Birthday Boy

Ben turned one yesterday, but we've been celebrating all week. Last Monday we had all of our Folsom family over for cake and ice cream. Ben didn't eat much of his smash cake, but boy he sure made a mess of it. I forgot to get an after picture, but we took all sorts of video. Hopefully I can grab a frame from that.

We didn't do much on his actual birthday because we had a lot of other things going on, but today we went and got his one year pictures taken and then got ice cream at Leatherbys.

We were doing peek-a-boo to get him to smile. He started covering his ears whenever we did peek-a-boo, trying to do it with us. It was so cute!

Oh Ben. We love him so much. He loves to cuddle when he is tired or sick. He loves being part of the action. He tries so hard to keep up with Luke, and wants whatever Luke is playing with or imitates Luke whenever he can (including, to our chagrin, when Luke is throwing a tantrum). He started walking consistently at about 10 1/2 months. He waves bye-bye, plays peek-a-boo, claps, and gives high five. We call him our beggar baby. He wants to eat whatever we're eating, no matter what. Even if he just ate. Even if it's something he hates, like avocado. Here's to another year with him!

Halloween

Jason and I are not huge Halloween people. Neither of us like dressing up. And so far Luke doesn't seem to like it either. I had to bribe him with the thought of candy for him to keep his costume on. That said, they looked pretty cute.

Marty McFly and Einstein the dog

Jason even made a cardboard hoverboard

Enjoying the fruits of his labors

How to Train Your Dragon is one of Luke's favorite movies so we thought it would be fun to carve Toothless the pumpkin.

It was probably our most enjoyable Halloween yet as a couple. This was the first year that Luke got it. He would go up to the houses, hold out his bag and say trick-or-treat. Anything for candy!

Allergies

Our whole family got a horrible cough/cold in August that lasted an entire month. We finally all went into the doctor when mine turned into a raging ear infection. Ben had never been on antibiotics before so we assumed he was okay to take whatever. The doctor gave him some amoxicillin.

Because he hadn't been feeling well, he hadn't slept well recently. So I didn't think much of it when he was increasingly tired and whiny. A couple days later I took the boys for a walk and when I came home, Ben had a fever of 102. It was later evening on a weekend and I was by myself with the boys so I called my dad. After talking through everything with him, we decided to not take Ben to the ER and to watch him through the night. He still had a fever in the morning, but it was gone by lunch time. He still seemed really tired though, but I attributed it to being sick and not sleeping well.

A couple days after that Jason was changing Ben's clothes and noticed a rash on his body. We decided to take Ben to his doctor who said Ben had an allergic reaction to the amoxicillin. We were probably really lucky, considering Ben was taking the meds for about 4-5 days before we noticed the rash. He never seemed to have any problems breathing. I feel bad it took us that long to figure out what the problem was. Unfortunately, this means he's got an allergy we've got to watch out for the rest of his life. At least it isn't something like peanuts, which would really be an adjustment.

This was during one of his really lethargic spells. I would just suddenly find him asleep around the house.

Big Boy Bed

Luke was born while we lived in Chicago. We never had a lot of living space and so we really tried to tailor our baby furniture to the limited area. So Luke always slept in a pack n play, since it was portable and compact. We figured we could always use it later if we ever had more room and decided to get a crib.

When Ben was born, my brother gave us his old crib. Luke had always seemed okay in his little bed and I liked the idea of him not being able to get out of bed whenever he wanted. But then in the last few months he got enough will power to climb out. Plus, it got so that he just looked too big for the bed. He always seemed curled up in the corner and I finally decided it was time for him to graduate to a big boy bed. Luckily, my brother gave us one of those too :)

I wasn't sure how Luke would react since he doesn't love new things and hadn't complained about his current sleeping situation. But we took him to the store and showed him the bedding we picked out for him. When I showed him the picture of the bed on the packaging and told him it was Luke's new bed, he got this really shy, excited grin on his face.

We set up the bed the next night. Luke was out of his mind excited. He jumped on the bed and wouldn't get off it. At night time, we put him in bed and he just settled right in like he'd been doing it all his life. He seemed really pleased with the whole thing. If he is wound up or not totally tired when we put him down, he will get out of bed and play in the room. But he has never tried to leave the room once we put him down. So all in all, it's been a fairly easy transition.

Six Flags

One of the great things about working for Intel are the perks. We were able to buy season tickets to our nearby Six Flags for the price of a normal day pass. And these season tickets are good for the next 15 months. Oh, and they include free parking. We were pretty excited.

We had one Saturday that all of us had free, so we made the trek down. Unfortunately, it was also their Fright Fest, so we made sure to leave by 6:00 because we heard that it gets pretty scary for little kids. But that was okay because we were about done anyway.

We spent most of our time in the little kid section of the park. I did make it on a couple roller coasters, but that was it. Instead, we saw elephants, giraffes, lions, baby tigers (!), and dolphins.

The giraffes were fairly active and Luke was pretty excited by them.

These baby tigers were so cute! And they were wrestling right in front of me.

Luke was very attentive when he first saw the elephants. He just sat and watched them for about ten minutes. We've talked to him about elephants, but this was his first up close experience and I think he was just surprised at their size.

The kids played on the play equipment, and we rode all the little kiddie rides. We assumed there would be no problems for all of us to ride, because that's how (ahem) Disneyland is. It turns out that at Six Flags, your kid needs to be able to walk (at least "3-5 steps") before they'll let them on the ride. I don't know how that matters because Ben sat on my lap either way. Luckily, Ben can take more than 3-5 steps, so we were all able to ride together.

Before we left, we found a little kid trick or treating section. The Looney Tunes characters were in the path of the trick or treating so we got some pictures with them.

Luke looks like this in all of our pictures of him with a character: warily eyeing the actor while getting as close to me as possible.

Ben is doing this in all of our pictures of him with a character: hitting them wherever he can.

See? Also, Ben loved Tweety. He kept looking back at Tweety and giggling.

Happenings

So, it's been more than a month since this happened, but Ben walks now. He took his first steps while Jason was away for the weekend, which Jason felt bad about. I wasn't even trying to get Ben to walk. I just set him down on his feet in the play room and he walked about 10 steps to the toy he wanted. He hadn't even walked 2 steps by himself before. I pulled out the video camera and managed to get his second steps on camera. He walks everywhere now. Occasionally he'll drop down and crawl, but his default is walking. Now we just need to teach him to go down stairs so we can get rid of our baby gate :).

Jason spends at least one day a week at the local children's museum. The kids always seem excited to go. It has been money well spent for a membership and I think we'll renew this year.