Our first Christmas at home

Before Madelyn was born, we decided to give each of the new grandparents one Christmas with their first grandchild and then we would start celebrating Christmas at our house. It is time that we start our own traditions and don't put so much pressure on ourselves to go somewhere. Traveling is such a pain with little children! So, Madelyn's first Christmas was spent with the Cobb grandparents and her second Christmas was spent with the Rhodes grandparents and they were both great! However, this year was our first year that we spent at home. It was a good first year, but we have some room for improvement! Ben came down with the flu on Christmas Eve and after getting up and opening presents with the rest of us, he spent most of Christmas day in bed - poor Ben! So we postponed Christmas dinner for the day after Christmas so that Ben could enjoy it with us. While Ben was in bed, Madelyn, Greyson and I had blast playing with toys and cooing. It was too bad that Ben had to miss out on it. Greyson didn't get much because he has pretty much everything he needs for the next year plus some. He did get a few new toys, a couple of outfits, a embroidered blanket with his birth stats, a quilt and an Easter outfit. The Easter outfit is so cute! It has a little buttonup shirt with a sweater vest and tie. He will be the handsome-est baby in the nursery! Madelyn really made out this year though! She got a Magna-doodle (Ben's favorite gift of hers!), a baby stroller and a new baby, some block toys, playdough, puppets, a little rocking chair (it was Ben's when he was little), a huge rolling backpack FULL of dress-up outfits (see pics), a quilt, and a sled. I know there was more but I just can't remember it all right now. She also got money from Ga-Ga to buy a tricycle in the spring. So many presents! Now, we have so many thank-yous to send! They will get out this year, I promise. They may not be very timely, but they will be sent!

Even though dinner was a day late, it ended up being awesome! I think that we made the best turkey that I've ever had! Moist and juicy! We didn't want to overdo dinner; we kept it pretty easy - turkey, mashed potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce, and sliced pineapple. It was wonderful! We made a 12 lb. turkey; there was so much left that I took half our leftovers to a neighbor after we were done!

We also went sledding with Madelyn the day after Christmas. We have a really nice sledding hill about a half mile from our house, so we bundled ourselves and the kids up and walked down there. Madelyn had a blast! We thought that she wasn't going to want to go down by herself at first so I was all ready to take the first trip with her and she refused to get on the sled! She was saying, "Madelyn's sled!! Get off, Mommy!" So I sent her down herself and she laughed out loud all the way down! It was so fun! She took about six trips down before she lost her grip on the sled once and it scared her, so she took a break and then asked to go down again. She took another few trips and didn't want to stop to head home. Just another thing to prove how much of a daredevil we have on our hands!

I got a wonderful Christmas gift this year - a lot of time with Ben! He is off from school and because he was sick, he decided to lay low this week, so he stayed home from work almost all week! It was so nice to have time to spend with him talking and laughing. It seems that lately we spend so much of our attention on the kids or just trying to be quiet after they go to bed. But this week I was able to have a little fun with just my husband and it was wonderful!

The Rhodes Thanksgiving - continued

Here are some more pictures from our Thanksgiving trip. ENJOY!


It was really fun to see Stacy. She is one of Ben's great friends from college. They met at the Baptist Student Union there. Here she is with Ben holding Greyson. She and I both owned up to being in crabby moods as soon as we arrived at Ray's PeGe to visit over ice cream. Hers was due to having to be on-call for the holiday weekend and mine was due to the last 3 (almost sleepless) nights. But ice cream must make everything better because as we ate it, we actually laughed some and had a good visit. Ben's eyes are a little wierd in this picture because the dork blinked as I was taking the picture. Oh well....

This is one of my favorite pictures of the trip. The women in the picture is Ben's sister, Christina. She and Madelyn get along great. Christina loves to play with her. Madelyn is trying to tickle her with a long piece of grass in this picture (and I guess she is succeeding). The background is Ben's Grandfather Thurlkill's land (on his mother's side). They call this "the back 40" because it is a 40-acre piece of land that is connect to the rest of Grandfather Thurlkill's land by a skinny dirty road. Ben seems to loves this land! So the family decided to walk it while we were there. Behind Christina and Madelyn you can see the pond that we stopped at.
Here is a picture of Ben and I (and a bundled up Greyson). This is also out on "the back 40". Nothing more...
A picture of four generations on the Thurlkill side - Grandfather Thurlkill, Momma Susan, Ben, and our kids. The picture was taken in Grandfather Thurlkill's gas station/store. We got there in time to have breakfast and he fed us some the best brekfast biscuits I have ever had!
And to round out our trip, we stayed at Christina and Brandon's house in Dallas before flying out of Dallas the next day. Also meet their dog Cooper. Madelyn and Cooper were good long-distance friends. Madelyn loved Cooper as long as he couldn't get to her, which made Cooper sad because he wanted to play with her! It was great spending time with Christina and Brandon and seeing their house for the first time. They house is beautiful! Also, staying at their house was a great relief after 4 relatively sleepless nights. We had a sleeping setup at their house that separated us into two bedrooms that worked really well, therefore we got a pretty good night's sleep - finally!

Well, that's all for now, folks!

The Rhodes Thanksgiving

This Rhodes Family really had a wonderful Thanksgiving! It was an adventure though! Several months ago, Ben and I decided that we would take our family down to Louisiana to the extended Rhodes Family Thanksgiving. This is where Ben's Grandparents Rhodes and their children's families get together every year to celebrate Thanksgiving. We aren't able to make it every year, but we try to make it every other year. This year was the year we were supposed to go and we figured that traveling with a 2-yr-old and a newborn would be do-able, so we bought tickets way back in the summer time. Well, we weren't too far off. The kids really did great during the trip and it was REALLY great to let the extended family see them (and meet Greyson for the first time). There were some sleepless nights due to some less than ideal sleeping arrangements, but all in all it was a good trip. Of course, there was Sonic which always makes a trip to the south worth it! Here are some pictures of our trip:

Here's a pic of Madelyn by the fountain in the middle of the quad at Louisiana Tech (Ben's and my alma mater). We visited Ruston and Tech when we arrived to the area. It was a perfect day! Warm and beautiful!

Here is the "cool kids" table at the Rhodes Thanksgiving. They have already accepted Madelyn to sit with them (haha). Here is Grandmother Rhodes holding Greyson. I know that he looks slightly concerned but Grandmother really was very good with him. He loosened up and did a lot of cooing and smiling for her too.(I have more pictures but can't seem to get them to show up on this post coreectly so I will put up another post with them.)

Now, since we were celebrating Thanksgiving, I guess I will tell you what I'm thankful for. There is SO MUCH to be thankful for right now! Too many to name everything but I want to name a few specifically -

• My family! With our new addition this year, Ben and I have a ton to be thankful for.... starting with a healthy baby boy who is a dream second child and a little girl who keeps us on our toes!
• Extended family. We have had an awesome time over the last six weeks seeing and spending time with our extended families. It has just been awesome to show off our children!
• Friends. Ben and I have been so blessed with wonderful friends. They really are our family when "real" family can't be there.

The Rhodes Thanksgiving Adventure

I just found this post in my drafts. I think I decided not to post it because it was so negative and posted a more positive post instead (the next one), but I'm going to post it now anyway. These are definitely strong memories of Thanksgiving 2006. Keep in mind that Madelyn was 2 and Greyson was 3 WEEKS.

Thanksgiving of 2006 will be an occasion that I will remember for a long while... for good and not-so-good reasons! Let's name a good one first - the kids were awesome!! I couldn't believe how well-behaved Madelyn was and how great Greyson did! I was relieved because you always want to show off the best of your kids, especially when it is family. I only really have two not-so-good things that I will remember - 1) the Dallas airport (enough said?) and 2) all four of us sleeping in the same room for 4 nights in a row.

So we started off our trip by flying non-stop to Dallas on Tuesday morning. I can't complain about the flight at all. We got checked-in fine, through security fine (with two kids, stroller, carseat, backpack, diaper bag, camera bag, plus having to remove all our shoes and empty our pockets - it was probably a trip to watch!), and then to the gate fine. We had a great flight with well-behaved children too. Everything was going great and I was so thrilled to be done with what I thought would be the worst part, then Ben and I decided to split up, Ben to get the bags and me to get the rental van. I assumed that we would only be split up about 30 minutes.... Only one problem with this scenario - I didn't take note of what gate we flew into to. This may not be an important piece of information at most airports but it IS at DFW. You see, each gate has its own baggage claim area and door to leave the terminal. So, now I was trying to backtrack and find Ben (and a hungry Greyson) and had no idea of where he was.... Not only that but the rental car hub was outside the airport and I couldn't find my way back into the airport either. I drove up and down the service road a couple of times trying to decipher the signs to figure out how to get in the airport. This is when I broke down and starting crying. I had Madelyn in the van with me and she was saying from the backseat, "Okay, Mommy" like when I tell her to say "It's okay, Greyson" when he is crying. It was sweet but I felt like such a doofus with my two-year-old trying to console me, the mom. I've finally found my way into the airport and it is just at this moment that I realize that I have no idea where Ben is waiting for me (and Ben, the anti-cellphone dweeb, can't help me). I stop to talk to someone at a gate and he takes pity on me (since I'm sobbing at this point) and tells me that NWA flies into terminal E, so I go to terminal E hoping that I will see Ben on the curb... So after lots of searching and driving in circles, almost two hours after Madelyn and I left my husband and hungry baby to get the van, I find them! Looking back, I wonder how much of my break down was frustration and how much I should attribute to the post-partum hormones... anyway, it was good to get out of that God-forsaken airport!

Note to Self - if you are picking someone up from DFW, take note of what gate they are flying into.

Maybe I should go ahead and write about the other not-so-good thing to get it out of my system.... The four of us, Ben, Madelyn, Greyson, and myself, slept in the same room for four nights of our "vacation". I would not suggest this for a family that has a 3 week old baby. I don't think any of us slept well any of those nights. I think Madelyn slept the best and Greyson probably slept okay, but Ben and I had a really hard time sleeping while Greyson was snorting and grunting. I think he started battling some awful gas pains on the second night and was grunting more often and more loudly! I actually would have slept a whole lot better if I hadn't been afraid that Greyson was going to wake up Madelyn! So, by the fourth morning, I was more than ready to move to different sleeping quarters.

Note to Self - make sure to have two rooms for your family to sleep in when traveling with a newborn.

Now I really should spend some blog space on things that I am thankful for from the trip (it was thanksgiving after all). I will list them in chronological order for you:

• Spending time with Ben's sister and her husband at their home. And I'm also thankful that they have two rooms that we were able to use while we slept there!
• Children that traveled well on planes and in cars
• Sonic (Man, do we love Sonic!)
• Spending time with the Murphy family in Ruston, LA

Okay, now that I have that out of my system.... we then left the airport to go to Ben's sister's house. Of course, we also had to stop by a Sonic on the way for food and beverages. We love Sonic! Once we got the house, we settled in and spent some time with Ben's sister and her husband, Christina and Brandon. We spent the night there and Madelyn got to sleep in her own room that night. Looking back, that was our last good night of sleep for several nights. The next morning, the four of us headed out to Ruston, LA - a surprisingly wonderful 3 hour drive. Once we got there, we visited Sarah's grave and Tech's campus and ate dinner with a couple of my friends from college that still live in the area. It was wonderful! After dinner, we left the Murphy's and headed up to Lake Darbonne State Park. That is where we stayed for the next 4 (long) nights.... more to come...

Just for you!

Just thought I'd let everyone know that I have put more Greyson pictures out on Webshots - http://community.webshots.com/user/moncherie76. Also, Ben has put his thoughts (and a couple pictures) out on his blog. Enjoy!

Pictures of Greyson

Well, here are a few pictures for you to enjoy! This first one is of Greyson, of course. He is such a cutie-patootie! He has been such a good baby. He is doing everything that we can expect for him at this point - napping, learning to nurse, and entertaining us some when he is wide awake. If you can believe it, he is nursing well enough that he drew my milk in within 48 hours! It was amazing and the nurses thought I was crazy when I said it. But sure enough, my milk was in and he was getting a full belly of it. I think Greyson might end up being ultra efficient like his daddy.... This second picture is of Madelyn holding Greyson and giving him a kiss (you can go ahead and say it - how cute!). She has really been so good with him. She has welcomed him home with open arms. I have been so impressed. Her behavior is a little different than it was before but not in such a way that is going to be problematic - I think. Disclaimer: The pacifier was my savior! He wanted to be nursing all the time and my poor breasts couldn't take it. I do not think that day old babies in general should be given a pacifier...
Here's the background on this picture: I had been waiting for Greyson to come for days and had come to the conclusion that I was going to have to be induced. My induction was scheduled for Nov 1st and Madelyn was having a costume party at school on Halloween. So I made a costume for myself to go to the costume party in - one of Ben's t-shirts with a pumpkin drawn over my round belly (so maybe it was really a costume for Greyson?!). BUT...as you have all figured out by now, Greyson decided to arrive on Halloween morning before the costume party. So, Greyson was able to wear his costume all by himself!
Although I don't like this picture much, it is the first and only family picture we have. Enjoy!