The Princess Playground!

JT and I had a really good day today. It seems like silly stuff, but there were so many firsts today that it seemed worthy of sharing. First of all, when it was time to get dressed for preschool JT decided he didn't want to wear Pull-Ups, he wanted Thomas underwear. He happens to have Thomas The Tank Engine underwear so I decided why not! He's been going to preschool all month and really enjoying it. He's been keeping his Pull-Ups dry since 1/16/10. So today we put the two together and it was his first day of wearing big boy Thomas underwear to school and all day long. And yes, he kept it dry ALL day, even through nap. So I was very proud of him for that! Second, when he got home from school we changed into some clean clothes. He helped me move all his clothes down a drawer or two in his dresser yesterday so that he could start picking out his own clothes. Scary thought I know, but he's been asserting his independence a lot lately! So today was the day, he went up, picked out a new outfit, and he put it on by himself. I told the doctor he could dress himself and I suspect he probably was capable of doing it before today, but today I made him prove that he could do it! I wouldn't have put that shirt with those pants, but we weren't going anywhere so I didn't care. The point was he picked it out and put it on himself! Third trick... we have a baby gate by his bedroom door so that he can't escape in the middle of the night and so I can lock him in during time-outs. Today, he opened the gate by himself and came downstairs. He wasn't being punished or anything, he was just playing in his room because he needed some quiet time. Apparently he was done with quiet time and decided to let himself out. Fourth fun new first... I baked cookies today and I made a big chocolate chip cookie as an experiment. It turned out goofy shaped, but yummy so I let JT use his heart cookie cutters that Grandmom gave us for Christmas and we cut out a bunch of heart cookies for Valentine's Day. It was fun and he enjoyed getting to use the cookie cutters instead of just playing with them on the family room floor. And last, but not least, JT rented his first DVD today. I decided to sign up to Netflix for the remainder of the winter so we could see some new movies. JT has been wanting to see Alvin & The Chipmunks so we rented it and it came in the mail today. It seems like no big deal to most, but he thought it was really cool that he got a movie in the mail and we snuggled on the couch and watched it until he fell asleep. Then we just napped on the couch together for a while. After a day of being such a big boy, it was nice to have my baby bear snuggling with me again. Then we had dinner and took a bath and read stories and went to bed. Now I'm staying up way past my bedtime to get this website a little more caught up. All in all ... it was a GREAT DAY! And now to upload all this and go to bed! Someday I'll try to get some videos posted too. I think I need to update RapidWeaver (my software program) before I get too wild and crazy with this thing. But I'll try to keep posting stories in the blog at the very least. TTFN!

I've been trying to update this website for how long now? I thought I had more pictures up and would only have to do the Fall and Winter pictures. Nope! Looking at my site tonight I discovered I only had The Children's Museum and The Henry Ford pictures uploaded and The Henry Ford ones didn't even work (broken link). So I went through all of my 2009 pictures and I have A LOT and I picked some of my favorites. I tried to get at least one from each month. I didn't go over board with birthday pictures or Christmas pictures or anything. Just a little sampling so you can see how he's changed over the last year. Hope you enjoy them, let me know if you have any problems viewing them.

Welcome back to amyrene.com! It's been several months since I've updated my website. I've been wanting to change it around a little bit and make it easier to post pictures and videos of JT since that's what most of you are interested in. I just haven't made the time to totally re-work the site the way I wanted, but tonight I decided I needed to get something done. So keep in mind that it's still under construction, but I'm trying out some new things. Feel free to let me know what you like and don't like about it. Keep in mind as you're reading through some of this that I'm trying to keep it simple for JT's grandparents and my grandparents. So, grandparents of all skill sets, if you can't access anything or have problems pulling up anything please let me know so I can make sure that you're getting to see all that is J.T. Long!

Previously I had this info listed on it's own page on this site, but now I've decided to try and just enter it as a blog entry to see how it looks. Let me know what you think. It's just a little bit about myself. Nothing surprising to most people. Read More...

Hey Everyone! I'm trying to figure out how I can easily host videos, training and entertainment, up on my site. I've got a page called Digital Diva up and so far all it has on it is the CM Digital DVD link. There wasn't a way to explain what it was so I thought I'd just write up a quick blog about it. It's a great introduction to what Creative Memories has to offer right now. I got a lot of stats at convention and I hope to post some of those soon too. Right now I have to switch back into "mommy mode". More later!