Jamaica Man!

After 1 year, 1 month, and 12 days I had to leave my baby girl. Not only were we going to be gone for a full week, we were going out of the country for a full week. We were jumping a plane to Negril, Jamaica.  Thankfully my Mom could take care of Jade for the week to ease the separation on my part! We had a little scare in getting my Mom here. In the height of the flu season, my Mom happened to catch it just days before she was supposed to board the plane to Fargo. My parents had actually called to warn me that I might need to find someone else to care for Jade. Yea right! I wasn't about to go out of country and leave my baby for the first time with just anyone! Long story short, Erik came to help out for the first couple days she was with Jade and by the time he left, she felt pretty good. Leaving Jade was hard on me, but I knew she was in good hands...look how well I turned out. This was also the first time a vacation really felt like a vacation!

On to Jamaica! I absolutely loved Jamaica and recommend it to anyone looking for a tropical get-away. The people are very polite and fun, the water was great, the food was good, and the Miami Vice's went down smooth. We were going to be a part of Lee and Jenna's wedding. We met up with the party of 16 in Minneapolis, flew to Atlanta, and then finally Montego Bay. From there we had about a 2 hour drive to Negril.

Looking out from our hotel lobby.

The swim-up bar...where we spent most of our time.

In Jamaica, we spent a lot of time in the sun of course! There were many activities to do in the area, but you also had to drive to a lot of them. The off the resort fun Nate and I did was go down the road to Margaritaville, took a catamaran with the entire party, and Nate went fishing while I went shopping. The catamaran ride is a must!! We sailed off into the ocean with a 3 man Jamaican crew drinking rum punch and red stripe. We got to see the coast line of Bloody Bay and 7 Mile Beach. We were able to get off the boat and swim and snorkel at one point. We didn't see a whole lot off fish, but it was still fun. Then we headed onward to Rick's Cafe! This is a tourist attraction and a must see in my book. You could cliff jump here while many people watched you take the plunge...super fun!

On the catamaran.

Boating up to Rick's Cafe

Me jumping!

Nate jumping!

Our Captain

Then of course there was the wedding day! Lee and Jenna chose a sunset ceremony right on the water. Very beautiful! The ceremony was followed by drinks and a dinner.

Us at the wedding.

Bride and Groom with their parents.

After the wedding...cocktail hour.

By Sunday, Nate and I were ready to come home. We were not only missing our little princess, but we missed our bed, home cooked food, and our normal routine. I guess we're not good travelers. We are good for about 5 days, but after that gets long. We said goodbye to Jamaica on February 5. We got back late Tuesday night to snow and cold and finally got to wake up to our blue eyed beauty on Wednesday! My Mom flew back Wednesday as well. I think Jade had a great time with Grandma. We had to break her of a few habits from Grandma spoiling her, but it sure was nice to have a free babysitter! We wouldn't have wanted to take Jade after being there. It would have been hard for us to do the things we wanted to do.

Christmas/New Years

This blogging thing is harder to keep up with than I thought it would be! It has been over 2 months since I posted a thing! That means we've had Christmas, New Years, Nate and I left Jade with my Mom and went to Jamaica, and Jade is 2 months older. Here is my best attempt to recap our lives the last two months starting with Christmas....

Jade visited Santa before the Holiday festivities began. As you can see she LOVED Santa!

Once again, we were fortunate enough to be able to spend Christmas with both sides of the family. My parents were up from Wyoming and my brother came from Mankato. We spent Christmas Eve at my Uncles with my Grandparents there too. We ate lutfisk as always for Christmas Eve with the Elgin side. Nate actually said it was decent this year and Jade tried it without spitting it out! We opened our gifts there on Christmas Eve. It got to be a late night for Jade so she wasn't totally into the gift opening, but then again she was only 1.

We did not plan the color coordination, but it did make for a nice picture!

Are all these mine?

Jade's pony that Grandma had to let her open...even before dinner!

Christmas Day was spend with the Noland side. We enjoyed opening what Santa left over night. I guess we were all good this year as Santa left something for everyone. Great Grandma Peterson was able to join us for Christmas dinner too.

Helping Daddy open gifts.

Playing with her new toys.

After Christmas festivities came the New Years Party! We met up in Bemidji with Mike and Jean, Lee and Jenna, and the entire Aube family. It was a packed house full of games, drinks, and laughter! During the day, Jade and I made it into town to see Denae and her new little man Samuel. Jade thought the baby was pretty cool! Denae and I spent the afternoon catching up on our busy lives that now consists of a child! Our conversations have definitely changed over the last 2 years!

Jade really wanted to help Denae with Baby Sam!

Possible love connection? Time will tell.

For New Years itself...we were duds. Nate wasn't feeling well and I had a headache, so the 3 of us went to bed at 8:30. We didn't even wake up to the "New Year" shouts coming from upstairs. We probably should have just stayed home, but it was still nice to bring in the New Year with friends and family. This also marked 2 years in a row that we didn't make the count down.

Happy New Year!

The whole Aube/Noland Family! How many additions to this picture will there be next year?

I will post this now and then hopefully get a recap of our Jamaica vacation up soon! Stay tuned...

Happy 1st Birthday

Happy Birthday banners, balloons, presents, cupcakes, food, family, friends, and baby sitters filled our home this past weekend as we celebrated Jade's 1st birthday. I can't believe our little 7lb 14oz bundle of joy is now a crawling, "waking," babbling one year old! We couldn't be more in love with our little girl or more excited to see what the next year has in store for us. She truly has been the best addition to our lives. Things have certainly changed around our house in 1 year too.   Lazy nights/weekends of laying on our comfortable couches TV and movie watching no longer exists. We can't just randomly choose to go out with friends, we have plan and find a baby sitter.  If it wasn't for DVR, I would never see any of "my" TV shows. Our DVD's are no longer alphabetized, in fact we are lucky to have all of them in the DVD stand. All kitchen drawers at Jade's level are an unorganized mess. Our bathroom doors are kept closed so Jade can't "play" in the water or show us all the amazing things she finds in the garbage. Just in-case we forget to close the bathroom door, our garbage cans now sit on top of our toilets and the toilet lids are always shut.  Our blocks that we had in the basement that used to say UND SIOUX now say something along the lines of UN SI  X. Where are the missing blocks? Your guess is as good as ours. We've searched the house and they are no where to be found. There are little finger marks all over the bottom of the TV screen because Jade thinks it's cool that she can turn the TV on and off. We are lucky that she hasn't changed the language on our phone or ordered anything on the TV yet, as she LOVES electronics. The sliding door to the deck is full of drool, along with the full length mirror in our bedroom. Even when our house is "picked up" and clean, it still looks messy because of the explosion of baby paraphernalia. These are just a few examples of what has changed over the last 12 months. I'm sure the next 12 will bring even more change and we are excited to continue to watch Jade change and grow. Here are a few pictures of the birthday girl...enjoy!

The rocking chair Daddy got her. She gets into it all by herself!

Her baby sitter got her a drum set. So far she hasn't been too bad with the noise, but I'm sure that'll change!

"It's my party and I'll cry if I want to..."

I would like to take credit for her CUTE birthday outfit too! She had the skirt from the wedding she was in in September, I found the leggings online, and I made her shirt!

And She's Off....

Our tummy's are still full and the pounds have been packed on thanks to a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner. We enjoyed a 4 day weekend out at the "Noland Ranch." The new and improved "ranch" was the host to it's first, of I'm sure many, Thanksgiving dinners. We enjoyed food, drinks, stories, and hunting with Nate's parents, his brother Lee and his fiance, and his Uncle Mark and Aunt Barb. Hunting was unfortunately unsuccessful for all of us, although Nate put up a good fight as he was out driving the minimum maintenance roads of 2L much of the weekend. I was even able to get away for a night cruise. We saw a handful of deer, but either not for long enough to get a shot off, on posted land, or 300+ yards away. As they say... better luck next year! Here is a family photo of Jade's first Thanksgiving!

Sunday morning we were all ready to head home. Our little girl seemed a bit homesick, I was ready to decorate for Christmas, and I think Nate was just sick of unsuccessful hunting and wanted to watch some football. Jade was busy walking her walker up and down the hallway as she often does when she decided to ditch the walker and try walking all by herself! Nate was sitting on the floor ready to catch her fall, but she didn't need Daddy's help and walked all the way across the living room to Mommy who was on the couch! I'll have to admit...this brought a tear to my eyes. I don't know if it's because my little girl is getting so big already or because I was so proud of her. Probably a little of both I guess. Here are a couple video's of my BABY walking! She is so interested in the camera that it's hard for me to get good video, but here is what I managed to capture. 

She still isn't "cruising" after figuring out she can walk on her own, but I'm sure we're not far from her being EVERYWHERE! She's growing up so fast, but it's so much fun too. She has such a personality!

Kitchen Utensil Cake

Every once in a while I try to be crafty/creative and it actually turns out.  My soon to be sister in law was having a bridal shower so I thought I would try and make a utensil cake. On a side note, my soon to be sister-in-law will be the second Jenna Noland in the same family! Weird I know! I had seen a few pictures, on where else but Pinterest, and thought I was up for the challenge.  I read how a couple other people created their cakes and eventually came up with a way that worked out great for me. So here's what I did and what you'll need.

Ingredients:
Kitchen towels (the towels I bought came in a pack of 4)
Utensils of your choice
Ribbon
Pins
An empty coffee/hot chocolate tin

I washed out a tin of hot chocolate and used this to wrap the first towel around. I kept it folded the way that it was folded when I bought it. I stuck a couple pins in it to hold it around the container (the grey towel in the picture). Then I took another towel and without unfolding it the way that it came folded it in half the long way one more time. I wrapped this around the first towel (grey towel) and pinned it. The pin wasn't holding all the material great, so I quickly tied ribbon around it to hold it all in place.

For the top tiers of the "cake," I rolled up one towel like a sleeping bag as tight as I could (all white towel). Then I wrapped another towel around that (black towel) and tied it with ribbon.

I did have to take the tags off a few of the utensils and the towels to make this so I just threw them inside the hot chocolate tin in case the bride-to-be needed to return them. I then shoved one end of the top tier I just made into the canister part of the hot chocolate tin. From there I finished it off with the utensils I bought. I also cut out a piece of cardboard to use as a base and wrapped it in black and white striped wrapping paper I had. I hot glued this part to the bottom of the hot chocolate tin for the finished product.

I didn't realize how hard it is to give directions...hope it makes sense and that the pictures help if you decide to give this a try yourself.

Mess Maker...

I finally have some time for a quick post! I've been busy with football play-offs, hunting season, cleaning house, etc!

I know and understand that this is a developmental thing that probably most, if not all, infants go through, but would seriously like to know what the fascination of pulling things off tables, emptying book cases, completely cleaning out drawers, etc. is. I leave a room for what seems like just seconds and return to find that Jade has completely emptied a drawer of clothes, cleaned out our food cabinet in the kitchen, and/or pulled every book off the shelves. I ask her what she's doing and she just looks at me and smiles as if she knows she's making a mess for me to clean up! This new found skill she has does however come in handy while unloading the dishwasher and folding laundry. Yes, I do make sure things like knives and pizza cutters are out of reach or taken out of the dishwasher immediately before I let Jade help me with the dishes. She stands at the dishwasher and hands me the clean dishes one by one so I can put them away. If I don't put them away fast enough for her, she drops whatever is in her hand and grabs the next closest dish. When we do laundry, she is really good at taking things out of the dryer and putting them in. It's fun to watch her concentrate on a task that is so mindless and simple to us.

I think my Mom has the same or similar pictures of me doing the exact same things...

She looks so sweet and innocent...

Hope everyone has a Happy Thanksgiving! I hope to get another post in over the long weekend so stay tuned.

Happy Spooky and Scary Halloween!

Happy belated Halloween! It was Jade's 1st Halloween, and I have to say she was the cutest kid I saw last night! I saw a lot of cute kids out trick or treating and many pictures posted on facebook, but I still think my little elephant was the cutest ;). The best part of her costume was her little tail that "wiggled when she walked and wiggled when she talked"...ok, so not when she talked, but that's how the song goes. Anyway, it wiggled when she would walk/crawl around it was funny to say the least. I'm going to try to insert a video...let's see if it works....

I was able to leave work early to pick Jade up from the baby sitter and take her "trick or treating." I took her to come co-workers/friends houses in Moorhead before bringing her home. When Jade and I got home, we put her in her little Harley wagon and took her to some of the neighbors houses. Then we came back to the house to trick or treat via skype with Grandma Noland and Grandma and Grandpa Elgin! Technology is awesome! I'm glad the Grandparents were able to get to see her in her costume! Here are a few more pics of our little elephant. 

The whole costume...

 Up close and personal...

 The backside...