My husband's son

Today I decided to feed Riley cereal the real way. You know, poured in a bowl, drenched in whole milk and transferred via spoon into a toothless mouth. As far as I know this was a first for him. He has had dry cereal often. It is super easy for him to pick up, and makes for an easy snack. But dry cereal is just not the same as milk drenched cereal, and Riley needed to know this fact.

Okay, so mommy was thrifty and bought generic Rice Pockets, but I have a hard time calling them anything other than the name brand. I found that he enjoyed the cereal the best when it was soggy. He liked to slurp milk out of the pockets. Mr. Riley is usually only happy if he has something on his tray to play with or feed himself with. So I put some damp Chex in front of him, as well as spoon fed him a couple. He enjoyed his breakfast as usual.

My grandma would be upset to find that he will often pause a meal and refuse to eat until he is given a drink of water or milk. He really just needs to wash his food down. She used to feel that beverages did not go with mealtimes because she felt kids would get full on milk or juice and not eat their meals. Sorry Grandma! I did not encourage this behavior, he started doing it on his own.

At one point I got up to clean the sink out for bath time and Riley had grabbed a rice pocket and was "vrooming" with it along his tray. It is absolutely adorable to see him play cars, knowing that his daddy loves cars too. Anything can be made into a car, even a soggy, impostor Chex.

Snowpacalypse

I took a few pictures of the recent snow storm that swept through this state, and just thought I'd share them. These are just a few quick shots from outside my front door. I thankfully didn't have to drive out on the ice, it just so happened that I had the week off of work. (Well I was scheduled to work on Saturday, but I had food poisoning all day Friday and am still recovering from that. I haven't had my stomach hurt that bad for that long in a very, very long time, if ever!? It was not worth missing work, that's for sure!) Anyway, back to the weather ...

My power went off Thursday morning just after I laid Riley down for his nap. I called my mom to check if she had power, but she also was without. She had said that my brother was offering to drive her to lunch, and I asked to join in on that deal. Long story short we ended up going to Red Robin for lunch. It was a nice meal, with good conversation (though my mom accidentally spilled her diet coke all over the table and onto my jeans) . :) As we were wrapping up, the lights went out. Pretty much everyone groaned or said "oh man!" It was kind of funny. We didn't care, because we had finished up, but got Red Robin Bucks out of it. In all the commotion I forgot to ask for a balloon for Riley. I promised him one too. Later, I know he won't let me forget that easily. ;)

Well, to bed I go. It is so comforting to hear baby snores coming from the video monitor. He is such a noisy sleeper! :)

Riley and the Red Balloon

This morning Riley came running up to me with a red Red Robin balloon. He had the goofiest grin on his face, he was so very proud of himself. I worked for 12 hours yesterday and my mom watched him. My youngest two nephews got out of school early, so the 4 of them went out to lunch. My little man got a balloon out of the deal. :) He didn't get a chance to show me it until this morning, and by the look on his face he was very happy to share his joy with me. :) He spent the majority of this morning playing with his balloon, until finally the string came untied and the balloon deflated. He just sort of sat there expressionless. He didn't cry or fuss. And that is the story of Riley and the red balloon.  :)