Beaches & Cuteness

Last weekend, Michael and I took a much needed, albeit brief, vacation down to the Keys for Amber's wedding. This was the view from my beach chair that I spent pretty much all of Friday sitting in:

The wedding, weather and location was perfect....I felt like I was in a Corona commercial, and for just one day life was simple....

We realized that it was our first time actually on vacation without Nate. He had stayed overnight at his Nena's before, but we had never actually left town without him. He probably didn't notice we were gone because he was having too much fun with his grandmothers....Thursday night his Alie came and spent the night with him and then Friday night he had a sleepover at his Nena's. I am pretty sure he had a blast...he loves being with both of them.

I feel like I have done a poor job of capturing all of the wonderful little things about Nate lately so I wanted to make sure I wrote them down so I will always remember them....some are old "tricks" and some are new, but they all make us smile:

1) He loves books - he will grab them on his own and sit and flip the pages and point to and call out everything he sees. Right now, his favorite book is the Color Train book that his CC bought him...he flips each page and yells "CHOO CHOO" moving his arm up and down. We read Goodnight Moon everynight and one of his favorite pages is the "old lady whispering hush"...he puts his finger to his mouth and says "Ssshhh".

2) He loves Sesame Street - he will come up to us and say "street?" when he wants to watch it (luckily our new cable box has it on demand because I am not sure I could have watched the Alphabet All-Stars video again). He loves all of the characters and he loves to yell out letters and numbers when he sees them.

3) He loves to kiss - he is always willing to give kisses when we ask for them, he chases Cameron around and kisses him, and whenever he sees an animal in a book he kisses the page. It melts my heart.

4) He has so many little things he says that I love...when he wakes up in the morning and we turn the lamp on he covers his eyes and says "bright!" (even if it is already daylight in his room), he just learned to say "I Love You" and it sounds like "Ilalu" (best word ever), when we are getting ready for bed he chants "p-JAY!"...and his favorite word right now - "No". He says it and he means it...I guess I don't actually love that though....

And I will leave you with the story of Nate's bad haircut...in an effort to save money, we decided one place we could cut our budget was Nate's "stylist"...there really was no need to pay more than $20 for a toddler haircut, even if they did have toys for him to play with. So, a week or so ago as we strolled in to our local Wal-Mart we actually noticed the "hair salon" inside -and after glancing back over at our shaggy kid, we thought "what the heck?" - it was half the price we were paying. So, we then subjected our poor baby to the worst haircut money could buy...the guy just took scissors around his hairline, no cutting the top or anything. This photo doesn't really portray the full effect of the 'do but you can see the look of frustration on Nate's face.

We thought we could live with it but we just couldn't, so we decided to give him the most economical haircut of all...daddy's clippers! Michael put the 1" guard on and went to town...and it worked (I thought he was going to have a buzz cut so I was nervous)! I don't have a good "after" shot (he was pretty red-faced and runny nose from all the crying) but I will post a recent pic soon. So, the moral of the story is - don't get your (or your child's) hair cut at Wal-Mart - I probably didn't have to tell you that though.