Darr Family Blog

After the rodeo fun on Monday, I thought we were going to have a relatively quiet week. It wasn’t quite so. It was fun, but it was busy!

Tuesday we had a play date with Joseph’s favorite little friend in the world, Kysen. Kysen’s mom is my visiting teaching companion, so we’re together a couple times a month at least, but it was fun to get to go to her house and chat while the boys played.

Wednesday we had yet another play date. One of my friends from high school recently moved to San Antonio, so I invited her and her girls over to play. After they played for a bit, we went to Chick-fil-A for lunch. Joseph loved playing in their play area.

Thursday was music playtime, which Joseph always loves.

Friday was another Chick-fil-A day. Our ward was split last week (we were just too big) and some of the ward boundaries were changed, so Friday was a chance to get to see people we knew we might not get to see as often anymore. The moms lunched and the kids played to their hearts’ content.

Because the week was so full of activity, I decided to make yesterday a completely lazy day. We went grocery shopping in the morning and then came home and spent the rest of the day relaxing around the house. This was good, because late last night Joseph randomly threw up. Everywhere. We got him cleaned up and I comforted him while Paul was on clean-up duty. He cleaned up bedding, stuffed animals, the crib liner, the walls…everything. Joseph went back to bed a little while later, but it was a late night for Paul and me (I tried to go back to sleep in case Joseph woke up again, but with my mommy ear tuned in to see if he was going to throw up again, I didn’t fall asleep until well after midnight, and Paul was cleaning everything as well as doing a load of pukey laundry). Joseph didn’t (and still doesn’t) have a fever, and didn’t throw up again (yay!), and was back to his normal, happy self (he was a little cranky last night and refused to eat dinner, but we didn’t attribute it to illness, we attributed it to him being a toddler), so we went to church as normal.

Today was an interesting day because it was the first day that our ward didn’t have a lot of families that we had before, and gained a lot of families that we didn’t have before. I felt kind of bad for the new people, because I know that they are leaving friends in their old ward, but I think they’ll soon find out that we’re a really friendly ward and they will start making new friends fast. We will, too. 🙂

Joseph’s appetite isn’t quite back to normal, but we think he was a bit traumatized about the whole throwing up thing, so he might be scared of eating a lot of food. Hopefully we’ll slowly get him back on his feed. 😉

Funny/Cute Stories for the Week:

One night this past week, Joseph came up to Paul and uttered a long string of gibberish. When Paul asked him what he said, he repeated the same string of gibberish. It was clear that he was trying to get SOMETHING across. When Paul listened carefully, he noticed that intermixed with the gibberish were the words, “wanna rough-house” so he asked Joseph if he wanted to rough-house. Joseph (looking very pleased), said, “Okay!” A rough-housing session then commenced. Let me say this: I am so grateful for my husband. I would be exhausted if I had to try to keep up with Joseph like that!

I was reading Where the Wild Things Are to Joseph the other night and he noticed the sticker on the front (it looks like a gold medal) that represents the fact that the book is a Caldecott Medal winner for best storybook. Joseph got really excited and said, “Gold doubloons!” One of his favorite shows is Jake and the Neverland Pirates. One of the things that Jake and his friends do is collect gold doubloons whenever they solve a problem. I guess it did look a little like a fancy coin. 🙂

Joseph is super friendly. Today when he was leaving nursery, he looked around and said, “Bye, friends!” I love that he loves nursery and that he thinks everyone is his friend. 🙂

He has REALLY been getting interactive with his shows as of late. If a character waves at the screen, he waves back. If they say goodbye, so does he (or often he’ll say, “See you later!”).

He’s starting to form slightly longer sentences. Today, he and Paul were waiting in the car for me to get done in Primary (we usually park right outside the Primary room). Paul said that as soon as Joseph saw me come out, he got super excited and said, “Mommy out the door!” He’s getting so big!

Earlier this week, as Joseph and I were headed somewhere, I was listening to my favorite country station. A slightly over-played song came on, so I decided to change it. No dice. As soon as I did, I heard a little questioning voice from the back saying, “Want that song?” I turned it back, glanced back at him, and saw him grinning at me. I guess he likes country. 🙂

This Week in Pictures:

Bonus Video:

Joseph has really been into planes and rockets as of late. He loves to count down and blast off…though he doesn’t always remember to count DOWN, hahaha:

Bonus Blog Post! Today we went to the rodeo/stock show that comes into town every year about this time. It was so much fun! Today was a Dollar Day, too, so it only cost a dollar for Paul and I to get in (Joseph was free) and some of the food was only a dollar (we had hot dogs for lunch). We saw a bunch of animals (pigs, cows, and some wild animals and reptiles that are native to Texas), watched the sheep dogs compete in herding, walked around a bunch of booths, visited the petting zoo (they even had a wallaby there!), and did some other fun stuff. We had a pretty good time. 🙂 Joseph walked everywhere with us, and did a pretty good job listening. We thought he’d crash once we got back to the car, but he surprised us both by not doing so…in fact, he didn’t nap at all today, which made for a very tired momma and daddy. Here are a few pictures that Paul took of our fun day:

See ya’ next year, rodeo!

This past week was pretty run-of-the-mill, which wasn’t exactly a bad thing. Sometimes it’s nice to have a break from the craziness. We hung around the house, did our normal stuff, and just had a good time with our little family. We did take Joseph to Barnes & Noble to play with the trains and we went to the zoo (the trip was cut a little short because a certain two-year-old was being a little…challenging. We decided that after two time-outs in 10 minutes, it was time to head home). Other than that, it was a pretty quiet week.

Cute/Funny Stories for the Week:

We Skyped with Jason, so that Joseph could see him while talking to him. He loved it! He showed Jason one of his fire trucks and showed off that he knows a lot of animal sounds (including a very spitty elephant). Now he’ll show me the fire truck and say, “Uncle Jason see fire truck!” He remembers that he showed Jason the fire truck. 🙂

Joseph will hold something up to his face, tell me to say cheese (which I will do), and then make a clicking sound. Then he’ll run over to me and ask if I want to see the “picture” (“Wanna see picture?”). I’ll tell him yes and then he’ll tell me, “Okay, hold on, wait a minute!” ( he then pretends to push buttons on whatever it is, kind of like I do with my phone). Can you tell what he hears after I take a picture of him?

Whenever we read to Joseph, he always needs to tell us more information about each page. It’s pretty entertaining!

The other day, when he was supposed to be taking a nap, I could hear Joseph barking…at first I was wondering why he was barking, but as I listened more carefully, I noticed that he was only barking when one of our neighbor’s dog barked. He then moved on to singing “Jingle Bells” at the top of his lungs. After two hours of this, I finally got him out of his bed…I guess you can say that his naps are hit-and-miss at this point. Some days he takes super-long naps and other days he takes no nap.

While we were out on a walk yesterday, Joseph would see people out in their yards (the weather was beautiful, so a lot of people were out enjoying it), he’d call out, “Good to see you!” and then as we walked past, he’d say, “Have a nice day!” The best part of our neighborhood is that people had no problem calling back to him. I love where we live!

This Week in Pictures:

And here’s a throw-back picture. Google+ recently put a few of Paul’s older pictures together and this was one of them. I think Joseph was just under a year old here (it’s either right before or right after we moved to Texas). 🙂