An Airplane in my Kitchen

On a regular basis, while either home on lunch or after work, I groan when I walk around our house and see so much stuff everywhere.  I've never been a very minimalistic person and my husband certainly isn't so we have to make a conscious effort to keep all of our crazy contained and somewhat organized.  Throw in the fact that I'm just shy of 36 weeks pregnant and we'd much rather focus our energy on Duke when he's awake and you can imagine how successful we are with this task.  My point though, I promise I have one, is that yesterday I was walking through the house on lunch and saw things with a  completely different perspective. 

Take for instance, the airplane in my kitchen...

Apparently Duke tried to drag it with him to daycare yesterday and I loved the midday reminder of my sweet, wild, adventurous little man.  Sure we have 27 ride on toys scattered throughout our house, but this one in the kitchen didn't bother me one bit.  

I put my keys on the key rack and couldn't help but giggle that sometimes Duke's coat ends up on the same little hooks that hold our keys...

Things like that remind me how small he truly is. 

I went into the living room to eat lunch and relax for a bit and loved the contrast of the little man's own couch, blanket, pillow setup next to ours.  He loves this thing and gets so excited to grab a book and go sit on his own furniture and snuggle up with Elmo.

Lastly, I made my way into the bathroom to wash my hands and make sure I didn't have food all over my face {#peanutbutterproblems} and was reminded that even personal hygiene is cuter with a toddler.  Duke is stubborn about brushing his teeth himself which pretty much just means running it under water and sucking on it, but he gets so excited to mimic something he sees mommy and daddy doing that we go with it and sneak in some actual toothpaste scrubbing when he's sufficiently distracted by something else.

I was so excited to get him from daycare yesterday because I feel like we had a crazy whirlwind three days {Saturday-Monday} that involved lots of time away from my main mini man and I missed him like crazy.  He was banging on the windows and happily screaming for me when I showed up and gently put his hand on my cheek and pulled my face towards him whenever I was looking at someone or something else for the rest of the evening.  It's the sweetest thing he started recently and it's a pretty hilarious and quite literal way of reminding us to focus on HIM. We shared a snack of grapes and Colby jack cheese on the couch and even though there were plenty of tantrums throughout the evening {I wouldn't let him take all the toilet paper off the roll, drink dog shampoo, play in the dog food container, empty the medicine cabinet, climb into the oven, or drink a glass of ice water unassisted} the night ended with giggles, wrestling, and plenty of spontaneous kisses. 

If you visit us anytime soon, expect a laundry basket on the dining room table and make sure you watch your step...those blocks could make a grown man cry when stepped on.  You can find us sitting on the floor in the living room playing with toys and make a good ol' fashion mess.  Good news is, now that the Roomba is in my life, there's less dog hair to get covered in.

-T-