Robots and Parent Teachers Conferences

If there is one thing I learned in the last 4 years of having my little boy, is that the Christmas mood does not enter my system until after his birthday on the 12th. Yes, you heard me right, last Saturday, my little boy turned 4. Time does fly but he is, in all honesty, at my favorite age so far. His excitement bubbles over and he’s just an overall joy and I could ask for nothing better!

For his birthday we went with a ROBOT Theme and I blogged about it over at the Colorblind Productions blog: Robot Party So you can go over there and see the creative robot cake I made and the Robots that decorated

He is enjoying his gifts immensely, and we are slowly introducing him to the many games he received for his Leapster which is without a doubt a fabulous gift. One of my favorite moments of his party was when he went into the breezeway and spied his uncle’s gift: a radio flyer big wheel.

He openly said “WOW, Cool” and then proceeded to want to ride it outside. It’s very cold for that so even though we had lots of people in our little house he got to ride it a bit over people’s toes.

So his birthday has come and gone and he’s a proud four years old and now mama can move into Christmas mode. Doing that 2 weeks before Christmas can leave me a bit stressed, but thankfully, Rob is totally on top of his game as leaving me tend to Ari’s birthday took the reins and started the holiday gift purchases, etc. Honestly though, we’ve always been what I call Christmas Eve shoppers. To this day one of my fondest memories was Rob and us timing how long it would take us to buy all the gifts on our list. This was earlier in our relationship and it was one or 2 days before Christmas. 3.5 hours for 9 of his immediate family’s gifts and 2 of mine. And we managed that included in the travel between places (3 malls and 2 shopping centers.) We’ve failed at beating that time since then. There is still this odd rush in getting things done at a procrastinator’s rate. I have issues.
We had our first parent teacher’s conference last week too. I worried about the result but Rob, of course, did not. What we heard was not surprising. Ari gets easily distracted and sometimes won’t listen but has gotten very good at finally sitting still. He can be a bit of a fresh mouth, vocalizing quite voraciously when he does not want to do something. He’s very helpful, doesn’t really take naps during nap time and is happily in charge of waking up the other kids. He barely eats snack and is VERY slow at eating lunch. It was nice to hear a teacher remark on how bright he is, knowing all his letters, and being able to count to 100 (all thanks to Rob), so big proud mama moment there. I really do love his school.
There is so much more I want to share and I will…in another post.

Behind the 8 ball…

I have a lot I want to say and so much to review. I have such great pictures of Nilsa’s first birthday to share with you and this one is by far my favorite of Ari and Nilsa.

I am truly blessed with 2 fabulous kids. I know not how I got as lucky as I did. And you can see all the pictures from the party by clicking here and a very special thank you for photo contributors to this gallery – Diannie & Kathy. You can if you want buy prints from that site to if you guys fall in love with them. I’m not in the mindset to go into the party in detail but I did document it here at the colorblind blog if you want to read about it and lucky for me it’s been picked up by other websites already! How awesome is that?

Peppers & Pollywogs

Everyday Celebrating

Crash this Party

Swanky Tables

It really was an absolutely fabulous time and I’m grateful to those people who helped me put together the insane little details I came up with and joined us to enjoy fresh from the dairy milk, delectable cookies and the coolest balloon guy ever.

Yet internally I’m trying to figure myself out yet again. I’m overwhelmed with the amount of stuff that NEEDS to be done and the lackluster ability to really achieve it all. I hate to see the kind of stress and anxiety take a hold of Rob and it leaves me with an inability to help him through it. We try very hard to balance things in our household but it’s getting increasingly harder. Finding time to find what the bottleneck in our lives is while simultaneously giving our kids the attention they need leaves us trying to decipher what the best route to go is. And there’s barely time to even think about what that means or what we can do to help it. And in this all there’s flat out NO time for us as a couple. Monday is out 6 year wedding anniversary. It still feels like our wedding was only yesterday and yet it was 6 years ago. And how much has changed. So many good things have entered our lives and so many other things have occurred. I love Rob more then ever now. So much so that I worry immensely about him.

I’m hoping we can gather ourselves on Monday and not only enjoy each others company but start making a plan of action for our lives. The stress levels we are living with right now is unhealthy for us and will have a negative affect on the kids as I fear it’s at the brink of slipping over into them. There has to be a better way of doing thing then what we’re currently doing. We’re not failing. Things are well. We are just in a state of disorganization and disarray and that needs to change. So after the insanity that is this weekend (the most busy fall wedding weekend of the year out here in the North East) I’ve decided I need to really hash out what needs to be done to bring our lives to a more comfortable place. And I will do it. For us.