Yo Gabba Gaaaabbbbbbaaaaaa!

First off, yes, these pics are awful. I didn't think they'd let me take in my nice camera, as to be fair it does have very nice HD video, maybe I'd just record the whole thing and distribute, haha. Other than that all we have is cameras who do AWFUL in low light. But after I kinda felt bad, because other people had SLRs in there, so maybe I could've got away with it.

So the story is we ended up winning some tickets to a live stage show event of one of Charlie's fav shows, 'Yo Gabba Gabba' from a radio station through the magic of facebook. I felt a little bad because I found out about the contest through another facebook friend who would also have loved to go. We did end up winning. (I was begging, borrowing and stealing for votes.) This is just a show that actually interests Charlie. He's not big time into TV yet, but this is his speed. 5 of the about 30 words he knows how to say right now are, Muno, Fuffa, Brobee, Toodee, and Plex. So yeah, he's a fan. I really wanted him to see it, but there really wasn't money in the budget for it - some of the cheaper seats are $30 per ticket, and yes, a not quite two year old has to have a ticket. So we decided weren't going to go if we didn't win, but we did. I was like jumping up and down when we won.

Charlie, who has an attention span of 2 minutes for anything besides coloring (even watching the show on netflix, he has to run around and play while he watches), sat completely and totally still for the entire hour and a half of this show. It was unreal.


The bad part - they sold all this merch, of course. And Charlie saw some beanie babies with the other kids, and he was instantly obsessed. He just kept staring and screaming 'muno', 'brobee'.... Sooooo... like the sucker parents we are, we got a few. They were stupid expensive, but it was totally worth it. Check out this video of how much he loved these things... that makes the price worth it! (We were just glad we hadn't had to buy tickets AND the dolls.)

In the not quite 24 hours we've had these things, Charlie has probably put them down twice. And that wasn't for a long time. While walking to the car after I tried to take them so he wouldn't drop and lose them, but there was absolutely NO question of that.

Thanks friends and anyone who voted to get us these tickets. We had so much fun!

A Post that is Mostly About Halloween...oh and HI, I'm back!

This is me diving back in to blogging after 6+ months, ha. I've decided that it's a good plan not to try to catch up all at once, and I may never really catch up, but I may pepper stuff back in as I have the time and energy. I'd like to jot down a few things before I forget, but we'll see! I really got inspired to try and keep up some tidbits here, as I went back and tried to put together a scrap/photobook of our 2010. This blog helped me so much! You never know if anyone cares or is reading your blog, so sometimes I was just like, 'eh, whatever no one cares.' But after how nice this blog was to help put together a picture book of our year, I truly realized, the person I'm blogging for is mostly me!

The lead up to Halloween I wanted to do all this stuff, but I've actually been pretty busy with a lot of weddings with the photography thing. Which is great, but we didn't get a lot I wanted to in. But we did go over to the pumpkin walk which is like tradition. Charlie is a bit young yet for this, but he did like a few things. The amount of open grass to run in, the kids all around, running away from mom and dad. He didn't get the 'scenes' except one: Tangled. He was absolutely memorized by the Tangled scene.


And we had a melt down and had to leave over the little, I don't know what they're called you put your head through a hole and you're in a scene or whatever, that was of Toy Story. He absolutely was taken with it, but he didn't want any kids to put their faces in! It really upset him, he just wanted to stand at the front and stare at it and touch it. So we had to leave, cuz he kept trying to keep other little kids out of it, which isn't great.


SO here's the thing about Halloween for us... I'm ambivalent about dressing up and all that, I like a good party, but that's it... John won't dress up at all really. He likes eating candy, if that counts for being involved in Halloween. Charlie being little and not knowing if he cares about it or not, basically gets involved to the level we care to, so the last two years we've just kinda had a fun time coming up with random ideas to dress him up as. Year one, he was 10 mths old and had funny patchy hair. We thought he looked like he had a 'comb-over'. That hair started these ideas of an old man costume, which sorta refined into him being 'Benjamin Buttons'... Thus a baby-old man. Haha. This year we knew what Charlie was going to be for a very long time because we've been calling him "Charticus" for ages. I don't know how the nickname started honestly. But probably 6 months ago one of us threw out the idea that he should be like a Spartan warrior/one of the 300 for Halloween - named Charticus of course.

So we printed off some pictures from the internet of like Gerard Butler in "300" and then just pieced together how we'd make a costume. The nice thing was, we NEVER thought he'd be able to actually go outside in his costume. In October it's usually just way too cold to wear most costumes without a coat, let along basically underwear and a cape. But randomly Halloween turned out to be 60+ degrees. Still a little chilly for extended wear of this particular costume, but he ran outside and we took some pictures, and we spent 5-10 minutes at the neighborhood trunk-or-treat. Then we just went to my moms to 'trick or treat' and hung out till bedtime at her house. We were real party animals this year!

This is John and Charlie eating their Halloween hot dogs at the trunk or treat. And John trying to coax Charlie to look at mom and smile.

All in all it was fun, albeit laid back!