Baby Shower and Boys Fishing Trip

Saturday was my baby shower! It was combined with a friend of mine from church whose due date is only 2 days after mine and it was perfect. She is having a little boy too, so it was fun to celebrate our new little guys. I had so much fun talking and visiting, that I didn't take any pictures! Luckily my mom got this one of the presents area. We were so grateful to get so many diapers, wipes, and other essentials for baby brother!

We played a few small games, but mostly we just talked and ate :) Since we didn't need any clothes, it was fun to watch the other mom open the cute outfits people had given her and Oooo and ahhh over the adorableness.

Anthony's parents and his niece and nephew came up from Merritt Island for the big day. While all the girls went to the shower, all the boys took the boat out to go fishing. The boys had a blast! They stayed out pretty late and made us a little nervous when they still hadn't come back by 8pm. Anthony said everyone was having such a good time, he had to force himself to be the bad guy and tell them it was time to go. They all wanted to keep fishing!

James/Anthony caught a few fish. Man I love this cute face!

This fish was actually pretty big! James and Dallas were excited to show it to me after they brought it home:

After they got home, James and the cousins were playing tag in the front yard while Anthony and his Dad cleaned and put the boat away. It was so late at night, but it was fun to see James play with Dallas and Nevada! I needed to get sharing time ready for the next day, so I brought the laptop into the office to print some pages...only to find that our printer had died! It wouldn't power on or anything, which was the exact same thing that happened to our computer a few months ago. Both were plugged into the same power strip so now we are thinking that the outlet is bad. Anyway, I needed to print some things, and Anthony had a talk in Sacrament and was teaching Elder's quorum the next day, so he definitely needed to print some stuff! We couldn't decide if we should just go to Walmart and buy a cheap printer, or if we should try to get our things printed somewhere else. Anthony's mom got a picture of me trying to research printers online. Decisions, decisions! 

The thing I loved about our printer was that I found great, cheap, ink for it. I looked back at our amazon purchases and found that the last time we bought ink was almost a year ago: 3 full sets of black and color for $8 shipped! The printer was an old one from Anthony's office that they were getting rid of, so not only is it more expensive than we would ever pay but they don't even make it anymore. Now I am torn between all the printer options out there: wireless, color or not color, inkjet or laser, etc.. So far I am trying to find similar deals on the cheap ink and just look for printers to match them. I just can't go back to paying $30+ dollars each time I need more ink! Anyone else had to go through this recently? Any suggestions?

Angell & Phelps Chocolate Factory

So there is a chocolate factory. Only 30 minutes from our house. And they offer free tours. How could you resist that??!! I've been dying to go, but I always remember it when we have other things planned. Friday turned out to be the perfect day to try it out. They offer tours at the top of every hour and you don't have to call ahead, you just show up. I wasn't sure what to expect when we got there, but it turned out to be a very large store that uses the back area for the chocolate/candy area. Definitely not as industrial as I imagined. There is a long hallway at the back of the store front that has windows so you can see all the workers making the treats. It was so interesting! The windows were too high for James to see, so we had to carry him the entire time:

This is what we saw at the first window. A bunch of chocolate flip flop lollipops set out to cool! James laughed when he saw these, he thought they were the coolest thing ever. The tour guide told us all about the machinery they used, some of them were antiques from when the store opened in 1925!

Here is one of the workers making dark chocolate covered popcorn. We noticed that all of the workers wore long sleeves, long pants, and thick shoes. The tour guide said they keep the candy making room at a cool 65 degrees!

At the second window, they showed us their conveyor belt system for coating their candies/treats in chocolate. At the moment they were making chocolate covered potato chips! One worker had the job of picking up every single individual potato chip after it got a coating of chocolate and rubbing it all around to make sure chocolate got into every groove (he looked really bored):

More molded chocolates:

The potato chips coming out at the end of the line:

After the tour you got to pick two candies from the sample tray. Yum! I got a chocolate covered potato chip, which was good but you couldn't really tell that it was a potato chip. It just tasted crunchy. James chose a nut/chocolate candy and one of the foil wrapped chocolates.

Digging in to the chocolate!

This the face he made when we asked him to smile:

We laughed at the first face and got him to laugh too :)

They also sold chocolate covered bacon and white chocolate eggs. It was so strange we had to buy it:

It was really neat to hear the history of the store and to see how passionate and friendly the staff was about their chocolates. Now I know where to go when I need some really good candy!

Babymoon for James

This year's trip to the Keys was definitely a last hurrah for James! He got so much one on one time with me, one on one time with Anthony, and time with just the three of us. I was worried about how James would behave away from home since he usually is a big fuss pot when we do anything different from his routine, but he was an angel! (Aside from his 2 year old 'tude that he has developed). He acted like he was made for vacation! I think he really soaked in all the attention we were able to give him. Even though it wasn't the most exciting of vacations for me since I spent most of my time watching James at the rental place while Anthony snorkeled/lobstered, I felt really good about the experience we were able to give James.

The drive down to the keys took a lot longer than we expected because of some bad traffic. It was a lot of time spent in the car! We had a few new toys that we spread out throughout the day and he loved them, especially these pineapple sunglasses! He talks about pineapples all the time now :)

On the drive James got to have his pacifier, which is a big deal since he usually only gets it while sleeping. He also got to watch movies on the kindle, which he only gets to do in the car. It was a great distraction! He barely watched anything on the way down, maybe only 30 minutes or so. The way home was another story! He watched Cars over and over and over for almost the entire 8 1/2 hour drive.

Our vacation rental had a back porch with a lot of rocks and a little hole in the porch for (I think) water drainage. James loved picking up the rocks and throwing them in the "tunnel"

I knew that we would be spending a lot of time at home while Anthony was out fishing and lobstering so I came prepared with new games and activities for James to do. One afternoon it was all about balloons! We had  balloon rockets that you blow up and then let go so it can fly across the room, balloons that we used as volleyballs, and balloon swords. I love that I got to learn how to make things out of balloons, it is a handy trick to have up your sleeve!

Another night we did poppers on the back porch. It was a hit!

Anthony did some kind of fishing or lobstering almost every day for at least a few hours, but he planned one all day lobstering excursion where he would leave early in the morning and not get back until bedtime. Since he had to take our car, we were stuck in the house all day by default. I pulled out as many of my planned activities as I could! Some of them didn't work out as I had imagined, but we gave it a shot. First I tried out cloud dough (moldable flour made from flour and baby oil).

 It smelled great and James seemed to like it, but I soon realized it is an outside activity when James started flinging it around with the spoons I put in there for digging. So we moved outside and he flung all of it out of the pan and all around the porch. Then he demanded more, and when I told him we didn't have any more he had quite a meltdown.

I decided it would be a good idea at this point to get out our inflatable pool and hose that I brought for the back porch. That way I could get him in the pool and wash off the flour as well as hose off the porch. Every time I would pull out my phone to get a picture, James would exclaim, "No pictures!!" and get mad, so I didn't get any pictures of him playing in the pool. He did enjoy himself though! He said he was swimming and looking for "lomsters" like Daddy does. He also took a break from the pool to put his golf balls into the hole in the middle of the patio table. He was very determined to get them in there!

We also spent a lot of time with him during the week playing with foam airplanes, looking for bugs, cooking, and looking for him around the house. He loves to tell you that he is hiding, point to where he is going to, and then wait for you to find him. He also loves to be chased! He will start running away from you and say "Run away!!", all the while looking behind him to make sure you are following him. Anthony chased him around the house one afternoon and I don't think James has ever been happier.



Some other things I want to remember about James on this vacation:

• His imaginative play has really started to take off! He had a toy fishing pole and would run over to the hallway and cast it, as if that was the water, and then he would run back to us in the living room to "show" us his catch. He would tell us if it was a "big lombster" or a "tiny lombster" on his hook and we would make a big fuss over it. Another time he took the phone receiver off the desk (we disconnected the phone from the wall first thing when we got there), put it on the arm of a chair, and sat there telling us that he was "putting gas in the car". I could kind of see how he would think the phone looked like the handle you use to pump gas. It is amazing the connections that he makes!
• While we were at the aquarium, James found a dime and instantly became attached to it. An hour or so later while we were walking back to the car, Anthony asked James what he was going to buy with his dime. He immediately said, "sharks". Anthony asked him again a few minutes later to see what he would say and this time his response was, "turtles" :)
• We finally succeeded in getting James to call my mom Grandma! He has been calling her Papa for forever (which is also what he calls Anthony's dad) and nothing we did or said ever convinced him that her name was something else. He started using Grandma on the trip and eventually even started correcting himself when he would call her Papa. I haven't heard him call my mom Papa at all since the first few days of our trip.
• For a kid that really likes TV and usually begs me to watch Mater or Sesame Street, it was surprising when he decided that he would rather play with us and have our attention than watch TV. If the TV was on, he would run over and turn it off and if we turned it back on he would get really mad and yell "TV off!". Now that we are home, it has carried over and he will tell me "Ipad off!" or "phone off!" if I am looking at them when he wants me to be playing with him.

I'm so glad that James had such a good time on this vacation. It really makes me feel like we bonded that much more before his world and ours gets turned upside down with a new sibling!



Key West 2013

Last Saturday we got back from our annual trip to Key West and it was a fun and exhausting vacation! We didn't do as many touristy things as in previous years and definitely spent more time at home, relaxing and enjoying each other's company. I definitely needed to rest more this year! Anthony did a lot of fishing and snorkeling, but he got to spend a lot of time with us too. The best was being able to get up in the morning and have breakfast together. We literally never get to do that since Anthony works 6 days a week and then on Sundays we rush out of the door as soon as James gets up to go to church. The first morning I made French toast and James loved being able to sit at the table and eat breakfast with Daddy.

This trip we saw a crazy amount of wild iguanas! The keys are known for wild iguanas so we have always heard about them, but we only ever saw one or two. This year we saw over 100, easily! We took James to a playground on the base and ended up seeing tons of iguanas on the seawall. I don't think we ever even touched the playground equipment, we spent all our time walking around looking at the iguanas.

Our first night in Key West, we scoped out some fishing spots on the base with our friends. A member of the coast guard came and chased us off the docks and told us that the only place designated for fishing was a pier on the very edge of the base. The next morning we decided to take James there to see what we could get. It wasn't a very kid friendly area, the pier itself had no railing, just a small step and then a steep drop off to the channel and on the other side of the parking area was large gated areas with big biohazard signs that warned of radiation. We did manage to get some good fishing in! We worked it out that my mom would stand behind James and make sure he stayed sitting on our cooler, I would keep putting James' rod in the water after he reeled it up, and Anthony would fish to the side of us, trying to actually hook something for James. Here is James reeling in his pole. He was all business about it!

 We moved to a different area and almost immediately Anthony hooked into a fish! James got so excited and ran over to reel it in:

 Here he is showing it to us! He wasn't scared of it at all and he just laughed and laughed!

 Then Anthony caught another one and James got to reel it up again!

Pretty soon after this, James gave us such a fright by laughing and running away from us and getting really close to the non-existent pier wall. Our hearts stopped while we chased after him, thinking that one wrong step could send him over the edge. Even Anthony got upset! We put him straight into the car after that and told him fishing was over and that he cannot run away like that. Scary!

Monday afternoon we tried out a small beach at one of the navy bases while Anthony took off snorkeling. James sat in the water with me and looked for snails and clams for a little while and then spent the rest of the time walking with me or my mom around the marina looking at boats. I finally got him to sit down for a few minutes with the promise of fruit snacks :)

Tuesday morning we met up with our friends to buy our tickets for the week. While we were deciding and coordinating our plans, Anthony played with James in the gym that is right next to the ticket office.

There was also this cool chair outside, so we had to get pictures!

Wednesday morning we went to Bahia Honda state park for the first time. We always plan to go every year but have never actually made the time. There are two different sides of the park with beach access and we chose one side and our friends who were meeting us there chose the other side. It was quite a comedy of errors trying to figure out which side everyone was on and which side we all wanted to be on! We liked the rocky side since there were a lot of snails and hermit crabs to find and look at, but everyone else liked the other side because the beach was more sandy there. We didn't want to be party poopers, so my mom, James, and I left Anthony while we tried out the other side, only to regret our decision and make our way back. Anthony didn't know that we were coming back, so he started walking the two miles to the other side. Once he got there he realized that we had gone back to where he started so he borrowed someone's phone to call me. I then had to get in the car again and go get him. So exhausting and confusing! It all worked out in the end and overall we had a good time, although at multiple points I was ready to call it a day.

Friday we decided to go downtown and visit the aquarium and the toy factory. We have been to the aquarium every year and each year I am surprised by how small it actually is. James liked looking at the sharks and the sting rays, but we had to keep reminding him that he couldn't touch these sting rays, since he is so used to sting ray touch tanks.

The aquarium is open to the outside and doesn't have air conditioning, so I was ready to head over to the toy factory and do some shopping. We told James we were going to the toy store and he was so excited! We walked over and rode the elevator up to the entrance only to find a sign on the door saying that they closed down in February! I looked it up online and it looks like they were only in business a few years, but I am still curious about what happened. It seemed like they were doing so well last year and it was such a cool place to visit. I was so disappointed! James didn't seem to mind too much, I think I was more put out than he was. We rode the elevator back down to the first floor and bought some fudge and cookies instead :)

When we were walking back to the car, James wanted to be carried so Anthony held him while I walked behind. James kept peeking at me over Anthony's shoulder and it was too cute!

At the end of the week, we took all of the lobsters and fish that the boys caught and saved and made one big feast! We had lobster two different ways, fish, macaroni and cheese, garlic bread, corn on the cob, and hush puppies. It took forever to get everything cooked and organized but it was so delicious, it was worth it!

Our fishermen:

 The catch as they collected it throughout the week:

The final tally of lobsters, cleaned and ready to cook:

We tried frying some of the lobsters with a honey batter and it was delicious! The rest of them we broiled:

One of our friends thought to take a picture of her plate before digging in. Everything looked so good!

It was another great year in Key West! Anthony is already thinking about when he can go back and get more lobster :)