Niagara Falls

This past weekend we went on a mini family vacation to Niagara Falls.  This was the first time that we were to take the kids out of the United States, so there was a little added anxiety in packing to get ready to go.  I couldn't remember if we had ordered Kyler's birth certificate, but I was happy to find we had when I was looking in our safe.  We ended up not needing the kid's information, which was good.

Going into Canada was so easy.  We had to pay $3 and tell them where we were going, then were sent on our way.  Getting into the United States was a little tougher.  The border patrol guy had a gun on his side and asked us our citizenship, then asked if we had brought any food back from Canada, to which we both answered "No".  Then he asked Steve to unlock the doors and he opened the drivers' side rear door where Brayden was sitting with a Pizza Hut box on his lap!!!!!  We both quickly said, "Oh Yes, we just came from eating lunch", both sweating, wondering what trouble we'd be in.  Thankfully he didn't care and sent us on our way.

Niagara Falls was great.  We stayed in the Sheraton on the Falls, but had a city-view room instead of a Falls-view room.  We were ok with that, as we were only there for a night.  The Canadian, aka Horseshoe Falls, were VERY impressive...as were the American Falls.  The only complaint that we had was that it was bitter cold while we were there.  We remembered the boys' hats, but forgot gloves.  Kyler's little hands were very cold and red after just a few minutes outside.

We are planning another trip back when the weather gets warmer.  It is only 3.5 hours away, so it is a great, short vacation destination for us.

Take Care!

Canada eh!

So it's been awhile since we posted a blog. Brayden is doing amazing things as usual. His latest is that tonight at dinner, we could NOT get Kyler to stop crying to save our lives, but then Brayden hopped down out of his chair, grabbed a plastic pencil box and handed it to Kyler. He said "here Kyler, this is what you want." Well, Kyler must have agreed because he instantly smiled, giggled and took the box and was happy the rest of the night! We told Brayden that he could have any treat he wanted that night in gratitude for figuring out how to keep his brother happy.

Also recently in the Dillon household we have purchased a Nintendo Wii. The whole family loves playing with it and Brayden is really good. Most surprising however is that Sarah is a Phenom when it comes to video boxing! She dominates everyone she plays and it's rare that anyone survives the first round!

Well, tomorrow we will be taking the boys on "The Polar Express". The Cuyahoga valley scenic railroad changes every year for two months into the Polar express and the kids are invited to come wearing their pajamas and the railroad serves cookies and hot chocolate! Brayden can't wait.

And then this weekend, I have Friday off, so were taking advantage and going on a brief trip to Niagara Falls.

Well, that's it for now. Enjoy some recent photos and we'll see ya later!!!!

We're Going to AUSTRALIA!!!!

Well, today while we were driving out to the store to pick up some things, Brayden, out of nowhere, proclaimed "We have to go to Australia because I've never been there before!". Well Sarah and I looked at each other and just shrugged our shoulders and and laughed. We have no idea where he got that from but we thought it was pretty funny!

We also had some fun watching the Cleveland Air Show from our deck today. We woke Brayden up from his nap to see the Thunderbirds (airforce demonstration team). He was VERY cranky about being woken up early, and he said that the jets scared him, but I think he enjoyed it by the end.

Kyler did another first today. When we put him in his crib, he pulled himself up on all fours and started playing with his little aquarium! It was really cute!

Well that's it for now!

-Steve

Pictures and updates

We finally figured out how to upload pictures to put on our blog. I hope you like them.

Things have been crazy around here. Kyler is almost 6 months old and is finally getting less fussy. Brayden is also getting big and is keeping us very entertained and busy keeping him out of trouble. A few weeks ago he decided to experiment with electricity. I (Sarah) was feeding/rocking Kyler on a Saturday morning when all of a sudden the lights in the living room went out. I turned around and saw my tweezers sticking out of the electrical socket. I started to scold Brayden, telling him that we DO NOT put anything in the electrical socket, but stopped because I saw that he was just sitting there stunned beside the light socket. He had gotten quite a jolt of electricity. I said, "buddy, does your hand hurt" and he just melted. He told us that his hand burned. Daddy checked him out an everything was ok, but we sat him down and told him why his hand burned and told him not to do it again. After that, we made sure that we had plug protectors in each outlet. Needless to say, he hasn't went near an outlet since.

The picture of Kyler above is from this evening when we gave him his first "big boy" bath, in which he got to sit up. He loved it. He is growing up too fast. As you can see from the picture he already has two teeth on the bottom and we just noticed this morning that he is getting some teeth on the top now. It looks like one of his top front teeth and the tooth beside it are budding. Hopefully the other front tooth buds soon or he will look kind of silly!

Everything is going well with Steve and me. We are getting ready to ship Brayden up to Grandma and Grandpa Grubaugh's tomorrow so he can be spoiled for the next week, swimming, picking blueberries and playing on Grandma and Grandpa's jungle gym in their back yard. He will have a great time and Steve and I will get a little break, only having one child for a week. We will miss him, but he will not miss us with all the spoiling that will take place.

- Sarah

Well Kyler is certainly becoming a very charming little boy! He has a very coy smile that just melts your heart when you see it! The most interesting thing that Kyler has done recently was this morning. When Sarah went into the room to wake up the boys, she found Kyler lying there grinning from ear to ear with his PJ's almost completely off! His bottoms were around his ankles and he had successfully taken one arm completely out of the sleeve! We don't know how he did it, but we speculate that he must have been chewing on his clothes and pulling them off.

Later on, when we picked up the kids from daycare, Brayden was reluctant to go, so I told him that we were going to go get some pizza for dinner. One of his teachers asked him "Wow Brayden! Can I have some of your pizza!?" To which he replied "yes." Well imagine our shock when 45 minutes later after we picked up the pizza and did some running of errands, Brayden told us to stop the car at daycare so we could give his teacher some of the pizza! I swear that kid remembers things like nothing I've ever seen before in someone so young.

Sarah and I celebrated our anniversary a little early and bought a new tool to capture all the great moments our kids bring us. We got ourselves a new SLR digital camera. For those of you who may not know... SLR stands for Single Lens Reflex, and it's the type of camera that has no shutter delay so you can take photos very quickly and not miss those precious moments. We'll try to figure out how to post some pictures on this site in the near future.

Anyway, got to go study now.

Shooting it on

Okay, so this my (Steve's) first attempt at "blogging", so forgive me if I am not familiar with the protocol. First off, a little update about me... I've been in my "orientation month" for clinical anesthesia the last two weeks. So far everything is going well, but the thought of being alone in a room is quite scary right now. Sarah has been really working hard the last several days trying to clean the house up so when we travel up to Michigan this weekend, we won't come back to a long list of things to do.

Now we come to the focus of almost every blog, the boys. Kyler is teething right now and has two tiny little teeth poking through his lower gums. It's really cute, but he does seem to be screaming a little more lately. He is learning more every day and today he and I had a brief but very fun game of Peek-a-boo and he just laughed and laughed in a deep belly laugh every time I showed him my face in a new pose.

But the excitement of the night definitely came from Brayden tonight. I was getting him ready for bed and told him he had to "go potty" before he went to bed, so I sent him into the bathroom by himself and told him to call me when he was done. This is our usual routine. I was in my office studying and could hear everything, and the sound I heard was not what I expected, so went to check on things and found my three year old son swinging his penis up and down, and back and forth, effectively painting the bathroom wall with his urine! I quickly told him to point into the toilet and asked him what he was doing, to which he replied "I'm shooting it on the wall!" Further questioning revealed that he was pretending that he was a fireman and was using his "hose" to shoot water on the wall to put out an imaginary fire. Sarah and I were laughing too hard to reprimand him, but we did tell him that he was NOT to do that again. We then decided that this warranted a "post" on the Dillon Family Blog. Hope you enjoyed reading the story as much as we did living it!

-Steve

It's been a while...sorry about that!

Wow, I am sorry it has been over a month since I posted to this blog! Things have been crazy!

Steve is now a CA1 - PGY2 Anesthesiology resident - actually putting people to sleep for surgery! I am so proud of him! He is doing great, but is really exhausted because of the early start time and the HUGE reading assignments he gets every night!

Kyler is now 4 months old and is getting his first teeth! On Sunday we noticed that he has is 2 lower teething poking through his gums. This has caused some LONG evenings and a lot of fussing! Hopefully it ends soon! There is just so much a parent can take!!!!!

Brayden...what can I say about Brayden...there is always so much to say about him as he is constantly cracking us up with the things he says and the things he does. Of course there are also the times we want to pull our hair out because he doesn't have his "listening ears" on.

A story about Brayden...last night we were all sitting in the dining room waiting for the hamburgers to be ready to take off the grill. To kill some time I started showing Brayden some of the pictures I had of me growing up. My grandma "K" had given me a picture frame that had all of my school pictures in it. I was going through them one by one saying , "Look Brayden, this is mommy when she was 3", "look Brayden, this is mommy when she was 4"...you get the picture. Well, I turned the picture to the picture of me in 1st or 2nd grade, and before I could say anything Brayden said, "Mommy is that you when you were a BOY????". The picture was of me when I had a really short haircut, "unisex" as Steve called it. A boy...A boy!!!!! I told him that mommy was still a girl, but she just had really short hair. I think he is still confused....

Have a great day!
- Sarah

Such a loving big brother

Brayden is such a great big brother. He like to give Kyler kisses and is starting to share with is little brother. The other day he made my heart melt. When he was little he had two blankets that he slept with. One was a yellow crocheted blanket and the other is a blue fleece blanket. He hasn't really used them much since he transitioned from the crib to the toddler bed. Because of this, when Kyler was born I took the yellow crocheted blanket and started to use it for Kyler. Brayden DID NOT LIKE THIS. He kept steeling it and putting it back in his room. Well, recently he became "OK" with Kyler using the blanket and went into his room, got the blue fleece blanket and said, "Mommy, Kyler can have my blue blanket too!!!". He is such a good brother.

Last night Steve and Brayden were playing upstairs before bedtime. When it was time for Brayden to go to bed, they came downstairs so Brayden could say goodnight to me. Steve said, "Brayden, what did we do while we were upstairs?". After a little coaching Brayden informed me that he moved his bed into Kylers room. We have been trying to talk him into moving into Kyler's room for a little bit. We didn't want to force the issue because it wasn't imperative that we did it right away. Moving the boys into the same room would allow us to have a guest room again since the guest room became Kyler's room when he was born. The boys will have the old guest room and Brayden's room will become the guest room/study. So, last night was the first night that the boys slept in the same room. Kyler woke up at 4am crying, but Brayden was able to sleep through it and didn't complain at all this morning. We will see if this is a permanent move or if he wants to move back into his room tonight. I will keep you up-to-date on this situation.

- Sarah

Kyler...a weekend of firsts

Well, I am always talking about Brayden so I thought it is time to talk about Kyler. He is now 3 months old and is getting to be a lot of fun. This past weekend Steve was changing his diaper and he let out a big belly laugh. This is the first time that he has laughed so it was so cute.

This was a weekend of firsts because he also started to roll around. He has been rolling from his belly to his back for about a month and a half, but now he can roll from his back to his belly! This makes life a little more interesting as he doesn't stay in one place when he set him down on the floor or the bed anymore. You have to be really careful and have to keep a close eye on him.

Kyler is still a fussy baby, although he is getting a little better. The hardest time, what we call the "witching hour" is between about 7pm and 9pm. During this time there isn't much we can do to make him happy. We love him anyways!!!!

"Break Dancing" 3 year old

This past week Brayden and I sat down in the evening and watched a episode of the FOX reality show, "So you think you can dance". Brayden calls it "Funny people dancing". The current episodes are the audition rounds so most of the people they show are REALLY bad. We love to laugh at the bad people.

Well, Brayden must have loved the dancers that were break dancing because now he loves to dance around and do some of the moves, the funniest of which is when he tries to spin on his head!!! It is halarious to watch!

Adventures at Ceder Point

The boys and I left Steve home and went over to Cedar Point for the weekend. We left on Saturday afternoon and just got back this afternoon. It was a blast. We wish Steve could have went with us, but he was on call this weekend so he couldn't go. Brayden has a blast. The kid has no fear. If he was tall enough I could see him going on all the top thrill rides. I bought a cute video of him on one of the kiddy coasters. It is so funny. He is just giggling the whole time. He wants to go back again soon. We only live about an hour away from the park, so I can see us heading there a few more times this summer.

My parents and my brother's family also went. It was really nice to have the whole family together. Having everyone there allowed me to get some "kid free" time. My parents played in the kiddie park with Brayden and watched Kyler so Steve (brother) and I waited almost 2 hours to ride the newest ride at the park, the Maverick. This ride was really awesome (of course I screamed the WHOLE time). It is like no ride I have ever ridden. It opened for the first time this weekend and Steve (brother) and I were one of the first 3000 riders so we got a voucher for a free shirt saying we were one of the first riders. Steve (brother) and I both bought a picture that was taken of us during the ride. It is halarious!!! I have funniest look on my face. When I see you guys next ask me and I'll show you. You will laugh your heads off!

Steve (brother) and his family bought season passes to the park, so I can see us going a few more times this summer. I will make sure to tell everyone how it goes!!!

- Sarah

Adventures in potty training

We have been working on potty training with Brayden since around Christmas time. The thought of having 2 kids in diapers made me stress out. So, around Christmas we started putting Brayden in pullups, followed closely be putting him in "big boy" underwear. Well, we are STILL not 100% potty trained but we are getting really close. I think that it won't be long before we have a fully potty trained boy. We have a few issues we are dealing with:

1) Brayden is a little guy so he is afraid to fall in.
2) He doesn't like to go potty in public. I think this has something to do with "automatic" flushing toilets.
3) He just recently moved from the 2's room to the 3's room at daycare, which caused him to go from a room with little toilets to a room with full sized toilets. (back to the issue of thinking he'd fall in)
4) Moving to a new room at daycare has caused some "trust" issues as he has a new teacher that he isn't comfortable telling that he had to go potty.

We are working on managing these issues. We make sure he knows that he won't fall in, as we are right there with him. We are also working on "standing up" to urinate, which makes it less scary for him, as most of the time he just as to urinate. And as for the new room at daycare, I am working with the teachers to help him get more comfortable and keep an eye on him to make sure he goes to the bathroom during potty breaks.

I never thought potty training would be so challenging, but we will get through it. Especially now that the baby is 3 months old and I have more time to work with him!

- Sarah

The sayings of a Three Year old!!!

Brayden is our 3 year old son and he is such a riot to talk to sometimes. Here are some funny things he has said to me in the past few day...

- Mommy, Papa calls me his "pumpkin"...but mommy, I am not round so I can't be his pumpkin

- Mommy, I want to go to "Peter" Point (I had just said we were going to go to Cedar Point!!!!)

- When Daddy asked him if he wanted to play the XBox 360 game "Guitar Hero", he said "Yes Daddy, I'll ROCK"

- When Mommy bought him a pair of new tennis shoes, he said, "Wow Mommy!!! These are my favorite shoes in the WHOLE world!!!"

- When he walked into the living room after I had painted it (while he was at daycare) he said, "The living Room is COOL"!

- When Mommy went into Brayden's room to give him a kiss and hug after daddy put him to bed Brayden told her that he couldn't give her a hug or kiss because he had already given Daddy two!!!!

- When Mommy finally got her hug and kiss and excitedly told Brayden we'd be going to Cedar Point in the morning he looked at her and said, "Mommy, it is going to BLOW MY MIND!!!" (We had mentioned in passing to each other - Steve and Sarah - that it would blow his mind...little ears are always listening in out house!!!)

Every day he brings such joy to our lives. We just love the little guy!

-Sarah