Post-Thanksgiving weekend

We had a busy weekend after Thanksgiving!
Friday
No crazy Black Friday fun-times. Just a trip out to Ferndale for lunch at the WAB and some Black Friday deals at No Pins Required. We picked up some bum cream, soap, holiday edition Rockin' Green detergent, and 3 diapers; a purple Fuzzibuns, a black Happy Heiny's and a robot Rump-a-rooz.

This print is so cute, it's the only reason I got the RaR, not going to lie.

The rest of the day was quite lazy and spent with catching up with laundry and fluffing it up since our dryer had been broken all week. Thanks to Ikea and our drying rack/hanging octopus thing! I also worked on my semi-top-secret Christmas crafts.

Octopus!

Saturday
My parents took Jude on errands for most of the day. I went to an open-interview for a new restaurant opening in a month. It went really well. They said they'd call within a week, so imagine my surprise when they called later that day and said they'd love to hire me! Luckily, I'll have time to finish up this semester without that added stress/time-eater. After that interview I napped and then Jude and I chilled, my dad & I went super-grocery shopping at Costco.

Sunday
My mum and I took Jude to get his Christmas portraits taken at JC Penney. He wasn't being very cooperative, until the very end and afterwards so they didn't all turn out as adorable as they normally do.

This was one of the few good ones, so naturally, we ordered a bunch of it!

We then continued on to Ikea for some Christmas presents for Jude and had some tasty meatballs for lunch.

This is his big present this year

Some things you may have learned from this post:
Jude is a punk. I have a real job starting next month. We love Ikea around here. I love cloth diapers.

Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving yesterday was spent at my Aunt Kathy's house with my dad's side of the family (all my aunt's, uncle's, cousins, and grandparents). Dinner was tasty. Jude was shy at first. My grandma brought back gifts from Disney (a shirt and Toy Story cars for Jude, an antenna topper for me, and a Mickey pepper grinder for everyone). We chatted. We played euchre and Wii games. All the cousins drew names out of a hat bag for Secret Santa gifts, which I organized. It was good, quality family time that really never gets old. I didn't take pictures for some reason, I just got caught in the moment and didn't think about my camera. Hopefully I won't do that when Christmas time rolls around.
When I was younger I never really understood the "being thankful" for something aspect of Thanksgiving. I'm not sure why, maybe because I just wasn't mature enough to grasp the concept or something, who knows. This year I was am very thankful for lots of things:

1. My super adorable son who gives me a reason to live, work, laugh, love, breathe... I think you get the point. 
2. My family for being so supportive of me by letting me live at home, paying my bills when I am strapped for cash, watching Jude so I can work and go to school, understanding that sometimes I just need to get away, and being awesome. That's right, my family is awesome. Deal with it.
3. Zak, my best friend. He's willing to talk with my about literally everything, and we do talk about everything. Some things we talk about, I'm fairly certain no one else can understand. He adores Jude almost as much as I do and he likes to talk about the silly, minute details of his life. I adore that when he talks to people about Jude he refers to him as his Godson even though Jude's not(and never will be) baptised. I do wish he lived closer, but despite our distance we still have mad-crazy telepathy with each other and our cycles sync up. I don't know if I'd be able to stay sane without him. 
4. The internet, for it has allowed me to do a good portion of my Christmas shopping in my underwear and without having a panic attack. This year I've vowed to not step foot in a mall for any of my Christmas shopping. So far, so good, and I'm almost done thanks to Ikea, Amazon, and Etsy. I'm also trying to make a bunch of stuff for people. 

What are you thankful for?

So it goes...

Lists, lists are fun, right?
-Jude's walking! Like, all over the place and not just a few steps here and there! He does still crawl a lot.
-I'm putting my blog under construction until I can make it look snazzy.
-I'm oddly excited for the hectic holiday season. I won't be shopping for any Christmas presents at the mall and I'm hoping to make a decent chunk of them, especially Jude's stocking/stuffers. I need to figure out what to stuff his stocking with. I already have most of his other presents. Amazon & Ikea are my favorite for that.
-Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's that whole recent boycott against Amazon because of "pedophile handbooks" but all the books referred to in anything about that are not a how to diddle little boys, so I choose to continue to use their awesome services. That's enough on that topic.
-Still no check. :| Seriously, State of Michigan, you suck.
-I have no school until next Monday! I'm so excited for this little break. Hopefully I'll be able to actually get stuff done. I should write myself a list so I don't forget things, or I'll just wing it.
-I saw some of my favorite people on Sunday. I went to Kelsey's potluck in BG and it was amazing! Everyone made excellent food (I slaved over pumpkin soup all day), and it was just an all around good time. I miss it down there, but then I remember how much I wouldn't have (Jude and my awesome new perspective on life that is credited to Jude) if I were still there.
-I don't have much else to say, really. not that I can think of at least. If I don't come back before Thanksgiving, have fun, be safe, and may the force be with you!

I feel like this blog isn't exciting enough...

Maybe that means my life isn't all that exciting?

I started working last weekend! I'm working at Laurel Manor, it's a banquet hall. I worked there in high school but had to quit when I left for college in Ohio. In high school I was a busser, now I'm wait staff, woot. It's really not all that more exciting, I get paid more than I used to, and I might get more hours, but it's mostly a weekend/night job, because that's when the majority of people have weddings/parties/excitingfuntimes.

I took Jude to story time at our local library for the first time today. He wasn't a complete punk like I half expected him to be. He was more interested at looking at all the other babies than he was in the stories/songs/dancing. It made me realize that he really does need more exposure to kids or else he's going to end up all socially awkward like me. On that note, I didn't have a huge panic attack like I usually do in most social situations. Hooray!

2 days ago was the 9th, which means 5 months post-op from the CVR!
2 days from now is the 13th, which means 1 year post-op from the skin tag removal!
So much happiness and excitement, and I know I say it like every time some sort of milestone and time passes from those surgeries, but he looks like a completely different baby now. Plus, his eye color changed dramatically, which I didn't really notice until I was making a sweet comparison scrapblog thing and had two pictures side by side. I then went through a lot of my pictures to try to pin point when it changed and the determination was some time around April.

I almost made a whole calendar of things like this. I still might, after I finished this one I made another one, for fun (and my computer desktop) because I have a cool kid who has a skeleton sweater for every year! He already has one for next year too.

Halloween 5k for Craniosynostosis

Over the weekend my parents, Jude, and I roadtripped from our humble abode in Metro-Detroit to Long Island for a 5k walk/run for craniosynostosis. We took off Friday night (I forgot to take epic roadtripping pictures to commemorate Jude's first roadtrip though :() and stopped in the middle of Pennsylvania the wee hours to get some rest in a motel room. Saturday morning, we wasted no time in getting out of there and back on the road and got to New York in the early afternoon. Before checking into the hotel we made a stop at Coney Island for lunch (coney's, naturally) and to go to the aquarium.

Jude was a shark!

He wanted to eat the penguins, because that's what sharks do. 

With his sharky brethren.

On the Coney Island boardwalk.

After we got to the hotel that night, Jude crawled and played around the room until eleven o'clock because he was so restless from being stuck in the car seat for so long, but he was so happy to be free.

Stretching before the race. My mum was a trooper and ran the 5K while the rest of us walked. She ran it in 33 minutes!

At the starting line!

Mile 2! Jude wanted a little break to stretch his legs.

He walked a little bit of it, with help from his Pop-Pop and I of course.

He crossed the finish line and got a medal for being so awesome.

We made a slight detour to have Halloween lunch in Sleepy Hollow... because we're that awesome nerdy. 

We all had matching capes that said Jude's Mama, PopPop, and Gran and also shirts that said "Going the distance for Jude Man" buttttt we didn't take pictures. I think we should take pictures sometime soon so we can have some. There were tons of people at the race, it was great to see all the people supporting the cause and we got to talk to a few. Jude played with a few kids afterwards too. 

The downfalls to the trip:

- No trick-or-treating for us.

- Jude became addicted to the tube because we had car DVD players and it was the only way to keep him calm. I didn't think that I would need more than 4 full movie and 1 Baby Einstein DVD's so we ended up watching "Alice In Wonderland" 4 times. I knew I should have followed my gut and grabbed more. 

Top 2 Tuesday!

I'm getting an early start on this. Tomorrow (or somewhere else in the near future) you'll get goodies about our weekend.



Top 2 gifts I have received. (Aside from Jude, of course)
1) My tea press. I love tea. Especially loose leaf tea. My parents got me this for Christmas a few years ago and it's the greatest thing in the world. It makes two cups of tea, which is great for the times when I want lots of tea, which is usually all the time. The only downfall is that loose leaf tea isn't as easy to find in stores, but I did discover Teavana recently because one of my friends works there, I just haven't had the money to go and spend on tea. :(

Image from Google.

2) The surprise trip to NYC my parents took my sister and I on for Christmas a couple years ago. We were opening our presents and we got to the last box. It had socks in it and underneath them were tickets to plays and airplane tickets to NYC. We were still half-asleep and it took us awhile to catch on, but we pretty much packed our bags and got on a plane Christmas day and went to NYC for 3 days to see "Evil Dead The Musical" and "The Producers" on Broadway. It was great!