Hey, Y'all!

Rockin' The Baby

Shell over at Things I Can't Say is hosting a fun link-up called Rockin' The Baby.  I went through my photos and selected a few of my favorites from Dean's baby days to share with all of you.

Here we see Dean in an adorable hat made especially for him by my friend Angelina:

 
Don't you wish you could sleep like that?

Or this?

 
How 'bout that hat?  Marcus insisted that Dean wear a hat at all times when we brought him home from the hospital. Sure it was January, but our apartment was about 400 degrees, hence the short-sleeved onesie.  This hat earned him the nickname "Gangsta Dean."

Speaking of Marcus, he just glanced over and asked why I'd chosen 2 pictures of Dean sleeping, since, honestly, these may be the only moments Dean slept somewhere other than on one of us during his first 4 months of life. Touche', Marcus Lane, touche'.

Here's one of him in an adorable onesie that reads "Everyone's Favorite."

 
Tiny muffin.

And finally, what very well may be the all-time greatest baby picture ever taken:

 
CHUBBEH!  On the left is my nephew, Adam, who was about 16 months at the time; on the right is Dean, 4 months.  Everyone in our family has framed copies of this shot, and we lovingly call them the Buddah Babies.

Got any cute pictures of your babies?  Link up at Shell's blog!

 

 

You're The Inspiration

I've been collecting inspiring images lately, mostly of things that just make me happy.  I find extreme joy in simple things like this: 

If you don't want a hedgehog pencil holder, something might be seriously wrong with your funny bone. Have that checked, wouldya?

and in majestic, God-given miracles like this:

 
Alaska. So beautiful it's kind of ridiculous.

I also like looking at this baby:

 

Nom nom nom I will eat your baby head in that hat!

And I want these shoes:

 
I have nothing to match you, per se, but OMG, get in mah closet!

All these images are living in my Pinterest gallery right now. (Have you been to Pinterest? It's addictive and so much fun!)  I'm trying to use my boards as inspirational spaces, but sometimes I find things like this which just make me laugh:

 
Heck, yeah.

Where do you find inspiration?  Are you on Pinterest? Let's be friends.  (Or let me know if you want an invitation!)

Wordless Wednesday: 4th of July edition

 

 
 

Our week at a glance

 
Mooooooooooom, do these black ballet flats go with my new big boy undies?  I like them. Sorry I trashed the living room. (again)

 
Dean has started calling his father "Marcus," probably because he heard all of us calling him that a lot on vacation. When he says it, it sounds like "Mah-cus."  Here he can be seen explaining how to catch a bluegill.

"You trow the cricket in da water and da fishy bites it--CHOMP, Mahcus."

 
Look! A rare photo of me! I do exist!

Whatever, lady. It's hot. Let's get a juice box.

 

Deano Lane'll make ya JUMP JUMP! (on the couch!) (which is a no-no!) (but still cute!) (in big boy undies!)

 

Mooom, I appreciate that you and Mahcus are "show people," really, I do.  However, I do not care about these Tony Awards of which you speak.  Hook me up with some Princess and The Frog.

Don't call us show people, son.

The one thing I didn't get a picture of that OH, I wish I would have was Dean and me watching his lovey, Stu, in the washer last night. We had a bit of a traumatic evening--Dean was stung by a yellowjacket 3 times. He was such a trouper about it though. Between his screams of pain, he made sure to say "thank you" to me for putting ice on his stings and to his dad for applying hydrocortisone cream.  With all that excitement, we all lost track of how long it had been since our last potty break, so we had a little accident on the living room floor. Poor Stu got a little damp, so into the washer he went.  Dean was nervous for him, so I let him pour in the detergent and we sat right in front of the door and watched Stu roll around in the suds.  It was one of those perfectly simple moments. I got to steal lots of top-of-the-head kisses and we sang a lot of songs.  And once Stu was all clean, to bed they went.

Today, we head to Birmingham Children's Theatre to see one of our former students in The Little Red Hen. I'm so, so excited and I hope Dean loves it.  Something tells me he will, being the son of show people.

Wordlessish Wednesday: Vacation Teaser

Here are some vacation pictures to hold you over until I can get it together and finish the three (count em, THREE) vacation posts I'm working on writing.  I keep going back and editing because, really--who cares that we ate pizza?  Here are a few of my favorite moments from our trip to Florida:

 
Hmmm...looks pokey.

By the way, if you ever need to know how to get cactucs needles out of tiny fingers--use scotch tape. Pulls right out. Not that THAT happened to us.  Ahem.

 
Fishing in the pond with cousin Belle.

 
At the zoo with G-Mama

 
"Breakfast Dessert," AKA  eating all the popsicles before we leave.

 I promise to sit myself down and finish pecking out some real posts about our trip because it was pretty awesome.  Happy Hump Day, y'all.

 

Easter

 Admit it.  It's my catchy titles that keep you coming back.

It's been a while since my little family of three had (more or less) an entire weekend with just the three of us.  We had originally planned to go out of town for Easter, but those plans fell through, so I got to work filling our Saturday and Sunday with fun activities to do as a famiy.

Saturday morning, we headed to our favorite park for our town's Easter Egg Hunt.  Dean had a great time hunting eggs, seeing the extremely creepy life-sized Easter Bunny and playing on the playground.

 

 
After the egg hunt, we stopped by Panera to grab a quick lunch.  Dean was in kids' meal Heaven. He ordered macaroni and cheese (which is GREAT there), a fruit cup and juice and they threw in a yogurt as part of his meal. He ate and ate and ate.  After lunch, we headed to the movies to see HOP. This was only Dean's second time at the movies and he did pretty well.

 
Our movie theatre provides these dreamy booster seats. Dean tolerated it during the previews while he was enjoying his gummi bears, then stood up (on my foot) the second the movie started. He only tried to escape once, which I counted as Success!  The movie was cute, but had a bit too much live action and not enough bunny rabbit for Dean's liking.

Saturday night, Marcus grilled some amazingly good ribs and we played outside until the sun went down.

Sunday morning, Dean woke up and we went down to check out his loot from the Easter Bunny.

 
Kid racked up!  Not all that is from the bunny, though.  Some of it was sent by his Nana and Pop Pop, some by his GG. He also got a pre-Easter basket from my mom and dad last weekend when we visited them.  (Forgive the clutter behind the table.  It's our old pack n play and a Huggies box full of baby stuff for a friend who's having a little boy next month.)

Dean LOVED everything in his basket, with the dinosaurs taking a slight edge for first place in his heart.  We read all the books, stuck stickers all over ourselves and sorted through the edible things.  Then this happened:

 
This child done decided he LOVES the chocolate bunnies.  In fact, he talked about this one (which he devoured before breakfast) so much that Marcus bought him another one on Tuesday.

The rest of Easter Sunday was spent around the house painting, playing outside and eating a tasty brunch.  That evening, we went out on the boat. This was Dean's first trip out and he had an absolute blast!  He grabbed the little emergency paddle that you use if your motor gives out, declared it his Diego paddle and proceeded to sing the "rescue pack" song from Go Diego Go. Then he let the paddle go in the water and that was pretty much the end of that.

 
Marcus caught a couple of small bass while we were out and, as usual, Dean was stoked. He held the fish and told them they were cute.

 

All was dandy until we had to let the fish go back to his watery home.

 
Tears. GIANT SAD TEARS.  Marcus tried to gently explain how the fish couldn't breathe if he was out of the water and that he probably needed to get home for dinner anyway or his fish mom would worry about him, but still. Tears.  We had to go home shortly after this picture was taken.

Once everyone got home and calmed down, we spread out on the hood of my car, looked at the stars and talked about our favorite things we'd done over the weekend.  If it wasn't a perfect weekend, it was pretty darn close.

 

Underage Blogger Attack!

Hey, y'all.  Dean here.  We seriously need to ditch the "Deano the Bambino" label. I am a BIG BOY now. Anywho, I haven't written in a while, so I thought I'd share some pictures. 
This squirrel has taken a liking to our front deck. We call him Albert.  I wanted to name him Dean, as I name everything because it's the BEST name (duh), but Sugar said all the Deans were confusing her, to pick something else.

 
Here I am having a picnic in our living room.  Daddy bought a buncha these chairs for our deck, but I like to sit on them in the house.  Sugar is often very adaptable to my needs and lets me eat in unconventional places.  I applaud her flexibility.

(my vocabulary has advanced a lot since last I wrote, no?)

 
Sugar told me about the CheeseburgHer party you all have at your blog conferences. Now that sounds like my kind of party!

 
Here I am grilling up some burgers last weekend. I like springtime.

 
I don't like getting up ANY MORE. I often hide from Sugar and Daddy until they deliver my milk to my bed. 

 
That's what's up(side down) here!  Hope y'all have a happy Easter!

Why I Didn't Have Cellulite Til I Was 23

I went to a magnet school for middle school.  My parents assumed, as did I, that I would continue on and go to the magnet high school.  Then I went to a Zachary High School football game.  The boy I liked was in the band and my family was super-close friends with his family, so we all went  to watch him march and play the bassoon or the drums or whatever he played. (I think it was the drums.  It would be very awkward to march while playing the bassoon.)  I enjoyed the crowd, as I always did at sporting events, but when I saw the dance team, my life changed. It sounds dramatic because it WAS. 8th grade Jen saw the Bronco Belles (catchy name, huh?) take to the field in their shiny leotards, fringy gloves and velvet capes and a dream was born.  After  many entries about them in my diary, Roxie (What, you don't name your diaries?), I dropped the bomb on my parents:  I was going to ZHS and trying out for Bronco Belles.

This posed many issues, the first and foremost being that we did not live in the Zachary school district.  I'm fairly sure I had already registered at the magnet high school, but that was easy enough to fix:  my mom called and told them  I wasn't coming.  The geography thing, however, posed a problem.  After much dilliberation, my  parents decided to put the house on the market  and try to move to Zachary.  When this did not happen quickly, they did the only other thing they could think of:  They gave legal custody of me, their only child, to a couple at our church who lived just a few miles from good ol' ZHS.  (My mother is now telling me that they just switched the people's water bill into my dad's name so they could show it to the school board, but my version's better, so let's stick with the idea that they handed me over to Susan and Gil, ok? Great.)

Anyway, long story short, I went to ZHS, tried out for and made the Bronco Belles and was happy as a clam.  We practiced from 1-4pm every single day, sometimes longer if we had a really difficult routine.  In the summer months, we practiced early in the morning outside our school, preparing for dance camp and competitions. I was over-the-moon happy to wear my uniform and be a part of the team.  When I look back on those years, I know my experiences with the Belles taught me time-management, self-discipline and dedication, things that are so very important in my career.

Ok, enough waxing philosophical...who wants to see pictures!?!? I thought so.

 
In case you couldn't tell, that's me, second from the left, and some of my teammates gathered outside the school at some ungodly hour of the morning carrying way too much luggage to go to a competition or some such. Dig the plastic shorts. And the matching hair bows. And the  "modern" dancer on our shirts, bags,and pretty much every other item we owned. Speaking of which,there was another Jennifer N. on the team. That's when I officially became Jen. But the other Jennifer liked to go by Jen sometimes, too, so I became Jen :). For real. There was a smiley face embroidered on every Bronco Belle item that was mine.  We were hard core, yo.

Here we are at a Disney dance competition wearing the ugliest outfits we could find and enough makeup to make a hooker do a double-take:

 
That's me absolutely dead-center.  Check out the toe point.  I always got really good scores for my toe points.

Here we are doing our home routine for the judges at camp:

 
See how innovative we were?  We made an arrow!  One time for a field routine, we tried to  spell "GO," but we practiced it backwards in the gym, so when we got to the football field to practice with the band, it said, "OG." I'm honestly not sure which one's me in this picture. I purposely didn't crop  it so you could admire the guy  in the bottom left corner's  awesome video camera. 

I poke fun, but those were seriously some of the best years of my life. I'll  post some more pictures soon, along with the magical story of my very first football game as a Bronco  Belle. 

Wordless Wednesday: Almost Done

 

Wordless Wednesday: Dean and Trudy