buhbuhbuhbrrroooom

Mr. B doesn't quite have all his animal sounds figured out (okay he makes the gggaaaaahhhhh sound for pretty much every animal besides the pig) but he sure knows his tractor sounds. One of his favorite things at the orchard is watching the tractor drive around (an occasional tractor ride sure thrilled him too) and when he got this tractor from 'Papa Tractor' himself, he knew just what noise to make. Buhbuhbuhbrroooom is obviously the noise tractors make. Ask the farming expert yourself. :)

PS- check out how he pushes it with his tummy to get it to move. :)

139

Within hours of unlocking the Hickstionary, it had 139 unique visitors. I guess blog rolls and feeds are to thank for that. And I also guess this means I'm back to blogging. ;)

I'm not sure how much my blogging style will change but one thing you'll probably see more of is updates from the blogger app. I'll try to tag them with 'from the iPhone' so if a post is less than coherent (I'm gonna blame autocorrect) or appears to be a case of clumbsy thumbsies, you'll know why.

Also, during deconstruction mode, I kinda, sorta, really bad messed up my blog template. Anyone have one with a 960px post area they want to share with me? ;) In the meantime, please be patient with the eyesore. 

Welcome back, Hickstionarians. I'm thankful you're here (again). I've missed ya!!

Under construction

When we moved here we were the only ones living on the street. Slowly more have moved in and there are currently 7 of us on the block. There hadn't been anything new up in over a year. It was kind of nice not having a muddy street from construction.
This week though four lots were marked off for building.
Four! And one is our next door neighbor. Aka right outside the baby's window. I thought he'd have fun watching them excavate yesterday but when I showed him he got really sad and kept shaking his head no. I don't blame him. I felt the same way. But I put on my mommy face and told him it was fun. He wasn't 100% convinced but clapped anyway. Then proceeded to watch for over an hour. He was the happiest once they were done.
Sad about it or not, I think this could provide hours of entertainment in the coming months so we'll take it.
And if your looking for a new house (and your good neighbor quality of course) come to our street! Looks like there will be plenty available soon!

I don't want to forget

That you spent most of yesterday giving hugs and kisses. Mommy, daddy & Dakota were the lucky recipients of your affection. All day long you would stop what you were doing for a little snuggle. Sweetest. Thing. Ever.

test one two

The hickstionary is live and unlocked again. A little bit crazy. But maybe not. Maybe it wont be too much different than it has been for the last several months. I didn't make any sort of announcement that it was unlocked (I don't know if past subscribers will get a notice or not?). So it still just might be R & I as the only readers. And I still just might only blog once in a great while. But there it is. Or here it is, rather. The hickstionary. Back in business. Sort of. 

So why the change? Well I mentioned in some previous posts about why I blocked people from reading it. And I'm starting to think most of those things don't matter. Too much. The big reason though- my hard drive crashed and I was pretty sure all of B's pictures were gone for. ev .er.  I kept scrolling through the hickstionary and revisting the few posts I had post B. I was so sad I hadn't blogged more of his life. What if those pictures were gone forever? What if our house burnt down and all his milestones disappeared in his baby book? I was SO sad. 

So here it is. The hickstionary is back. And I am going to record B's life here. Some of it anyway. Because even though it's still his story to share.. if I die, if the baby book disappears, if the computer crashes.... he wont have those memories to share that part of his story. So here you go, B. This if for you. And your mama that doesn't ever want to forget how absolutely sweet and amazing you are. Right. Now.

Our Growing Family

If you were thinking the shadow picture looked a little familiar, you're right!

Here's some snapshots of our growing family's shadows. :)

I cant really think of too many positives about a crashed hard drive with a $2700 data recovery bill!!!! (YIKES.) But if there's a silver lining it's that it forced me to go through all the old files that had been recovered. Imagine my delight when I found this little gem taken in 2009. Just add it to the line up. :)

Giving Thanks

We have so much to be thankful for around here and Beckett had a great first Thanksgiving meal to celebrate and give thanks.

(First Thanksgiving meal because last year all he was having was milk of course).

We spent Wednesday preparing our first Thanksgiving meal. Roasting a turkey wasn't covered in all those years of food science classes at Iowa State but once we found the neck, it was a lot easier than we thought it would be. :)

The weather was amazing so once we had all the food prepped and cooking, we headed out for a walk/wagon ride. We spent as much time enjoying the Indian Summer as we could before heading back to the kitchen.

We hosted some family and great friends for dinner Wednesday night and had a fun time.

The next morning we all headed down to the Turkey Trot. R missed the shoot at the end, taking the long route to the finish line and just barely missing out on 3rd place and his free pumpkin pie. All the guys were medal qualifiers though and it was a fun time.

We had Thanksgiving lunch with Rusty's extended family then dessert at his sister's house.

R had tried some 'pumpkin bon bons' from our orchard awhile back and went on and on about how great they are. I tried to come up with a similar version based off of R's description and they didn't turn out too bad for a first try.

Here's the pumpkin cake balls recipe I used. I doubled the batch and made 2 cakes. One was a bit more full so when I took them out one wasn't quite as done in the middle. It ended up being a good thing, the part that was less done worked to hold the cake balls together better (this recipe does not call for crumbling the cake up and mixing with frosting). If I make these again, I'll have all of the cake just a little underdone. (Some of the cake balls were a little dry so I think that would help!)

Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving!!

It Was Fall Y'all!

We had an awesome fall here at the Hicks ranch and I cant believe it's already time to put the pumpkin decorations away and start decking the halls and hanging the stockings.

The biggest highlight of our fall was visiting the Orchard/Pumpkin Patch. We made a trip to the orchard at least once a week from opening day (technically a week before opening day- the nice owners let us have an early sneak peek!) to the very last weekend. We definitely got our monies worth out of our season pass. B loved, loved, loved it! We had taken a ton of pictures at the orchard so of course when my hard drive crashed, I was so sad to think we were going to lose all of those shots! Thankfully, there was one more warm day left in the season and we got back out to try to get some more pictures. A lot of the signage had been put away already so the 'how tall this year' sign was gone for the season but THANKFULLY we heard 98% of my hard drive has been recovered. I'm hopeful the 'how tall this year' sign picture is part of the 98%!

R was back at work this fall and B & I got into our 'new normal' with a great routine. We had just really gotten our new schedules figured out when basketball season started. We're currently figuring out our 'new, new schedule.' :)

Hopefully I'll get around to updating this post with some orchard pictures soon. In the meantime, we're off to get pictures of the tree trimming! And the newly walking baby!!

Beckett | one year old

Mr. Beckett- I can't believe you are ONE! This year has flown by but at the same time, it feels like you've been here forever. You are SUCH a sweet boy. You are a thinker- you examine things closely with your 'thinking face' on. It doesn't take you long to figure out how to do things on your own which I'm afraid might lead to early tantrums. Just the other day you were insistent on putting your own shirt on, you just couldn't quite get the 'over the head' part figured out. You've been taking steps for quite some time now but as of yesterday (one week after your birthday), we're officially considering you as walking. And as of this morning, you are wanting to walk everywhere- no crawling for you! It makes me so happy and thankful to see you growing into such a healthy, smart, strong boy but at the same time I'm just a little sad that it's all happening so fast.

Walkie Walkie

He's been taking a few steps for several weeks now. Five was his long time record but he never really got anywhere he was trying to go. Then a week after his first birthday, he took off across the room and has been walking (probably 90% of the time) since. He's so stinkin' cute. But I might be just a little biased.

How Do You Measure A Year?

Dear Beckett,
It's the eve of your Birthday Party Day and mama should be sleeping. Instead I'm staring at you in the baby monitor and wondering how in the world a year has gone so fast. I really need to get to bed so I hope to write more soon but I just posted your cake smash session on the photo blog: http://www.capturedbyheidiphoto.com/2012/11/beckett-cake-smash.html

Obviously you LOVED it. :)

You also love:
-Dakota. You snuggle him, wrestle him, feed him, pet him, kiss him. He's your best buddy!
-Blueberries. And pretty much any other food we give you!
-Moo Baa Lalala. All your favorite books are about animals these days. You love pointing out the animals you know and making animal sounds (though all your sounds are the same "gahhhhh"). Probably because you also love the
-Orchard so much. Besides home, it's probably your favorite place to be.
-Riding in the shopping cart! (And people watching.)
-Pushing your train around and around and around in the basement.
-Playing with blocks. And putting the blocks in the back of the train and pushing them around too.
-Music! You love to dance. Most mornings you wake up and nurse then give Dakota a kiss then go turn on daddy's radio and dance. I love that you need a little dance party to get your day started right.

Oh B, you are the coolest and sweetest boy all wrapped up into one amazing package. I will never know how I was blessed enough to get to be your mama. I love you so!

Lesson Learned

So this week I learned a tough lesson... when you know someone whose computer crashes and they warn you to back up your computer... BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER!!
Not just your client images (like I did) but EVERYTHING and ESPECIALLY your sweet boy's first year of life in pictures forgoodnesssakes!

Seriously, I'll wait while you go back everything up.

Go.

Now!








Okay.

Now that you've taken care of that I can tell you that I learned that lesson the hard way this week. And it really had me wishing I would have at least been blogging for some sort of documentation of his life.

So that's my goal... to start blogging a little bit more for sweet B. Because he is TOO cute with too many funny stories not to be keeping a record somewhere that wont get erased before I have a chance to send it to the printer (like his one year scrapbook I had been working super hard on all year... well the first 8 months or so anyway... ).  :)