Family Reunion Fun!

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I guess I missed Dylan's 9 month mark. I was waiting til after he went to the doctor to post all his fun stats and then I just got so busy that here it is a month later and still no post.

9 month stats
Weight - 22 lbs 64%
Height - 29 in 65%
Head - 48 cm 97%

I'm amazed that he isn't higher in the weight and height. He always seems so big to me!

A few things about Dylan
Dylan is like a magnet to the dog food. Whenever he spies the dish on the floor he makes a beeline right for it as fast as he can just to splash in the water and try to shove some food in his mouth.
He has 8 teeth now.
He eats mostly table food now and loves it.
He said his first word on August 23rd. He said mama followed shortly by dada.
He can crawl so fast. And an update, he took his first steps on September 2nd. He loves to walk along the walls and almost prefers that to crawling anymore.
loves to walk along furniture and walls.
He loves his blanket (swaddling blanket - aden and anais) and I'm so glad that I 4 of them to rotate through.
He is just my busy body. He loves to be where ever the other kids are and loves to use his voice. I love to lay in bed in the mornings to listen to him babble to himself.
He is such a mellow baby. People always comment on how good he is. He really only cries when he is hungry or tired. Never just to whine.
He is so fun and I still love to kiss on him all day long.

Sometimes I Can Craft

Sometimes I catch a crafty bug - it's kinda like the flu, it hits hard but doesn't last very long. Here are some things I did while I was in the mood.

Gallery Wall-
I had a lot of family pictures that I was in love with. I couldn't pick just 1 of each kid to display and I have a billion frames in boxes in my storage closet. So I decided to take my big wall of my family room and make it a gallery wall.
I started with pulling out all my frames so I could pick what ones to use and I knew what sizes I had so I could print my pictures. I laid them all out on my floor and did a rough design with them. Then I used my awesome artistic abilities and drew my design on paper so I could map out my pictures. I had to decide what kid to put where and make sure I didn't have 3 of the same kid clustered together.

I had to paint some of my frames and I wanted to add some color to them so I picked 4 frames to paint blue and painted the rest black. That's what the green outline is, showing which frames to paint blue.

 I printed my pictures at Mpix and I love the metallic prints! So I got all my big pictures in metallic.

Then the fun part. Tracing all the frames onto paper so you have templates for hanging your frames. It was a pain in the butt but so worth it. I only ended up making one mistake by not making one template the exact size so my spacing in one spot was off and I ended up with a visible oops hole. I made sure to mark where the hanging hardware is on the templates so you can just nail through them and not have to do a lot of work putting nails in.

The finished product. I love how it turned out! And I loved that I got lots of frames out of my storage and onto my walls.

Chair Redo

                             Before                                                                           After

My work was going to throw this chair out and I knew I could do something fun with it. So I snagged it before we put it in the dumpster. It only had it about a month before I got to work on it. I got my fabric at Wal-mart. I think it's darling. So after sanding and painting all the wood, and running out of staples for the staple gun so I had to use tack nails to finish, here is the final product. I had originally wanted to put it in the toy room but I don't think it would last too long before it was colored on, or ripped, or spilled on, or something else to stain it. So I'm keeping it downstairs for a while.

More Family Pictures

Here are more family pictures. I love love love them! Dylan was being a stinker towards the end of the night so it was hard to get a good shot of all of us. But Jaci is awesome and caught some great moments!

Mexico - Day 1

We had so much fun on our vacation. I hope to be able to post about all of it before I forget.

Technically, our first day of vacation was spent in airports and shuttle vans. We left our house at 4 am and didn't arrive to our hotel until 9 pm. It was a long day of sitting in an airport, but I did enjoy some yummy chocolate while we waited. What a way to break your diet right. This picture was taken when we finally got to our hotel, that's why we look so chipper.

 Some views from our balcony. This is the Lagoon that was part of our hotel. Well I actually think it was a public area but I only saw hotel guests swimming in it.

This is what our Villa looked like that we stayed in. We upgraded our room when we arrived, mostly to have free Internet access. But our room was really nice and I liked not being connected to the main hotel.

 There were iguanas everywhere. We watched these in the mornings from our balcony.

 Hitting the pool. It was so nice to just relax after our long day of travel.

Just one of the 6 pools we got to choose from.

The had really fancy restaurants to eat at during the evening. You had to make reservations everyday to be able to eat there. The food was ridiculously good and looked like works of art. You almost didn't want to eat it and mess it up. There were 5 speciality restaurants and we only got to eat at 4 because we missed the night the other one was open.

 We ended the night sitting on the beach just listening to the ocean. Perfect way to end our first day of vacation.

My Little Monster

8 Months Old-

This is my "little" big monster. I helped to shape him into that. He loves to cuddle to fall asleep and sleeps the best when mom is holding him. This makes getting things done around the house nearly impossible. But I can't be mad because I love that he lets me baby him like that still.

Just this week he has started going from laying to sitting by himself and actually standing up when you hold his hands. He would not put weight on his feet and that was kinda making me nervous but now he's a pro. He scoots around the floor backwards and will get on his hands and knees to rock.  I'm sad though, I thought that with Dylan not being as far as my other kids were at this age he would stay a baby longer, but I'm sure within a few weeks he'll be right on track with his brother and sister.

He just cut his 3rd tooth and the 4th is about to break through any day. He looks like a vampire.

He started clapping this week too. His favorite song is Pat-a-Cake so it was only a matter of time before he started clapping along with it.

He still LOVES Tray and Kinlee and would sit and watch them play all day if they would stay in the same room as him. I'm sure when he's fully mobile he won't have a problem following them around the house.

He went swimming for the first time yesterday and had so much fun! He loved watching all the kids play in the pool and loved playing in the water.

He totally surpassed the weight restrictions on his car seat so we had to get him a new one, so that means he gets to sit in the cart at the store like a big kid. The look on his face is so cute, he knows that he's a big boy and feels so special.

  

I can't get enough of this boy. I could hug and kiss him all day and I usually do.

Family Photo

Remember Dylan's gorgeous newborn pictures. Well my friend Jaci (U Pix Photography) recently took our family pictures and here is a little sneak peak. I can't wait to see the rest of them!