June 18th:

Well, Jake is 2!! Next thing you'll know, he'll be graduating high school! Now that he's two, we're seeing a lot of changes. His vocabulary increases daily and he now puts two words together. Jake's favorite word at the moment seems to be "bulldozer". He has a huge fascination with trucks right now…especially the land moving type. Even though he's all boy, he has a sensitive side as well. The other day I was trying on one of my nice tops and he looked at me and said "pretty". He already knows the way to a woman's heart! If he sees someone sad or crying, he becomes very concerned and gets sad himself. I know with the age 2, comes the terrible twos, but we've been pretty lucky (knock on wood). He's happy and listens well 93% of the time. I personally think it's because he gets a ton of sleep (approximately 15 hours a day!), then again, maybe it's because he takes after his Dad. The other 7% of the time it's bearable, but exhausting (in fact, as I type this, we're going through one of those tough times - he's refusing to go down for his afternoon nap and crawling out of his crib).

As for Jake's birthday, we had a great time. We thought about doing something small, but since we don't have a lot of family here we thought it would be nice to include our friends as well and I'm so happy we did! For a few hours, we had our run of an indoor playground where all 17 kids could spend their energy running around and the parents hang out and eat lunch. I posted a few pics below. Thomas the Train was the theme and so he was spoiled with lots of Thomas items. He loves it!






Marshall and I had our first weekend getaway. We flew to Vegas for a few days while Jake stayed with Grandma. We had a fabulous time...even though we didn't win anything. We decided that Vegas is our new favorite weekend getaway spot. There's so much to do, even if you don't like gambling. I can't believe that it took us nearly 9 years to visit Vegas together! The highlight of the weekend was probably seeing the show "O". Now we need to plan another visit, only this time, we'll go with our friends.

We also celebrated Marshall's birthday last weekend. I won't tell you how old he is, but he's only 3 years away from being 40. Poor guy! Good thing I'm a few years younger! Then of course there's Father's Day tomorrow. They might as well call June "Marshall's Month"!

Marshall and I have kept pretty busy the last few weekends during Jake's naptime. We remodeled our downstairs bathroom. I thought it would be a quick easy task since it's such a small room, but needless to say I was very wrong! Let it be in writing that we will NEVER paint another room. It's so draining. It didn't help that I decided to faux paint the room. I'm happy now that it's done, but I'm still having nightmares. Although, I can admit that I bring a lot of it on myself. I'm rather OCD when it comes to projects (okay, I'll retract that and say that I'm OCD about most things), that I obsess until it's perfect. Now all I have to do is find the right artwork and floor cabinet for our magazines/toilet paper and we're completely done. I didn't think to take a 'before' picture, but below is the finished project.

Happy Father's Day to our very own Marshall (who is such an amazing Dad), my Dad, Marshall's Dad and my two Grandfathers!