On The Road Again........

I thought I would post and let everyone know that our family is splitting up tomorrow to go an seperate road trips for the next week. Brandon is leaving to go on a hunting trip in Canada, one he has been looking forward to for a while now. I am so excited he gets to do this because he really needs a vacation from work and from us, even though he wouldn't admit it. Jack and I are headed to Mandeville to visit family and friends while he is gone. We will miss him, but are really excited about the amount of time we will get to spend with everyone.

Thursday night I am going out with the girls to celebrate Kylie's birthday. I love our get togethers and miss them so much so I am really looking forward to tomorrow night.
Friday we will be meeting our friends The Parnells at the indoor playground. I know Jack will love it.
Saturday Jack is staying with Cookie and me, Kylie, Simone, Lindsay, Cara(hopefully) and my Mom are heading to Baton Rouge for LSU homecoming to see them play MSU. Go Tigers!
We will also spend a few days in Baton Rouge. While we are gone our downstairs is being repainted. I am really excited but nervous because I am painting my kitchen and my bedroom totally different colors. I won't be here to stop them if they don't look good, so it will be very permanent. I hope it turns out okay. I don't think that you can go too wrong with shades of brown.

I will try my hardest to keep up the blog while we are gone. For your sake I hope that I can or the blog will be overloaded with pictures when we get home from all of the fun things that we have planned.

I hope everyone has great weekend and next week!

Love,
Ashley

LSU 26, Auburn 21

GEAUX TIGERS! This is really the only way that I can celebrate this victory since my Husband and all of my friends are Auburn fans. This is always an interesting game for Brandon and I and it was the first time in 5 years that we have sat together at the game. It turned out okay because Brandon had a bunch of his friends around and I was able to watch it with some LSU fans that I met in the stadium. It was a nail biter as usual, but our Tigers pulled through. Yeah! I do have to say that it will be a long time and take a lot of cohersion to get me to go back to Auburn for another LSU game. I have never been anywhere in the SEC where the other teams fans were so rude as they were yesterday and last night. It was amazing! Auburn is very famous for saying how awful and rude our fans are for things like spitting on the eye of the tiger on our field or lighting a van on fire, etc. but they have won the trophy in my mind after yesterday. I am not saying this to hurt anyones feelings, but I was very disappointed. We even had a guy stop our car in the middle of the road on the way home and proceed to yell very bad words to us about LSU, for no reason. We were just trying to get to McDonald's and then home to Birmingham. Anyway, I will get off of my soapbox.
I am going to make alot of people mad by saying this, but Jack wore and Auburn outfit yesterday. Long story, but his LSU one that I ordered has not come in and this was all that he had. I made Brandon put it on him because I just couldn't bring myself to do that in case we lost, I would forever blame myself. Well, it looks like it brought us good luck. Antoine told me that if we won he would allow Jack to wear that outfit for LSU games for the rest of the season. It is really cute and I am sad that I didn't get any pictures, but we will have to revert to the LSU outfit next weeked because we will be in Louisiana.
I hope everyone has a great week and GEAUX TIGERS!!!!!

Playschool Drop Out.....

Poor Jack, we had to drop out of Mother's Day Out yesterday. Brandon and I debated and debated all weekend on what we should do and when I woke up yesterday I just felt that pulling him out was the right thing to do. He was miserable and not getting any better. In fact each day he got worse and now he won't even go to church nursery because of it. We will try again after Christmas and see if he is any better. He is just going through some serious seperation anxiety from his Mom, and most of the time it flatters me, but it would be nice to have a few minutes break throughout the day. I wouldn't trade any of it for the world though.

The Stricklands Are Back

Our friends The Stricklands are finally back from Switzerland and we are so excited. They got back about a week ago and we have been having sooooo much fun with them. When they moved Mary Molloy was almost 1 and she turned 2 in July, so she is having to take it all in and remember us. Jack wasn't even here yet when they moved. I remember calling Mindy at 2 a.m. on the way to the hospital because it was 9 a.m. there and I knew she would be awake.
Anyway, we took the kids to the park today. Leeann, Layton, and Rose met us as well as Kate, Jake, and Parker. Jack was a little younger than the other kids, but MM was such a Mother to him. She was sooo sweet!
After that we took the whole gang for lunch. It was alot of fun. Jack tried to eat all of Layton's food that Layton refused to eat and Mary Molloy flirted and gave sweet eyes to all of the men. It was the cutest thing I have ever seen.

We are so glad that ya'll are back and can't wait to make many more memories like this. I can't wait for a girls night reunion at the Stricklands Thursday night!

Bye Bye Bottle

I had to post this because I am so excited. Jack no longer takes a bottle at bedtime. Yeah!!!! He has been on sippy cups all day for a while now, but I was just not brave enough for to take his bedtime bottle away even though I knew that I needed to. The other night I realized at dinner that he was drinking over 20 ounces of milk a day and that lately at bedtime he had only been drinking a couple of ounces of his bottle before he went to sleep. Basically, for comfort. Tuesday night I decided to try no bottle. I bathed him, read him 2 books, and put him down in his crib. He went down without a wimper. I kept thinking, "We can't get this lucky", but we did. We never heard a peep from him. Brandon put him down last night and we kept thinking "it can't be this easy", but again we never heard from him. Hopefully it was that easy and we are done with the bottly. Now, if we could only start liking school!

Daddy's Little Helper

Yesterday was just one of those days for me, so my wonderful husband took Jack outside with him when he got home to do some yard work, so that I could have a few minutes of peace and quiet. After about 15 minutes I couldn't stand not hanging out with them, so I got my glass of wine and sat on the back porch and watched the 2 of them weed the back yard. It was precious and the more wine I drank the more emotional I got about it.
Brandon was so patient, because as most of you know Jack was not much help. Everytime Brandon would put a weed in the bucket, Jack would try to take it out or throw something in the bucket, like his sippy cup, that wasn't supposed to be in there.
Brandon and I were laughing so hard at times because Jack wants to talk so bad and will just have conversations with you that sound like chinese and think that you understand. He is starting to make some words out. He definitely has Dada down and Brandon was so proud of him. He also started saying Thank you last night.
We had a great time in the backyard and are going to have to start doing this more often. Jack absolutely loves the outdoors.

Monday at The Sellers

Jack and I had our normal Monday of grocery shopping and hanging out at home doing laundry and straightening up. We had a good time. As you can see from the pictures I got a little bored and pulled out the camera for a photo shoot. He is so much fun these days I don't feel that I am quick enough to capture all of the funny things that he does. In the pictures below he insisted on sitting on top of the towels from the second I took them out of the dryer in the laundry room, so I gave him a fun ride and carried him like this into the living room. He loved it and didn't want to get down.

He is starting to talk a little and say things like ball and juice. He has also become our "parrot". He tries to copy anything that you say and do and has become so smart. You can tell that he actually stops to think about things. Last night Brandon was sitting on the sofa with his legs propped up on the coffee table and Jack was next to him teasing Bella. Bella ran off to the kitchen trying to get away from him, but he wanted to go with her. Instead of standing at Brandon's legs until he moved them like he used to do he looked up at Brandon and then crawled under his legs. I was amazed that he actually thought about that.
He is constantly entertaining me and Brandon. This is a picture of him making a funny face when I told him to smile.
He now loves his rocker(thanks Aunt Mo). We were at Mimi's a couple of Sundays ago and she had Brandon and Nikki's old rocker out for Jack. I didn't think he would pay it much attention but I was wrong. He loved it. He would climb in it and turn around to face us and rock. When we got home that night I got his from the playroom upstairs and he sits in it all of the time. This is him having his snack in it yesterday while the 2 of us watched the season premiere of Oprah.
This is just a cute one that I took of him. I know he is faced the wrong way and can fall and hurt himself(Gigi and Mimi), but it made a cute picture. He did fall out backwards a few minutes after but got right up and tried again.

One quick update on school, for those of you that are wondering. He still can't make it past 11. 11 is really stretching it because he cries the whole time they said. Last week they could take him outside and he was fine until they came back in. Today they tried that and I think he outsmarted them and knew what they were doing so I had to go and pick him up. I am going to try it for one more week because his teachers say that sometimes it can take up to 3 weeks for them to get used to it. We will see.

Labor Day Weekend

This Labor Day we got to spend alot of time with Gigi(Mom) and Papa(Doug). They came here to get away from Hurricane Gustav, so we were very busy hanging out with them. We are having a blast. They will probably head back tomorrow sometime. I am just posting some random pics that we took over the weekend.

Geaux Tigers!!

Jack loves playing with the dogs (ba, as he would call them)
Gigi and Jack sitting on Bailey's bed
Jack and his Aunt Nikki being silly

Jack's 1st Day of School

Well, Mother's Day Out! I have really been looking forward to this so that I can have a couple of hours to myself each week. My Mom and Doug are here because of Gustav, so Mom and I had planned to drop Jack off and shop around town for a while, meet the boys for lunch, and then pick Jack up from School. Well, Mom and I dropped him off and went to get breakfast and then to Marshalls and were on our way to meet the guys when I got a phone call from his teacher. Jack had been crying since right after we left and had not stopped. I felt awful so we went and picked him up. As soon as we walked in he stopped(of course) and was happy as can be. He was great the rest of the day. I am really worried that he won't like school but we are going to continue to try for a little while. I am going to take him for a couple of hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays until he can hopefully make it the whole time. We will see.
I am an awful Mother because I have no pictures. My Mom took some so as soon as she can get home and send them to me I will post. He looked really cute and seemed really excited!