Aidan's First Haircut


Since Aidan was about 6 months old, I've been trimming his hair at home by myself, which was fine when it just needed to be trimmed a little by his ears or to remove the 80's "rat tail" from the back. Now that he's getting older and his hair is getting thicker I decided it was time to stop putting it off and finally get it cut for real. I figured since we had to come home to NY for a NYE wedding tonight anyway that we would get it done while home in NY.

Sooo.....meet John the Barber. Not only has he cut Ryan's hair since he was little, he was also the DJ at our wedding (gotta love small towns). We made it to him just in time today to get Aidan in line for his first cut by Daddy's barber before he closed for the day. Uncle "Ama" even managed to catch up with us and take some pics of the big event !!!

I was a little worried since we had 3 men in front of us in line that he might get fussy during a long wait and refuse to cooperate but he was quite content to play with some cars that John had in a play area, and drive them across the other customer's laps in the waiting area. Oh how my kid loves to make friends!

When it was finally Aidan's turn he sat on my lap and was only slightly squirmy. We made sure he had his hands out from under the cape and was able to still play with the cars, and he did great! Every once in a while he said "down please" and when John would turn the clippers off he would say "all done". But all in all, he was so well-behaved!!! John even filled an envelope with hair clippings for me and told us that the first one is always free.  He was very excited to have been able to cut Aidan's hair since we have such a history with him.

Aidan now looks like a little man, and I love his new big boy haircut!!

New Baby Names

   So with Aidan the name decision was super easy. I mentioned "Aidan James" and Ryan and I both fell in love with it simultaneously. The end. Done. We also knew at 11 weeks we were having a boy because when we had the amnio to have the baby's chromosomes mapped (due to a Down's scare) we also got to find out the gender if we wanted. We never really even had a chance to consider girl's names.

   This time? Ugh what a pain. I had a favorite, Ry shot it down, Ry had a favorite, and I shot it down (I mean really, Piper for a girl? I think not). So at this point we still need to be thinking of names for both genders, and there just aren't any that are jumping right out at us.

I decided to take some advice from a co-worker with how she handled it:

   So in taking her advice I now have pink and blue post-its labeled with our top name choices. They are stuck on the wall in our bedroom next to the closet door where we will have to see them every day. The theory behind this is that the more you look at them, the more you will start to dislike some and you can remove those post-its. Both Ry and I have veto power and can remove any post-it we want whenever we want. When my girlfriend did this, by the time she went into labor she only had 2 post-its left and was finally able to make her decision. Let's hope this goes as well for us! As far as progress on the name decision, I guess you'll all have to wait until June 28 to find out!!!!!!!!

Dunh dun dun stick

While growing up Ryan and his cousin Eric had this weird tradition they started on their own with empty paper towel rolls. Before you could throw the empty cardboard tube out you had to put one end to your mouth and yell "dun dun dun dun duuuuun!" like a trumpet. Ryan now has Aidan doing it.. Oh man.

Uncle Larry Love

I love this progression of pics of my brother and Aidan.....

Christmas Morning with a 1 1/2 yr Old

   Another Christmas has gone and passed, and this one has probably been the best yet! Even though Aidan isn't quite old enough to grasp the concept of Christmas and Santa bringing presents, he sure enjoyed all the loot he got, and we sure enjoyed watching him have so much fun!

Grandpa got him a Buzz Lightyear 4-wheeler and since we had that out and unwrapped in the living room, it was the first thing he ran for! He hopped right on, pressed the power button, and rammed it right into the bottom of the stairs (our next lesson will be in steering).

  We decided to let Aidan dive headfirst into opening presents. He opened the first one which was a new Truck from Grandpa and then wanted to play with it, having absolutely NO interest in opening any more gifts. Awesome. We even tried hiding them after each one was open, which also didn't work because he's too smart and he knew they were hidden somewhere so we couldn't get him to concentrate on opening any more. Sooo...we let him play with the small group of toys that he opened and we moved on to opening all of our gifts instead.

    It was really nice to have my Dad and my Brother here for the Holiday, and we had an amazing filet mignon dinner for Christmas night. We're also looking forward to going home to NY for New Year's weekend for a family wedding!

Creative Baking Season (for others ;-) )

This year I went with plain old snowflake and star shaped homemade sugar cookies frosted with royal icing. Pretty boring. Some of my friends however, had much cuter inventive ideas!!

Jess made these really cute Reindeer Cake Pops:

and Michele made these awesome Reindeer cupcakes:

KUDOS ladies, they were both delicious!! (and almost too cute to eat!)

Christmas Insanity

And so begin the final countdown to Christmas. I don't think I have ever been this busy the week before Christmas. Between dinner dates with friends, making cookies for a Cookie Exchange, work, dr's appt's and holiday parties I fear I may be going insane. There are definitely NOT enough hours in the day!!!!

I did manage to squeeze in a visit to the Santa at the mall for Aidan which was pretty entertaining. While waiting in line he was so excited and kept yelling "Danta! Danta!" His mood quickly changed once he walked up to him though. Santa held his hand and I asked him if he wanted to sit with Santa and he quickly replied "no." Well, of course I made him do it anyway and he was not exactly thrilled. He cried for a millisecond then the look of fear came. The girl taking the picture and I were lauhging and the look of terror on his face. Priceless.

 Yesterday we took him to a Breakfast with Santa at a local restaurant. It started with them telling us they didn't have any available high chairs at the moment, which irked me because my 1 1/2 year old is pretty well-behaved, but not enough to sit still on one of our laps while we all try to eat, plus I specified in my reservation I was going to need one. Finally after about a half hour they got us a high chair and we were able to get him seated in it.

So Santa was upstairs and for some reason they seated us downstairs. I was a little peeved because the whole reason we went to this place was to see Santa (the food is NOT that great).  We saw Santa go up the stairs once or twice and Aidan got all excited, which irritated me even more because I wanted him to be able to get the full breakfast with Santa experience!! Finally we were done eating and had our check and Ry suggested that I just take him upstairs to see Santa, so I did. Of course there was a table of about 20 people with about 11 kids just getting in line to see him, because he was sitting in a chair by the fireplace. My kid certainly does not understand the concept of "it's not your turn yet buddy" so he kept yelling "Danta" and trying to run to him while the other kids were on his lap. I very impatiently waited for about 15 minutes with my squirming kid while these people rearranged their gaggle of kids for about 30 different pictures. Sheesh. FINALLY it was Aidan's turn!! He ran up to Santa,  got all the way to his feet and made a hard left and booked it to the other side of the room hahahaha! I brought him back and Santa let him pick a goodie out of his toy sack and of course from that moment on they were buddies. My kid will love you if you give him a treat! He sat on his lap and I managed to get a picture, even though Aidan wouldn't smile for me, I was pleased!!

All in all the service is slow, the food is mediocre and it took us almost 2 hours from start to finish for breakfast. Oy. But seeing Aidan all excited to see Santa was worth it all!!

A new chapter in our lives

Well, as most of our friends and family are finally in the loop, we're excited to announce we are expecting baby #2 at the very end of June. I figure with all the craziness that I am about to experience a blog will be a great way to keep family members/friends updated on the insanity in the Lawless household. I've seen some blog pages created by friends and am always amazed at their creativity, so I decided I want to be a follower and create my own blog.

Ryan and I are very excited about the arrival of munchkin #2 and he says he has a feeling this one's going to be a girl. We're definitely going to find out in Feb what the sex is, but we're thinking that we aren't going to share that with anybody (I mean there has to be some surprise for everyone SOMEWHERE right?)

We're also not going to share our name choices with anyone. We did this with Aidan and were thankful, because people always have to give their 2 cents anyway and frankly I don't give a DAMN which names they don't like paired with our last name or what they wish they had named their kid instead of what they did.

With Aidan the girls at work had a Baby Name pool instead of a weight pool, which was really fun. I gave them the initials of his first and middle name and they got to guess the combination. One of the girls actually guessed Aidan James...which was pretty impressive if you ask me!! Speaking of the little monster, he's definitely too young to grasp the idea of a baby, but it sure is funny to ask him if he wants a baby brother or sister...because he responds "no" to both anyway.