Long time no Blog...Christmas and beyond!

It has been a long time since I have blogged (obviously) I even comtemplated whether I would bother anymore, but I know of several people that love to see pictures of the boys, so I am renewing my commitment to blogging!

I will post a smattering of pictures from Christmas onwards, I was thinking that we had not done much, but as I look at the pictures I see that life has been eventful. But for the most part one or all of us has been sick everyday since around November. This has been the worst winter for that and we are all tired of it. It has made life really difficult around here and we don't venture out much. I can't wait until spring and hopefully we can get out of survival mode. UGH!

We had a great Christmas, as you can see by this cute, cute picture of the boys on Christmas morning. It was fun to see Isaac fully get into the whole Santa thing. Matthew seemed to enjoy his first Christmas, and was so excited to open presents (and then try and eat the paper!) We spent Christmas day here with Anne's family and then drove up on Boxing Day to Canada to see Chris's family. Luckily for us we purchased a new Mini Van the week before Christmas, so it was a much much more comfortable ride up to Canada.


Isaac at Grandma and Grandpa Dunlops house playing "Hungry, Hungry Hippo's"

Matthew sure enjoyed mashed potato's and Cranberry sauce...Mmmmmmm!!

Once we got home from Christmas we were ready to get going on the house. I had been without a kitchen floor for a few months, and though it was nice to ignore it and not clean it, I was anxious to get the kitchen done. Chris worked really hard and now we have a beautiful laminate floor. Chris did a great job installing it....now if I could just find time to finish painting the cupboard doors, and paint the walls, and get the trim done...ugh, I guess we still have a lot of work to do!


Chris, Happily putting in the last board! Way to go Mr. Handyman.


In January, we finally got enough snow to play in, but only for a few hours and then it melted. Isaac was so excited to go out and build a snowman, and Matthew loved feeling the snow and looking at everything.



The big news of the last month is that we have started Potty Training Isaac. He is eager to go on his potty and wear big boy underwear, but usually on his terms. That means that he does well for awhile and then will have 2 or three accidents on the carpet. I will be so happy to get our carpets cleaned soon! Today we went out to lunch at my Grandmas and he used the bathroom there and stayed dry all morning, hopefully this is a sign of things to come!!! I can't wait.


This last picture seems to depict our life the last few months. This is us visiting our friends Dave and Wendy in Canada last weekend. On the sunday that we were leaving, instead of playing with their two boys, Isaac climbed up on me and fell asleep (10am, very unlike him) He ended up having a fever that lasted most of last week. I feel like I have spent about a month on the couch with either kid sick or myself.

So there you go, a very quick up date on what we have been up to! Tomorrow we celebrate Isaac's 3 year birthday. WOW, I am amazed and sad at the same time...he is such a little boy now, no longer my baby. Will do a post on him and his special suprise for tomorrow.

Merry Christmas from the Dunlop Clan

We just recently sent out our Christmas pictures minus the annual letter this year. We have just been swamped with stuff around here and did not get around to writing one. Hopefully you have recieved our cards and are now checking out the blog to see what we have been up to. Here is our year in a nutshell.

This past year has been a busy one and an exciting one. The highlight of the year happened in April - our precious son Matthew was born! He has been such a joy and a delight! He is the cutest little thing, and no matter how he is feeling, he is smiling. He likes to kick his legs and chatters non-stop. He has had acid reflux and will cover you in spit up if you are not careful, but I think we are finally starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel on that...it seems to be less and less. He is growing so big, so fast. He loves to sit on the floor surrounded with all of his toys and play and play. He lights up whenever Isaac is in the room. He is not crawling yet, but I suspect it will happen at any moment. He gets into the position, but hasnt figured out how to actually get moving yet.

Isaac is growing by leaps and bounds. He is a smart little boy who loves to jump and play hide and go seek. He knows all his letters and their sounds and counts pretty well too. His favorite letter is G, his favorite number is 5, and his favorite color is blue. He is showing himself to be fairly musical as well and loves to sing and dance. When he goes to Grandma and Grandpa Basden's he loves to play Grandpa's banjo and Grandma's Mandolin....he is even starting to get some rhythm. Isaac is a sweet, sweet, soul who is very caring towards Matthew and others around him. He loves to laugh and have fun! His favorite thing to say right now is "Come play toys with me!"

I (Anne) love being home with the kids and feel so blessed that we can do that. This past fall I have taken a part time teaching job with a Theatre Company called CYT, Christian Youth Theatre. They hold theatre classes for kids after school, as well as produce 3 Musical productions a year. I fell in love with the company and have since been asked to be on their Board of Directors for the Portland and Vancouver CYT's. It is as if God handed me the perfect company to fit my talents and interests. I will also be directing for them in the spring and again next fall. This has been a tremendous blessing in my life, and fits nicely with our schedule. Isaac has really enjoyed seeing the older kids and learning some of the songs and dances. Good thing I get free tuition, I will need it when he is old enough to take classes!

One of the things that we do with the kids is to go visit my Grandma and my Auntie at their Retirement home for lunch. The people there just love seeing the boys, and Isaac spends most of the time dancing and entertaining them. He calls it "grandma's castle" because of the way the building looks and just loves going there.

Chris is still working in the mapping department at Oregon City, and doing taxes during tax season. He is an awesome father who spends lots of time playing and roughhousing with the boys. All of his pants are getting holes worn into the knees from crawling around on the floor with the kids. Chris is in a men's Bible study group that meets every week at a local coffee shop. He has made some great friendships with the other guys there, and looks forward to it every week. He is quite proud of winning the "Most Hideous Holiday Sweater" award last week at our Bible Study's Christmas Party!

We have settled into the house now and have spent the past year doing many projects around here. The biggest one being remodeling the kitchen. At this point, we still have no floor and most of the cupboard doors are just half painted. Hopefully when life returns to normal in the new year (ha!) we can get that finished up.

We hope that you all are having a Merry Christmas season and wish you best in the New Year! Bookmark our page and come back often to keep track of our growing boys!

All is better...and Busy

Life around here has been really crazy the last 3 weeks....we had a week of Matthew being sick, then travel to Canada for Thanksgiving, and then Anne was at the theatre all last week working on "You're a Good Man Charlie Brown". I thought I would get everyone caught up a little on us.

#1 Matthew is doing much better, sorry for the gross picture I posted...I honestly was not waiting for him to throw up so I could take a picture, it just happened that he did that right when I went to take a picture of him. But, really that is what was going on most of that week. We are going back to the doctor today, just to make sure he is 100% better, but he is really much better, just a little bit of a cough left. Here is a much nicer picture of him looking much healthier. This was taken at a family Christmas party we had at my Grandma's retirement home.


#2 Our trip to Victoria was wonderful. It was the first time that we had been able to travel up there since Matthew was born. He did really well in the EPIC car ride. Our drive on the busiest travel day of the year took almost 12 hours (it normally would be around 5) It took us 1.5 hours to get through Seattle and Everett, and then their was an 1.5 hour wait at the border, then we had to wait for the ferry. We arrived at Chris's parents around 11 pm, very tired. The boys actually did really well though, and they slept most of the way. It could have been a whole lot worse.
We had a nice relaxing time, and Matthew's cousins and Aunt Lorna and Uncle Bob enjoyed getting to know him. They were soooo excited to finally meet him.

We went to the duck pond several times and fed the ducks and peacocks.
They were amazing and would eat right out of your hand. It was really fun. Isaac just loved it of course.
#3 This last week, Chris has played "Mr. Mom" in the evenings while I was off at the theatre getting the show "You're A Good Man Charlie Brown" up and running. For those of you who don't know, I have taken a part time job with a children's theatre company called CYT...Christian Youth Theatre. It has been a lot of fun and the perfect job for me. The kids range in age from 8-18. We still have shows this weekend at Mt. Hood Community College. It is a really great, HIGH QUALITY show, perfect to bring the young kids to.


Check out the website if you would like to purchase tickets, or give me a call. The Gresham outlook had a great article about the musical and the company on weds. I currently am teaching an acting class for them and will be directing for them in the future. I am looking forward to being around this week and getting caught up on housework, and spending lots of time with the kids. If you are wondering wether I fell off the face of the earth, I didn't, I just got swallowed up by the theatre.

On Saturday morning, I woke up to a high school flashback....our lawn had been "forked" and saran wrapped. The kids in CYT decided to show their love for me by filling our yard with forks and wrapping saran wrap all over our lawn, car and porch. Very sweet. Isaac LOVED it and thought is was really fun to stomp on the forks. They wrote all sorts of notes on paper plates and left those around. Funny Funny!!! Guess this is payback for all those poor people we toilet papered while in high school.


Along with all of that, Chris bought a new (new to us) car on saturday...a post about that to follow, and we had a family Christmas get together on sunday. So needless to say it has been a VERY VERY busy 3 weeks. I still have another weekend of shows to do as well. Ah, the busy Christmas season! :-)

Kitchen Remodel Update

Well the kitchen remodel is SLOWLY coming along. We might just get done before Christmas, but I doubt it...who knows. One of the issues we had with the house is that the patio door was leaking under the floor just a bit. So we decided to replace it. (Eventually we want to replace all the old windows with much more energy efficient ones, so this got at least one upgraded) Here are some photos of the door being replaced. Chris decided the floor and everything else was more than enough work for him, so we did hire someone else to come in and do this. It only took them less than an hour to do the whole thing. Once they took out the old door, we second guessed our decision to not do French doors, but the new door looks great and we did not want to disrupt our view of our backyard with lattice in the windows.


Here is the new door all installed. It is so nice and white and shiny, the old one had turned a kind of Grey white and just looked dirty....notice no muddy dog prints on it....yet!


As for the painting, we almost have the cupboards finished. I still have 15 doors sitting in the basement that need 4 coats of paint on each side, but those can stay off for awhile yet. I havent even thought about the walls yet, those may stay until after we get the floor in.

This week while I was at Charlie Brown rehearsal, Chris put Isaac to work ripping off the old vinyl flooring. I was so happy to come home to find that the awful 80's vinyl was gone!!!

Isaac loves helping do any work around the house and is having a good time helping daddy whenever he can. Yesterday we were talking about what we were thankful for and he kept talking about the new door. :-) What a cutie.

Croup, Reflux and a lot of grossness

If you have been wondering where we have been for awhile, these pictures tell all. Poor Poor Matthew started out Saturday with a bad cough, so we took him to the doctor and they gave us a nebulizer to do breathing treatments with. By Monday he was wheezing horribly all the time and coughing like a seal uncontrollably. Classic Croup symptoms. We were scheduled to go back to the doctor at 4, but at 3 he threw up all over my mom and was just not himself, so we rushed him to the doctor early and they were able to give him a steroid that would make his cough go away. It took until the next day, but he finally started sounding normal.


On top of all of that, whenever he eats, he coughs which makes him throw up all of his bottle. Our carpet, clothes are covered in rotten puked up milk...oh the fun of a sick child.
It is now almost a week later and he seems to be feeling a lot better, but he is still throwing up most of what he eats, mainly due to his acid reflux disease, combined with his cough. While I was taking the picture of the milk coming out of his nose, he decided to give me an even better picture.
(Note to Matthews Birthmom: I did immediately put down the camera and clean him up/ console him :-) hahaha) He really isn't bothered by it and just continues right on playing. So that has been our week, poor little guy. Hopefully he will get over this soon. So far (knock on wood) the rest of us have managed to not catch it.

Our little cuties

Here are a some photos of our favorite little guys.


This is Matthew's 5 month portrait, taken Sept.



Here is Isaac at 2 years (taken in Feb)



Isaac and Matthew get on great. It's so cute watching them together.

Trick or Treat

We had such a good time yesterday! This was the first Halloween that Isaac actually understood what was going on. He learned to say "Trick or Treat" early in the day, and was quick to say it in hopes of some candy!!! We dressed up early in the day so the kids could go to Kids Club at the gym all dressed up. Isaac was Bob the Builder, Matthew was a frog and I was an old maid. (I decided at the last minute to get in on the fun as well.) After that we headed over to my Grandma's retirement home to have lunch with her and my auntie. The people there love to see the kids and were so excited to see them dressed up. Isaac was saying "trick or treat" to all of them, and luckily they had candy to give him! We then headed over to my mom's work (the Dr. office) to "trick or treat" at all the desks of the people that worked there. That was really fun.

That night, my parents and my Grandma came over for dinner and to help hand out candy. We walked around to about 10 houses for Trick or Treating.


Matthew had a great time on his first time out trick or treating. He loves being outside and was happy to be carried around by us! He made such a cute froggy.


By this time, my costume was off, but I was still stuck with the make up...sad to say it was easier than in years past to find where to put the wrinkles on my face. :-)


Isaac was so cute, walking around dressed as Bob, with his candy pail in one hand and his thumb in his mouth.


Grandma was a good sport and wore the wee jimmy hat for awhile! We love her! (She'd kill me if she knew that I put that picture up, but I couldn't resist!)



Both kids fell asleep promptly last night and we were not far behind! Now if I could just stop eating all of the candy....and figure out a way to help Isaac not ask for a piece every ten minutes. I am trying to limit it to one piece a day, but I am so tired already of him asking me for more candy!!! hehehe