Lucas's New Room

I have wanted to give Lucas a really cute room since we moved into our new house last year, but I wasn't sure on what kind of design I wanted or theme to go with. Then as it got cold we realized that two of our three smaller bedrooms are over the garage making them very cold in the winter and terrible rooms for little guys that don't sleep with covers on. Anyways, that lead to the quandry of if we stay in this house for a long time, it needs to be a gender neutral room because this one will always have to be the nursery. Therefore, after a lot of ok ideas and driving my family nuts telling them all of those ideas and asking opinions, I finally put the finishing touches on it today (Monday). I started on painting on Wednesday, so I am pretty proud of myself.

This is the room where he has been for the last year:

This is the room he moved into before I painted. It is hard to tell, but it was purple, kinda grayish purple.Note the VERY white ceiling fan:
Lucas's first night in his new room
At first, all he wanted was out
Here are the chinese lanterns we put inPainted ceiling fan, hand painted spots, and new curtains

Shot of as much of the room as I could get at onceHe dramatically fell over all goofy in his crib and smiled at me. I shot this in the dark, I couldn't even see that he was smiling.
He has started saying cheese and posing. Also, you can see the King and McQueen (from Cars) in his hands. He has to have them to sleep.

Halloween

Happy Halloween!
We decided to go as Snow White, Prince Charming, and Dopey again.
Lucas actually looked happy about it at Trunk or Treat. He got some candy that night, but they had music playing so all he wanted to do was stand by the speakers and dance!

We went to Gilcrease Orchard in Las Vegas to get a pumpkin which Lucas called a ball.
Here he won't look at me because it is VERY windy and he was getting dust in his face.

He's almost looking at me, but making a funny face. It was the best I could hope for.
We didn't carve his pumpkin because since he thought it was a ball, every time he saw it, he would kick it off the porch. Carving it would have lead to a very early smashing.Halloween night before trick or treating. He hadn't really taken a nap and he didn't want to put his costume back on.Going for the hat..."I don't want to wear this stupid thing!"After the first round of trick or treating. He went with mommy first and daddy second.

(note to reader: Yes we know he is allergic to peanuts and that he is holding peanut M&Ms. Let's just say it was a happy halloween for mommy too.)

Out getting candy

He liked to hold on to the most recent candy he got. When someone would give him a new one, he would put the old one in the bag. He was very sweet saying "Treat. Peese." and "Two" (which is thank you in this case)

Just for reference sake, here is my little tiny cutie as Dopey last year. He looks so tiny here and so big now!

Calves of Steel

For those of you who have not seen Lucas lately, he is a tippy-toe-er. That's right, all tippy-toes, all the time. It recently came to my attention just how long he has been doing this when someone pointed out that he was doing it last Christmas. Therefore, we are coming up on a year that being an inch taller and having a bounce in your step became commonplace in our house.

These pictures are tribute to the calves you can get from walking on your toes for a year. I tell you what, it's inspirational. I think his calves have convinced more than one person that this is the way to go!

Go BYU!

We went to the BYU vs UNLV (59-21) game on October 10. It was Lucas's first football game and he LOVED it. Yesterday when we were flipping channels on the TV, he saw a football game and starting yelling "booball" and actually wanted me to stay on that channel so he could watch it.

The whole fam after the game

Cute boy with Mommy

He liked sitting on the stairs because he had a clear view. He kept yelling and cheering and UNLV fans all around us gave him high-fives every time BYU did something good.

He kept yelling "go, go" like the whole game.

It was hard to get pictures of his face because he was leaning into it the whole time, much like this.

Sitting on Daddy's lap at the beginning of the game. He was already yelling and cheering at this point, but he wasn't jumping around quite yet. He loved every minute of it!

Mowing the Lawn

We have finally put the finishing touches on our backyard and all that we needed was a push lawnmower (it isn't a very big yard), so we got a used one and set to work on trimming the very tall grass.
Lucas was very excited about it.

He helped push a lot

Sometimes daddy was faster and would steal the mower and run away with a little guy chasing him.

Put your shoulder to the mower

Seriously hard at work.

I haven't taken official "after" pictures yet, but here are some before pictures to give you reference from the backgrounds of the above pictures as to how much work we did back there.
This was while Jared was putting in the concrete edging and after we ripped out all of the stupid plants that were in there. I have worse before pictures and I will take better after pictures soon.

Worms

This post is kinda gross and kinda funny. The dirt here in Vegas is terrible, so we put in a raised garden bed and bought some dirt, but it still needed some organic help in the form of worms. So we mail ordered some worms. When they first got here, we put them in a bucket to help them recover from the mail. These are pics of Lucas looking at a big bucket of several hundred worms.

Brand New

We have been working on several projects around the house (let's face it, who doesn't have a million projects) so I am going to post some pics of one of our most recent achievements. Sometime I will post more, like the backyard (which is SO close to being finished) and our bedroom (we just need to refinish the our new used furniture). I have before pictures, I just haven't finished taking the after pictures yet.

The ceiling fan from our bedroom:
It works great and we didn't want to just throw it out, but it is boring and therefore kinda ugly in our room.

So, we took it down and decided to see if we could disassemble it and paint it. Jared spray painted all of the metal pieces one at a time and I very carefully painted the blades and bought new light shades for it. We took it down on Sunday and had it all dry and reassembled and put back up by Monday night.
Here is the finished (still working) ceiling fan:

We think it's a big improvement!