Trick? or Treat?

Cheerleader: "I want CANDY!! I don't want to take a picture!"

Angel: "Oh, boo, I made the baby cry and that is not fun. I only like him when he's happy. I'm done."

Pumpkin in Denim: "WHHHHHHHHHAAAAA is everyone yelling and laughing and WHHHHAAAAAA are we leaving the house when it's my bedtime?!?!?!"

T Love

If you are a parent, aunt, uncle, or close friend, you find yourself making nicknames for the special kids in your life. Kate is "Bug" most often. We call Nancy "Nan" or "Nanners", some friends of ours call her "Nan-nan". Every now and then a "Rosie" will slip out. Thomas has lots, maybe because he's little. He sometimes gets "Tommy" by friends, mainly to irk me. Nancy Rose quickly corrects them. He gets "Little Man", "Sweet Boy", "My Boy" (that's me calling him that), "Chunky Monkey", "Wild Man" and even "The Best Baby in the Whole World". Okay, so maybe that's not a nickname. But he still gets called that....

Anyway, most often he is "T". I do not plan on calling him T, it just comes out though. And lemme just say, I can't get enough of my sweet T. He is the perfect addition to our family, and already has such a fun personality that we get to see come out more and more every day. Here are some pictures of Thomas, who is now 5 months old.

Kate was playing with Thomas one day and this made him giggle so much. She's saying "Thomas is an antique!" I don't know where she learned that word, and I've realized that's what happens when you have a kid in the house that's independently reading: they pick up on new words daily and their speech and way of talking is constantly changing. The other day she used "BFF" in a story she wrote. But that probably didn't come from one of her books....anyway. Watch this. Baby laughing. Super cute.

Snippits

I haven't posted many pictures lately. I'm too impatient to choose and upload. While the posts may be about what funny things the girls are saying these days, it greatly underestimates how often I pull out the camera to capture them and the other little moments of our daily life. Here are a few snippits from August to now. And by "now", I mean up until 2 weeks ago when strep throat turned our home upside down for a couple of weeks. All I want to say right now is that October 2010 has been an overwhelming month. More on that later. Maybe.

August 16 was Kate's first day of 2nd Grade. Her teacher is Mrs. (Katherine) Hawkins. I knew I'd like her the first time we met her: she told Kate, "we Katherines have to stick together."

An army of brushes, compliments of Nancy Rose.

When Kate is at school, I try and be intentional about my time with Nancy. This morning was lunch wearing dress up clothes and eating in the fort in front of the tv.

Nancy learned she can wink.

Thomas gets plenty of attention, even though it's not always from me.

Weekly trips to Michael's, Hobby Lobby and AC Moore began in August as well.

We took a quick trip to Sky Top in August, just to get apples for jelly & apple butter. This picture captures who these girls really are....

Minute to Win It games with our Community Group. Could you stack 3 golf balls on top of each other in 60 seconds? Mark Clark can, in less than 15!!

I call this Thomas's "carpool line face".

Ryan and I celebrated his 31st Birthday in Tiger Town. Horrible game. We still had a blast, and even got to tailgate with our friends the Bolings.

What do you think Thomas thinks of cereal?

I am in love with this baby boy.

We found an old birthday present for Nancy under our bed. Totally forgot to give her the hippity hop in February, but pulled it out on a day when boredom was threatening to bring the house down. Hippity hop to the rescue!

A Story I Want to Remember

A few things I want to remember about Nancy at 3 1/2:

She does not eat supper food. Almost never.

She loves to lounge in her bed in the morning after waking up, sometimes as long as 10 minutes. Partly because she likes her bed, mostly because she doesn't want to do her chores.

The only thing that does get her out of bed is the excitement of finding out what's for breabast (breakfast).

Her favorite color is purple. ("'cause red is for boys.")

Now that I remembered that, this story can be much more entertaining.

We have a family dinner game my mom loaned me; we often play it at dinner. It's a box of cards with questions like: "What's your least favorite house rule?" and "If you could choose to be anyone else in your family, who would you trade with?"

The question the other evening was "If you could change your garage into anything you wanted it to be, what would you change it into?" Keep in mind we only have one living space, one eating space and the girls share a bedroom. Ryan said a game and movie room; I said a playroom-slash-craft room-slash-laundry room; Kate said an art room. Here is Nancy's response (please imagine it with large circling hand motions):

"It would be RED! And all our beds would be IN IT! And we would get to eat breabast in our BEDS!!! And we wouldn't have to make our beds! And I wouldn't have to make my bed, turn off the light, or go to the potty."

"Oh, and we would not eat supper."

Who, Me?

Just in case there was any question who Thomas looks like....

I'm a Toys R Us Kid

Nancy: "Mom, I don't wanna be a grown up. I wanna stay a kid."

Me: "Why do you not want to grow up, sweetie?"

Nancy: "Because I don't want to be your age."

Momma's in the Kitchen

The smell of freshly baked cookies should elicit sighs of contentment and squeals of delight from little ones in the house. Right? I imagine in someone else's house they do, but in my house, this is the response when I bake cookies:

"Mom, what is that smell??!?"

"Well, darlin'. It's Kate's giant pizza cookie cake thing for her birthday party that Mommy made too big and it overflowed in the oven and burnt on the bottom of the rack. Aren't you excited about eating it?!?!"

At 3:40, the cookie burning happened, then a bottle of red wine was spilled in the fridge and a giant blow out of a diaper happened, plus Kate and I were trying to get ready for meet the teacher. I'm running through a smoky haze in the house without my shirt on, trying not to get poop on me while getting it out of my son's hair, and also closing all the hall doors and opening all doors and windows to the 98 degree heat outside to let the smoke out to avoid setting off the fire alarm. I opened the door to the garage, opened the garage door to allow the smoke to go out, and the dog runs inside, then out, then I forget about the dog for a few minutes until I remember I forgot about the dog and start hollering for her to come, she's taken off on a joy walk around the neighborhood. When my mom arrived at 4:00, all was well and besides the fragrance of burnt marshmallows burning our noses, she never would have known the chaos that was happening just seconds before she came inside. Too bad that wine was spilled. Coulda used some before meet the teacher.

Happy Birthday, Kate!