the day of love

how could you not be in love with a little boy who loves YOU so much that he starts panting when he sees you, who gives you the world's biggest grin when you save him from their naps, who tries to eat every part of you whenever you're holding him, who sometimes can't finish eating because he makes eye contact with you and then just keeps smiling and laughing because he remembers that you're there? all he wants, all he needs to make him happy is ME (and his daddy). what else do you need in life?

and how could you not be in love with a man who wakes up early to clean the house without you knowing, who comes home from a long day at school hoping for a chance to play with his baby and who always wants to be the one to rock him to sleep, who buys you flowers the week before valentine's day so they'll be cheaper, who will watch cheesy movies with you whenever you want (even when you still won't watch the dark knight rises with him), who will sometimes call you "lovergirl" when he texts you during the day?

these two guys are promising to give me a rockin' valentine's day celebration tomorrow. even though we don't actually have anything planned--every day with them is a day of love.

and also, happy 55th anniversary to my wonderful Myres grandparents today! we love you!

a lot of firsts

this week has been kind of a bummer week, because tommy and i have both been sick off and on with a sore throat and stuffy nose. luckily, no really bad coughing like the last cold we got in december, and even more luckily, dane still hasn't caught it. but we (especially i) have been pretty tired and grumpy all week long, and not very motivated to anything exciting, which means dane and i have spent a lot of time just lying in bed reading books and playing with toys. he doesn't seem to mind.

but this weekend, we actually did some new stuff. we gave dane several firsts: his first haircut, his first race, and his first taste of rice cereal. the race was planned, but the haircut and the cereal were spur-of-the-moment decisions (i know, we're just going CRAZY around here!), and we made sure to document them for posterity and his grandparents.

first haircut: friday night
dane's hair was starting to look like gollum's in the back--i'm sorry to say it, but it was true. long and stringy and hanging over his ears. he's also totally getting some bald spots from where he sleeps (only on the left side of his head, and in the back). it's been doing that for months, actually, but i finally decided it was shaggy enough. we didn't even touch the top of it--that can get as long and crazy as it wants to, as far as i'm concerned (for now)--but just trimmed the sides and back. and of course, i totally butchered it--went way shorter than i wanted to--but oh well, i think it still looks better than the gollum look.

before:

during:

(don't worry, we never put the bumbo seat on the table usually. this is just for the haircut.)

after: 

hahaha i can't stop laughing at his hair now. it's so cute, even when it's not a good haircut. i'm glad i didn't touch the top. i'm not even going to show you a good shot of the back, because it's so uneven. but man, it's HARD cutting a four-and-a-half-month-old's hair! he didn't stop moving the whole time!

first race: saturday morning
the krispy kreme challenge was yesterday morning! i was really, really nervous for us to be doing it with dane. i kept thinking we were crazy to be bringing a baby out in the freezing cold weather at 8 a.m. to run a race--but then we got there and tons of other people had their babies in strollers too! and it turned out that it wasn't even too cold. i wasn't nervous about how dane would handle the stroller, because he always just falls asleep and is really happy in his stroller rides, and we had several blankets to keep him covered up and warm.

however, dane did a great job, for about the first mile, until he got jolted too much or something and then he screamed the rest of the way to the krispy kreme. we felt really bad, but there wasn't much more we could do than try to run faster to take him out, haha.

tommy ate all 12 of his doughnuts,

but i only managed to finish about 5. but that's a 5-doughnut improvement over the last time we did the race!

dane was totally happy the whole time we were eating our doughnuts and holding him, but as soon as we tried to put him back in his stroller to run back, he started screaming again. it was very sad. but again, there was nothing we could do. so eventually he fell asleep after screaming for another mile or two.

the verdict: we did not fully complete the challenge, because we didn't do the running and eating within the time limit of an hour. (tommy totally could have, but he was nice and waited for me.) but we did run the whole five miles, and my knees didn't hurt at all. so i think it was a win-win day. 

first cereal: saturday night
we got home from the race and crashed, spent all day napping and reading (and working on the computer, in tommy's case). after dinner, we decided to try to feed dane some cereal, something we've been thinking about but putting off for no real reason other than laziness. long story short, he hated it, of course. after about four bites he started crying, and we decided it was time to stop.

the unsuspecting victim (notice his classy bib, with a shakespeare quote on it (thanks to the colemans/bodines for sending it!))

oh, well. better luck next time!

life lately

like i've mentioned before, one of my recent goals is to consolidate and organize all of the pictures on our multiple computers with one giant and excellent photo-organizational plan. it's going decently well, considering how low our starting point was. so i'm staring a lot at pictures and i realized there were some that i hadn't shared with the internet yet. tragedy! so to remedy that fact...

dane usually doesn't mind wearing hats. he barely ever notices when they're on. 

but sometimes, he does, and they scare him (apparently).

he woke up from a nap where he was supposed to be swaddled, and this was how the blanket had ended up. more like a poncho than a swaddle. he's still fully waking up here. . . . he's usually pretty calm for a few minutes after his naps.

i could take pictures every time dane sits on the couch because it's so funny to see him sitting up like he's really big. he totally thinks he belongs there. this was on a sunday evening; tommy and dane were just having some guy bonding time together.

he's a viking. he's proud of it.

going for a walk one day when tommy was working from home, so he took some pictures of us, mostly because of dane's hat. it was so awesome. tommy is an excellent photographer, don't you think?

post-walk chillin'.

when tommy went to the duke game with chelsea, dane dressed up to support the team. (duke clothes for babies are ridiculously expensive--$30 at the duke store for a onesie!--but i found this 70% off at target for $3. have to brag about my deals.)

dane absolutely LOVES looking at himself in the mirror. he'll dive for it and try to lick the mirror. his fingerprints are all over the mirror in our bedroom.

this picture is awesome because of his HAIR--it looks just like mine, haha. and his eyes look fantastic, right? 

buddies.

why buy him toys when he would rather just suck on the water bottle?

this is after he rolled over for the first time a few days ago! he hasn't repeated it since, but i think that's because he never tries. he usually is happy to just lie there flat on his back, until he's NOT happy and then he just cries until i take pity on the poor baby and save him from his misery. (he has a really hard life sometimes.)

chelsea comes to visit!

one of the perks about tommy attending duke: people want to come visit us to go to duke games! i mean, i know we're really fantastic and amazing people and they are really just coming to see us, but it also just so happens that we can offer to take them to a bball game and they usually accept. this last weekend my old roommate and good friend chelsea flew out from utah to come to a game--she's a lifelong duke fan and hardcore basketball player and she's been working way too much lately so she needed a break and came to go to the game with us. turned out i didn't even go (oh, dane) but she and tommy watched duke beat whoever they were playing (wow, i am terrible) and we basically just sat and talked for four days. it was totally awesome.

besides the game and the talking, we took her to all our favorite places to eat (q-shack, mellow mushroom, cosmic cantina):

went to unc campus, where chelsea photobombed them with her duke shirt everywhere we went:

and watched NC State beat UNC in their basketball game! oh yeah! go wolfpack!

(i'm only including this picture because i never get over how funny it is to see dane sitting on the couch like he's a grown-up. he totally thinks he's AT LEAST six months old.)

okay, confession, i don't really care. i just have to show SOME alumni pride, don't i? obviously i don't care because . . . i own more duke shirts than state shirts and my baby has a duke outfit. 

also, not pictured: the three half-gallons of bluebell ice cream we (almost totally) consumed while she was here. thank you, chelsea, for introducing us to moo-lennial crunch . . . my life will never be the same.

the dane monster

dane's so lucky. we haven't had to buy him a single article of clothing yet (well, okay, we have, but very few) because of all the gifts we've gotten (and thanks to lindsay and travis and the twins who have donated basically his whole wardrobe!). he got this awesome cookie monster outfit from alec and sarah, and then camille crocheted him this cookie monster hat--and yeah. it was cute.

we still can never get him to smile when the camera is out, but tommy was teasing him and playing peek-a-boo with a blanket, and he got super excited and we FINALLY got some good ones of him smiling.

on a different note, we went to the UNC student store last week and he was not so happy to be a UNC monster. he's a duke fan through and through. UNC blue offends him. . . . we're working on it.