If it's hot, blow on it.

Whenever Nate's food is hot, I tell him that it's too hot and I have to blow on it. Then he watches me blow and stir his food and then he usually "blows" (AKA blows raspberries) on it as well.

Today while he was eating, I pushed a chair up against the cabinets to get at something high up. After I took him out of his high chair, he copied me and pushed a chair up against the cabinet and climbed on it. He was a little close to the stove (which was off) so I told him "be careful, it's hot!"

What did he do? Blew on it, of course.

And we're in!

Well, we're in the new house.

The move went really well. And we have cable (internet, tv and phone). The kitchen is half unpacked (we even have the kitchen table up and cooked in there for the first time tonight).

Nate's room is the most finished at the moment (only 3 boxes in there that need to be unpacked). The rest of the rooms are mostly undone. The family room (with most of Nate's toys) is also doing very well.

We have no pictures yet. When the house is unpacked, we'll share pictures.

That's it. Just wanted to check in. :D

Ready ... set ... go!

Nate's running now. I noticed today that he was running around the house. He's gone from falling every two steps to running in 3 months. And climbing on the kitchen table.

We're moving on Monday, so our belongings are mostly packed except for the things we needed. There are some parts of the house we would have had to baby-proof that Nate started to get into -- like the knife drawer -- but we're moving. So we just moved the knives on the counter top instead.

We've been living in such a state of limbo since we put the house on the market in August. We could never fully baby-proof and just put things away because we were trying to make the house look nice for showings. So the pictures and candles and little knick-knacks in Nate's reach were just put up out of his reach until showings when we would rush around the house "un-baby-proofing." I wonder how many showings we had where we had forgotten to set some things out properly.

The woman who ended up buying our house saw it on the day after Christmas when there were giant boxes outside from Nate's new slide-castle-thing, I hadn't had a chance to clean the kitchen floor, and the house just wasn't as "showing ready" as it normally was. Didn't seem to matter. :)

It will be nice to move into a house and get it set up and Nate-safe from the beginning. He will still be able to find ways to get into trouble (two staircases, two brick fireplaces/chimneys to fall into, a basement ...) but at least there are regular knobs on the doors outside, not lever-style ones that he can open so -- at least until he learns to open the new ones -- we won't find him in the backyard when we forget to lock the door.

I'm very much looking forward to the new house. I don't really feel any sadness about leaving this one. It was awesome while we were here, but now it's time for something new and more suited to our family. Yay! I am very much looking forward to decorating and filling the house in with the things that we need. :) SO MUCH FUN! Woo hoo!

Happy Valentine's Day.

No PB&J for you!

So, Nate has a peanut allergy.

I was pretty bummed and actually a little angry at first (not sure what I was angry at ...). After digesting the info for a bit, I was fine. So many people are used to peanut and nut allergies these days. It's the egg, dairy or wheat allergies today that are the unknown ones that fewer people understand. So not too much is changing about how we eat or what Nate eats. I'm just checking packages for "May contain traces of peanuts" or "Processed on shared equipment with peanuts." Also, Nate won't get to eat Chinese take-out because it's generally all cooked in peanut oil. A lot of Asian foods are. We will learn. And we have an epi-pen for him now.

Nate really did like the few peanut butter and jelly sandwiches he ate before he started having the skin reactions (to where to PB touched his skin). Instead of making Nate eat almond butter, which has a very different taste and texture, I have found that sunflower seed butter has a very similar taste and texture to PB. I'm excited to bake some tasty treats with it too! So, peanut allergy, no big deal. And hey, maybe he'll outgrow it.

I'll leave you with a photo of Nate that we'll be sure to show to all of his girl- or boyfriends when he's in high school.