Wise Words from Joshua

Joshua has finally said his first official word. Now that I’m a parent, I realize it’s a little difficult to determine what constitutes as a word versus simple babbling. And if he simple repeats a word, does that count? So, I came up with criteria as to what would constitute as the first official word: He would need to say it on his own initiative and use it in an appropriate setting. For example, looking at a tree and saying, “Daddy” wasn’t going to cut it.

After what seems like months of babbling “Da-Da” and “Ma Ma” with a number of other sounds, I was ready. When asked what a lion (or honestly, what any animal sounds like) and he will roar. He can repeat “uh-oh” and shakes his head “no” when you tell him “no, no.” He constantly chatters in his own little language and will even raise his hand in the air to get your attention when he’s talking to you. (This makes me think he will be a preacher or a rapper some day, or maybe a rapping preacher?)

Several weeks ago, Kurt and I headed out to shop for some accessories to decorate our living room. We went to our local Bassett furniture store because we have a gift card. Now Bassett isn’t the fanciest store in town, but it certainly isn’t Wal-mart. They have an area set out with complimentary coffee, lemonade and cookies. Being the cheap people we are, we always take advantage of their hospitality. After hanging out in the stroller for a while, Joshua was ready to do some walking around on his own. Kurt decided to hang out with him for a little while in the kid’s area while I went to get a cup of coffee. We then ventured around the store a little more and talked about our options. After making some decisions, Kurt stated he was going to put Joshua back in the stroller so we could head back to one of the rooms.

I’m not really sure what happened next. Either I stepped forward while bringing my hand down or Kurt stepped back while reaching down for Joshua. All I know is that my left hand, the one with the diamond ring, made contact with Kurt’s forehead. Hard. Kurt lifted Joshua up while moaning in agony. I tried to suppress my laughter, but I didn’t do a very good job. Kurt, in a very frustrated tone, asked what I was doing, as if he thought I did in intentionally. At that moment I was using all my energy trying not to laugh, knowing it would only make my dear hubby angrier. That’s when Joshua decided it was a good moment to try and steal my coffee. He pulled the cup over, spilling the full cup down the front of my cream sweater and all over the floor of Bassett. By this point I was really laughing and Kurt was not happy. Joshua surveyed the scene; coffee on mommy and the floor, and a mad daddy and proclaimed, “uh oh!” Uh-oh was right little buddy.

Ice storm hits Austin, Terrorizes Texans

Falling behind on blogging has become a trend...I'm sure most of you know by now that Austin got hit by an ice storm recently. But did you know that cold weather animals also attacked? Here, Joshua and I are trying to outrun a vicious polar bear.

Austin in winter weather is pretty humorous. Everything shuts down and they warn people to stay off the roads. News reporters gets worked up and have you thinking a natural disaster to the scale of Katrina is about to hit. Sunday night they were predicting terrible road conditions, loss of power, and stranded people for the next day. The tricky part of the storm was that it was going to be off and on all day, making it difficult to pinpoint safe times to drive. I, believing my trusted news anchors, begged Kurt not to go to work. I wondered what I would do if he got stranded at the office and we lost power and Joshua and I had to fend for ourselves. So, like a good husband, Kurt stayed home. He was the only one in his office that wasn't there. oops. By the end of Monday afternoon we began to realize the apocalypse was not coming and the media folks were overdoing it a bit for the ratings. They predicated even worse weather for Tuesday, leading into Wednesday. Kurt went on into work Tuesday. The schools were closed, business were closing, and his office closed too. Would you East Coasters believe this-even Walmart closed. Walmart never closes! While the bridges were a little icy, Kurt didn't have any problems driving in with the Xterra.
Tuesday Joshua and I ventured outside. It had started snowing, but by the time I wrestled him into his snowsuit it wasn't snowing anymore. He enjoyed walking around and crunching the grass, but definitely needed a hand to keep his balance. But of course I needed to take a picture of the cute boy in his snowsuit, which would leave him on his own. I tried to convince him to stand on his own, but he would cooperate. So of course, he fell down. That didn't bother him so much, but in order to push himself back up he had to put his hands in the cold, icy stuff (he won't keep his mittens on). This made him very upset and he started crying, so I brought him inside and here he is.

What can I say? He's a Texan.


By Wednesday night, I was getting stir crazy. Since Kurt was driving the Xterra I was stuck indoors (the Mazda is a manual and I didn't think this was the time to learn how to drive it). That night, Kurt scraped the Mazda's windshield. Given the fact it had been gathering all the precipitation over three days, it took a while... I stayed inside sipping hot cocoa, thanking the Lord that I didn't have to scrap a thing.

By Thursday at noon, things began to get back into order. As for the Polar Bears, they didn't really attack. Last Tuesday Kurt had a meeting in Tyler, Texas so Joshua and I went along for the ride. We thought it might be a good time to test Joshua's road trip adaptability. All in all he did great. He had two basic dispositions for the ride:

Joshua and I checked out Tyler's Rose Garden and Rose Festival Museum. (I'll save that for another entry though.) By the time we got lunch, Kurt was finished with his meeting. We then all headed to the Brookshire Wildlife Museum for some wild fun. It was actually pretty impressive for a free museum. I guess the Brookshire's have a lot of money? They owned the local grocery chain there in Tyler. We made lots of new friends (see pics below) and had fun together. Besides lots of stuffed animals, the museum has an old time general store. It is set up just like back in the day. While I feel like I have seen examples of these before, this was by far the most well done.

This was the wildest animal we saw that day...

Don't you have anything else to do?

Recently I was asked about You Tube and the fact that our videos were public. I didn't think much of making our videos public. So I went to the site to check out some things and found that you can see how many people have viewed your videos. Would you believe that Joshua doing the Hokie Pokie as been viewed over 1,000 times! I think people have found it because it gets linked with other Hokie and Viginia Tech stuff. One Haircut video was viewed over 200 times and the other over 300 times. Isn't funny that people don't have more to do than watch random videos on YouTube? Then again, Kurt and I love watching random videos on You Tube. Here are two favorites we have come across.

Bush Bloopers. No matter what your political views, this is funny.



Get your groove on to this one.


I have gone back and changed the settings on our videos to Private. I can still post them on the blog, but I don't know if I want thousands or even hundreds of people watching our videos!

Sliding fun

Santa brought Joshua a slide for Christmas. He has already figured out how to climb up on it himself. Here he is having fun with it. (I really need to remember not to talk when I'm videoing!)