Cutest. Army hat. Ever.

A little smug...


This was after I said "show me your teeth!"...


Aaaannd perfect.

not much of an update

Here at the Holt household we enjoy the days Daddy gets to stay home, as they are usually few and far between. So we have thoroughly enjoyed this last month because he's been on leave! Unfortunately, he has to go back soon, and since this is a new unit for him and he's doing a brand-new job (woo hoo PA!), it'll be a big adjustment. We'll just have to remember these last few weeks, and our lazy days of watching "Sesame Street" every morning, maybe going shopping for a few must-need items, and watching all our DVRed shows in the afternoon. Wait - that's what I do every day!! Oh, right - but now it'll just be me and the bubs...no Daddy. *sigh* Guess I'll have to get back into my playgroup so I actually get Aiden out of the house once in a while.

In other news (not really) - Aiden is picking up new words every day. And sometimes he'll hear something when we don't realize he's listening, then we have to hold our breaths and hope he doesn't repeat some of those things....like, we had "Friends" on one night, and Rachael said the word "boob", which Aiden then repeated - but we didn't say anything, and he didn't say it again. Whew! We've learned if we don't make a big deal about things he says - or, rather, things we don't want him to say - then he doesn't continue saying them. Good advice to all our friends with new babies, or going to have babies soon - when they start talking, be excited about all the words you want to hear, and ignore the ones you don't!

That's about all from us. Oh - we had a little party for the Super Bowl, and I made these: White Trash Puff Balls They were awesome, and so easy. And I just really like the name :) Ok that's all. Bye for now.

A serious one...

I've been contemplating this whole "blogworld" that I joined by beginning this blog. I wonder who is actually reading any of this, or if I want anyone other than family reading it at all. I started this in order to put news about our family out there for anyone interested in us, but knowing how prevalent blogs are nowadays I wonder if any "schmo" would come across this and start following every word I type. That's a bit scary to me, as I tend to think I'm a pretty private person. Not that I believe some random person would stalk us just by reading this. But it does worry me that our entire families' names are posted within this blog. I wonder if I should have used nicknames for all of us, and not put our last name in the blog name at all. Then again, I wonder if I'm just being paranoid. I like this blogging stuff, and I like those of you who do read this to know what's happening in our lives, so I don't want to stop. I know I've labeled this blog as "private" so unless I've told you about it, you somehow must have stumbled upon it by mistyping a URL or something. I keep up with other friends' blogs who use their actual names as well, and I wonder if any of them have had any reservations about that - but then, I might not know what they're naming their new baby if they didn't post it in their blog! Oh well. I'm going to continue this blog as is, with the hopes that only the persons we know will keep up with my ramblings. And as you can tell from this posting, I do tend to ramble. Thanks for reading :)

Celebrating Beth's 1st anniversary of her 29th birthday!

Ok, so I turned the big 3-0 on the 18th. Yikes! Here's how I celebrated:

Matt and I stayed at a Doubletree hotel on Sat night. Yummy cookies!! (and I mean that literally - they give you a warm chocolate chip cookie when you check in)


Making a toast at Einstein's in Buckhead

Sisters at Zucca's in Smyrna
Da boys at Zucca's

Pretty cake! I'm sure someone made a mistake about the age, though.


And to top the weekend off, we all got to watch a sneak preview of the new show "Trust Me", and got free hats too! I guess so far being 29 again - ok, fine, 30 - isn't so bad. Ask me again how it feels in 10 years.

Just have to share...

AIDEN PEEPEED IN THE POTTY TONIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You may now return to your regularly scheduled program.

Organizational craziness

OMG. The toys in the living room are officially organized. Not that they always looked like this:
That's the "during" shot of putting together the cubicle shelf organizer. Although, it's not far off the mark of what the room looked like some days.

After over 2 hours of slaving over MDF and rearranging a few things, we now have a decent looking living room (i.e. you can almost barely tell a 2 year old lives here):
Oh, and for family members reading this: Yes, that is a Wii console on the floor. Yes, we are going to download the old Nintendo games for our enjoyment. Yes, we're ready for you to come visit already!!!

And here's a cutiepie shot of Aiden sitting inside his train tracks:

We're back!

Well, we've been back for a couple of days but I'm just now sorting through all the pictures we took over the holidays! I wouldn't want to burden my devoted readers (all 2 of ya!) with 150 pictures so I'll limit myself to posting the ones that best depict our trip to Arkansas. Here's an overview:

We arrived a few days before Christmas which gave us time to prepare Aiden for the excitement. Since he's repeating everything we got him to say "Santa", "Merry Christmas", "Christmas lights" - all in his cute lispy voice. On Christmas Eve we went to a church service and he sat through the whole thing like a big boy!
Then Christmas morning came, and Aiden was so patient in waiting for each person to get their presents and open them. There were so many presents that we had to take an "intermission" for breakfast, then went back and opened the rest. All in all, it took about 3 hours to get everything opened! Of course, that was just the first Christmas.Friday morning we left to go see the other side of the family, and we opened more presents there!
We also went over to the cousin's house where Aiden participated in an impromptu jam session with Grampa Holt and cousin Jason.
We came back to the Grandparent's house on Sunday. We had intended on leaving Tuesday to spend New Year's Eve with Beth's family in ATL, but before we left on Friday morning we noticed a rather large pink stain under our Jeep. Luckily there was a Jeep dealer in the town, so we got it towed, and they said they might not see it until the next week. We got a message on Monday saying it was just a small part in the transmission that needed to be replaced, but of course the parts truck hadn't arrived yet, so they said the earliest it would be ready would be noon on Tuesday. Since the drive is about 9 hours we didn't feel like leaving that late in the day, so we just decided to stay through New Year's. We had a relaxing, quiet NYE because we all managed to catch a lovely cold so we didn't feel like going out and partying. We came home Friday and have gotten everything into the house - now we must figure out how to organize it all!

Here's more pictures for your enjoyment:

Aiden on his Elmo chair

Family picture

Stockings hung by the chimney with care