Playdate

We had our friends Kristina, Neil and their 2 kids, Wes and Parker over this past weekend.  Wes is a year older than Chase and they always have a great time playing together.  

Wes started out by making a quick phone call: 

"Chase, I needed to call my girlfriend real fast.  What's the problem??"

They quickly hugged and all was better.  Good times.  :)

Easter 2011

So Easter kind of began last night when I pulled out Chase's outfit.  My dad had gotten him this precious outfit last year for his first birthday.  Given the fact that it's a big size 12-months paired with Chase being a runt, he is just now able to wear it at two years of age.  At any rate, after his bath, I decided to try the clothes on him before putting his diaper on.  (Now that I'm reading over this I'm not really sure what I was thinking...)  So, you can imagine what happened.  He looked so cute that I ran downstairs to grab the camera.  When I came back upstairs, Chase exclaimed, "Oh no!  Poop!".  I looked down and he had pee all over his pants (as seen in the picture below) and was standing in a puddle...of pee.  Nice.  We're still working on him understanding the difference between pee and poop but that's another story...

After completing an unanticipated load of laundry last night, Chase had a clean, new Easter outfit.  And was looking pretty snazzy, I must say.  :)

 Don't you think??

After church, we made a quick stop by Starbucks, headed to Henderson for lunch at my mom's house and then a second lunch at Matt's aunt and uncle's house.  Here are a couple of cute pictures of Chase on the way. 

Surprisingly he loved the tie and didn't want to take it off all day...

Here is Chase with cousin Justice, who is 4.

Chase wasn't as excited as I was for the 2 of us to take a picture together...

Happy Easter everyone!!!

Happy

At 2 years old, Chase is full of energy and personality.  Overall he is an extremely happy little boy.  Check out these pictures of him being his typical, silly self:

Chase's first Easter egg hunt

 This past Saturday was our neighborhood's annual Easter Egg hunt and I was excited about the fact that it was Chase's first one. 

 Before the hunt started he had a pretty good time toting around my water and his Icee around in the Easter basket.  (Since the poor kid can't have ice cream or frozen yogurt, I get excited when I find some sort of frozen treat that is dairy-free...)

 

Still carrying around the drinks, but gearing up for the hunt by checking out his competition.  

(We were good to go since he was in the 0-2-year-old area...)  :)

He had it down for a while..Until he got about 8 eggs and realized there was candy in inside the eggs.  At that point he stopped, began opening each of his 8 eggs and wanted to eat the laffy taffy and other chewy, stick-to-your-teeth candies...I let him eat a couple pieces (which took him the whole 10 minute wagon ride home to finish) then quickly hid the rest.  :)

Happy Birthday to you

Chase has had a lot of practice singing Happy Birthday since his was a few weeks ago, so I really wanted to get it on video of us singing to Matt.  (Sorry about the quality of video)...

Happy Birthday the man that this sweet little boy grew up to be!  We love you so much!!!

Milk allergy and lipstick

I haven't blogged too much about Chase's milk allergy.  It basically just plains sucks.  And it's still there.  There's not really all that much to say about it.  I think we've adapted to his dietary limitations pretty well.  (Thank God you can still have chicken nuggets and fries when you're allergic to milk).  :)  One of the reasons it's not more 'painful' is that we live so close to places like Whole Foods and Trader Joes where you can buy things like coconut yogurt, which is an absolute favorite...  At any rate, the allergic reactions luckily don't happen that often.  But they have happened twice in the last week.  Earlier this week he had a rash after his breakfast when I dropped him off at Leslie's.  He had his normal oatmeal and I made him a 'smoothie' with strawberries and almond milk.  I blended them up using both my and Chase's leftover cut-up strawberries from the day before.  All morning I thought about what he could have eaten that was different.  All I could think of was that the oatmeal was a new Quaker 'flavor'.  But it was cinnamon.  That's obviously not dairy.  So then I realized that I had been eating (dairy) yogurt the day before and was using the same spoon to dip the strawberries into my yogurt.  I had dumped those same strawberries into Chase's smoothie.  That had to be it, right?  Well, maybe but maybe not.  Because, this morning, Chase had that same Quaker Cinnamon flavored oatmeal...And then about ten minutes later, this is what he looked like:

It's kind of hard to see in this picture (I did the best I could), but see the splotches around his mouth?  And see the redness between his eyes??  He was on a pretty important phone call (probably asking Bebe to hurry up and finish her work in Richmond, VA) so it was hard to get a good shot.

 So I went to the pantry and grabbed the oatmeal box, flipped over the box and read "whey protein isolate" listed as one of the ingredients (otherwise known as milk proteins).  AHA.  Well, there you go.

Now this picture.  Well, this was taken after he got into my lipstick.  He likes to imitate me and I was getting ready for a friend's baby shower.  He wanted to 'participate' so I let him hold my lipstick.  And look what happend.  Silly boy.

Boots

We are very lucky to get many hand-me-downs from Christopher, who is 10 months older than Chase and the son of 2 coworkers of mine.  Chase's favorite items from Christopher have to be his boots.  He was handed down a cool green pair that you've probably seen him wearing in many many pictures.  Then yesterday, they gave us this cool pair of yellow and black ones.  Chase wanted to wear one of each.

See?

 And, then, a view from the back...

:)

Watch out, John Deer...

...We may have a new model for you...  :)

Parenthood

There are many things that make me realize I'm a parent.  But there are those moments where it occasionally really hits me.  And sometimes makes me laugh.  Here's one of those moments that happened a couple of hours ago.  We were in the kitchen, finishing up with dinner and Chase was being his usual active self.  To be specific, he was standing on our kitchen chairs (Yes.  I know).  He had one foot on one chair and one on the other, with his legs spread as the chairs slowly began to slide apart.  Not exactly the safest position to be in.  I was washing dishes so I let Matt handle it.  The part that makes me laugh is what happened next.  Matt was standing at the counter trying to tape Chase's 'art project' from Sunday school back together and, without blinking an eye, yelled over his shoulder, "CHASE.  Get DOWN.  I'm not going to the emergency room tonight".  This makes me laugh because I distinctly remember my mom saying this to my sisters and/or me while we were growing up.  I just thought it was because she was a nurse and didn't want to go back to work.  I guess not.  Now I get it. 

Welcome to parenthood, huh?

This isn't what Chase was doing at the time, but when he jumped down (after Matt spoke to him), he grabbed one of his smaller chairs and slid it over to the counter so he could stand on that (sigh).  THIS is why we're so tired each night.  That little boy sure does keep us busy.  :)

Thomas the Train pinata

Here's a video to show how much fun the pinata was that Lauren bought for Chase's birthday.  It took a little while for the kids to figure out how to get the candy out...But once they did they were excited.  They were even excited before they got the candy out.  Check it out for yourself: