Hello Kale

As everyone knows, Jesse and I had another son back in July named Kale Michael. I have been majorly slacking on getting updated pictures out here, so I am going to put some out now that date back to when Kale was born. Kale is a great baby so far, and Hudson's a great big brother. Kale is very laid back and allows us to feed him and then set him in his swing or under his play gym and he entertains himself for a while. This lets us gets some things done, and play with Hudson. Hudson hasn't had too many issues with being a big brother. Every now and then he'll tell us to put Kale down and get him somthing. But he's never said that he doesn't like his baby brother, or anything like that. He's actually pretty proud and very protective of him. He'll tell people that his baby brother's name is Kale and he says "ah-goo". And for some reason he thinks he gets to grant or deny permission for people to look at, talk to, or hold Kale, which can get very interesting!

For the Birds

Sorry it has been so long since I updated this! Things have been hectic lately between the upcoming arrival of baby #2, and me switching jobs, the last few months have flown by! But everything is going well, and Hudson's baby brother is expected to arrive in just 3 short months. We are nowhere near ready! Hudson is, though. He's been really good with the whole thing, except for me not being able to hold him. He'll ask me to hold him, and then tell me that he's little (since I've told him in the past that he's a big boy and I can't hold him). As far as the baby, he's excited to see his baby brother, and even talks about his own baby brother in his belly. When he's hungy, his baby wants something to eat, and when he's full, he tells us his baby is full. The other day the baby was kicking, and I asked Hudson if he wanted to feel him. He put his hand on my stomach and felt it, and then asked me if his brother was kicking because he wants out! You never know what he's going to say! But he'll kiss my belly and put his hand on my stomach to give his brother high fives, and stuff like that. It'll just be interesting what his reaction is when his baby brother is here and disrupts his routine!

Below are some pictures of Jesse and Hudson putting together the birdhouse from a kit that Nick's girlfriend got for Hudson. She works at Home Depot, and they must have monthly hands-on activities for kids and parents. Hudson really enjoyed putting it together, and hanging it up. He was pretty proud of the end result!

We went to our first Christmas party over the weekend and it was Hudson's first meeting with Santa since last Christmas when he refused to even look at him. This year, he was reluctant to get too near him, but he knew that Santa had a present to give him, so he sat on his lap, but wouldn't look at him! After I picked him up off of Santa's lap, we did convince him to give Santa knuckles! But if you ask him, he'll tell you that he sat on Santa's lap like a big boy!

He's starting to get into some of the animated movies, so we watch a lot of The Jungle Book and he also likes the donkey movie (Shrek). He knows the Junge Book well enough to sing along to the songs, and he actually talks along with Baloo the Bear in some parts. He's been singing Jingle Bells lately, and it's pretty comical. His version goes Jingle bells, jingle all the way, oh what fun it is to ride HEY! So he's missing some parts, but that's ok! He's still as active as ever, running around the house playing "soccer ball" and throwing any type of ball he can find laying around. It's a good thing we have a basement, or I don't know what we'd do with him this winter. We went to corydon to visit Jesse's sisters last weekend and Jen took some pictures for us, and we laughed afterwards about how he's in motion in every shot. He's never sitting still.

Below are some pictures of him with santa, making cookies at mom and dad's and one of him with Uncle johnny's football helmet on. He wore that around Jonathan's house the night before Thanksgiving when we were over there visiting.

Hudson is really in a fun stage where you can carry on a conversation with him and you never know what he's going to say. Sometimes, you can almost see the wheels turning in his head as he's trying to put words together to make a sentence and get his point across. It's fun when it works, but when he knows what he's saying and nobody else can decipher it, he gets pretty frustrated! He's quite the little tattle tale lately, and doesn't forget anything! The days of promising him something later to divert his attention right now, and then forgetting about it are long gone! He points out the park by the Riverwalk that Grandpa takes him to on Sat mornings while I go shopping with Mom and Grandma, and talks about the bridge that they run across and throw rocks off of. He knows the way to certain places, so when we turn off of the highway to go to Great Grandma's house, he knows where we're going, and that she has a piggy light he can turn on and candy for him to eat! He was a hamburger for Halloween, so any time anyone mentions something about Halloween, he'll tell them he was a hamburger and mommy was ketchup. I took him to a Halloween carnival set up for kids at a local church, and he had a blast.(pics below) Everyone was getting a kick out of watching him run from one thing to the next.

Potty training is still hit or miss. He goes just about every time we sit him on the potty, but he rarely tells us when he has to go. I'm sure that will come with time, but until then we just have to make sure we ask him frequently. He does prefer his pull ups, or big boy pants (bo bo fants in Hudson speak) over diapers, which is good, but that doesn't stop him from going in them. Oh well, I guess he'll get it when he's ready and until then there isn't anything anyone can do to make him do something he doesn't want to!

Hudson is now firmly entrenched in the Terrible Twos in both age and attitude. He's as stubborn as they come, and not afraid to let anyone know when he isn't happy. He can yell, scream, slap, kick and throw tantrums with the best of them, but he's usually a ball of energy and a lot of fun to play with. We've started the potty training now and he's really good with it when he wants to be. It's just convincing him that it's worth taking time out of playing to go on the potty that we're having trouble with. He'd much rather just go in his diaper and keep right on playing. I picked him up from the sitter one day last week and asked her how he did with potty training that day. She just started laughing and explained that he must have overheard us talking about potty training and every time he had to go, he ran up to her and told her he wanted to go on the potty train! I told her whatever worked was fine with me.

We took him to Huber Farm over the weekend to play around and get a pumpkin, but we were so disappointed with it, we only stayed about 45 mins. It's $6 per person to get in, and then pretty much anything else he wanted to do was extra. But we did get some good pictures of him while we were there.

We took our first family "vacation" over the weekend and ventured out to St Louis. We left last Fri when Jesse got off work and went straight to a Cabellas store that luckily ended up being attached to a mall! I was picturing chasing Hudson around the store while Jesse looked at everything, but it worked out. The mall had a great childrens area in the center of it so Hudson and I played on that for a while, and then a train pulled up that offered rides around the mall. Of course, Hudson made a mad dash for the train and was trying to scale the fence to get to it when I convinced him to go around the fence like all of the other children were! So we went on a train ride that turned out to be a neat way to see what stores were located in the mall. After the mall, we went downtown and met up with some of our friends who were in St Louis that weekend as well and we had dinner and then went back to the hotel to let the kids play.

Sat we went to Grant's Farm, which is just a little outside St Louis and that turned out to be fun for the adults and kids. Hudson got to ride a carousel, feed baby goats, and also ride on the tram, which he thought was a choo choo train. The goats were probably the funniest thing, though, because they knew that the people entering their area had milk in bottles for them, so they attacked! Hudson didn't like that, so we brought him back out and he fed them through a fence, and that was much more his speed! After Grant's Farm and naptime we went to a St Louis Cardinals game. We got first pitch tickets, so we only paid $5.50 per ticket, which ended up being a good thing. Hudson was more interested in standing at the back of the stadium and watching their metro trains come in and out than he was in watching the game, but we expected that. We visited the gift shop and found a mini wooden bat for him that he loved. He ended up finding a couple of older boys who had a ball and they were nice enough to picth the ball to him and let him pitch it to them a couple of times. He really thought that was neat! Below are some pictures from the weekend.

The summer is almost over already and Hudson will be 2 years old in less than a month. Isn't that crazy?! He's such a big boy now, he does or says something new every day it seems like. His big thing is anything that has to do with sports, especially baseball and basektball. He has a little ball and glove and a bat that he gets out at least once every day and we all take turns with them. He'll throw it to you, but only if you have your entire hand in the smallest glove ever made, and if you catch it, he smiles real big and says "Good Catch". Then he'll announce that it's his turn and he'll grab the bat or the glove and then we have to throw it to him. Right now, he's much better at throwing or catching the ball, but I guess that's allowed. Over the weekend we went to the Strassenfest, where Hudson got to ride some rides, play a few games, and even go on a choo choo train ride. He loved every minute of it, and there are pictures below of the rides and the train ride. The big grin is from when he finally heard the train whistle and we started to move.