a three-day catch up

i got lazy on thursday and never posted about the day, had to work friday night, and so now i'm posting all 3 days (including today) together. get ready :)

thursday i wanted to go to the park to let parker play and then we'd go for a walk afterwards. jesse wasn't too keen on the walking idea, so we ended up going to a different park so that he/we could play basketball. he ended up calling our friend jacob and he came out to play with jesse. which turned out better because jesse wanted more of a workout from it and i definitely wasn't the person to do that for him.

parker does NOT like to be dirty. i've determined he's not really a boy haha. if he gets something on his hands, "yucky mommy yucky." anything in his shoe, he has to stick it in the air, "yucky mommy yucky." he won't continue until it's off his hands/shoes/legs/etc. i'm working on this one.

he tried to chase after a butterfly...wasn't too successful on that one. but it was quite entertaining watching him run all over the place :)

the boys playing some basketball. it was quite hot this particular day. we were burning up, everyone bright red. and i somehow was the only person to get a slight sunburn.

after our morning at the park, we had the afternoon with reed again.

i find parker to be quite interesting with his toys since reed has started coming over. i pull out old toys that he never uses and that would be good for reed. and the second reed starts to play with them, "parker's toy mommy." all these toys sit right in front of him in his room everyday, yet he doesn't play with them. but if anyone else dare touch them, he gets upset. again, still working on the sharing concept.

friday i started the day off trying to let parker play in the dirt...since we're having the "being dirty" issue. when we were doing the yard work in the front, he wanted to help and was kinda playing with the dirt. so i bought him some gardening gloves and a little shovel. i took him out front and told him to go play in the dirt, go dig. didn't want to but for about a minute... :( but he did look cute!

we even found a fuzzy white caterpillar and 1 of the hundreds of rolly pollies in our yard.

i have also started to experiment with big-boy undies. not going so well so far. i spoke with 1 person a while ago about potty training their daughter. he said they just put her straight in big undies and she didn't like the feel of the pee running down her legs, so she quickly learned to tell her parents that she needed to potty. well, parker will tell you he pottied, but still hasn't grasped the before part to that. and it doesn't seem to bother him that much. it seems this is going to be much more difficult than i was hoping.

his big-boy undies and his favorite new chair. an outdoor foldable monkey chair that he wants to take EVERYWHERE.

and finally, we're at saturday. today my dad came over to see about wiring a wall with cable. we're trying to rearrange our furniture in the living room and move the tv to a different wall, but it doesn't have a cable hook-up. and lucky for us, my dad is the expert :)

parker ran to get his tools to help my dad. how cute! he's such a sweetie :)

dad started getting everything together and was all excited because he figured it out (there were a few run-ins to start). and he joked he was so good, until he dumped everything out of his tool box...

sorry dad! i had to. :)

needless to say, he got everything hooked up like i knew he would. i forgot to take a finished picture before i pushed the sofa back. but it's all hooked up on the inside. now he just has to hook it up on the roof. so hopefully in the near future we'll have a completely different looking living room! i'm excited about the prospects of that.

and so tonight i will be relaxing and waiting for jesse to come home. i'll be watching leap year and starting on a new project for parker. and as of right now, it looks like this:

you'll have to wait for the finished product to see what it is! stay tuned for next time :)

water fun

since we decided to keep parker home for the summer, i've been trying to find free/cheap fun things to do. over in highland village they have a water feature that shoots out water and i've seen a ton of kids out there playing. so today i decided to take parker. luckily, no one else was out there when we went :)

he was very hesitant at first to go by himself. i had to stand with him at one of the spouts for a while. i kept sticking my foot out to get him to do the same. most kids love running through the whole thing, but he never would. he mainly stood by 1 the whole time. he's a strange child at times.

he was trying to stick his head in the water/drink it. and he was quickly stopped for trying to drink it. you could smell all the chlorine just from standing by it.

today was also the first day that reed came over!

he is my friend katy's baby boy. he's 1 and absolutely adorable. we've babysat him 1 time and parker had a blast with him. just baby this and baby that. and was even upset when he had to go to bed because he couldn't play with reed anymore.

well, today marked the day they get to spend a few days a week together for the next 10 weeks. parker now has a playmate and i, obviously, get to experiment with taking care of 2 kids. it's a handful! but lots of fun watching them together. katy and i are hoping for BFFs haha.

parker gave reed kisses because he started crying. how sweet :)

and that would be parker trying to "talk" to reed. he started at a good distance and gradually got closer and closer.

i think this is 1 of my favorites! they were watching shark tale.

katy said reed loves to put in and take things out, so i found this lovely little toy in parker's room. he loved it!

so we played this fun little game of "reed's gonna get you." parker was running around everywhere the whole time, but every time that i started to walk around reed would follow me. so i decided to tell parker that reed was gonna get him. so parker would proceed with squealing and laughing...reed would start to smile. so i'd start leading reed towards parker and EVERY TIME parker would run and get on the rocking chair. and this is reed "getting parker."

and parker had to protect his toys haha.

day 1 went well...we'll let you know how the rest of the days go! definitely going to have to work on the whole sharing thing. i kind of thought parker might be somewhat ok at it since he's been at daycare with a bunch of other kids. but not so much. it'll be a project.

we now know about yard work

last saturday my dad came over to help us clear out our front flower bed. it was pretty nasty...full of weeds and overgrown plants. i forgot to take a before picture, so here is the best i had.

this is from when we first looked at the house. the flower bed on the left was way worse than that the other day. you couldn't even see the front of the house, practically. lots of weeds!

and here is the finished product...

look at all that crap! ugh...it was a pain. but even parker managed to "help."

we now have 3 rose bushes left. they are all trimmed down pretty far right now. but now, what to do with all that area?

well...as i was looking through my new favorite blog yesterday, i have an idea :)

how adorable?! it's her front porch. and she lives in california, so it fits right in and looks so cute. but we could totally make it work for us, right? what do you think?

anyways, after our day of hard work (and a wonderful morning at the coppell farmers market), we enjoyed the live music at work. we were having an event at all the stores: bugs, buckets, and blues. and it was nice to actually go to work and not have to work.

i had a way-to-strong chocolate martini (geez aaron) and grilled tuna with crabmeat butter. delicious!

jesse had his fill of 9 pounds of crawfish for the season.

and parker was intent on the band the whole time.

what a great day! :)

parker used the potty!

yes, it is true. he FINALLY used the potty!

he was proud. but unfortunately hasn't used it again... :(

our first grilling of the season

i knew i would have a hard time keeping up with this, but i definitely didn't think i'd wait THIS long. it's been a while.

anyways, we grilled chicken the other night for the first time this season. it was quite yummy :)

and while jesse grilled and i cooked rosemary citrus potatoes (our favorite!) inside, parker enjoyed some wonderful time outside.

and we even found LOTS of rolly pollies. he's obsessed. and it's also the only bug i'll pick up, so maybe that's why. haha

in the end, we had a very delicious dinner. and many more to come :)