All About Oliver!

Uly and I decided to combine our Christmas presents this year and splurge on a Nikon DSLR for us. We bought it last Tuesday and went up to L.A. to take it for a spin. I was planning on doing a post about our day, but the pictures of Oliver we got were just too cute, so instead I’m going to post an obscene amount of pictures of him and give you all a long overdue update! :)

Oliver is just over 2 1/2 years old now. He is always talking up a storm and has a pretty decent Spanish vocabulary as well as a lack of accent that his grandparents are proud of! He can say buenas días (good morning), buenas noches (good night), adios, hola, hasta luego (see you later), grande, pequeño (little), agua, and he knows some numbers and all of his colors in Spanish! He knows his colors in English, too, and can say his numbers up to ten in English but hasn’t quite got them in order yet. He knows lots of animal sounds including bird, puppy, kitty, pig, horse, chicken, goat/sheep, cow, and every once in a while you can get a hilarious attempt at an elephant out of him.

He loves anything with wheels, particularly cars and has a knack of finding cars that Mom and Dad had no idea where they were hiding. He loves the movie Cars and McQueen is his favorite character, of course. He still loves Dora the Explorer but his number one favorite these days is Little Einsteins. After watching it only a few days he can sing pretty much the whole song! I got it on video and will post it up here.

Oliver is fiercely independent and loves to do things himself. He loves to pick out what shirt he wants to wear that day and also loves to pick out his own shoes. We haven’t had to use Nemo safety harness for at least a month and we’re hoping that we will be able to be stroller free in a few months! Monday is the day we’re going to start our first serious attempt at potty training, so I’m sure there will be lots of updates in the next week or so!

Oliver is a whopping 39 inches and weighs about 40 pounds…I think. He looks like a 3 or 4 year old instead of a 2 1/2 year old, as always! He is such a happy, good, sweet, friendly kiddo and we are so blessed and lucky to have him in our lives!

His unruly hair. He got a haircut just a few days ago, you’ll see pictures soon!

These pictures are from the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, such a cool place!

You can’t quite see it but that statue says “Mejor Hijo”which means Best Son in Spanish. :)

Excited for his hot dog (that he didn’t eat) at the famous Pink’s Hot Dogs!

Blasting through our Halloween!

Sorry for the horribly bad pun in the post title…I had to!

Halloween this year was so much fun. Uly had class early so we picked up his little brother Jake from school and went trick or treating downtown Redlands and at the Ontario Mills Mall. Oliver figured it out real quick and figured out even quicker that the cuter he was, the more candy he got!

Oliver’s rocket ship was a HUGE hit! Every few seconds we would hear “Oh, look at the rocket ship!” “He’s so cute!” “I love his costume!” which was too much fun. He loved all the attention!

His first of many stops!

Jessie and one of the Army Soldiers were around to say hi!

My sweet friend Mila and her adorable baby trick or treated with us for a bit. He was still in his “I don’t know you and I’m not sure about you” phase when I took this picture, haha!

Oliver started eating candy as soon as it hit his bucket and didn’t stop until we had to pry it from his fingers to put him in the carseat!

They shut down all of downtown!

The haul that Oliver got just after trick of treating downtown!

Our pumpkins!

Oliver and I checking out the decorations at our friend’s house.

We all know that Oliver inherited his grace – or lack thereof – from me so we were surprised when he managed to make it through Halloween with no peripherals in his costume and survived several tumbles without hurting himself. Literally the next morning…He shimmied himself right off the bed. Go figure!

We’re hoping for more sightings of our rocket man before he grows out of his costume. We’ll make sure to share any with you! Until then…

Rocket man out!

Pumpkin Patch fun

There’s a pumpkin patch that is on the way to my job that I saw last year and this year and every time I pass it I think to myself that I want to go there. Well, today I finally got to go! It was so much cuter than I thought it would be and I’m already planning on making my parents visit next year and taking them! I was all ready to go digging for my cute winter coat and scarves and then I looked at the forecast for the day – 87 degrees! And yes I have my child in a long sleeve t shirt and pants. His Aunt Ali bought him a rocket ship t shirt and as per his new found love for Little Einsteins, he HAD to wear it. I had a short sleeve t shirt in my purse as back up. :)

They had TONS of different varieties of pumpkins!

We won nicest parents EVER award for a few minutes when we let Oliver go on this slide.

That, my friends, is the look of pure joy.
We won WORST parents ever award a short time later when his turn was over.

Getting Oliver to look at pictures is almost impossible. Most of the time he just isn’t in the mood, and when he does look he moves before my camera can take the picture. :(

The next part was the petting zoo and Oliver was in HEAVEN. HE kept saying “Hi chicken!” over and over.

Petting the “birdie”

Uly and I got a pumpkin, Jake got one and Oliver even got his very own little one! We went home and carved them up!

I tried taking some pictures but it was too dark and I was too far away from them, so as I light them tomorrow night I’ll take some close ups!

P.S. Sorry the pictures are so huge! "Small" is smaller than I want and apparently there's a bigger difference between small and medium sizes than I realized, but oh well.

Check it out!

I was asked to guest post over at my friend Mila’s blog Free Bird Train on how I balance work and school with being a single mom. Go over to her blog and check it out!

Adventures in Parenting

Oliver and I woke up this morning and as I changed his diaper I realized that he was now wearing his last diaper, which meant I needed to go buy some. By time I got us breakfast, got some stuff down around the house and was ready to go, his diaper was a little wet so Uly told me to just put his pants on and we’ll hurry to buy the diapers. I figured why not and grabbed an extra pair of pants and out the door we went. We were debating which diapers were the best deal (Oh, the joys of being poor!) when Oliver started freaking out. He kept pointing at something on the ground and yelling “EW! UCKY! EW MOM YUCKY!” We look and what is sitting there on the floor of TARGET FOR EVERYONE TO SEE? Yup. Poop. He had pooped his pants – something that never even OCCURRED to us that would happen! – and it fell out on the floor of Target. I grabbed Oliver and took him several rows down so that he would stop his yelling of “MOMMY UCKY! EW MOMMY EWWWW!”and Uly followed me frantically searching through my purse for something to pick up the poop in. Why? Cuz I was awesome and forgot wipes at home. Yup, again. Poop in hand, we grabbed some diapers and booked it to the cash register, paid for our diapers and stuck one on Oliver as quickly as we could!