Just For You Baby Boy!
Today Brady turns 1 (this post was written last Friday, but wasn't posted until Sunday due to internet difficulties!)
No one at the 554 (who notices the passing of time) can believe it's been a whole year. Brian and I are both a bit sad knowing that this is our last little one. We so love the babies!
Everyone keeps asking what to get Bear for his birthday or for Christmas, but after having our 3rd little boy in 3 years, there really isn't anything out there that we don't have (and nothing more that we could possibly need!!) Aiden, Logan, Bray and I went in search of a birthday present and came up with nothin'! We aren't even having the big "you're 1" birthday bash this time around because we just hosted a big neighborhood Halloween party, Thanksgiving for the family and next up is Christmas at our house. From past experience, I know they don't even get the whole birthday party thing until they are 2 anyway. Do I feel bad? YES! So...I spent the better part of today digging through the past 12 months of Brady pictures for this special post. I'm planning to make this into a special birthday book for him in the next few days as well using Snapfish or Shutterfly.....or maybe just my own 2 hands if I can find the time.
And now....a year of Brady:
One year ago today, Brady was born at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago. We went in WAY early in the morning for my induction. I kept telling Logan that his brother would arrive "when there was snow on the ground". In the early hours of December 5th, 2007, the snow accumulated for the first time that year. Something about a low pressure area meant that there were quite a few women going into ACTUAL labor so we had to sit in the waiting area for a good hour before a room opened up for us. I think our original induction time was 4:30, but we didn't get into a room until around 6. Blah blah blah on the labor part. Brady was born at 11:15am weighing 7 pounds and measuring 20.25 inches.
Here he is sleeping in his little "baby tub" in our postpardum recovery room.
His brothers and other family members arrived and we had a birthday party! (notice the zero on the cupcakes!)
When I see this picture, I first look at how tiny he was and then how much stuff I had all over my arms!!
Daddy and his "mini me"
I can't believe he was ever that small!
I took today's picture in the same bean bag, in the same corner of the kitchen as this 1 month picture....wow have you come a long way baby!
2 months old....
3 months old enjoying some tummy time (notice Logan dashing by in the background)
3 months old....no more hair...hanging with daddy in the office / playroom
April 2008: 4 months old - more tummy time with his mirror toy.
May 2008: 5 months old. Here comes the lighter colored hair and the beginning of his love of leaning backwards.
In June, Brady and I traveled for the second time together to San Francisco for my sister's baby shower. Here, Brady dips his feet in the Pacific for the first time.
7 months: This is the first time Brady fed himself puffies! Logan and Aiden came over and started eating them too.
6 months: This is one of Brady's favorite sleeping spots: our friend Jeff's shoulder.
The obligatory Sears photo session: I waited until Bray was 7 months old and Aiden was 2...which made Logan 3 and 4 months.
8 months: This is from a series of pictures I took for the blog post "The Boys Have a Message" Brian and I traveled shortly after this picture to Mexico for a week....leaving Brady for the longest amount of time since he was born.
9 months: The first day of his "gym" class. Here, Bear crawls under one of the big toys.
10 months: "playing rock band" with daddy and his brothers.
November, 11 months: swinging for one last time before it got cold.
We had a party on Saturday for our little man. Pictures will be posted soon!!!"Not as good as real snow"
Lodey struck again last night. This time, he wanted to decorate our house a bit like the North Pole. Aiden had unrolled a bunch of toilet paper the other day so I didn't feel bad draping it all over the dining room (um....I mean that I wasn't mad that LODEY draped it all over the dining room...when he was SUPPOSED to be getting to bed early last night....but didn't.....um.....as far as I know that is). He left each boy a bag of "snow balls" as well.
Here is Lodey's note:
Inside one of the "snow ball" bags. 
Before breakfast, I encouraged the boys to have a little "snow ball fight" in the front foyer. In this corner...Aiden preps his ammo:
While Logan, posted at the front door, empties his supplies on the ground...ready to do battle.
These pictures are pretty bad since we get so much sunlight in the morning from the way-up-high-windows, but here is Aiden running in to strike!
Logan stages his counter-attack! 
Brady plays with his snow balls...and various other things...
P.S. Just in case you think I'm this creative...I'm not. The toilet paper came out of the elf book and the snow balls came from a mother's group holiday party last year. The hand print tree...I heard that they do something like that at "Color Me Mine" (paint your own pottery) :)
In other news:
How funny is that (see picture below)?! And yes....they already decided that Logan is the green one (obviously!), Aiden is the blue one and Brady is the giant snowman in the middle!)
Tomorrow Bear turns 1!!!The Return of Lodey the Elf
Last year, Memaw found this fun little holiday elf doll for the kids. It came out of a catalog and you get to do all of the following: determine hair and eye color, pick his/her name and pick the department where the elf works at the North Pole. The elf is mailed to you with all these "elf note" blank cards, a letter from Santa and a letter from the elf. The gist is that the elf "watches" the kids all day and has to sit still, but when they are sleeping at night, he gets to do all kinds of fun stuff. (Thankfully he comes with a book of ideas!) He is also supposed to return to Santa on Christmas Eve to report back on the naught vs. nice factor of "his kids" (and he comes with a "you're now my best friends, it was fun, gotta run" note to leave for them to find on Christmas morning) Here are the details on our elf: his name is Lodey (LOgan, aiDEn, bradY) and he works in the cars (Logan) and balls (Aiden) department.
Yesterday, I gave the kids the note from Santa that said "very soon I will be sending a special friend to watch over you and keep you company this month". I told them that it arrived a few days ago and I forgot about it until the elf showed up during nap time! Lodey was hanging in his stocking on the cabinets in the dining room. This morning...he had a little project planned for the boys.
Here are strips of red and green paper plus a note from Lodey.
Lodey's note. My plan was to make a chain with 23 links since we have 23 days left until Christmas. Each morning, the boys can tear one link off until there is only one left on Christmas morning (an interactive advent calendar). I accidentally spelled Lodey's name wrong on my note. Good thing the kids can't read :)
Here I had the boys pick out 5 green and 5 red strips each (I put three together to show them how it worked). They alternated putting a little glue on the end of a strip and I put the links together. They only had the attention span to make about 10 of them so I quickly did the rest.
Our finished product!
Here are some pictures I took yesterday. The boys REALLY REALLY wanted to play outside since we got a couple inches of snow that finally stuck to the ground. I released them to the backyard during both breakfast and lunch preparation. 10 minute spurts seem to satisfy them...especially after they soaked their gloves the second time scooping all the snow off of the patio table.
They came RUNNING and yelling "SHOVELS!!!" when I dug their snow shovels out of the garage. I sort of knew they would be thrilled so I obviously took my camera with me to deliver the "goods".
This is Brady...watching his brothers clear the snow off of the table. He kept crawling over to the window and looking out. I'm sure he wishes he could join in. One more year baby....and you'll be out there too!!
Say "Cheese"!...Well...Sit Still and Then Say "Cheese"!
We've been trying for the past week to get a good picture for our Christmas card. With three active, independent little boys....this is much easier said than done. This mission is also the reason why it took us two days to put up and decorate our Christmas tree. We started Saturday night and then Bray was sitting under the tree looking so cute that we thought we would try to get the other boys under there as well. After an hour of trying THAT (unsuccessfully)...it was time for bed. We finished the tree Sunday night instead. Here are some of our picture attempts plus tree shopping on Saturday. Many many pictures of the actual tree to follow (and I promise that I'll catch up and post the 2 pictures I managed to take on Thanksgiving. It's a shame too because Denay and Tom were here and I got NO pictures of them - booooo!!!!)Here are the three boys from the 554 and BABY RYAN (who just turned 3 months).
While on the couch, I tried to get a close-up of my boys...this was the cutest thing I managed to snap (not good enough!)
Next we tried laying them on the floor, but that just got them all riled up
They had a good time posing I guess!
I have at least 20 pictures just like this....boys in varying states of moving around and mauling each other.
The next thing I tried was to take individual pictures which I thought I might collage together. After realizing that I have no idea how to collage (and after Brian told me the next day that they needed to be taken from the same angle, I gave up). I did take this opportunity to document Brady's "pointing". He points at EVERYTHING. It's adorable and...in 4 days, we'll pretend he's so smart as to say that he is "1"! Note: Bray took his first real steps on the Saturday 11/29 and he took 5 in a row today (12/2!!)
Here is the picture that started all the nonsense of us trying to get all three boys together under the tree. Besides the fact that he was chewing on the lights, Bray looked ADORABLE sitting under there. Without the flash, he was all a-glow under the dark shadows of the branches.
This would have been a winner except for the fact that Bray had all this drool all over him and was making a horrendous face (look...he has like 4 chins in this picture!) Now that I'm looking at this, I can see why I always get the question of "are Aiden and Bray twins". Aiden is such a peanut!!!!!
We even tried giving them all candy canes to make them sit still. That only led to pictures with lots of red streaks on their faces :)
I'm not sure what they were looking at here...not the camera, that's for sure!
This is Sunday night. I managed to make some hot cocoa and the boys sat under the tree drinking it while daddy prepped the ornaments. Logan and Aiden were GREAT helpers. They delivered the ornaments to me and daddy and they were very careful to follow our instructions not to hang any of them too low so that Bray can't get 'em (although Monday morning started with Aiden breaking an ornament that he thought was a cookie and wanted to eat).
Based mostly on Brady's intense fascination with pulling the tops out of the round ornaments, we decided to skip the "ball like" ones this year. Brian reasoned that they are just far too tempting as toys for Bray AND Aiden.
Our sweet little Santa baby!!
This is Logan's new favorite ornament (thank you GG and GGpa!) He loves being 3 and anything that has the number 3 on it!
This was Aiden's favorite thing - the bubble wrap in each ornament box. Carole (memaw) has been giving Brian a Santa ornament each year since he was young and they are all in bubble-wrap sleeves inside of their original boxes. Aiden collected ALL the sleeves and put them in one big zip lock bag. Later, he was sitting on the couch with all the bubble wrap spread around him. I just downloaded an iPhone app (like a game on my phone) that is bubble wrap popping. Aiden played it for quite a while today!!! He can't get enough of the bubble wrap!!
We totally slacked and forgot our camera the day we went to get the tree so I took the next few pictures with my phone. Here we are shopping in Menard's for lights and other stuff. I grabbed these hats and put them on the boys.
Daddy and Bray at the tree lot. We went back to the Boy Scout one this year. We bought our tree at this same place back when Logan was just a baby. I have almost this exact same picture of baby Logan and daddy....
The man who helped us pick out our tree was nice enough to snap a family picture for us! By the way, Logan elected not to wear his coat. He is a little HEATER!
Logan and Aiden had a BLAST running everywhere. The trees were set up in between wooden "decking" and they were playing pirates talking about "walking the plank" <-- small "step down" pieces of wood that led to another area of trees. They then decided to hand sweep the needles off of the wooden walk-way. 
About Me
- Renay
- Stories about BRLAB: Brian & Renay, two relatively sane parents, and our three adorable, but active boys: Logan - 9, Aiden - 7 and Brady - 6. I started this blog to document our adventures and milestones for those family members who are far away and can't always share the fun in person. This blog has become my way to keep track of everything in the lives of my growing boys - from the super big stuff that seems the most important to the small things that probably really ARE the most important. I always include tons of pictures because I plan to make a book out of the blog on a yearly basis. Time flies by so fast, I can only hope that these posts will help us remember all the wonderful and silly times we have together as a family.