Photography with Matt

I got out the camera the other night while we were playing on the floor. Matt is so interested in taking pictures now that I gave him my old film camera and put batteries in it. Occasionally he gets the flash to go off and he loves the sound it makes when he pushes the button. It keeps him from reaching out for the camera when I am taking pictures! I was trying to get shots of Jonathan and Matt didn't have his camera nearby. Uh oh!

Here's our little one lifting his head and discovering all there is to look at while on his belly. It looks a lot different when everything isn't hovering over you!

I don't know if there are some teeth coming in our what, but there's sure a lot of drool these days!

This is just the perfect picture of Matt! He looks like he needs to be rocking out at a concert or something! I love the look too. Notice his shirt: "Can u dig it?" coupled with "Move it". The look on his face cracks us up too. He's on the verge of laughter in this picture, while telling me it's his turn to use the camera and take pictures of Jonathan. That's when I reminded him he had a camera of his own he could use.

Another shot of Jonathan while Matt ran to get his camera. Jonathan recently started hanging onto toys and bringing them to his mouth along with shaking them and staring in amazement at what he can do with his hands!

Matt returned with his camera and promptly told me to stand "over there" to take pictures. Apparently I wasn't in the right place. Jonathan just stares at his brother with the most starry eyed looks. It's awesome!

Matt takes a picture this time. He hasn't quite learned about aiming, but rather just puts it up to his face and pushes the button. Good thing there's no film in there!

Messy playtime!

It just hit me this weekend that I am going back to work next week! YIKES! I have been off since December 6th and my mind has been really off since Jonathan was born. Apparently I suffer from "momnesia". I think the work routine will be good for all of us! I found a clinic with a daycare on site, and they also have a preschool where Matt will go every morning. He'll join Jonathan around lunchtime and for nap. I am excited to get started and see how Matt does in his new environment.

Since I'll be back at work, I figured we'd better do some special things this week while we have the time. Jonathan was napping this morning, so Matt & I took advantage of the rare one on one playtime and went out back. I introduced him to one of my favorite activities - play with cornstarch and water! He dove in and loved it!

Here we are, starting out. Matt had no idea what I had in store for him.

One of his favorite sayings these days is "I do myself, Mommy", so he was overjoyed when I let him pour the cornstarch into the pan.

Enter the water, and the game was on!

Midway through, he had to make sure I was getting messy too, so he asked me to join in with both hands as well as pouring some of the mixture onto my hands. I looked at him to tell him how much I enjoyed playing with him. Tears came to my eyes when his reply was "me too, Mommy!" I just love motherhood!

I started showing him how the mixture "melts" and he just wanted more.

It was time to clean up, and I intended to have Matt scrape the patio with me to start the cleaning process, but he had different plans and just added the scraper to the mixture.

He was finally done and decided to help with the clean up!

Jonathan woke up from his nap and was happy to see us!

The Big A!

We took a trip up to Anaheim to see the Angels' stadium. Nick and Jonathan shopped a bit while Matt & I ran around out front. He had a blast! The front of the stadium has a baseball diamond within the bricks. Matt was fascinated by the pitcher's mound, but did not really understand the rest of the diamond. He also found the "big hats" fascinating and wanted to run under them repeatedly.

There were big cement baseballs out front and Matt ran up to them and told me he wanted to push them over.

Here he is trying to push one of the balls. He cracked me up with this!

This picture sets the scene for the rest of our visit. He was off and running, EVERYWHERE!

Once Nick was done shopping, he & Jonathan joined us out front and Matt broke in his new Angels' baseball. Notice he's on the pitcher's mound.

He's still trying to figure out if he's a lefty or not when he throws. This day he decided he'd be more of a righty.

More running!

Here's a picture of the front of the stadium with Matt & Nick playing baseball out front.

Here's a shot of the "big hats".

More throwing from the pitcher's mound.

Jonathan's such a trooper on our morning trips these days. He's quite the sleeper when his brother is not being too loud! Matt & I were on our way back from the big hat in this picture.

He just didn't stop running!

He stopped running long enough to play a little catch with me.

We had to chase him down to get him to want to leave!

He's still running!

We're home!

The Move Has Been Made

We're back in California! This time we decided to try the sun and surf in sunny Southern California! We are in San Clemente and loving it. We are getting settled into our house and making it our home.

To catch you up, here's a recap of the past few weeks. We put our house on the market, and within a week we had an offer! We never expected to move so quickly, but once the offer came in there was no turning back! We were set to have movers come on the 17th to start packing us up and our cars were to leave the same day on a different truck. As everyone knows, timelines rarely work out with moving. The movers did not arrive until late on the 18th and the cars left that morning. The packing took all the way up until sometime on the 20th, well after we had signed the papers to close on our house, and set off to the airport to fly to California with the boys.

We stayed in a hotel in Seabrook until the closing, which was an adventure. My dad and stepmother came into town for a couple of days and endured the adventure with us! We are so very grateful for their help and I don't think we could have done it without them. Nick ended up staying at the house because of the incompetence of the packing and I was at the hotel with the boys. They did remarkably well considering all that was going on. Once I gave up on Matt having a nap at the hotel, the adventure became a bit more enjoyable. He slept with his Granny and Grandpa one night after refusing to fall asleep for me.

Once we closed on the house, we said our goodbyes and we were off to the airport. Matt was incredible on the flights out here. He slept much of the flight to Phoenix and was an angel on the way to Orange County. The boys were both a mess by the time we got to the house, but we still had to get a few things. Considering time changes, Matt was up at least 2 hours past bedtime by the time we ate and got our essentials at the store. Because our things left Seabrook the day we did, we had nothing here and decided to camp out in the house and get Matt acclimated to his new home. It all worked out well and he even took naps!

Our things arrived finally on the 24th, as I was out interviewing for jobs. It was a bit chaotic, but we made it through. Our cars did not arrive until the 26th. We are still unpacking and finding interesting things in each box. There was one box that contained things from 5 different rooms in our house. Why they labeled the boxes amazes me!

Enough about the craziness of our last 2 weeks, and on to the pictures of the boys!

There's a little devilish grin peeking out from behind Jonathan's crab.

Matt still combines his toys so he can use as many things at once as possible. Here he is preparing for his first ride to our new park, donning his baseball helmet. He took off the helmet as soon as he got on the bike and we went off to the park.

He is much more adventurous than he was last summer on this same playground, but he's still a bit cautious.

Jonathan and I walked around while the big boys played. He was quite entertained by all my funny faces to keep him entertained.

Matt was quite proud of himself climbing all over the playground by himself. I think Nick was a bit proud of him too!

There were some older kids at the playground, and Matt wanted to try all of the things they were doing. He was enjoying it a bit more than his expression lets on in this shot.

There was a little 4 year old girl at the playground that had no shoes on, and she ordered Matt to take his off in order to play with her. They were quite funny together.

In true Trevino men fashion, here are 2 of them zoned out watching the USC song girls on tv.

Jonathan's expressions and vocalizations are increasing daily! Today he just started laughing. He looked at me and started laughing. Should I take it personally?

When Nick came out to find us a house, he went to a wonderful indoor playground with our friend Aaron and his son Waylon for Waylon's birthday. Nick couldn't wait to take Matt and see how much fun Matt would have there. He was right. The boys played together for a little over an hour and they were both working up quite a sweat by the time we left.

Matt tried his hand at playing piano. He looks like he really knows what he's doing.

Jonathan's first photo shoot

No, it's not a professional photographer, just me. I was looking back at pictures of Matt at 2 months and realized that's when I started taking pictures of him sitting in our big armchair. Matt was napping, so Jonathan and I got started with the smiles and cooing!

We also had Jonathan's 8 week check up. He weighed 13 pounds, 13 ounces and was 23" long. That's about a pound heavier than Matt was, and an inch shorter. All is well and the baby acne has cleared up and we are just working on getting the cradle cap to do the same. Unfortunately the doctor says it looks like Jonathan may have a bit of eczema. Hopefully it won't be quite as bad as Matt's has been. I don't want them both to have to go through it!

He looks a lot like Matt in this photo.

His first picture in the chair! He looks so happy sitting up and not strapped into some kind of seating device. Freedom!

He's starting to reach out toward toys and really react to our voices and facial expressions. It's so much fun!

Here's my favorite!

Playing at the park

Playing at the park has been minimal lately due to the weather, so we took advantage of the burst of sunlight we saw the other day. We bundled up in the wind and set off to play at the playground.

Jonathan woke up and gave a few smiles while Matt and I played in the sand. He has started cooing and smiling more and more this week and it's so much fun!

I finally remembered to bring some of Matt's sand toys to the playground with us so he could really play in the new sandy area.

Those toys got toted all over the playground and soon I found Matt filling the tunnel with sand. He had a blast and was covered in sand by the time we left.

A rare closeup without a hand in the picture! He was crawling through the tunnel so he was a little slower to reach up and grab the camera from me!

A helicopter had just gone by and Matt imitated the sound it had made.