This time last year I was sitting in a hospital bed basking in the joy of having given birth for a second time. I was either gazing at Tebow’s beautiful red hair or trying to figure out why they gave us the smallest hospital room in the joint.

Well, 365 days have passed and Tebow is officially a year old. My baby boy.

Since we have been under renovation at our house, separating our family for a short while, I was fretting over birthday party plans.

See, I have this kind of birthday philosophy. I don’t think birthday parties are a requirement for every birthday. But I do think they are important for the first birthday. It isn’t because the child will remember the perfect cake, the tower of presents, and the many guests. When Fuller turned one, we worked for weeks on a party for him. But it was kind of more of a celebration of us, making it through the first year as parents.

This time around, I had this overwhelming desire to invite people to celebrate Tebow’s first year as a way to say “thank you” to them for blessing our family.
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While we have been visiting/ living in Lake Martin, we have had been blessed with some tasty treats.

These brownies were made by Fuller and me soon after our visit began. Grandma Linda was given a Perfect Brownie Pan as a Christmas gift, so we thought it the perfect time to try it out! It really did make brownies well. (There is an entire flickr set of the process, in case you want to see how the pan really works.)

These funny looking things are “squid” in the making. We went into Montgomery to visit a friend and she was so clever to make this fun lunch for the kiddos. You cut up hot dogs, stick in pieces of spaghetti, then boil them until the spaghetti is cooked al dente. When you pull it out of the water, you have squid!

Last Friday I went to a gourmet grocery store with Linda and came home with a few delicacies such as microbrewed rootbeer. I thought it would be fun to introduce Fuller to rootbeer floats. (Sidenote: a freezer without ice cream at Grandpa Albert’s must be a broken freezer.) Fuller liked it, and since a full bottle was too much for Fuller, I got to have some too.

It was during the root beer float fun that Grandpa Albert taught Fuller how to say, “Over the lips, past the gums, look out stomach, here it comes!” Fuller worked so hard to learn it and say it right. Now, if only he would finally remember the days of the week.

Tebow has earned himself a nickname, “Tebow the Tornado.” He will walk/ stumble his way to an area of a room, destroy it and then move on to the next area. He takes great pleasure in toppling block towers and thinks that Legos/ Duplos should reside in the natural state of a pile on the floor. In fact, Grandpa Albert has occupied Tebow for many minutes by building brick towers out of Megablocks and Tebow will then take them apart in seconds, as if telling Grandpa Albert there is no reason for those bricks to be stacked on top of each other.

Which is why Fuller’s Christmas gift of the Jenga game is confusing to Tebow.

He sees this:

Isn’t it begging for tiny hands to knock it over? Tebow thinks so. And when we end up playing with Tebow around, Tebow reaches, grunts, and whines while Fuller and I take our turns playing the game.

The first time Tebow saw us playing, I was the one who lost, knocking the tower down when removing a crucial block. Tebow saw the blocks, picked up two and threw them down in anger. My baby was angry because he was not the one who knocked down the tower.

Someday we will let him play in our reindeer games, but right now, I guess we need to stick to playing Jenga when Tebow is napping. We can’t have a game ruined by a tornado.

Soon after we got to Lake Martin last week, I mentioned wanting to go to one of the Auburn basketball games. It happened that Auburn would be playing Kentucky, so we got excited and made plans. But apparently a lot of other people got excited as well (probably mostly Kentucky fans) and when I checked the ticket site on Saturday morning I found out the general tickets were all sold out.

Rain dashed our ideas of buying from scalpers so Albert and Linda generously gave their tickets to Fuller and me.

This gift was generous because Albert and Linda have magic tickets that not only get them entrance to the games but access to the hospitality suite (aka free food, drinks, and Fuller’s favorite: POPCORN!). Also, it meant they were going to keep Tebow while Fuller and had a mother-son date. It all adds up to generous giving.
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Christmas 2008 was the Christmas we received the Wii game system as a gift. It has been such a fun thing for our family to have, providing lots of good family fun and an excellent way for Fuller to release some energy on rainy or freezing days.

This Christmas it was no surprise that Fuller’s Christmas list included a few Wii games.

Mariokart was a game he had seen at Best Buy once, long ago, and it stuck with him because it was something he could drive. When he saw it on Christmas morning, with his name tag on it, he was thrilled. Apparently he took to the game right away and can do really well when he wants to. Unfortunately that is a game I can’t play with him since it makes me motion sick. Damon however, can earn lots of father-son points with Fuller when they play together.

Fuller also got Wii Resort. This made his list because he had seen it at Luke’s house. Fuller was surprisingly good at the archery and loved the flying he could do.

While Wii games aren’t the only things Fuller got for Christmas, they are definitely the most used right now. Once we start school back up, it will be back to scheduling Wii time and choosing our games carefully.

In the weeks leading up to our Ohio Christmas trip I baited Fuller with hopes and dreams of the white stuff. Fuller’s first Christmas was spent in Ohio when they had the most snow they had had in 20 years or so (it was classified as a blizzard, we described it as cabin fever).

Of course there was really no way to guarantee snow would be a part of our holidays, but it was fun to dream. And then in preparation, I bought him snow boots at Wal-Mart. For some reason the fact that he had snow boots meant he really thought it was going to snow. He had faith it would be there.

The day we drove up to my parents’ house was very cold. And the forecast had called for snow in the early morning. But we weren’t sure if it would stick around long enough for us to enjoy by the time we arrive in the early evening.

A little bit before Knoxville I took over driving so Damon could take a nap. And as we were cruising North on I-75 I looked ahead towards a mountain and gasped to see it covered in white. I pointed out the picturesque scene to Fuller. He was so excited to see the snow. I suggested he take out his camera and take a picture. So he did.

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