Facetime With Oliver

These photos were taken during my "Facetime with Oliver" last night. Try to ignore my crazy faces in the corner. To grab a toddler's attention on a phone you have to be pretty animated. I'm fairly animated anyways. Also... by the end of the day my hair is pretty much just a fuzzy bun. I'm not trying to impress.

I Facetime with Cody and Oliver - mostly Oliver - a couple of times a week. They live about 100 miles South of us and I'm just not as portable as I'd like to be so I end up seeing Oliver about once a month. Facetiming with him when he was a tiny baby was like... ummmm... I think we did better with pictures. Facetiming now that he's old enough to realize that it's Nana on the phone and now that he realizes it's an interactive process is loads of fun! Usually Cody will call me after they've had dinner while Marquee is having a bath and recuperating from taking care of our crazy monkey boy all day.

Oliver is ALL boy. B-O-WHY???? Boy. He climbs all over the place. He's a daredevil. He is hilarious and adorable and full of life. He also doesn't sleep much. He doesn't have a slow speed. He is busy all the time.

Oliver is now 13 months old. He loves cars, balls, climbing on things, Scooby Doo, outside and water. If you make faces at him he will make the same face back to you. He can stick out his tongue, wiggle his eyebrows, blow raspberries, make about a dozen different motor sounds... he's just fun to play with, even over the phone.

He sort of understands the phone situation but not fully. The other day I was eating an Italian Ice and I said, "do you want a bite?" and held the spoon up to the phone and he opened his mouth. I have the same activity table that he has. Yesterday while he was playing with it I pressed buttons on mine and he was really confused. He's really good at waving goodbye and blowing kisses when it's time to hang up the phone. He's honestly just the most adorable little boy ever... and I'm an expert on little boys!

Because I'm used to little boys... I don't freak out when they climb on things. Cody famously pushed my mom's ladder back rocking chair up against her refrigerator and climbed up... all the way to the top... and was pulling himself up on top... at 8 months old. Whenever someone at the ballfield would say, "whose kid is that way up in that tree?" I knew it was Austin. Ryan was never as much of a daredevil because he was born "grown". He found trouble in other ways. (We'll save that for another blog post... I could write volumes on Ryan. He turns 30 in November... maybe then... )

< --- in this picture Oliver is running across his couch. RUNNING. He will reach for his dad's hand when he crosses the ottoman from the couch to the loveseat. He still hasn't quite figured out how to climb up on the chair - his favorite spot because it's beside the window and he LOVES to look outside.

He's pretty good at getting down off of the furniture. He thinks that pillows are magical protection from injury and will sometimes jump with a pillow. It reminds me of when we were growing up and the two Jeffs would do Evil Knievel tricks off of our concrete slab porch. It was about three feet off the ground. They would build ramps and ride up one end and jump off the other. It's a wonder we didn't have more backyard injuries.

There was the one time Jim slid down the hill behind our house because someone yelled that "the old man" who lived in the house behind our property was coming after him. He snagged his knee on something and ended up with a lot of stitches.

Our neighborhood was your typical 1970's neighborhood... ranch houses, fenced yards, dads worked and moms stayed home, for the most part. We had a Jeff on one side of us, in the house where Cody and Marquee now live. There was John on the other side and just past his house was another Jeff. Jeff, Jeff, John and Jimmy. I played with Shannon and Karen (John and one of the Jeff's sisters) and Kim, who lived a few houses down and across the street. There were a ton of other kids in the neighborhood. I'm friends on Facebook with a lot of them. But mainly, especially during elementary school it was Jeff, Jeff, John, Shannon, Karen and Kim. The house we lived in had belonged to John and Karen's grandmother. Now my grandson lives in the house beside the house where I grew up. And Dawn who is my parents "favorite daughter" (really just a much loved neighbor) lives across the street from Cody. Her daughter lives in the house next door... where I grew up! Also... my sister-in-law Angie, being the smart woman that she is, bought the house across the street from my parents when her and Jim started getting serious. Once she was in the neighborhood it was a cinch roping her into the family! (she has since sold the house).

Oliver living in our old neighborhood... I guess he can't help but carry on the Evil Knievel traditions.

The other day I posted a picture of him standing on one of his ride on toys... here's him standing on his activity table. You can only barely see the table but...

Why is he clapping? Because Nana said, "yay, Oliver!" He's got amazing core strength. And you know that activity table hurt his feet... at one point he got frustrated with it but he's just a tough little boy.

I've bet Cody that this one ends up with stitches or a broken bone before his second birthday. Not wishing it on him, of course, just knowing... from being a boy mommy...

 

Notice the one picture where Little Kitty is in the upper right instead of me? He got bent out of shape because I had moved from my usual nest to another chair in my living room. He climbed all across the living room to be able to get behind me so I put the camera on him for a minute. Oliver checked him out for a hot second but he's not as impressed with cats as he is dogs. And pretty much everything else.

My parents came through my living room while I was on the phone. You can tell when I'm talking to Ollie because I answer the phone screaming, "OLIVER!!!!" Which makes him giggle. I really love that kid! He seriously makes my day. I've always said that Austin is my youngest and Cody is my baby. Cody has always just been the sweet one. Oliver is like his dad... tough... but just so sweet.

Cody's birthday is on Tuesday. They're coming up next weekend and *hopefully* I can get the two babies in one place for the first time since April. Marquee's family was celebrating with Cody today. He wanted us to drive down but it's just too much car time for me. I promised him a SECOND BIRTHDAY!!!! if he came up, complete with cake, balloons, clowns... whatever he wants. So I'm really looking forward to seeing him and celebrating his 26th birthday next weekend. And I can't wait to play with my buddy Oliver!

Hope you enjoyed "Facetime With Oliver"... I know I talk about my grandchildren in every single blog post but they really are the loves of my life, my reason for getting out of bed in the morning and truly, my reward for sticking it out this long! Love and hugs, y'all!

Daddy / Daughter Day Part Due (two)

I'm not gonna lie... going full speed with a toddler wears me out! Austin is with her every second except for, you know, calls of nature and such but I have never been a sidelines type Nana. If one of my babies is around or on the phone or in my presence in any way, I'm giving them 110% of me, even when there are other caregivers around. Time is so precious. I don't want to waste a bit of it!

That being said... my energy level dropped a bit in the afternoon so I ended up with more pictures from the morning than from the afternoon. Of course, some of that is because we're actively doing things and not looking at life through a camera or phone. Still... I did get some cute photos!

I have a LOT of pictures of Cosette holding my iPhone and all of those came within about a ten minute period. Her dad had a phone call and she's just a little mimic. The whole time he was talking she walked around with my phone doing exactly what he was doing. She even carried the phone outside with her. I have a good Otter Box so I don't worry too much about her damaging the phone. Plus... she's a girl and she's got a pretty delicate touch most of the time.

 

 

 

 

 

She did manage to drag my digital camera across the concrete on my back porch yesterday and scratched the viewing screen on the back just a tiny bit. I paid around $100 for that little camera six years ago and it's survived lots of "enthusiastic" little photographers over the years. It's going to have to be replaced soon anyways so I just let the babies have fun with it. She does get rather frustrated that she can't "swipe" to change the photo in the view finder like she does on the phone. They're just born understanding technology. It blows my mind!

Anyways... like I said... every moment is precious.

We played quite a bit on my back porch yesterday which is nice and shady in the afternoon. We set up the foam blocks/puzzle/mat for her to have a soft place to sit. She prefers the cats' mats which are sort of yucky to me. She kept her little Frozen fuzzy house shoes on all day which made her look like such a little teenager. My porch is concrete so it is a little rough on bare feet. Her mom had dressed her in cute little capri leggings that Austin pulled off at naptime to let her be comfy. Somehow she went the rest of the afternoon without her leggings. Hope you're not offended of photos of a little girl in her diaper. I think it's ok... We totally forgot to put her leggings back in her bag to go home. Oops.

She also loves Amazon packaging... the big box makes a great fort. The big bubbles that keep things from shifting in the box... she loves when her dad pops those. If you see plastic around her... no worries... we're not letting her ingest it. She actually doesn't touch it other than giving it to her dad to make the loud noise for her. She is not afraid of loud noises. She is usually supervised by at least two adults, sometimes three or four! We use the baby gate to block her access to my room, the cat room (where there's a litter box) and the bathroom. We don't have the stairs blocked off but we are never more than a foot away from her. She's also a bit skittish about falling so she will climb a step and then look to see if someone is going to help her. Just a little safety disclaimer there!

When Mawmaw and Pop woke up from their naps (LOL!) we went upstairs to their porch and let Cosy splash in the water a little bit. Oliver is a little fish. He loves water and you can pour it over his head, hold the hose on him... whatever... and he's in Heaven. Cosette is a bit delicate. She splashed in a little bowl and played with some cups but it was definitely not her favorite thing to do. She DOES love her books and the kitty cats and like I said, just being outside on the porch. I love that our weather stays mild around here most of the year and I think we'll get lots of use out of both my screened in porch and my parents new covered porch upstairs. The new porch is great. The old wood porch was rough so you couldn't have walked barefoot or let a baby just plop down on it to play. Now it's like a great big play pen!

After we played in the water we went back to my living room. Austin tried to get her to have a little mini-rest-time/not a nap because we had played SO hard all afternoon. She basically gave him an eye roll and jumped back down to play with all of her things. I think if I had cleaned up all the things while she was upstairs playing in the water she wouldn't have had the urge to PLAY. WITH. ALL. THE. THINGS!!!! She read a book with her dad for a hot second and then was up walking around reading her books and enjoying her toys but really, REALLY enjoying her books! We're thinking about taking her to story time at the library. They were doing it on Thursday mornings at the local library the last time we asked and I think she might have the temperament to sit and enjoy a group story.

 

We took her back to her mommy. She fell asleep on the ride but handled the transition beautifully again. She's a champ! My parents had picked up dinner from our local meat-and-three restaurant so I had dinner, facetimed with Ollie and then crashed hard!

And now it's Friday again! Hope you have a great weekend! Thanks for checking in! Love and hugs, y'all!