August Picture Catch Up!

I'm behind on posting pictures again! I think I'll give myself a once a month goal...hopefully I can meet that :)

Quentin is 2 months! (Or at least he was on August 26th....now he's 2.5 months. My how time flies!). He's had a "social smile" for a few weeks now, and is smiling more and more everyday!

Wheeee!

Quentin loves his baths now. He at least gets to soak in warm water every night, even if he doesn't get soaped up.

Taking a nap on dad's lap with the boppy. Posing for the camera even in his sleep...what a ham!

We're getting pretty good at tummy time now. What a strong boy!

His crib needed new sheets...so into the laundry hamper he went. Probably wouldn't fit anymore!

We went to Ilya & Nicole's wedding in Lodi, CA. The ceremony was at a Greek Orthodox church in Stockton. Quentin was a champ and slept the whole time in the sling.

The reception took place at a winery. It was a beautiful location!

Our family of 3...all jazzed up!

My handsome boys!

Quentin got to go to his first Giant's game against the Cubs...and the Giant's won! He looks pretty pleased about it.

And finally, Quentin learned a new trick! We're very proud :)

Baby Olsen's Room

I had grand intentions of writing my blog posts in the "proper" order (new house before, renovation, after with new paint, and finally nursery pics). Unfortunately, I don't have any good pictures of the house with the new paint job yet, so that'll have to wait. Instead, I'll just jump to the good stuff and post pictures of the baby's room. It's all ready for him and I'm just about 38 weeks, which means he can make his grand debut whenever he decides to. Until then, though, we'll let him cook a little longer.

For his room, we had our hearts set on a farm theme very early on. We found a super cute stencil set from www.mywonderfulwalls.com and were able to order both the stencils and the coordinating paint colors from them. We basically decided to do this whether we were having a boy or a girl. The nerdy speechie in me gets really excited about having baby boy's room be such a language-rich environment. We can talk about the cows and the rooster and the pig, learn about all the different sounds the animals make, and then go see the real animals on a farm someday! Yipee!

So we started by painting the whole room sky blue. Then once this was dry, we drew hills with sidewalk chalk and then painted the green rolling hills free hand.

Next, we had to make some decisions about approximately where furniture would go, and thus, where to place the barn. Once that was decided, we carefully stuck the giant stencil for the barn on the wall (using a level to make sure the whole thing was...well...level).

Next came the fun part- painting the barn red! It took a couple coats of paint, and some very careful touch up once the stencil was removed, but it ended up looking pretty good. Prior to removing the stencil, though, it looked like this:

After that, I stopped taking pictures at each step. We added some rows of corn, a fence, some cows, a pig, a goose, a rooster, a hen and her 4 little chicks, a mouse...etc! It was fun times. We definitely spent many afternoons after work adding various animals, and then touching up. But we're so happy with the results and think baby Olsen will love it too! Here are some pictures of the finished product!

Belated Barcelona pics

My this vacation has been flying by! I expected that it would, but it's kind of sad when it actually does. Trevor and I were in Spain about 2 weeks ago, and now I'm finally getting around the posting the pictures from that part of our trip. Since then, Trevor left to go back home and go back to work, and I've been hanging out with my parents in Paris/visiting friends with my parents in Marseille. More on that later.

Barcelona was a very interesting city, and full of life! Our plane arrived at 9:30pm. By the time we took the train into Barcelona and transferred to the metro, it about 11pm. Taking the metro in Paris at such a late hour generally means it will be close to empty...this was SO far from the case in Barcelona. When our metro arrived, it was full of people, dressed up in their best clubbing clothes, just getting ready to hit the clubs. We could hardly fit with our suitcases. By the time we got off the subway and found our hotel, it was 11:30pm, and we hadn't had dinner yet. So we headed back out to find a place to eat. Just around the corner we found a long strip of restaurants, all with terrace seating in the island in the middle of the street. All of them still had plenty of people having dinner, many who were just beginning. *Whew* we weren't going to go hungry. We sat down and ordered an assortment of tapas and some beers. The people watching at that time of the night in Barcelona is great. You have a full array of people- from the adolescents/young adults who are getting a bite to eat before going dancing, to the parents with their young children, to the old couples walking hand in hand on their way to dinner, everyone is out and about. It's quite the culture shock, even for us, who are used to starting dinner at 9pm regularly when we're in Paris. We jumped right into the fun, though, and acclimated to "Barcelona time," usually not starting dinner until at least 10pm. When in Rome, right?

We got to see a large array of Barcelona highlights, which I'll post pictures of below.

This is about as close to the club scene as we got during our time in Barcelona- I call it,
the morning after:

A beautiful port, near Barceloneta:

A giant fish sculpture, near the port:

View of the W Hotel Barcelona from the beach (not where we stayed)

Yellow tree flower petals in the Parc de la Ciutadella

More yellow flower petals

Trevor in the Parc de la Ciutadella

Love in the Parc de la Ciutadella

Fountain in the Parc de la Ciutadella

Sagrada Familia

Columbus monument

Lichtenstein street art

Outside the Picasso museum...didn't want to take pictures inside the museum, so we don't have many from here.

At the Picasso museum

Trevor enjoying some freshly pressed orange juice (made to order!) in the cafe where we had breakfast every morning

Some tapas...these were the best we tried while we were there

That's it for now! I might most some more Barcelona pictures when I get home and can upload all the vacation pictures onto our new computer. Currently, it takes about a minute to look at each of my pictures because my poor little laptop can't handle 5 meg pics. So once I'm home, I'll go through all of them and if there are any nice ones I missed, I'll post 'em.

More about Paris and the south of France later!