The Harrison Spot

finally.

2010-04-13T13:35:00.000-07:00

it has been almost a month since i posted anything. i do have a really good reason for this. our little bundle of boy was born march 26! he was 8 lbs. 6 oz. and 20 in. long. he is already 2.5 weeks old; i cannot believe it. we waited so long for him to get here and now time is flying by.

here are some pics from kase's big day. enjoy.

i don't remember being this big at all! especially now!

kase and gigi

kase and auntie lil

getting to see him for the first time!

finally, a boy!

i love this picture of kase and his big cousin grace.

leaving the hospital.

we had kase's newborn pictures taken when he was a week old. check out the sneak peek at this link: kase's pics it's going to be incredibly hard to pick out which ones to buy and i have only seen the preview so far!

this is no longer normal.

2010-03-16T14:49:00.001-07:00

my school secretary tells me everyday that my "situation," is not normal. i really hadn't noticed how huge this baby was until kyle took this picture. we did find out last week at our appointment that kase has decided to flip over and be a breech baby. i am by no means upset by this. i've read story after story of all of these women who are extremely disappointed that they missed out on the birthing experience by having a c-section.

my point of view: bring. it. on.

missing out on hours of labor and pain does not make me feel like less of a woman. sounds good to me actually. so now the four of us (dogs count as people in our house) are just sitting around waiting on something to happen. if nothing happens then kase will for sure be here on march 26th!

car seat is installed.

(i keep thinking someone is going to see the car seat and

comment on why we are leaving our baby in the car....)

bags are packed and ready to grab.

in the meantime here are some of my new favorite things, check them out:

-the first three are discount websites for mom, baby and kid gear! it is always great stuff and it sells out fast. so be there at 10 a.m. or you'll miss it.)
www.mamabargains.com
www.babysteals.com
www.kidsteals.com

-this is the website of the girl is going to take all of kase's newborn pics. eeek! i am so excited for these pictures i can't stand it! she was exactly what i was looking for! she happens to be the aunt of one of my super-duper kiddos! her stuff is so cute!
www.mollipopphotography.com

flying in first class.

2010-02-24T18:50:00.000-08:00

here are the high demand nursery pics.

we went with a vintage theme. the baby motif's were not really our thing.

it was a lot of work, but we love his nursery.

it's simple; that's how we like things around here.

view from doorway.

changing table, - the changing pad at the moment.

i love his bomber jacket that his auntie lili got him.

close up of the desk/bookshelf area.

crib (thanks grams and pops). basket of books. the little rocking chair was my mom's, then mine and now it will be kase's, the little stick horse in the corner was mine when i was little too. good thing gigi held onto all of that stuff (thanks, mom).

bedding made by gigi. (b's mom). we never found anything we liked, but this is perfect.

quilt.

bumper.

cute play mat also made by gigi. it has all kinds of different ribbons, textures and little toys on it. perfect for baby's touch and feel discoveries.

vintage abacus.

it took forever to find art, but we finally found these at

hobby lobby and snagged them up.

diapers, bottles, and onesies...oh, my.

2010-02-22T16:01:00.000-08:00

here are some pics from shower #1. we have two more to go this week.

one at school and one in ada. all of this is so much fun!

auntie lili (my sis), me, and auntie lainie (my cousin)

my three besties! thanks for a great shower chickies!

i know there were a ton more pictures taken, they just didn't show up on my camera.

if anybody has different pics from the shower, please send them to me!

watch b grow.

2010-02-09T15:47:00.000-08:00

we are finally nearing the end of this whole pregnant thing. yay!

here is a little look back from where i started at to where i am now.

i hope i can get back to the starting point soon. i will have about 9 weeks until summer, right? plenty of time to let jillian michaels kick my butt back into shape....we'll see...

(i'm also cracking up at how much the furniture in this room has been rearranged in the last 8 months)

11 weeks

14 weeks

20 weeks

24 weeks

28 weeks

30 weeks

33 weeks

------------------------------------------------------------------------

one of our concerns right now is trying to prepare our four legged babies for the new human baby. we read that you should start practicing by holding a doll, but gus ignored the doll and zoe figured out it was a toy and wanted to chew on it.

gus has been my cuddle buddy through all of this. we definitely think he knows something is up. he will either be very protective of kase or very jealous. both dogs have been around our nieces a lot and do fine, so we are feeling pretty confident...

zoe, bless her little heart, is definitely the more silly of the two. she will be completely infatuated with kase and have her little nose in his face all of the time.

happy 1st birthday today to our niece emi!

30 weeks.

2010-01-18T16:23:00.000-08:00

here is the requested belly pic.

it is huge.

my back hurts,

i can't reach my toes,

i'm super moody,

always hungry,

but still very excited.

ten more weeks, but i'll be shocked if i make it that long.

i am secretly hoping he makes an early entrance, only if he is healthy of course!

no touchy!

2010-01-11T18:22:00.000-08:00

my dad and stepmom gave us a 4d ultrasound package for christmas. so we and all of our parental units took the afternoon off work to enjoy sometime with our future bundle of joy. we went to miracle within in edmond. we had an hour session scheduled.

well, if an infant can throw a fit in the womb, our child did it. so, either he is just like me and can throw an awesome fit or he is like his dad and is totally chill unless someone really gets under his skin. the first 20 minutes were great, then the tech started poking him and he was not such a fan. here is the play by play of the action:

"oh, look how sweet and innocent I am everybody."

this is where the tech started ticking him off, a.k.a the fit starts.

"leave me alone, please!"

"i'm telling you you better stop it."

"now, i'm officially hating you techy!"

"i told you to stop, now watch me flip over and completely ignore you."

now he is just showing off...this is definitely like his dad.

"don't look at me anymore!"

this is what we saw for the last 40 minutes. the back of this head.

he had definitely had it with the tech. here he has his hand over his shoulder. you can see his ear and the bumpy stuff on his head is hair.

let's play a game

2010-01-07T15:45:00.000-08:00

which extreme would you prefer to be on???

our car this morning....

our car last august...

this is oklahoma weather for ya' though.

silly, mother nature.

the end of 2009.

2009-12-31T13:01:00.000-08:00

this one is a doozy, so I hope you have time to grab a drink and maybe a snack...

santa claus was very generous to us this year. one thing we asked for was a new digital camera. we are pretty sure that we were of the small percentage of people without one, this happened through a course of events that you don't care about. we've just been using our iphones which have worked great for us, but with baby on the way we decided it was time to get with the program. santa brought us a nikon - coolpix (better known as the ashton kutcher camera). it is way awesome. here are just a few play shots kyle took.

the zoe

the gus

the kyle

this is our new project. we know, we know...we have a baby on the way, what in the world are we thinking buying a house to flip? especially when only one of us is really able to do the "flipping," due to my "being with child" situation. it was just one of those things we couldn't pass up. we've also decided that our new camera does this joint way to much justice. the house is 53 years old and has been occupied with renters...trust me it is bad. we were finally able to get to work on it last monday, so here are the pics of the house when we first got our hands on it and after three days of demo.

front of house

view from the front door

current view from the front door after we demolished a wall

kitchen. it is wayyyy nas-tay! it will be demolished and replaced with new cabinets.

hallway

awesome peach colored hall bathroom.

extra room 1

extra room 2

master bedroom

master bathroom

kyle taking a break...it was well deserved he did most of the demolition on his own with me supervising.

lili and lainie painting the hallway bath

mom painting one of the extra bedrooms.

we've removed a lot of trim in all of our diy work, but the trim in this house was by far the hardest stuff to get off that we have ever seen. they didn't mess around in 1956.

removed the paneling from the dining room and hallway.

look mom, wood floors! we were wayyyy stoked to find wood floors throughout the entire house. unfortunately they have been covered up by disgusto renter carpet for who knows how long. they really weren't as bad as they looked once we cleaned up the mess from the carpet padding.

kitchen finally finished

i thought i would finish this up with the final shots on our kitchen renovation. if you remember from this post and this post, last summer we started a kitchen remodel in our old house. it has been a long 6 months, once school started back and all of the baby craze we didn't have the time or energy to accomplish much. we decided to take the cheaper route because of the baby costs that are taking over our finances. we tracked down our old doors that we had sold in our garage sale and painted them. thank goodness for xmas break, it is finally finished!

this was the last thing. if you have purchased many a faucet you know those babies are not cheap. i found this one brand new at a garage sale in our neighborhood last summer for $5. kyle installed it today in 1 hour (we are both very proud of him).

whew, that was a long one. good way to finish off the year though!

bring on 2010.

Baby, It's Cold Outside

2009-12-06T19:08:00.000-08:00

24 week belly pic

it is officially winter here. my favorite season, mainly because of christmas. it just makes me super-duper happy. in ada we were the only house on our block to have our house decked out in lights, but this year we didn't make it that far. this year we were just too darn worn out to get it done, we just put out our wreaths and cute lighted topiary trees. we are however throughly enjoying all of our neighbor's lights. one night we were driving home from work later than usual and ended up taking western just to get away from the highway traffic. while driving we stumbled upon chesapeake energy's awesome tree lights. my little iphone pic doesn't do it justice, you have got to see this for yourself. it is ah-mazing.

here is the crib winner! love it!

Nursery

2009-11-29T15:19:00.001-08:00

kase's nursery is coming along. it's more my style to keep it simple and that's what i am going for with his nursery, i just had to finally make a decision on something. the colors will be chocolate brown and deeper shades of red, blue, gold and green (see fabric below).

the people we bought our house from had 3 little girls, so all of our extra bedrooms were extremely girlie. since we are having a boy this girl thing just isn't going to work any longer. the room we chose to use as the nursery was painted pink on top and green on the bottom (see pic). this room has been kyle's game/man room (apparently pink and flowers worked for him...hehe).

it also had flowers painted all over the ceiling.

we chose to leave the green on the bottom and paint the top tawny, which is just taupe/khaki.

and ta-da! much more boyish!

this glider was my craigslist find. we love it! it was the exact one i was going to order!

no more flowers!

these are the fabrics that we are going to use. i loved them the moment i saw them! they are the perfect colors! i really didn't like anything that i saw at the baby stores, so my mom is going to make all of the crib bedding and accessories.

this is the inspiration crib bedding. except, where they have stripes i am going to use the argyle fabric above and in place of their large polka dots i am using the cream fabric above with the little dots. the other fabrics will be accents in the room.

this jar of pickles was a gift from my friend jade and her family. i think this is the cutest idea! in the future my pregnant friends will probably be receiving scrapbooked pickle jars.

my poor child currently has about 10 pairs of shoes...but how can anyone resist them!?

he may not have everything, but he will have stylish footwear.

boots, a necessity of every infant, right?

20 Weeks

2009-11-10T16:52:00.001-08:00

20 week belly pic. everything about being pregnant is just weird. don't get me wrong, it's wonderful (now that i'm not sick) but it is still weird. the weight gain has started, luckily it is all belly right now. i can live with that.

here are the cribs that we have picked out:

they are all pretty similar, the one on the top is my favorite. we'll see, i need to survive christmas and then we will get serious about baby furniture. if i could i would buy baby stuff all day long, i am attempting to pace myself. so. hard. i want him to have everything!

ooo boy, i love you so

2009-10-30T12:07:00.000-07:00

it took forever, but the 18 week ultrasound finally got here! obviously...it's a BOY!

i woke up at 5:30 and started drinking all of the liquids i could so we would get the best picture. i read to drink and eat sugary stuff so the baby would move around. when i went to look everything we have is sugar free...the only time this has been a problem for me! we did have diet d.p. so i chose that and thought the caffeine might help a little. it helped a little too much, he was wiggling and flipping the whole time, but she finally got a view at the goods.

Clark, Fuller or Garth???

2009-10-27T16:24:00.000-07:00

we attended ben and kelsey's annual halloween party last saturday. the theme was to dress like a celebrity that passed away this year or a character from a movie who's director passed away. i chose to go as a pregnant girl, i feel pretty dead lately and i'm famous right??? kyle decided to go as clark griswold from christmas vacation. i felt though he looked a little more like fuller from home alone and at one point he had on a blonde wig and he looked exactly like garth from wayne's world.

you can decide:

i made witch fingers and pumpkin fudge. so good...yet so bad. i can't stop eating them.

be my, be my, be my little baby

2009-10-20T14:38:00.000-07:00

what am i? boy or girl?

vote in our poll!

whoo-hoo! i want to scream and shout! one more week until we get to find out if we are having a boy or a girl! ultrasound is set for next friday, the 30th at 9 a.m. we also chose to take the whole day off to celebrate!

yesterday was our third baby check-up. i love going so much. it is such a relief to hear the heartbeat. i hate going for a month at a time not knowing what's going on down there. the heartbeat was 155 this time and 176 last time. it is still pretty high...i am told this means girl but not getting my hopes up i really have no clue what it is going to be and to be honest don't care either way, i just want to KNOW!

14 weeks.

2009-10-08T17:41:00.000-07:00

14 week pics, but i am actually 15 weeks this weekend. yay. it feels like forever and still forever to go. 3 weeks to go until we find out if it is a boy or a girl. we have picked names. boy will be patrick kale (will go by kale), girl will be sloane alexandra. we were having a heck of a time picking names. it seemed like we didn't like anything that the other person liked. so, we compromised, kyle got to pick the boy and i got the last say on the girl. now if baby h will just be a girl so i can win....hehe.

at 12 weeks all of the morning sickness disappeared. i have an occasional hit of it still, but nothing like the first trimester. thank you lord for taking that away. i'm finally enjoying this. my belly is large enough now that you can tell i am prego and not just do that she might be or she might not???

11 Weeks Pregnant

2009-09-09T18:00:00.000-07:00

these were taken about 20 minutes apart. in the bottom picture kyle insisted that i put on my convict-mug shot face. after i saw the picture i thought it was to serious. so I made him retake it with a happy smiling one.

whether you can see it or not, i promise there is a little bump there. it is keeping my pants from buttoning already, not cool baby h, but i guess i will let it slide.

Just updating.

2009-08-25T16:41:00.000-07:00

i have pretty much done everything just short of throwing the computer against the wall. blogger wants me to login with just my google id. i have never used my google id to login and it would not let me sign out to be able to put in the correct information.

argh.

technology.

anyways it is fixed now and i can finally update.

things that have happened in the last month:

we started school 3 weeks ago.

we miss ada a ton.

2nd grade is not my favorite, i miss my big kids.

i hate traffic.

i miss 3 minute drives to work.

oh, and i am pregnant! What?!

the two of us found out about two-three weeks ago, but chose to keep it a secret until we could go to the doctor. that day was finally today! it took forever to get here!

my ob/gyn sent me to get an ultrasound because she couldn't determine the exact due date. luckily the ultrasound people fit me in. we got to see the little bean, watch its heartbeat and hear the heartbeat too! it was so surreal.

the ultrasound tech puts me at 8 weeks and 2 days. baby harrison is due 4/4/2010. this is all too weird right now, but very exciting. the timing is perfect! i won't have to go back to school and i will have a new baby to play with! we should find out in 10 more weeks what the baby's gender is. i have no idea and am not leaning one way or the other.

it is so exciting! here is a video and the first pics of baby h.

waking up in vegas....

2009-07-31T18:17:00.000-07:00

i realize how long it has been since i updated. we have been so busy! i know this looks long, but there are a lot of pics. i tried to keep my jabber minimal.

the a.c. did get fixed. i spent the week after that preparing for a garage sale. this seriously took all week. we had a lot of stuff. a lot. and we did extremely well, so it was completely worth it!

so once we cleaned up it was time to head off to adam and kayla's wedding. too much fun with close friends. it was a beautiful, creative wedding.

me, tatum, kayla and faye.

sistas' from anotha' motha'

THE VEGAS

for father's day we got p-daddy tickets to the haunted las vegas tour. we are all into the ghost shows and haunted houses, except for kyle...he is a scaredy-cat. it was a little cheesy, but quite fun. we learned lots of interesting facts and all about the haunts in the vegas area. our tour guide has a day job of being an undertaker. creepy....
when we checked in we all received dousing rods or witching sticks. the point is to hold the sticks parallel to the ground about 10 inches apart. when they start spinning around on their own in your hand, you are apparently getting ghostly activity. the scary thing is it really worked, well they spun on their own, i don't know if there were ghosties or not. this picture was taken at a park down the street from wayne newton's house. this park was haunted because several bodies have been found there and supposedly they have all hung around. also, it was like 110 degrees there at night and the ground at the park was freezing. it was very strange.

this is part of wayne's estate. there was a house built across the street from his main gate that is supposedly haunted. apparently, some drug lords started building it and selling drugs out of it before it was completed. a 16 year old girl went missing from the same neighborhood and her body was found in the incomplete house. apparently, she was killed in some drug lord war or something... anyways, the house was never finished after that. the story is that the girl haunts the house. we were shown pictures of the house in day and at night. during the day it looked like a normal house, but at night it was covered in orbs (ghost talk). the killing took place like 18 years ago and numerous realtor's have listed it with no success. people that look at the house always come out saying it was hard to breathe and they felt like they were being strangled. the even freakier part of this story is that the address is 6660 pecos. the realtor's would move the address numbers up and down just to attempt some interest in it.

we stayed at the bellagio this time. this is one of my absolute favorite casino/hotels on the strip. it is just beautiful! we discovered that they also have the world's largest chocolate fountain. here is a pic of the guinness world record certificate. the fountain had all of these glass platters that three different types of chocolate ribbon down. it is absolutely stunning.

the best part of the bellagio is the decor. the ceiling in the lobby is covered in thousands of glass flowers. they are just stunning, no matter how many times i enter that building, i never get tired of seeing this ceiling.

the other great thing is the conservatory that changes with the seasons. all of the decorations are made of flowers and are just unbelievable. the fountain was made of flowers.
this time there was a green house in the center of the room. you could walk into it and it was filled with birds.

water tunnels. no, they are not in tubes. it was funny to watch people that would walk by and stick their hands into the water to see if it was real. the water sprayed all over them. well, that's what they get.
bird in the green house.

on the last day we finished up with some back to school shopping. my job was to keep gracie occupied while grams and jana shopped for her. we pretty much walked around and put funny hats on our heads and tried to talk jana into buying them for her. this was at gymboree. what 2 year old doesn't need a beret? we got bored and watched the tv they had setup for kids. i just do what i am told. so we were sitting there watching cartoons and i heard jana ask where the girls where? the gymboree lady responds by telling her that two of her kids are watching tv. bahaha. this made patty and i crack up, i don't think jana was too happy.

we got home from the vegas way late and then our time was so screwed up living on vegas time so we ended up with very little sleep and then we had to be at work in moore at 8:00. i feel as though things have been crazy since the a.c. debacle and this is the first time i have actually relaxed. yeah, i realize i was just on vacation, but there is very little time to rest in vegas, so much to do.

okay, we are all caught up for now!

feelin' hot, hot hot!

2009-07-15T15:22:00.000-07:00

i wrote this in red to emphasize how hot it currently is.

this was the view in my car yesterday.... ridiculous

we took a lil' trip to moore this morning, actually i do this a lot of mornings, to work in my classroom. i made kyle-boy go along to help unload my fridge. anywho...when we got home it was apparent our a/c was not working...big bummer because at this exact moment our buddies at the weather channel are telling us it is 104 out and pushing 90 in the house. not cool at all dudes (pun intended).

so after perusing the phonebook and calling every repairman from here to the county line, we finally found one very nice old man who has been outside for the last two hours telling us that the whole system needs to be replaced, yet he is continuing to try to get it to jump-start until tomorrow so we can decide how to afford this little detour.

so much for getting the kitchen done relatively soon. :( my granite countertops are going to have to wait a little while. i'll keep you updated.

Ta Da!

2009-07-12T19:46:00.000-07:00

whew! what a mess! we spent the entire day yesterday painting the kitchen. we had to pull everything out of the cabinets. which made another mess. i did get to de-clutter, which is sadly one of the things i really like to do. anything that we have not used in the last three years is getting the boot. we had a lot of help moving into our house (which i am very thankful for), but i have had no clue where a lot of our stuff is. now, we know where everything is and what we actually have.

the goal is to make this area look more like a built in hutch. there will doors on the bottom and the top center. we are going to leave the top outer cabinets open and use the shelves. i got this idea from a magazine, i have no shame in using someone else's designs.
today we took a little trip to builder's warehouse. fun place if you are into that kind of thing. we are definitely going with the white subway tiles for the backsplash. i know that is a lot of white, white tiles, white backsplash...but it is going to look great!

i like the one in the center, kyle likes the dark one on the top. what do you think? the tile behind all of this is what is on our floor.

-i have been notified by several people that our comment section is not working. this should be fixed, so try it again. :)

everything old is new again.

2009-07-09T20:16:00.000-07:00

if you know me you know i cannot sit still for more than 5 minutes and i have to be doing something at all times. well, kyle made the mistake of leaving me alone one day, so i took it upon myself to take the hammer to the kitchen and start my next project.

here is what we started with:

it may not look that bad to you, but trust me a 50 year old kitchen that has had nothing done to it can be quite gross. you just can't see it.
i attempted to hammer off the scroll -ey (sp?) molding above the window and got it most of the way, but kyle had to finish it off for me. this is after we took off all of the cabinet doors and sanded down the bases and drawers. it looks a little p.w.t (poor-white-trash) at the moment, but i have a vision.
kyle put us on budgets for the summer and my weekly allowance went to this beautiful baby, i am referring to the paint sprayer. it is awesome! such a clean finish! i did do a lot of work too! we had a hard time sharing the spray gun.
this is as far as we got tonight. no more golden 60's stain for us. thank the lord! i hated it!

just wait until we get done with it.

wickedly, wonderful weekend.

2009-07-06T18:40:00.000-07:00

whew, what a weekend we had. i took a spur of the moment trip friday to ikea in frisco, tx. i am totally in love and sold on ikea. so much stuff, such a little price. some of my great finds include laundry room hamper/clothes sorter for 2.00, cute napkins for .49, new kitchen knives for 4.00, duvet to accent our bedroom for 19.00, outdoor rugs for 9.00. like i said it is wonderful.

all of these items are necessities of course. ;)

saturday i was up bright and early for the fireball. i placed seventh overall and 2nd in my age group. which i am totally cool with. what i am not okay with is the number of people that registered as walkers and chose to run. i like to call this cheating. it is just not right to those of us that kick our booty's to win the walking part of the classic only to be bamboozled out of our correct walking placement.

...totally kidding, but seriously, seriously? anyways, ada rotary will be hearing my complaint. from what i have been told though quite a few have already had a gripe session.

we spent the afternoon at our friend's nate and susie. we taught with them in ada and all four of us moved to the city this summer. well, actually they live in choctaw, but it is close to the city. we had planned to go to uco to watch fireworks, but because of the sudden weather change we did not. instead, we decided to have a small cookout with adam, kayla, ben and kelsey. we ate, played games and ate some more.

sunday i recovered from my crazy weekend and kyle did the golf thing.

today we worked in my classroom again. it is finally getting there. i did bring home a yucky, old, yellow rocking chair left in my room and am in the process of painting it pink. i will post a pic of how it turns out. that's all for now!

One of the best things

2009-07-02T13:24:00.000-07:00

about moving into a new house is all of the wonderful house-warming presents we have gotten. like these really cute plates from my wonderful friend Vanessa. i think they are adorable!

or this really cute table and mirror from mi madre.

there are lots more, but this is all i had time to snap on my way out the door for a-town. i promise to do everyone justice when i get home!

i am walking in the annual fireball classic. i just do the walking 5k and have participated in it for the last 5 years. last summer i even got first place female in the 5k...let's hope i can keep my streak going! wish me luck!

everything is new.

2009-06-30T17:01:00.000-07:00

we have had this blog for a couple of months now and you would think that two people with nothing to do would be able to create their blog. we have actually been quite busy though! we moved from Ada to Oklahoma City. the problem with being a teacher is that when you move you don't just have your home to move, but a whole classroom worth of stuff and in our case two whole classrooms. whew, what a mess, luckily everything is finally organized...for the most part.

here is our new house in The Village. it is a pretty old house, but we love all of the character!

when we moved in our flower beds had been completely dug up by the previous owners leaving only ugly bushes and huge holes behind.

evidence a.

evidence b.

a lot of our time, money and energy has gone into landscaping our yard. here are some pics of the latest.