I'm ONE!

Sorry for such a hiatus from my blog. It's been pretty crazy around here lately. My "little" boy turned one in December and now is almost 13 months! He has done nothing but bring joy to our lives this last year and I can't wait to see what this upcoming year has in store for us.

At Jaxon's one year appointment he weighed 22 pounds 3 ounces. He finally grew too! He was 30.5" long which is a huge sigh of relief since he was "stuck" at 28 inches for many months.

We're still working on Jaxon being able to stand by himself. He gets jello legs when you hold him up to stand and he just refuses to try. I think he's just perfectly content with crawling and he's going to stick with that for a while. Jaxon did say Mama a total of 3 times now! Everything is still Dada around here. He primarily says Dada and Ya. He understands what we say to him but he just isn't good at communicating back with us. He does finally have down the ASL sign for "all done", which is what he'll do when he's done eating and sometimes he'll do it during bath time. All we can do is continue working with him and hopefully he picks up some more words, or at least sign language soon.

I want to thank you all for such a successful birthday party! Jaxon had a blast and the pictures prove it! His airplane theme turned out so fun and I'm glad so many family members and friends were able to attend. I'll add pictures to the blog down at the bottom.

Well, it seems as if Jake's orders for Japan are here to stay. It'll be a crazy, stressful, fun, and overwhelming time in our life. We're set to leave in August and be in Okinawa for 3 years. Jake does get 30 days of leave before we're supposed to check into his unit, so we'll be home in July for at least a couple weeks. I am extremely nervous about a 15+ hour plane ride with an 18 month old. Hopefully he sleeps most of the time and realizes he can't get up and run around.

I should find out if I'm accepted into nursing school here within a couple weeks! So if by some fat chance we don't end up going to Japan I'll be able to go to nursing school here. I plan on getting an online Psychology degree while we're in Okinawa and then when we come back to the States I can attend an accelerated nursing program. (fingers crossed that that plan works out)

On a totally different note, Jake and I are remodeling our kitchen! We bought new kitchen cabinets and granite countertops this past weekend. Hopefully install will happen later this week. We're so excited to spruce up our old, outdated, damaged kitchen and ugly tile countertops. I will definitely post before and after pictures after renovation is complete. We also are installing new flooring for our whole downstairs. We also bought that yesterday. Jake is installing that himself, so it'll be more than just a weekend project. I'm so excited to have more countertop space and more storage in our kitchen!!

I'll end this post with some pictures from our trip home and Jaxon's birthday party. Thanks for hosting us, KC!

Until we see you again,
Alycia, Jake and Jaxon