January Blahs

Our little crew is ready for spring. Being cooped up in the house all winter long is no fun. It has encouraged some new games for Nathan though: his latest interests include cruising on the furniture (not walking yet, thank goodness, his mom can barely keep up with his crawling!), rolling all the toilet paper off the roll, and clapping. He loves to play with pennies--I know, choking hazard, I don't let him do it unsupervised--and he's getting really good at putting the pennies in his "piggy-piggy." Hopefully he'll be better at saving money than his mom & dad are!
This month has largely been dedicated to getting Nathan to eat new foods. He's drinking (not really though) cow's milk now, and got over his phase of only wanting to eat crackers and yogurt. His repertoire has expanded now to cheese of all kinds, cereal, Nutrigrain bars, waffles, bacon, taco soup (loves it!), chicken nuggets, turkey dogs, fruit (kiwi is a favorite), and all things chocolate. Nathan proudly drinks through a straw now. Hopefully his weight will catch up with his height by his next doctor appointment.
One of my favorite things Nathan is doing right now is giving "loves." Instead of giving hugs when we ask for loves like he used to do, when asked Nate now smiles and tilts his head to the side, tucking in his chin. This is his dad's fault--Nathan is a great copy-cat, and every time daddy asked for loves, daddy did this action, so Nathan followed suit. It's crazy how quickly he learns.
Another cute story involving Nathan and his daddy is one I like to call, "Oh, dang it!" Jake was emptying our paper shredder one day and spilled some paper on the floor. He said, "Oh, dang it!" and Nathan laughed & laughed. So we said "Oh, dang it!" all day, and laughed a lot. That night in the tub, Nathan dropped his rubber duck and very slowly, concentrating on each syllable and sound, declared, "O-daaannn-gg-iiii-t!" Awesome. Moral of the story is, we have learned early to watch what we say around our little parrot.
In Jake's and my world, we decided to wait to start building a house in Dallas until we have more of a down payment saved so things won't be too tight when we get to Texas. We were both bummed by this decision (who wants to rent when they could own?), but we'll get a better interest rate if we wait until Jake is actually working, and we'll be able to make sure our future house is in the area of town that will best meet our family's needs. Heavenly Father works in amazing ways (although lack of funds is not my favorite way of His working things out for me), so I can't wait to see what He has in store for us!