2 and a half years of Charlie-ness

Charlie is over 2 and a half years old now and is so fun. He has a super bright personality and loves to talk and sing songs. He has learned and grown so much in the past 6 months - it is amazing to see. In the past 6 months his vocabulary has grown immensely. He has so much to say. Some of his funny little phrases lately are:

• "Mom, I'm just snuggin her" - when he is smothering Jill
• "Peace Out Yo" - when he says Goodbye (he learned this from our friends the LaBounty's and always says it to Uncle Brian)
• "Mom, where we goin' today?" He asks me this every morning.
• To which I usually reply "we're goin' crazy"
• "Hurry! Before the poop comes out!" He says on his way to the potty.
• "Now you get a prize, Mommy!" He tells me after I go potty. (A real prize would be getting to go potty without an audience)
• "Where's Jilly bean?" He asks whenever she is asleep in another room. He always has to know where she is.
• "I say Boo to him!" He tells me after he has scared Dave

This morning I heard him singing this primary song with his own creative ending: "Once there was a snowman, a snowman, a snowman. Once there was a snowman - a really nice guy"

I often also hear him singing the Casey Jr. song from Dumbo - he has it ALL memorized. His favorite part to sing is "Every time his funny little whistle sounds -toot toot - everyone hurries to the circus grounds. Time for lemonade and cracker jack, casey jr's back, casey jr's back."

These are some of the pictures from our family photo shoot last month by our friend, Jessica Brunette. Since Charlie loves trains so much, we thought the train tracks by our house would be a fun setting.

Charlie has also started riding a bike in the past month too (with training wheels of course). He got his first start on his cousin Wyatt's bike and so Santa (Grandma Lynn) brought him his own this year. Pictures of that to come later.

The past 6 months have also been full of potty training. We have had lots of ups and downs but overall Charlie has done very well and I'd say he's pretty much mastered it! He naps half the time with a pull-up on and half the time without, and he still wears a diaper to bed. But other than that - he's all underwear! It's cute to see these little undies come out of the washer each week. When it comes to underwear, we have Cars, Thomas, Toy Story, but he always goes with the Thomas ones, if they're clean.

Beachy Keen!

I am in California this week visiting my Grandma and my Mom while Dave is in Florida for a training for work. We have done lots of fun things here. I thought I'd put up a couple cute pictures from our outing today. I will post more later about the rest of the trip.

My Grandma and her sister took Charlie and I down to Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro today. It's about a 10 minute drive from her house. We brought some old bread to feed the birds and then took Charlie down near the water to get his "feet" wet. You can see how that turned out. He absolutely loved it.

It was a little chilly, but he really didn't mind. He did have jeans on, but he decided to sit down on the wet sand and a tiny wave got him. We were on the calm side of the beach. There is a pier on one side and a jetty on the other that break the waves and keep this little cove very calm. Charlie had a ball playing in the sand. He would throw the sand in the water and laugh when it splashed. We had to take his pants off and let him go in his diaper. (I had an extra shirt but no extra pants.) Oh well. He was a sandy little donut when we left.

Across from the beach is the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium. Lots of fish tanks to look at and some other neat displays. They also have a touch tank, but that didn't open until 1:30 and we left before then. We will have to go back for that, I think he'd really enjoy that next time.

Charlie is having a great time here with all this attention. My Grandma has lots of toys and she just lets him run the show around here. He didn't nap the first 3 days, but today he finally got 2 naps in and it was wonderful. Sleeping is always hard when we travel, but he is handling it pretty well. I was tired the first day we came because Dave and I stayed up the night before until almost 1am to watch Twilight. Plus - traveling always makes me tired. Maybe it's also the 1 year old I tote around and kept entertained on my lap during the FULL flight here. My Grandma said I look much more rested today. I think when I showed up I had bags under my eyes.

Dave is learning a lot at his training and enjoying eating out everyday at new places. I know Charlie misses him a lot. We will meet back up in Tucson together on Friday afternoon. Charlie will be so excited to see his Daddy.

Growing Up

So I'm not sure when it happened, but sometime in the last few months Charlie has officially gone from being a baby to a toddler. I mean it was only a 2-3 months ago that we were helping Charlie take his first steps and now we spend most of our time following him take more steps than you can imagine. He's such an energetic, happy, and social little kid. He gets bashful every now and then, but he's always saying "Hi!" (it definitely has an exclamation point when he says it) to people we meet. He also most definitely loves food and trying new things. He even loved eating chips and salsa when we went out to dinner on Saturday, so he's definitely got Jenni and my love for food (and the Burns' love for dip). You just can't help but smile when you see the little guy.

But here's the highlights of some of the things that we've done recently that are in the collage shown above. We went and fed the ducks at Reid Park, Jenni took Charlie to Madera Canyon, and my family came out to visit for the 4th of July. The biggest highlight for me was having the help with putting in the grass and sprinkler system in our backyard. It was a HUGE help and I can't thank my Dad and brother, Cody, enough for everything they did and for being willing to work on our yard during their vacation. Charlie loves playing out there and everyday when I get home from work, one of the first things I hear from Charlie is "side" quickly followed by "shis", which is Charlie saying that he wants to go outside and play and that he needs to put his shoes on first. Once again, you just can't help but smile when you see the little guy.

Adventures in Parenting

Every kid is different, but I guess the one thing they all share is that they will always surprise you in both good and bad ways. Two nights ago was one of those more bad (scary is probably the better word) than good experiences, but I guess that the bright side is that it means that Charlie is a fun and adventurous kid that's growing well. Anyway, onto the story.
Charlie's not the best napper, but he's usually GREAT about going down at night. He's been drooling like mad the last few days, so we think that he's teething and when we put him down on Friday night, he was crying. We decided that it was just going to take him a few minutes to fall asleep and we were doing our best to ignore his crying (it stresses me out and I usually don't handle it well). Then we heard a loud thud in his room and Jenni rushed over to see what happened. I assumed that he had knocked the top off of his changing table, and when Jenni opened the door, she pointed and said, "Yep!" I thought, "oh man it probably broke the door off of the changing table or something" (which might have been better than what happened), but then Charlie came walking out of the room. He had crawled over the top of his crib and dropped down onto the floor. And then when he walked into our room the next morning, we knew that something had to be done ASAP.

We had already lowered Charlie's crib down to its lowest setting, so there wasn't much we could do to make it so he couldn't crawl out anymore. But when Jenni was pregnant, we had visited our friends, Bryce and Christina, and they had the same problem with a climbing kid and had solved it by getting a crib tent. We decided that we needed to go get one. But it turns out that the Baby's R Us in Tucson doesn't carry them, so we got the little guy a PeaPod (basically a fancy cage with a cute name). We were ready to put it in his crib and just let the little guy learn to sleep in it, but then after Jenni talked to her Mom about it, we couldn't get thoughts of Charlie rolling around his crib in this little pod thing out of our head. So we decided to go the "make his crib a bed" route and have him learn to sleep in a bed like a big kid.
He obviously didn't like the idea of being locked in his room last night, but the 15 minutes of crying was much better than the 45 minutes to an hour that I had geared myself up for. After he was asleep for a little while, Jenni checked on him and he was crashed in the middle of the floor with his blanky. We then moved him onto his bed before we went to sleep and I was dumb enough to try taking a picture (he wasn't a fan of when I turned on his lamp), but fortunately he went back to sleep after a few minutes of Jenni rocking him.
So you might think that the adventure ends there, but then this morning we woke up to him crying. I thought that he might of rolled off the bed, but I figured that if he had done that that he would have come bolting into our room, so I went and checked. I could hear him crying but I couldn't see him anywhere. After some searching, I realized that he was under his crib. His head was sticking out the back and he had gotten stuck underneath. I had to wiggle him loose and then slide him back out the front. He was too happy about the experience but cheered right up once he realized we were going to get his milk. I guess the one thing that we can say is that the whole experience has definitely been fun and interesting.

Must be a Burns thing

One of the first words that I remember the Bubbers (Brian and Mindy's twins) saying is "shiiz" in a really excited voice. They would always be holding up at least one of their shoes with a big smile on their face and it was there way of letting you know that they wanted you to put their shoes on.
Well, it must be a Burns thing because Charlie also loves shoes. If he ever sees his shoes, he rushes over, picks them up, and then walks over to you with a big grin while waving them in the air (and usually making his "ah-ah" sound (which means he wants something) at least once or twice).
Jenni says that he just "really likes shoes", but my theory is that, like the Bubbers, he associates shoes to playing outside and going to the park and that's why he always wants to put them on. Who know what the real reason is and I guess it doesn't matter, but one thing I'm sure of is that the little guy sure does love shoes.

My baby is bigger than yours.

This blog (which has been mostly about Charlie) wouldn't be complete without a note about his size. (We'll do our Christmas update later - maybe after I take down my tree...)

Many of you who do not live nearby simply may not realize how large he really is. People around here will vouch for me when I say - he really is HUGE!
We do think he is so big because he will lengthen out to be a tall fellow like his Dad. However, he also does just eat a lot. Between me and him - one of us is always eating. Or often - both of us eating. We eat a lot. :)

When he was 6 months old, he had just passed 20lbs and by 7 months we had purchased the toddler carseat. He still faces backward because he is less than 1 year. He is 8 months old and we estimate he is roughly 23 - 25lbs.

We love our little chunker. He is the chubbiest, rolliest, happiest baby around. We just love every bit of him to pieces.

Big Poopin'!

Not to be confused with 'big pimpin' because this surely was not "pimp." On Sunday, Charlie dropped quite the deuce and what did we do first? You guessed it - grab the camera! Can I just say that I love that this happened when Dave was home? Cleaning up poop alone sucks - but cleaning up poop together - better than Disneyland. =) Almost.

Baby Charlie is Here!!!

Well, as everyone may already know baby Charlie is here! He came almost a month early (36 weeks 1 day), but he was apparently completely ready and grown. He came out 7lb 12oz, 20 inches long, born on April 23rd, 2008 at 5:30pm. His full name is Charles Kenneth Johansen. Kenneth comes from his Uncle Kenny who he now shares a birthday with! He is the cutest thing I have ever seen, and I can't help but smile when I think about him. Here are a couple of my favorite pictures from the last few days. For a more detailed run down, you can refer to his Dad's blog. He seems to find a bit more time to update his -- usually while I am breast feeding at night.
Thanks to everyone who has sent comments, messages, emails, phone calls of warm wishes. We appreciate the love and support. Not to mention the many dinners and visitors! We have enjoyed all of the attention and are so excited that our family has begun!