Beautiful Fall Weekend

This past weekend was so much fun! We were able to see most of our family and many of our friends and I was still able to have Sunday afternoon with just my Scott and Daniel, so that was nice, too. :o) Friday night we had a going-away party for one of Scott's co-workers who is moving up to ND. It was more fun than I had first thought it would be, considering I only knew four people out of the entire group going! Plus it was nice getting to know the other employees and their wives/husbands, so that I now have faces to go with everyone's names. They definitely seem like a great group of people and I know we'll enjoy Scott working in this office. It was also nice to talk to some of the wives about the various places they have moved since being with Marathon and how all the moves were... I'm excited for when we'll be able to move one day, but sometimes I worry about what it will be like moving from place to place so much. One of the families has lived in TX, WY, Alaska, and now GJ and had a kid in each place except for here! Now that is amazing! :o) I enjoyed talking to her and hearing what she liked about each place. So far GJ is almost everyone's favorite! That will probably be the same for us, but maybe we will find another place someday that we'll love just as much as here. :o)

Saturday we woke up late (even Daniel slept in until 9, which was amazing) and headed to Fruita once we got up and ready. We went by one of our friend's yard sale and then dropped by Scott's parents' to see if they would like to go down to the Fruita Fall Festival with us. His mom ended up walking with us, so we put lots of sunscreen all over little guy, strapped him in his stroller, and headed downtown. I am SO excited to live in such a small town again where you can walk almost everywhere! They took us on this little trail that I had never been on before, which was shady and very pretty. We got downtown and walked up and down the streets, looking at all the vendors and seeing what there was to see. We mainly just go to get out and walk as a family, so we didn't buy anything from the actual festival, just from a new thrift store in town owned by some friends. I wish we could have listened to more of the music because it sounded really good, but by the time we had been there an hour and a half it was getting super hot and we were ready to head back and eat a late lunch and cool off. Plus, little Daniel was quite tired and ready for a good, long nap! So, we walked back to their house and had delicious sandwiches, chips, and ice water, and then hung out for awhile before coming back home and cleaning. :o)

That night Amanda and Lelia, my sisters, and Wayne, my brother-in-law, came over for pizza and games. It was fun to hang out with them again! We hardly ever seen Lelia and Wayne because of their super busy evenings/weekends schedule, so this was fun to catch up with everything going on in their lives. Amanda joined us for the games and eventually Mom and Dad stopped by for a little while after church. Daniel had lots of fun with everyone and then surprised us by going down early and staying asleep even with some VERY loud people in the other room! (That would be us... :o) ) They all played Life while I hung out with Daniel and fed him, but it was still fun hanging out with everyone.

Sunday, we went to church in the morning and right afterwards we headed up to the Mesa to see all the colors! It was Color Sunday which was actually the first time in MANY years that I had been up there on that day! There are so many people all over the place, but at least that meant we were able to get a family picture taken by someone else! :o) We drove up Lands' End road and then back down through the town of Mesa, past Powderhorn, stopping at various beautiful places on the way. I LOVE the fall, and the fall colors are a big reason why I do, so it was so nice going up there and enjoying the beautiful creation God has made! :o) It did make us really want to go fishing/hiking, though, so we're hoping it will be really nice in Breckenridge (have no idea how to spell that) when we go in two weeks, so that we can go hiking! We took lots of pictures (imagine that!) of Daniel and the scenery, so I will post some on here. We took a lot of the pretty colors, because I really want to blow some up to put in our new house to keep part of fall there all the time!



















Sunday night we had dinner with some friends, which was nice, and that ended our amazing weekend! :o)

5 Months Old!

My little boy is already 5 months old today! So many of my friends have been having babies in the past few weeks... Each time one does it makes me think back to that time that seems like ages ago when Scott and I went to the hospital to have our little one, not knowing if it was a boy or a girl. Gee whiz! It seriously seems like forever ago! I can hardly remember not knowing our little Daniel; not hugging him in my arms or getting big, slobbery kisses from him; not taking a diaper bag and baby everywhere we go; or having the opportunity to not be quite as responsible as we are now. :o) For every moment I've had with him I have been thankful for... I really don't know what we would have done without our little boy! He is amazing and definitely the joy of our lives!

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Little Daniel, you are getting to be quite the big boy! Physically, you are getting taller and heavier, for sure, but I'm not positive how much so because you won't have your next appointment until six months. I just know that over the past week or so you have been sleeping a lot more and even I can tell that you are getting much bigger all around! Sometimes I think about how you will be in a few months - crawling all over the place and working on walking later on. I can't believe how fast you grow! There are many things you love to do now... much more so than at any other point of your young life. Your days usually consist of waking up between 7 and 8 after a good 10-12 hours of sleep (Mommy loves you for this, for sure!), and after a yummy breakfast of Mommy's milk you are usually good to 'cuddle' with Mommy a little while (I need my kisses and hugs from you after that long night apart) and then you have some play time on your mat and sometimes some tummy time. We are working on getting you to actually roll over again, which does not seem to interest you so much right now. We're also trying to work on building your arm muscles to get you ready to begin crawling, so I have been putting your whale pillow under your chest so you can have a jumpstart on bringing your chest up high with your arms. You loved your time on it today... trying to read your little cloth book and eating your little blue blankie. You are usually up for an hour before heading to your swing for your first nap of the day. Yep, you are still napping in your swing! Even after being gone in Denver for the entire last week without your swing, you still much prefer that over napping in your crib. I'm not exactly sure why, considering night time is okay in your crib, but that's okay... Mommy is realizing that you might just need that extra soothing motion that the swing gives you, at least for now. The rest of the day consists of three to four naps with usually up to 2 hours of eating/play time in between them. You are loving your 'jumper' from Maw-Maw and Pappy, your play mat as always, watching "Your Baby Can Read" DVDs on TV (you LOVE watching little kids talk to you!), being read to (especially your favorite "pigeon" books), playing airplane on Mommy, cuddling, walks in your stroller, car rides, or almost any type of time with Daddy. You love your cousin Vienna, too, who makes you burst out laughing most of the time! :o) It's so cute! She loves you, too. :o) I love going on walks with you because you are always so happy and smile at everyone we pass. You love being out and about and just want to take everything in and learn, learn, learn! You have also been trying to 'talk' a lot to us lately because you babble on and on sometimes. The cutest is when I put a book in front of you and you try to 'read' it to me. I think you are so used to us reading books to you that you are realizing when we have a book you are to speak. :o)

There is so much more I could say to you, my little boy, but these are just some of the highlights from this month! You are looking very forward to turning six months already because you are super excited about eating some 'real' food! You love sitting with us while we eat already and have tried many times to take our food off of our plates. Silly boy! :o) One day I know I'll not be looking for a second and you will end up putting some type of food in your mouth... Just wait a little bit longer and then you can find out the excitement of eating avacados, sweet potatoes, and other yummy veggies that we'll be starting you on! Yumm! Doesn't that sound delicious?! :o)

I love you SOOOO much, Daniel! God has blessed your daddy and I immensely by giving us you! We're so excited to see you grow even more in many ways this next month!

Love,
Your Mommy

Great Week in Denver

I was totally planning on spending some of my time while in Denver catching up on this blog, but I didn't end up having as much time as I thought for that because we didn't have internet at the second hotel we stayed at - for most of the trip. But, that was okay, because we had a wonderful time and it was SO nice to be there with my boys! :o) I am still recovering from the traveling... I've been very tired lately and hardly know where to begin with the house cleaning, unpacking, etc. It's also weird to think we'll be moving in probably three to four weeks. Makes me just want to start packing up everything but then in our little apartment there is no place to put full boxes so I don't really want to be in that 'moving stage' for over a month! So we will see what happens... :o) I just cleaned up the kitchen after lunch and am in the process of making brownies for the Christian group's meeting tonight at Mesa State College. (They asked people to sign up and make snacks for them whenever we could, so I have done it a few times. I know how much I grew while attending that group, so I love to do whatever I can to bless those students who are attending the group now.) ANYWAY, there is so much to talk about even back before leaving for Denver, but I think I will just focus on our trip for now because I am a mommy and never know how much time I'll have on here! :o)

We left for Denver late Tuesday morning, a week ago. I didn't do any packing the day before because I was busy with other things and I'm still not quite used to how long packing a little baby and us for a week will take. But, it all worked out and we DID get out and only forgot a few things that we came right back for. :o) The trip over was fun and fairly uneventful. We stopped for lunch and to feed Daniel in Glenwood Springs (I know... definitely didn't get too far), and then made it almost to Denver before having to stop again for me to feed him. We drove straight over to the Renaissance Hotel where Scott's conference Wed. was. Fancy dancy, is all I have to say! :o) I'm definitely not used to staying in quite that nice of a place. Lol. Scott hung out with us as we got everything all settled for a little while before we realized that we had left part of Daniel's swing at home!! Goody, goody! :o) Just so everyone knows Daniel hardly knows how to nap without his swing! He is very much a soothing through movement baby unless he is really tired at night, because then he doesn't mind sleeping in his crib. Well, I was very worried at first but then got into my determined mode and knew that we had to get through the week somehow WITHOUT going to Walmart and buying him another $150 swing! :o) Sooo, Scott left for his first meal / time at his conference and I hung out with Daniel, as I did the rest of Tues. and all day Wed. I enjoyed the time overall, although we definitely had some difficult times with Daniel not wanting to nap and being extra fussy. I took him on a few drives around the area so he could nap in the car and he napped on me quite a lot, too. Other than that we watched TV and he played with his new toys that I had bought him before the trip. Those times were fun. He would play for hours in front of me on the bed! So cute! :o) HIs favorite part of the hotel was the BIG, soft, kingsized bed of Mommy and Daddy's! He took some of his naps and slept part of the night on there when no where else was good enough for him. :o)






We definitely missed Daddy, though, so it was very nice Wed. night when we were able to join him and all the other Marathon people to talk and hang out. Everyone loved Daniel and it was nice to finally meet many of the people Scott had talked about from ND and TX.

Thurs. morning we had breakfast at the hotel and then left for our next hotel... the Embassy Suites in the Cherry Creek area. That hotel was very nice also, and we were very happy to have a suite so Daniel could actually nap and sleep in a different room. He did much better there... mainly napped on Daddy, but slept all night each night!! That was very nice after being up the 3 to 4 times the first two nights!

We went to the Cherry Creek Mall for lunch and much of the afternoon, which was fun! I got a beautiful necklace and earrings, but otherwise we just looked around at all the cool stores and walked, walked, walked. We ate at Noodles and Company for dinner (we LOVE that place) and then headed back to hotel where we got into our swimsuits and "swam" for a little bit. It was more just standing in the water for a few minutes, because it was not that warm so we didn't want Daniel to get too cold. Although he did love it! He splashed up a storm! :o)








Fri. we spent much of the day driving and walking up and down the 16th St. mall area downtown. We hung out in a coffee shop for awhile where we played some games and went to lunch. The rest of the day we really just rested at the hotel watching HGTV (not having any TV here means we love watching it elsewhere... I've always loved HGTV, and now Scott does to now that we are getting a house). :o)





Sat. was another super lazy day. We didn't do too much because Daniel was very tired most of the day, so we went to Babies R Us, where we got lots of stuff for our little one (all I have to say is it's probably good we don't have one og those in GJ). We took pizza out to Parker for dinner where we hung out with our awesome friends, Jess and Jenn! That was definitely one of the highlights of the week! It was a lot of fun to see their place and catch up!

Sun. was supposed to be just our traveling day, but Scott made it super fun because he took us up over Loveland Pass on the way back which was beautiful, and then we stopped in Silverthorne for 3 hours of shopping and walking all over the place going to the outlet stores! I got new shirts and sunglasses at the Columbia store and we got Daniel lots of cute clothes from Carter's. He is going to be one cute baby this winter! :o)











Well, that's about it! That was definitely the speedy version. I will try to put some of the hundreds of pictures on here from our time. :o)

Lazy days at home...

The past few days have been so nice just being home! Daniel has been waking up at least once for the past three nights, so that makes it even nicer to be home so that both of us can get extra rest. I'm not sure what is causing this phase, but I'm hoping it doesn't last long. :o) Right now it is 9 am and he is still asleep, after being up for an hour and a half last night. I guess that part is nice, but I wasn't able to sleep in because I'm babysitting a friend's little girl this morning, who should be arriving at any minute. :o) I'm expecting him to wake up at any minute, though, and he'll be very excited to see her here because he absolutely loves little kids! I think they could entertain him for hours, at least!

Tuesday afternoon I gave Daniel a bath, which is one of my favorite things to do with him now! :o) He is SO cute taking baths! He's at the age where he loves water (warm water, that is) and he will splash, splash, splash the entire time! I really need to remember to take my camera in there sometime and take a picture of him in his little bathtub... I'm not sure how much longer he'll be able to fit in that tub before going on to the real bathtub or one of those little seat things. After that we drove out to Fruita to see our house again... We needed to take measurements of some things and take more pictures. (I will try to load some of those pictures on here soon.) It was great seeing the house again because it's amazing all the things I didn't notice before that I love! For example, I love all the lights everywhere! It has amazing light fixtures and the places they put lights make it so pretty everywhere! I'm so excited to actually live there and see how it looks at night with all the lights on. Lol. I know... I'm silly, but I like that sort of thing. :o) We also had to check what windows for sure had blinds and all... We're trying to decide what to get. After we left there, we grabbed something for dinner and then went to my sister, Amanda's, to have some homemade chocolate chip cookies that Vienna and her made. :o) They were delicious! Then we headed back home at actually an early time, which was amazing! Scott and I were able to watch a movie, which had been such a long time since we have done that (we are usually super tired by the time Daniel goes down at 9 or 9:30), so that was fun to have that time with him. :o)

Yesterday (Wed.), Daniel and I just hung out at our apartment enjoying the sounds of the rain outside and the cloudy day! I LOVED being able to wake up to that sound... I love, love, love the rain! Scott came home for lunch and then after lunch Daniel slept on me for much of the afternoon after he wouldn't go down for his naps, and we watched some of his "Your Baby Can Read" DVD, which he loves! Last night we went for dinner at a friends, which was nice, and I kept dreaming up ways to decorate our new house! I'm getting so super excited! Lately I've been looking online for different good ideas of decorating the million and one 'planter ledges' that we have in our living room, dining room, and two front bedrooms. I've never had those before, so I'm trying to think of things I can put on it to make them look extra cute. :o) Also, things that would be non-expensive would be awesome!

Okay, I need to go! :o)

Ready for the fall...

So many things going on in our lives lately. It's been a lot of fun, but I'm exhausted! I love the summer, but I always get so tired near the end of it because of the almost constant going and going we usually do. I'm so looking forward to the fall! I'm excited to be in our new home with just our little family... Scott, Daniel, and I. I'm excited for the cool evenings to go on walks around our new place with my hubby and son and for it to begin getting darker earlier so we can enjoy our new gas fireplace, since we don't have a real one, and sipping tea or hot chocolate while we talk, watch a movie, or just watch our little one growing up. :o) The fall is a beautiful time of year, too. I can't wait to see the leaves begin changing on the trees around the Grand Valley, and for drives we'll probably take up on the Grand Mesa, which is exceptionally beautiful in the fall! SO many things to look forward to, but I have to realize that even now as I'm looking forward to that time, right now is pretty amazing too!

I am sitting in our recliner on this nice, warm day (probably about 70 degrees out), watching Daniel play with all his toys on his play mat. He's getting so close to rolling over from his back to tummy... I am just waiting each day wondering if it'll happen today. I know once that happens, he'll be moving on to a whole new stage where he'll want to roll everywhere and then eventually begin crawling all over the place! Then I will have to get really serious with baby-proofing... especially getting up cords around the place, as that is the main things I don't want him getting into. He is trying to grab his little stuffed giraffe right now. Maybe he'll just roll over and get it!

Scott just came over for lunch, which was great! I love that he gets to come home for his hour lunch each day. Especially after a long three day weekend when I got to see him every day, all day! It's also nice to be able to feel more like a wife... getting his sandwich made and having lunch ready for him when he gets home. Dinner is a whole different scene, because it takes longer to make dinners, which makes it hard with little Daniel's schedule to have time to cook while he is happy and not eating. Plus we go, go, go so much every evening that I don't really get the chance to make dinner much because I can't get it done before we have to leave. Thus, Scott makes dinner a lot or we do really simple things. Once we are in our new home, I am determined to do better with meals, and maybe I will venture forth and do the 30-meals in a day thing, since we are planning on buying a deep freezer that I should probably use! I wanted to do that awhile back and never made myself actually do it... Now I realize how nice it would be to actually do since I really do want to make meals for Scott when he gets home.

This weekend was so much fun! Even though it was extremely tiring for Daniel, he did great - much better than I first thought he would. :o) Sunday we went to church which was really great and while we were there our friends, Shawn and Katie, invited us to go boating with them on Monday. We decided that that would be a lot of fun and we could see if Daniel liked it, so Scott and I went to the mall to get swim suits which we had both been needing to get for awhile now. This is definitely the best time to get them considering they are all super cheap now! We got those and then went home to rest before Jessica's birthday dinner at Zen Garden. We went to that and then went to David and Jessica's and played games with them before heading home at our normal 8:30 / 9 time to get Daniel to bed.

Monday was a lot of fun boating with the Allens! Through a friend of theirs, we were able to go to a private lake out near Whitewater, which was awesome considering all the other lakes nearby would probably have been super full considering it was Labor Day. We put so much sunscreen on little Daniel and decked him out in his cute little swimming trunks and shirt from my uncle and aunt and he did awesome! He loved it when we were going super fast around the lake, bouncing around on the water. Katie, Shawn, and Scott all did the wake-boarding, wake surfing, and knee boarding, while I watched Daniel and them. I tried getting in at one point but I am a big wimp in cold water and it was freezing! I had a lot of fun in the boat, though, and it really was a wonderful day to be out (only like 75 degrees the whole time we were there). I was so bummed, though, because we forgot our camera, so we just got a few pictures on our phones (definitely not the greatest quality). I'll put a few of them on here just so y'all can see how cute our little boy was!





Monday evening we went to a BBQ with our small group to finish off the weekend. That was fun seeing many families we hadn't seen in awhile. This morning I had my first Proverbs 31 mom's group at the church which will be meeting the 1st and 3rd Tuesday morning of each month... It was great being able to meet many new ladies from church and visiting and eating good food with them. :o) Then one of the 'older' moms from church talked to us about different life experience she has had and about how she learned to turn over everything to God and give up control in her life. It was really good. I wish I could have taken notes, but poor little Daniel was very tired and was quite fussy while we were there. :o(

Speaking of being fussy, I need to go check on him. I just put him down for a nap about ten minutes ago and he is still crying... He is so tired and has been so off schedule this weekend that I know it's probably hard getting back into naps and everything. Hopefully he'll fall asleep soon.

Almost time to leave for church...

I have decided that I won't really be able to catch up with what all we've been up to on here, considering it's been weeks since I last really wrote of the goings on in the Slade household, so I am just going to start anew and try to do better with this...

I am sitting in our living room enjoying this amazing Sunday morning. I'm very excited to leave for church in a little under 30 minutes, although it looks like little Daniel might have to be woken from his nap unless we wakes up sometime soon. :o( Scott is looking on his computer for various 'house projects' as we approach the day we'll be moving into our NEW HOME! :o) Yep, we just put a contract on a house out in Fruita, which is super exciting for us! We started looking for homes about a month ago after trying to decide for awhile whether or not we should buy one. We had been wanting to move out of our little apartment for awhile now, especially as it gets more and more filled up with all of Daniel's things. We have loved this apartment, but we are so ready for a bigger kitchen, nice backyard, and an extra room for office space and my scrapbook stuff! ;o) SO, we began looking around at houses for sale after seeing how expensive the rental duplexes and houses were. Although we don't know when we'll be moving with Marathon Scott talked to many of the guys he works with and other people who are familiar with the company and they all encouraged us to actually buy a house, knowing that when we do move they take really good care of us and if we can't sell the house within 2 or 3 months, they buy it from us so we have the money to rent or buy in the new place. That made us feel much better, so we got ourselves pre-approved for a loan and began the process of finding our first house! We were not planning on looking in Fruita at first considering Scott works in GJ and we do many things here all through the week, but then realized it really isn't that far away (15 - 20 min. from most places in GJ), so we looked out there this past week and fell in love with a couple of houses that were actually right across the street from each other! We ended up calling my parents and having them come out to inspect the places more thoroughly with us and decided to go with this one after realizing the other one would require much more work and money to get it fixed up (and there was only $3000 difference between the two). We thought about it and prayed and decided to go ahead and place an offer on it and they accepted the offer a few days ago! We are super, duper excited!



The house is a very pretty place in a great neighborhood! (I am including a picture of the outside on here... It's not the greatest picture because I took it really fast on Scott's phone.) It is 1900 sf, which is definitely bigger than we were looking for, but compared to the homes in GJ we could definitely get more for our money in Fruita. It has 3 bedrooms and 2 baths, an amazing kitchen, gigantic dining room, and a gas fireplace in the living room. The backyard is a nice size and very pretty, with two patios out there. We can finally BBQ which is super exciting for us! And, even though we probably won't be in the house longer than two years :o(, there is a swing-set in the backyard that the previous owners kept there that Daniel will love once he's older! I will try to get pictures up at some point when we get back out there to see it yet again. I have a few now, but they are not the greatest. We still have to wait for the inspection sometime this next week or two to see if that passes before we have it for sure and then the closing date will hopefully be sometime early next month.

Yesterday we went around looking at carpet, lawn mowers, blinds, grills, deep freezers, and many other things we don't really need right now, which was a lot of fun. We are going to be replacing and adding some carpet in most of the rooms because there is a hole in the carpet in Daniel's bedroom and then right now there is Pergo in the living room and hallway that was put in NOT so well at all! (There are gaps in various places all over the room!) Since we had to take that out and try to fix it anyway, we've decided to leave it in the dining room and try to fix those gaps, but to put carpet through the hallway and living room mainly because of little Daniel who will have much more fun on soft carpet moving around than on the hard floor.

Okay, there is so much more I could say, but it's time for church so we better go wake up our still sleeping little one. :o( He's still in his cute PJs but I'm guessing we'll just have to keep him in them unless he wakes up as we transport him to his carseat.