin ran from splash pad to park for a total of 2 hours.  I was exhausted after our field trip.  So was Colin.  He took a 3 1/2 hour nap and still slept pretty good that night. 

In honor of  this weekends opening of the very last Harry Potter movie, I had to share this photo.  If you look very closely Colin was watching Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone! I knew he was like me a little.  I have been reading the books and watching the movies for 10 years now.  I am excited and a little sad about finally getting to see the last movie.  I am very lucky that I will get to relive them all through Colin's eyes as I fully intend of reading the books to him when he is old enough.   

Our Furry Friend

 This is our Furry Friend Tracker!

 Tracker is a 100 pound Rhodesian Ridgeback.  He turned 4 years old last week. I am sure if he could talk he would say he feels much older.  We got Tracker in August 2007.  At that time he was the "only child".  Brian was still in the Marine Corp getting ready to deploy to Iraq.  We were very excited about our new puppy and spoiled him to death.  He got to ride on our laps in the car (unfortuneatly he kept trying to do this even after he reached about 40 lbs), frequent trips to the "spa", Saturday morning biscuits and gravy (bad I know), afternoon naps with mommy on the weekends, bones and toys galore, and of course he got to sleep in the bed at night.  Basically Tracker helped me keep my sanity during the hardest 7 months of my life and therefore, I treated him like a prince. He was even more spoiled once Brian came home.  I guess you could say Tracker was "living the life". Then about 17 months ago that all changed.  Tracker went from being the "only child" to the dog. 

Tracker went from sleeping in the bed and spa treatments, to a comfy pillow on the floor and the occasional trip to the groomer for a bath ( No way I am going to attempt to give this horse a bath).  I will admit he has done very well and as you will see from the pictures, puts up with a lot from Colin.  Sometimes they are the best of friends and other times they antagonize each other to the extreme.  It is actually a lot of fun to watch their relationship progress.  I will never forget those first few nights that Colin was home and screaming at 2 in the morning and looking over at Tracker with his head UNDER his pillow.  He never was a big fan of the crying. We always try to look for ways to include Tracker in what we are doing and always try to let Colin be involved with Tracker as well.  For Tracker's birthday we let Colin give him his bone.  Colin of course thought it was for him and did not want to give it to Tracker.  They had a power struggle which of course, Tracker won.  Despite his loss, Colin did not give up and continued to sneak up on Tracker throughout the day and would steal the bone back.  This of course sent Tracker into panic mode.  It really reminded me of the commercial where the dog keeps looking for places to hide his bone.  This is not new for us.  I have found bones behind the toilet, under my pillow, under the dirty clothes in the closet, etc.  Usually he hides it and he is done but not this time.  He frantically ran about the house putting it places, thinking about it for a few minutes and then moving it again.  This continues for about 30 minutes.  He even tried to "dig up " the carpet in hopes of burying the bone.  Finally, he settled for under the couch cushion :)  .

This is a rare photo of Tracker alone with the bone.

Now I have said sometime they are the best of friends.  This is usually around breakfast, lunch and dinner time.  Imagine that :)  Tracker can hear the peal of a banana from anywhere and he can tell when I have opened the cabinet with the peanut butter.  The dog loves food.  He has quickly learned that Colin loves to share.  He spends lots of time sitting under Colin's high chair praying for the next flying piece of food.  Colin loves the attention from Tracker and is ever so willing to oblige.  I have to admit there have been time when I have been really glad Tracker is there ,particulary on a green bean night because there tends to be less for me to clean up afterwards.

Tracker really does put up with a lot.  You can see him giving me the devil eyes while I stood cracking up at the two of them.  Colin loved dressing up Tracker.  This is just one of the many examples when I look at Tracker and say "Good boy".  These moments are often followed by cookies which is the reason I really think he puts up with it.

Now if you take a good look at this picture you will see that Colin is wearing Tracker's collar. You can really see he loves his "Best Friend". He is also holding a lion that he is calling "Oggy!" which means Doggy. Pretty much anything with 4 legs is an Oggy! right now. In fact pretty much anything other than a human. We went to petco a couple of weeks ago and the fish, mice, and birds were Oggies to.  Just so you can see how far we have come in 4 years, here are some pictures of Tracker when we first got him.

The boy loves lawnmowers

 Colin loves lawnmowers.  He loves to play with his lawnmower.  He likes to look at lawnmowers.  He likes to listen to lawnmowers.  He also likes to pretend to mow with Dad!  He literally follows Brian around the entire yard "helping"him mow.  They look so cute together.

 When we go for walks I pray that we do not run into anyone who is mowing their lawn.  It adds an average of 10 extra minutes to our walk because we have to stop and watch them mow their lawn.  He is completely amazed by these things.  

 When we were swimming the other day, the neighbor was mowing his lawn and Colin had to stop and watch every few minutes and wave at the man.  The guy was probably thinking we were kind of creepy since we were watching him for a good hour or more.

 I love this picture.  They were just talking away.  

Pretty sure this made Colin's day. His dad let him touch the mower! He even walked with him and let him "push" the mower.  I am hoping this love of mowing continues through the teenage years.  I am sure by then he will be over it but I will kindly remind him, a couple of years ago you would have LOVED to mow the yard!  

Swimming and Happy Father's Day

 We finally got to go swimming for the first time this year! We went with my friend Ashley to her Dad's house and Colin had a blast.  He really enjoyed swimming but really did NOT like his life jacket.  He pretty much laid on the deck and screamed until I took it off.  So instead of the life jacket, Ashley and I took turns holding him in the water.  He was not too sure about it at first but he eventually loved putting his face in the water, kicking his feet, and JUMPING in the water.  His jumps were more like just taking steps off the edge but he still really liked it. 

 I think his favorite part was sitting in the chair and eating a snack.  Swimming must really make you hungry because this kid put down a whole bag of cookies and another bag of veggie straws.  Then 20 minutes later when we got home he ate an entire plate of pasta.  He may be small but this boy can eat.  He is finally hitting a growth spurt and more and more people are talking about how big he is getting instead of how small he is.  Our "little" guy has never made it past the 20th percentile for height, weight, or head circumference but our Doctor always tells us, "Who cares, he is obviously healthy".

 Not only can he eat, he can sleep.  I went into his room one day and found him like this.  The kid will sleep for 3 solid hours most days.  I even have to go in and wake him sometimes.  I know they say never wake a sleeping baby but there is nothing pretty about an exhausted Mama at 10 at night dealing with a wide awake toddler so after 3 hours its time to get up! What I really think is funny is how he sleeps.  I guess he didn't get the memo that pillows are for your head and not your butt :) 

 These were my boys on Father's Day.  Brian sat down to eat his breakfast by the couch and Colin ran over there and sat down and looked at me like "I'll have my breakfast here too please"  It is fun to watch Colin copy everything Brian does.  He really loves and wants to be just like his Dad.

Finally just another cute picture of Colin on Father's Day.  We went to Brian's moms house to eat dinner and Colin got to play with all of Grandmas fun toys.  I had to get a picture of him in his overalls.  I love them!

A new car and a roly poly!

 A couple of weeks ago, Colin and I were on one of our many walks and we were going past our neighbors house when Colin spotted a car.  You know those red cars with the yellow roof that every little kids seems to have.  Well I have never seen Colin run so fast.  He nearly knocked two little kids down in his pursuit of this car.  He pushed a kid out of the way, jumped in, closed the door, and took off.  Good thing I knew my neighbors and they were laughing at Colin instead of calling us in for grand theft auto.  I apologized and they said to let him play for a little bit.  Colin had a great time despite the fact that the other little boy kept opening the door and yelling "Boy Out!".  Colin would just close the door and keep on trucking.  Well after about 15 minutes I figured we better be going.  Easier said than done.  Colin was NOT happy.  I decided we had better get our own car.

 With perfect timing, my brother David called a few days later and said they had an old car that his kids couldn't play with anymore and asked if Colin would like it! Of course we said yes and now Colin is now the PROUD owner of a green convertible.  He loves this car.  In fact the day my brother brought it over it was raining and Colin could care less about that fact and drove up and down the driveway with Grandpa Stack in the rain.  We are now expert drivers, honk the horn on comand, and look how serious and skillful he is about backing up.  Thank you Uncle David!

 Today Colin said "Bubble" for the first time.  The kid is really starting to pick up on words and is making his mom and dad very proud.  Here is a picture of him "blowing bubbles".  Blowing bubbles sounds so nice and it should unfortunetly, blowing bubbles with Colin is not such a relaxing event.  First, Colin really likes to soak the wand really well,  getting as much soap as possible on it.  He then proceeds to whip it out of the bottle very quickly.  Warning! Step back at this point because you are likely to get soap in your eye, hair, all over your clothes, etc.  There have been many afternoons that I have been soaked with "bubbles".  Next, take another step back because this kid means buisness.  He whips that wand around so hard that we are lucky to see one bubble.  He also whacks whatever is close to him.  Today it happened to be the green convertible.  If you look at his face you can see the force he puts into this.  Blowing bubbles at our house is a dangerous event, especially to poor Tracker but Colin loves it and now he says "Bubble" so how can I refuse him the opportunity to waste half a bottle of soap, soak his moms clothes, and give anything close to him a black eye.  He sounds so cute when he said "Bubble".

On our walk today Colin got to hold his very first roly poly.  I really love showing Colin new things and I am always looking for opportunities to do this.  As soon as I saw this roly poly I grabbed it and showed Colin how to let it crawl around in his hand.  Colin was very intrigued by this.  I should have known when that roly poly immediatly rolled into a ball upon entering Colin's hand that this would not end well.  Colin dropped the roly poly several times and picked it up each time.  Finally, the roly poly started to crawl around in his hand and I started to say "oh good boy, be nice to the roly poly" and looked away for one second to look at my pictures.  That is when that poor roly poly met its end at the fingers of my 16 month old.  In the one second I turned away Colin grabbed the roly poly and in true boy fashion smashed it between two fingers.  I am sorry roly poly family.  I promise to leave all of your alone from this point on. 

 

First trip to the library

 I take these pictures so I can show him when he is a teenager just how much he LOVES to do the dishes.  Doing the dishes is probably one of Colin's favorite things to do.  Every time I go near the sink, he pulls a chair over so he can help.  There are several times throughout the day when I really do not want to do dishes and he will pull his chair over and then try to push me towards the sink.  Today we did the dishes first thing in the morning because we were going to the library.  We didn't have too much time so we had to cut our dish washing time short.

 This was his reaction to having to stop doing the dishes.  That is usually my reaction when I know I HAVE to do them :)  Like I said before I will keep the pictures just to remind him when he starts giving me attitude about doing the dishes.

 Today was our first trip to the library.  Like most libraries they have a toddler program that lasts for about 30 minutes.  During that time we sing songs, say funny poems, and read books.  I thought this would be a great way to get Colin around some other children during the summer.  This was a picture of him on the way to the library.  He was laughing because I was talking about how much fun we were going to have.  I thought we were going to have fun. 

This is where we went wrong.  I did not know the library was going to have blocks.  Colin loves blocks.  He spends much of his time during the day playing with some type of blocks.  We went over to the block table while we were waiting for the class to start.  When it was time to go over to the play group, Colin did not want to go.  I eventually got him over there basically kicking and screaming.  He would not sit still without his binki (I despise that thing).  He was ok for a little bit because he enjoyed me throwing him around to the music (note to self:  do not work out before library class again, library class is a workout in itself).  As soon as a song ended we had a wrestling match with him wanting to go to blocks and me wanting to enjoy class.  I was sweating. Colin was sweating.  Finally, I gave up and we played with blocks.  At the end of the music class the teacher had a bubble machine and since bubbles also rank up there on the list of things Colin loves, he ran over to see them.  So I learned my lesson.  Next week I will show up right on time and NOT go over to the blocks. 

Colin fed himself his own yougurt today. You can see he was very proud of himself!
Yum!

Brand new haircut and first black eye!

He never cried just wanted to know what in the world is this guy doing.

Getting ready for haircut. I kind of miss the curls :(

Hope you enjoy all the pictures. I will be sure to add more daily!