My baby is 18 months

I can hardly believe that my sweet baby is 18 months old. I swear I was just in the hospital giving birth to him yesterday. Now he is a big boy doing so many fun things. I truly love this phase (I said that about every phase too).


My big boy all smiles at 18 months

 Definitely loves to smiles these days, he is so big now (I love it)

 What? you want another picture or something

 Me loving on my boy, he clearly doesn't care for it

 I love his face on this one, he is such a big boy now

 

And of course a picture of the hubby with T-man, stop making crazy faces husband.

I have loved every minute (ok not quite every minute but most of it) of the last 18 months and I am looking forward to many more fun (and probably some not so fun) months with my little man.

Toddler + food = One stressed mama

Ahhhhh, I tell you. My toddler is in the "I don't want to eat anything phase" and I am just so stressed. My Dr is not concerned, he is healthy and growing but it's nerve wrecking when meal time is always a fight. We are down to eating carrots and cheerios every meals because he loves those.

My son used to be such a great eater. We introduced solid food at 6 months and he took a liking to it. By 10 months he was eating 3 solid meals a day. Then around 15 months something happened he decided to become picky. It's been a roller coaster ride.

My 6-month old licking his plate, what happened to that hungry hippo?

 

Snacking king at 10 months

 

Nowadays, he is perfectly content drinking milk all day and eating nothing. What happened to my good eater. My Dr recommended just giving him food at certain times and if he didn't eat then not offering anything else. She says that in due time, he'll be hungry and will eat to his heart's content. I am just scared that he won't. I probably should give it a try.

What have you done about your picky eater? Do you follow them around the house with food or just let them eat whenever they ask for it?

How we met

Funny and long story actually.
The short version is that we met in Spain in 2005.
Now onto the long version :). Back in 2004 my friend Melissa went to study abroad in London for a year. Because I can never resist a trip and I just love hanging out with Melissa, I decided to go visit her during her spring break in 2005. Turns out she was going to Spain with some of her friends that same week so I just joined the group (7 of us) on this trip. We rented a villa two hours south of Barcelona for the week.

It was a great vacation. We drank most of the time, went to Barcelona for the day and did some sightseeing around our little town

Here are the boys walking around town. My hubby is the one with the yellow shirt.

 Later, back at the house, drinking and snacking. Man look how young we look

 Having breakfast in our house

 The girls, my friend Melissa is the one on the right

 We always laugh at this picture of us walking around Barcelona. Hubby is behind me. Little did we know that 4 years later we would be married :)

 I took this picture of the hubby and at the time thought he was so handsome :)

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 Melissa and the hubby chilling on a cliff

After Barcelona, we went back to London where I hung out with them for another couple of days before coming home.

While I was in London, hubby and I hit it off and started talking about all sorts of things. We kept in touch when I came home but it wasn't until the next January when he came to the US to visit his best friend (who was now studying abroad in the US) that we really started hanging out.

In 2006, over a year after we met, we took a trip to Ireland, Austria, and Slovakia together. It was on.

Pictures of us in Dublin where things started :)

 

We always laugh at this picture of us in front of the St Patrick's cathedral in Dublin where hubby is touching my leg and talking about dating and all that jazz.

 

Us, all smiles that evening while we were out drinking, look at hubby's beard (this was also our first self portrait :))

 Our biggest hurdle was that we lived in separate continents. We decided to give it a try and see what happened knowing that if we did want to make this work, eventually one of us would have to move. We kept in touch via phone and emails. Planned a trip to Thailand for April of 2007. Traveling to different places was the only way we really got to hang out and see each other.

The trip to Thailand was awesome, I'll have to do another post for that, best of all this is when hubby decided to make the big move to the US, best move ever :). He finally moved on 25 June 2007, we were engaged on 1 April 2008 and married on 25 July 2009. I told you it was a long story :).

We love to travel

We had a long distance relationship when we first started dating. My hubby lived in England while I lived in the US. So we always met somewhere and traveled for a couple of weeks. Then we moved to Germany and it was on. Every month was another opportunity to discover another country or another town. It was great. I obviously have a million pictures of our adventures :). Here are a few. I will definitely do another post with more pictures.

Munich, Germany

Tijuana, Mexico

Rome, Italy

 London, England

 Prague, Czech Republic

 Just love this pic of us in front of the John Lennon wall in Prague

 White water rafting in Austria

Brussels, Belgium

 Las Vegas, Nevada

Paris, France

 Berlin, Germany

 Istanbul, Turkey

Garmish, Germany

We have enjoyed our traveling so far.  We don't travel as much now with T-man here but we definitely still enjoy our fair share of trips.

Relaxed hair shrinks too

I've always thought that just because I relaxed my hair I wouldn't have any shrinkage. It's definitely not as dramatic as natural hair's shrinkage but it's definitely there. I noticed it more once I started air drying instead of flat ironing.

Case in point. Check out my little shrinkage. And by the way, I am so dangerously close to BSL and I am loving it.

I am hoping to be BSL by the Summer and MBL by the end of the year. Here is to working hard on my hair to achieve some great results this year.

I am also loving the thickness of my hair right now. In that picture I was only 4 days post relaxer after a cowash and air dry.

YAY for another wedding

I am super psyched about this new wedding coming our way. Hubby's best friend just proposed to his girlfriend of 7 years and I am so excited like I was getting married again :). They are my hubby's friend (they went to college together) but they have become great friends of mine too.

They live in England so this will be a trip and a wedding. So excited. They don't have a date yet but I can't wait to start planning this trip.

The soon to be wife threw me an awesome bachelorette party in London before we got married. We went to the Ice bar in London and here we are freezing our butt off for 30 minutes in the heat of the Summer. It was a great experience and I highly recommend.

Then they traveled from London to the US for our wedding where the soon to be husband stood by my hubby

They also came to visit us in Germany when we lived there in 2009

And as soon as T-man was born they came to the US to see us and meet our little man in person. They so wanted to go to Silver Diner (funny how that was something special for them)

 Now you see why I am so excited. They are such great friend and I can't wait to go to London to celebrate their special day. More traveling in our future makes me a happy person :).

Daycare

As a working parent, you will definitely at some point have the discussion about child care or at least think about it..

We've been really lucky and blessed in our journey to parenthood. My mom and grandma live less than 5 miles away from us. For the first 14 months of T-man's life, he was in the care of a family member and that was superb. I stayed at home with him for 4 sweet months. When I went back to work, my mom and grandma alternated days watching him full time.

I believed that a year was a good time for him to go to daycare and socialize and also give a break to my mom and grandma. So in September, 14 months young, T-man started daycare. It was a great location, only 10 min walking distance from my office. I was able to have lunch with him almost everyday and usually stayed with him through breakfast. This sounded like such a great idea.

Within a couple of weeks of starting daycare, T-man started getting sick and I swear he has been sick on and off since then. I love the daycare and I do believe that he is learning a lot but I am not sure if it's worth the sickness. I know he is building his immune system but I am sure he could have waited another year to do that. I almost considered taking him out of daycare and back at home with my mom and grandma, he was doing so well when he was at home with them.

Well T-man is back in daycare after staying at home for 3 weeks with his grandma. I am so nervous, because I know he will be sick soon. I am so not looking forward to that.

My next baby is staying at home for at least 2 years before we consider daycare. I am lucky enough to have a great support system, I intend to take full advantage of it the next time around.

What have you done about daycare? What do you plan to do?

And because any post would not be complete without a picture, I leave you with pics of T-man discovering an Ipad for the first time :). It was a riot. He actually says Ipad now :)

The many faces of my son

My son makes so many great faces. I just love how expressive he is. I take a million and a half pictures of him daily (I know, I am ridiculous) and I love going through them and seeing all the fun things that he does. So here are a few of them:


The please don't bother me, I am reading face

 

The I am such a goofball and mom can resist me face :)

 

The I am going to smile but I am still thinking about it face

 

The I am going to ignore you mom and you can keep trying but I won't laugh face

 

The what else do you want from me, I am looking at the camera face. I so love this one, his eyes are just so beautiful and captivating. Love those big brown eyes

 

The I know I am adorable face, I love love love this face

The I am having way too much fun face, look at that laugh

And probably my favorite of the bunch, I just love this sweet face

And because I just can't get enough of this amazing boy and I take so many pictures of him and his grandma is in town from England (someone obviously just wants to post a bunch of pics  :)), here are a couple of pic of T-man and his grandma reading together and doing the dishes :).

Which one is your favorite :)?