Merry Christmas!

Wishing you and yours a very, very blessed Christmas.

Love, the Martins

These Are the Moments

Landon is just waking up from his nap. I am in the bedroom and he started cooing on the monitor. Savannah picked up the monitor and is talking to Landon through it:

"Landon? Can you hear me? It's me, your big sister. Savannah? I love you. Can you talk to me? I know you can hear me, why are you not talking? Landon? Guess where we're going? We're going to grandma's houuuuse. Isn't that exciting? Can you hear me? I love you. You're my baby brother."

Landon starts cooing some more. The he calls for daddy. Then Savannah says:

"Haha, Landon, you are so funny. I love you so much. We'll come and get you right now. Are you ready to get up? We'll see you soon! I love you!"

Melts my heart.

Fall Fun!

This past weekend when we were in Ocala, we headed down to the pumpkin patch! This is the third year in a row we have gone there- last year was a bust, we were late in the season and all the pumpkins were picked over and Landon wanted NOTHING to do with them! It was more fun this year, both kids really had a lot of fun running around with the pumpkins and playing on the play ground. Landon even got over his fear of sliding by himself and loved going down the curvy slide!

Siblings.

My handsome John Deere boy.

She loves her little brother!

My pretty girl.

So much for the shy girl who would never smile for the camera!

'Cheese!'

On Monday Landon's best friend (and Savannah's future husband, according to her!) Logan came over- and they boys were wearing the same shirt! They looked so cute, we had to get some pictures.

My little rocker boy.

Best friends :)

The boys, matching and holding hands.

Gro Baby Diapers

The Natural Baby Company has just introduced another great new product, that I'm going to be trying for free!

The new Gro Baby Bio Soaker System is quite possibly the most innovative, eco friendly, and leak proof system on the market today. They have these awesome biodegradable soaker pads that you can use instead of disposables when you're out and about if you don't want to bring your cloth inserts with you. These shells are already designed to be used multiple times between washes, so this disposable soaker makes the system even more versatile. All you have to do is stick the bio soaker pad into the Gro Baby shell, put it on and go! It easily removes once it is soiled, so you can just stick a new one in and keep going!

The soaker pads are: Biodegradable & Compostable , Breathable & Hypo-Allergenic, Fragrance & Dye Free, Plastic Free, and Chlorine Free which means they are very gentle on our babies delicate skin. And great on the environment too! These won't be filling up landfills like regular disposable diapers do.

You can purchase these great soaker pads here:http://www.thenaturalbabyco.com/gro-baby-biodegradable-soaker-pads-p-745.html

And if you're totally new to the Gro Baby diapering system, you might want to consider trying the Gro Baby Bio Soaker Intro Package which comes with the 50 soaker pads in addition to the one size Gro Baby shell that you will need to use the pads.

This awesome shell fits babies from 8-35 pounds! So they will fit Landon now, and when we have a third baby I'll be able to reuse them all! All I have to do is adjust the snaps in the front which will change the rise of the diaper and I'm good to go! I love how versatile the sizing is! You definitely can't do that with disposable diapers... just another reason I love cloth diapering- you really get so much more for your money!

You can find the package here:http://www.thenaturalbabyco.com/gro-baby-bio-soaker-intro-package-p-762.html

Just a Mom

At the Florida/Tennessee game a few weeks ago, Julie and I were in the most ridiculously cramped seats, ever. There was a guy to my right, and I was practically sitting in his lap, poor guy! He said to me, "As long as we are so close, we should get to know each other," and asked me what I did for a living. I told him I am just a mom.

Julie got on me for that, saying that there is so much more to what I do than "just a mom". It made me think- when did I start buying into the societal idea that stay-at-home-moms sit on the couch eating bon-bons and watching soap operas all day? Heck, I don't even know what bon-bons are! And I haven't watched my soaps in ages. So I started thinking, what is it that I do, really?

I started as a vessel, carrying life inside me, nurturing it and loving those unborn babies. It was a good trade off- they got life, and I got an excuse to consume as many cheeseburgers and chocolate milkshakes as I wanted for 9 months. I gave birth, bringing those tiny babies into the world, and knowing my life would never be the same. I nursed them until their bellies were full, changed their diapers and rocked them to sleep in the dead of night.

I am a teacher, giving to them all the knowledge that my parents gave to me. I am a cheerleader, giving encouragement as they rolled over, sat up, crawled, walked, ran, climbed for the first time, and the second and third.

I am a Sunday School teacher, teaching them about God, where they came from and where they are ultimately going. I am teaching them to love Him as much as He loves them, as if that is even possible.

I am a maid. If I hired a cleaning service to come in, they would send a team of four to do what I do on a daily basis. I am a handy(wo)man, fixing little things around the house. I work hard on a daily basis to maintain the home that my husband works so hard to provide for us. Except for those days where I stay in my jammies and cuddle with my kids all day.

I am a vehicle, giving piggy back rides all day long. I am one-third of an all day rendition of Ring around the Rosie. I have bruises on my knees from falling down. I am a little teapot. I am a hider, and a seeker. I am a comedienne, I am a tickle monster, I have cramps at the end of the day from laughing so hard.

I am an archeologist, unearthing fossilized milk cups from deep inside toy boxes. I am a gourmet chef- of chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese. I am a narrator, reading stories our loud all day long. I am a pop star, belting out Disney songs and nursery rhymes.

I am their best friend, their best advocate. I am their voice to the outside world. I am imparting on them now the most important things they will learn in their lives. Because one day Savannah will be a mom, and she will have learned how to do it from me. And Landon. The lessons I am teaching him today will shape the man he will become tomorrow. It is my hope that one day, his wife will thank me for who he is, the way I am so thankful to Janice for the man Brad has become.

I have loved God my whole life, in the way that your parents teach you to pray and praise and love Him. But it wasn't until I became a parent that I had an inkling of how He feels for us, His children. And when I became a parent, I developed a real relationship with Him, talking and praying to Him. And I hope more than anything that I can instill that love into my children.

To the outside world, it may look like I don't do a lot. And in the grand scheme of the world, maybe I don't. But to my kids, I am everything. And they are everything to me.

The next time someone asks me what I do, I will tell them I am a mom. Not 'just' a mom, but a mom. Because my resume is too long to give to a stranger passing by. I will say I am a Mom, and I will know it is the most important job I will have in my life.

A New Post and a New Look!

I made a few blog changes this morning, and I am really liking them! I still need to update the family pictures on the side, but I am loving the overall new scheme of the blog- I hope you do, too!

Fall is upon us, which in the Martin house means Football Season! And football season is always the busiest time of year for us, thus the lack of blog updates recently. The last few weeks have been away games or an off week so we have been home, but that doesn't mean anything slows down around here! Jaime and her family came down the weekend of the Kentucky game to to newborn pictures for my bestest, then Brad's parents were here for the off week, and Chris and Julie came down this past weekend for lSU. And now it is back to traveling!

I have also been working with my sister and her photography business and while the last few weeks have been quiet for me, we have a few shoots coming up that we will be doing together, so all my free time is no longer free! But I love being busy, especially at this time of year.

The kids are doing really well, keeping busy. They are best friends right now, which is a nice change from the constant fighting of a few months ago! Landon is learning so many new words and really expressing himself, which is so much fun. I love the age that he is at, I really think it is my favorite age. Three is fun too, but the learning at 1 1/2 is so exciting!

I'll upload some new pictures soon, I promise!

Loving His Cloth Tushie

I am loving his cloth tushie :) It actually makes diaper changes, well not quite enjoyable but still fun to put all the cute diapers on Landon's bum. This is my FAVORITE diaper just because it is a Twilight diaper! It was actually the first diaper I bought, when Weslie sent a link to me. I couldn't pass it up- it was even before I had talked to Brad about switching to cloth! So you could say this is the diaper that inspired it all.



It is hard to get him to sit still to get a good shot of it!


A very good friend of mine is launching a cloth diaper website in a few weeks and is having a cover baby contest, so below are a few shots I took to submit to the contest. I am SO in love with them, regardless of the contest! I am so glad that she inspired me to take them in the first place. Now I need to replicate these with his camouflage diaper!

Fluffy Butts

My best friend Weslie has been using cloth diapers on her daughter Avery for about a year now. I had actually thought about starting with Landon when he was an infant but there were so many different brands and types of diapers that I got overwhelmed and gave up. When the kids and I spent a week at Weslie's in April, I was able to see the whole process of cloth diapers and started thinking about it again in the back of my head. I mentioned it to Brad in July, that I was thinking of maybe doing cloth diapers whenever we have another baby, but the thought of jumping into something I wasn't familiar with on a newborn with a preschooler and toddler was a bit daunting. Landon is no where near ready for potty training, so I am figuring we have at least another year of diapers for him, so he became my guinea pig.

There are a lot of different websites that offer trial packs, where they send you a variety of cloth diapers (you'd be amazed if you knew how many different options there are!) but I know myself and knew that the pockets were the way to go. Basically a pocket diaper has microfiber inserts that you stuff into an opening at the back of the diaper, and take out for washing. Super simple, and after washing I go ahead and stuff the inserts back in, so the diapers are just as ready to go as disposables are.

We have been using the cloth diapers since we got back from our trip to North Carolina. We are loving it so far. Landon has pretty sensitive skin, he had some eczema issues on his bum and has had a lot of issues with diaper rash and the cloth diapers have been great! He used to wake up in the morning in a wet diaper and his skin would be all wet, but the cloth diapers pull in all the moisture and his skin is always dry in the mornings. It is crazy what a difference that alone makes. He seems to like them- he still tries to take them off all the time but that is just Landon being Landon :) I am so glad we made the switch and am really looking forward to using them on or next baby, too. And the best part is, the diapers I have bought for Landon are One Size- they are adjustable so they actually fit babies from 5-40 pounds. So everything I've got now can be reused on the next baby, too!

Photos from the Remodel

I didn't do a very good job of taking before pictures when we decided to start tearing out the floor and walls, so I had to go back and find some random shots that did a decent job of showing what things used to look like- so bear with me!

This picture shows the wall we took out. It came around the corner behind Savannah into an archway that led into the kitchen, and there was a pass through looking towards the dining room table. It also shows the old paint color, which I hated!

And here is how open the area looked when we took down the wall! I am so glad we decided to do that, it makes the house so much more open!!

Now these next two pictures show the floors before. The carpet was so nice when we first moved in. But since our back yard had gotten to torn up by the dogs before we redid the sod, they tracked endless amounts of dirt inside and there was no coming back from that! Brad and I had actually intended to put hardwood throughout the house when we built, but opted to do just the kitchen and by the front door, and put the other money towards upgraded countertops. In hindsight I am so glad we did, because I like our new floors so much better!

Here is Brad taking up the floors in the kitchen. Like I said in the last post, the laminate was glued right to the concrete subfloor. It was such a nightmare to get it up!! I stopped counting how many trash bins we filled that week.

And the floors after! This is looking from the kitchen out. This is before we had the drywall repaired and put the island in. You can also see the new paint color- it brightens the house so much!

Looking from the stairs at the new floors and paint. The couches are the next thing to be replaced!

And another shot of the new paint color. I love it so much! The doors and trim all got a fresh coat of paint too.

And here is the after picture of the island. This is taken from the same angle as the one of the missing wall above. Our handyman had some issues with the ceiling, because the kitchen and dining room ceilings aren't exactly level, so he installed a 1x10" beam across the ceiling. I actually love it, I wasn't sure how it would look but it adds definition to the room. Shawn and Brad installed pendant lights over the island. and I am waiting on my new IKEA pot rack too. They also covered the island with mosaic tiles, which I just love. Originally we were just going to tile the top, but Shawn had the idea to do the back too and it is beautiful! We are going to add tiles to the side at some point too, to finish it off.

Since we no longer had a wall separating the rooms, the kitchen that used to be pale blue got painted the same color as the rest of the house.

So I added an accent wall! I love the orange with the blue countertops and white cabinets!

Here is the front of the island. The cabinets are HUGE! They are so deep and wide, and the drawers are fantastic! I don't know how we survived before IKEA came to Tampa! We had looked at cabinets at Lowe's, but we got a much better set of cabinets at IKEA for less than we would have paid at Lowe's.

Back in March we had some palm trees and Birds of Paradise installed out front, and I realized I had never posted a picture of it! Brad was mowing while I took this, so the grass is super tall but the trees are just beautiful! They add some much needed shade, and keep the inside of the house a lot cooler, too.

Under Construction

What a busy, busy spring and summer we have had!!! It all started back the week before Easter when Brad and I decided to start some home improvement projects. There was a pointless wing wall that separated our kitchen and dining room, so we decided to take it down! We popped into one of the under construction houses across the street to be sure it wasn't a load bearing wall, and then we started whacking away! It was a lot of fun tearing out the drywall- Savannah helped too! Brad used a reciprocating saw to cut out the 2x4's and then we had a very dusty house!

The main reason we took the wall out when we did was because we had planned to redo the floors in the house over Memorial Day weekend. A few weeks after Easter, after we had moved the aquarium upstairs, I was repainting all the walls in the main areas of the house. I HATED to color it was painted when we moved in, but Brad refused to redo them until we decided to do these other projects but I had the responsibility of doing the actual painting. Let me tell you, painting is not easy to do with kids running around all day!. I actually got it done pretty quickly and the color is FANTASTIC, I absolutely love it and it is exactly what I wanted two years ago!

Anyway, while I was painting one afternoon, I happened to look up and there was a softball sized pocket of water in the ceiling right over where the couch is. And it was dripping on the floor! I freaked out, thinking the aquarium was going to come through the ceiling! I called Brad at work and of course he didn't answer so I had to have the receptionist page him for an emergency over the intercom- he was freaking out thinking there was an emergency with the kids- but he rushed home after telling me how to turn off the water to the tank. Luckily that stopped the leak and the bubble dried up. Later that night I was in the kitchen fixing dinner when suddenly there was a huge gush of water from one of the can lights in the kitchen ceiling!! Easily 2 gallons of water just poured out into the kitchen! We were very fortunate that it didn't start an electrical fire!!

So we had a plumber come out and wouldn't you know he couldn't find ANYTHING wrong. Our assumption was that Brad had dumped tank water into the sink upstairs, which maybe burst a pipe over the kitchen SO we shut off the water upstairs. The plumber was great, he stayed for over 2 hours trying everything he could think of to find any signs of water leakage and there was nothing. I even let him cut into the drywall in the kitchen ceiling and there was NO signs of any water being present, ever!! Even the water that came through the light should have left some kind of marks and there wasn't any evidence of anything happening! It was very frustrating but then we felt pretty lucky that the damage was minor. All we had were 3 holes in the ceiling, but we had other drywall repair projects so that wasn't a huge deal.

So over Memorial Day weekend Jaime, Shawn and Madalyn came down and the boys put new laminate wood floors down in all the main areas of the house- the loft and hall upstairs, kitchen, dining room and living room downstairs. They look fantastic! They are light wood and do so much to brighten the house up. It is such a difference, I am so glad we did it! It was a nightmare prepping for it... we had laminate floors in the kitchen and by the front door already... usually when you put laminate floors down you put an underlayment between the new floors and the subflooring. The geniuses who built our house didn't do that... they actually GLUED the laminate floors to the CONCRETE slab below. Really?! Luckily we had started taking them out a week before Memorial Day, if we had waited until the last minute we never would have gotten it done. It took us a solid week to get the old floors up- I worked on them all day and Brad got right to it after dinner. We actually weren't finished when Shawn got here Friday night! We had to literally sit on the floor and hack at the old floors with a flathead screwdriver and hammer. The old wood would actually split and splinter. It was awful. But totally worth it for how the floors look now.

Two weeks later, the Swanson's came back down- Jaime and I were shooting a wedding in St Petersburg- so the boys started another project- a custom island in the kitchen. We bought some awesome cabinets from the new IKEA that opened in Tampa, and Shawn and Brad tiled it with mosaic tiles. Shawn put an electrical outlet in it, and hung pendant lights over it for us. It looks awesome and gave me some much needed counter and cabinet space! The island is technically a peninsula, attached to one wall but is 72" long and I think 24" wide. I LOVE it.

So after all those projects were finished, we brought in a handyman to do our drywall repairs. We had the spot over the couch, the spaces in the ceiling from the plumber, as well as a lot of wall spots from taking the wing wall and arches down. It was a 3 day process the week before the 4th of July but our handyman was great and did a fantastic job for us. After the weekend of the 4th I painted the new drywall and we are DONE! I have a few more touch up spots to paint but the big projects are out of the way and our house looks awesome. We now have a 100% original house in a cookie cutter neighborhood!

The reason it has taken me so long to update all this is because when I went to update a month or so ago, I had gotten a bug in my photo software and almost lost all my pictures! I had just backed up but it was scary for a few days trying to figure it out!! Of course now I am posting this from the computer without the pictures but I will do another post soon with all the photos of the new house. I can't wait for you all to see it!! And of course I need to do a long update on Landon and Savannah, too!!

A Year in the Making

Our home builders liked to cut corners here and there, as we have discovered in the last two years since we moved into our house. One thing that they were very up front about was that they only put St. Augustine sod in the front and side yards when they build- the back yards get Bahaia. It wasn't so bad when we first moved in, but it didn't take too long for the two big dogs running around the yard to turn the entire back into a dirt pit. Which means bugs, and dirt tracked through the house. This is a big part of what happened to our carpet (but that is for another post). 

Another issue was, they only put the irrigation system in the front and side yards, too. So not only did we have terrible grass back there, but we couldn't even water it easily! So it got drier and drier and more torn up by the dogs. This is what our back yard looked like a year ago:

(taken from Landon's bedroom window)

We rented a sod cutter machine thing from Home Depot and Brad got to work tearing up the "grass" to get ready for our first major home improvement project. It was miserably hot and a very messy job!

On Memorial Day weekend last year, Jaime and Shawn came down and the boys got to work. They irrigated the whole back yard, and we had 4 pallets of St Augustine sod trucked in.

It was a miserably hot weekend and the boys worked their tails off.

I have been wanting to do this update for ages, but it took a while for the sod to all grow in. There was a strip along the back fence that still had the old grass and it took a while for the St Augustine to grow over it. There are still a few bare-ish spots from the dogs running around but I guess that can't be avoided. But here is the yard a year later and looking 1000 times better than before!!

(taken from Savannah's bedroom window)

Introducing.....

Edward!!!

Edward is a 9 week old mini-dachshund puppy and my surprise Mother's Day present from Brad and the kids. I absolutely adore him. He is a pocket puppy, the perfect addition to our crazy house full of pets and kids. The funniest part is, he looks JUST like Boone- everyone who has seen him so far has thought he is a lab! It would be just our luck to find out the breeder misidentified him!! 

He is so sweet, and the kids absolutely adore him. Savannah is slightly obsessed with him. She wants to carry him around all day, and will pick him up even when the poor thing is sound asleep. She even insists that he help tuck her in at night. Move over Melman, there is a new man in Savannah's life!

Landon thinks he is hilarious, and spends the whole day waving and saying, "Hi!" Landy is so gentle with Edward too, once I taught him how to stroke his fur gently he has been so sweet. I love Edward so much, the best Mother's Day present ever!!