Hi all! Here's an update on what's going on in the Seidel household:

The month of Jan was a lil rough, Austin was sick with Croup (seal type cough) and we went to the ER because it but he got better after about a week or so. He just hung out on the couch most of the week. Kevin and I are finishing up our winter semester of school and so far we are doing good. Both of us have our final exams in our last two classes; Kevin's is today in Meteorology. Mine is in Art Appreciation and Algebra. Yuck!

Austin is getting bigger and bigger by each day! He's over 38 pounds and I need to measure him again but he was over 37 inches tall! He's very tall/big for his age group. He'll be 29 months so like 2.5 so for Kevin's brother's wedding he'll be right around 2 1/2 years old. Austin is suppose to do ring barer duty but we'll see how that goes. We are actually going to do Tux fittings today so I'll be snapping some pictures on that. I mean its just measurements so they may not even put anything on him. I don't know how he will act wearing a suit for the first time, plus a tie. As of right now Austin is obsessed with his alphabet, numbers and his little Mickey Mouse that he calls Mikey. :) He watches Curious George alot still so no change there. Hee, hee. I try to get him to do more craft like coloring and drawing. He's a wiz with my iphone! He can navigate on that thing better than most adults can! Austin is also a major sponge with learning and new words. He's putting more and more words together and making sentences. It's pretty cool to see how much he changes even with each day. He says some phrases that we say to him alot like, "Be careful." "Come on!" "Cat get down." :) He also says, "Mama (or) Dada, where are you?" And it's super cute, i need to try to get him to say it when I'm taping him. It's super adorable! He still gibbers with words though. So he'll be like gibber gibber cat gibber gibber cat, Ash. :) It's funny. But he is saying more real words than gibbering now so that's cool. This year I plan to get or maybe family can get *hint, wink* a Wii, one of those tumble preschool camera, and maybe if I can convince Kevin a pet fish for Austin. The Wii has a lot of preschool type games that he can play and we can play together. Oh plus a leapfrog Tag Jr. It's a big pen type deal that scrolls across a book and reads the words for him on these special type of books. Everyone that has it swears by them and says their kids love it.

I have a play date this Friday to host. I'm doing Valentine's day cookies for the kids to decorate. I've been getting some decorations together to put up so it's festive in here. Austin has a little girlfriend, Hannah and I hope she'll be able to come. She's been getting sick off and on. So he hasn't seen her as much. We were suppose to see them today but she got sick during the night. Well I need to get going, I have been having some sinus issues myself. It's just that time of the year I guess.

Oh to add, it snowed like mad crazy the night before. I think it was at least ten inches or so. It was a lot! And that fluffy thick snow too! Craziness!

2010- 01_Jan 28ms

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Trying to win a free book

So either just ignore this or if you're interested, I'm reposting a blog post for a chance to win a free photo book. :) I used this site for my Christmas cards. So you can now resume to your normal schedule. :) I'll be posting a real update soon.

Scrapblog has generously donated either a Keepsake Book or Calendar for one lucky person to personalize with their own photos! Check out www.scrapblog.com

I hope your holidays were nice

Well Christmas 2009 has come to an end. It was the most stressful busiest holiday season yet. I was so swapped with play-dates, school, projects, gifts, sending those out, Christmas cards, decorating the house for Christmas, shopping for those gifts, Austin, school, oh did I mention school already? Oh and crafts I said I would make that took a while (I think I just did them wrong) so finally its all over and done! Ok, not done completely. I'm extremely late on my MIL's presents. :( It took a lot (ALOT) longer than I thought it would take to do a calendar so I finally ordered it today. So that will not be there for a while. I've never been late on gifts ever and I sent my nieces their gifts late too. I'm such a bad aunt/daughter-in-law/etc.

Austin really enjoyed his presents this Christmas. Thank you all who got him something this year. He loves them all and plays with everything! He also loved to unwrap them too! He opened all of his and ours! LOL! He was super excited. I need to download the video. It's long though so I don't know if it will ever be online come to think of it. I burned the first Christmas (techinically his second) onto a disk but never sent it out. Urgh...such a procrastinator! (<--wow, I actually spelt that word right!) Neways, I did do a lot of crafts this season so that's good and I did do them with Austin. I want to try better at staying off the computer more (it sucks me in!) and do more hands-on stuff with Austin creatively-wise. I had him color some Christmas tags, and I want him to color and draw on some brown paper bags to use them as wrapping paper. It'll mean more I think to family.

This Christmas my dad totally surprised us and got Austin a sorta giraffe bike thing that has a small screen and sings and talk and interacts with him. It's got buttons and lights up too. He's obsessed with it! He plays on it all the time. The first night we had to hide it from him to just get a break from the music and noise! :) It def will stay in his room though. Thank God it doesn't (or suppose to) move. He tried once so far to drag it out of his room into the living room but we told him to put it back. To top it off, his 'girlfriend' Hannah got the same gift! They both are making the parents suffer endlessly! :) I'm sure if Marcie is keeping hers downstairs that's all Austin will play with when we come over. I see a 'pushing' match in the near future. "Mine, mine, mine!" <--- Austin says that alot now. We say Share, when he gets like this so now he says, "Mine, share!" :) Oh and I was eating something and I said that it was mama's, and he said (and as cute as can be!) "Share?" Crap! So of course I did. I have to be a good example and all right?

So he's jumped into extreme toddler-ness. He can says tons, do tons, and always tries to sing the alphabet and count. It's all wrong but he's trying. Now he's trying to do colors! This kid is a genius! Kevin and I hadn't even gone to colors yet. He started with the longest color too, yellow. He thinks everything is yellow. He has only one toy that is yellow though, besides the bath toy ducks. So when he runs to me saying yellow this or yellow that, I correct him, he says the correct color, runs off and grabs another toy and we repeat the process. :) I'm sure he'll get it one day. He got the alphabet pretty quick. He can start from A and go to H without messing up or skipping letters. Pretty impressive. And counting, for some reason he is awesome going backwards. He won't say one going forward. He'll count forward like this: 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, yay! :) And going down he'll count 5-1 perfectly. He does add a 'go' to the end. :) And seven is pronounced sevie. Very cute! He says alot of one words with gibber gabber along with it. He does a few two/three word sentences but not a lot. He'll put three words together like, "Dada, mama, kiss!" Or "Mama cheers water cup" (water cup is his sippy cup) So he's on the right track. He's def a super talker but no surprise there if yall know him since birth. Always been a gibber gabber. He's playing really well alone in his room but he has become more of a mama's boy. He won't let me be alone when he's not playing in his room. If my office door is closed he'll bang on it over and over again even if Kevin is in the living room with him. Austin just wants to be with me 24/7 now. I think that is where the SAHM relationship starts to build between mom and child though. For awhile he was content with either one of us. He then would get really excited when Kevin would get home but now if I leave or go even into another room he has to be with me. He's very attached. I'm really starting to fear when I do get a job how he'll react to it. It's just going to break my heart so much.

Ok, enough of that. I will now clean up my office (craft room) from all the wrapping, and crafting I've done. My New Years' resolution is the following:

1- Get a job

2- Earn some money somehow which involves #1

3- Scrapbook at least one page a month (totally behind)

4- Stay on or below budget (use what I have, don't buy more)

5- Continue to loose weight (I'm doing an awesome job but technically its cheating)

6- Get an eye appt (should be easy enough, I NEED new contacts/glasses

7- Keep the house in a better shape clean wise

Those are the main ones. I'm sure there are more. We won't start potty training Austin until after Kevin's Brother's wedding in March. That would be just completely stressful if we wasn't still in diapers. I am totally dreading that milestone. Ugh...but he's gotta grow up.

If you've read all this, thank you. :)

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Finally got everything figured out on this dang computer. Well, almost everything. I still need to get my other monitor functional but I guess that'll be a work in progress for a while. I was without my photo software for a few weeks and it was torture! I got the issue resolved finally!

December is tomorrow! It is already the last month of 2009! My goal is to do layouts! I need to get some scrapping done. School work too! And gifts wrapped and etc etc. For not having a job I feel overwhelmed! If I don't do all this who will? Remember this family, you would get nothing if it was up to Kevin! I had to remind him it was christmas card and gift giving time and he rolled his eyes at me and said, "great....." I reminded him that if I did not do this for our family you know very well he would hear about it later. It takes time to do the things I do though. Then the house needs cleaning, I need to grocery shopping, I want to go to the craft store and make some decorations but I don't see that happening. I desperately need a hair cut but that requires to book an appt and to be there at that time. I need an eye exam bad as well. Oh and then we need to book our plane tickets. Figure out this whole kitchen remodel issue...the list goes on and on. During on this, we have a child to raise! :)

I had Austin go to his measuring wall and he's already 1 1/2 inch taller than his mark in October!!! I knew he was growing. I need to get the measuring tape out again and measure his height. He's sooo tall! He's as tall or taller than the 3 year olds we go to playdates with!

Well I added his wish-list on the side there. He's into Mickey mouse, Curious George and Pixar's Cars.

ice lantern

I was at my mommies night out Saturday night and they had these beautiful lanterns outside their walkway at the house. I asked how they were made and thank you Luke and Caroline for such an amazing idea! DIY your own ice lanterns! Per Luke's instructions:

1. Get a cylinder type container preferably a stronger plastic then I used (my pitcher cracked first use) and fill with water
2. Leave it outside for I say about 6-7 hours depending on how cold it is (it was between 3-0 degrees out last night).
3. Once frozen thick enough (about two to three inches) take inside, loose it up with warm water to let the pitcher go, and flip it over.
4. There is a nice thin layer at the top you need to crack open to let the rest of the water out. And there you have it, your ice vase!
5. That easy!!! I used a kitchen towel to carry it back to the deck and dropped a tea light in there and the tea light last the whole time outside in the cold for three hours! Thank you again Luke!!!

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