Rocket Ship Park

Our friends introduced us to this amazing new park appropriately titled Rocket Ship park.  The whole park is themed around the space program.  The kiddos had a BLAST running, climbing, swinging and sliding.  Elin, the 19 month old climbing monkey girl, even scaled the ladder in the bottom left.  After I took the picture I went behind her to supervise.  She sees her brother do something and I swear her mind says “alright I have this, game on!” 

Superheroes

With Halloween around the corner and Thomas’ pretend play revolving a lot around super heroes, protecting the house and and getting the bad guys we had a little fun with face paint tonight.  Thankfully Mike is a great sport and he’s always up for some bad guy hunting!

Smorgus Board of Our Life

Picture flop

Climby Monkey

Snuggle Kitty

The prettiest girls

ring around the tree

mean face

messiest eater

proud of the fort he built

mama in training

Lunch dates

bathing buns

crazy nap hair

Chillin’ in the back yard

Wish they always played/read this well together

Duck lips in sleep…ha

Love this face

First hockey stick

Swinging with her babies

Giant one talking

Sooo sleepy

Love the clouds in Texas

Spider web or volleyball

Halloween

We started our Halloween festivus the night before by carving our pumpkins.  The kiddos were very excited to carve.  Thomas wasn’t a huge fan of digging the guts out, but was all about cutting the pumpkin with his knife.  Elin scooped and happily threw the guts everywhere.

Thursday was a school day and I found it very fun to make a special orange Halloween lunch!  Thomas loved his pumpkin sandwich and asked for them the next few days.  While Thomas was at school Elin and I made a run for Halloween candy, we thought we would need a ton with all the kids in the neighborhood.    After school we came back here to rest before the big Trick or Treat event.

Thomas picked out our costumes this year.  We were all super heroes, even Stella had a cape!  We got the tripod set up and tried to get a family picture in front of the house.  I absolutely love the chaos that this captures.  I always set up the camera to take 10 pictures in the span of a few seconds…I figure one of them will turn out!  We then started around the neighborhood and were very excited about how well both the kiddos did saying “trick or treat” and “thank you.”  They got a lot of nice comments about their manners and outfits.  This was the first year that Thomas really got it, as we didn’t go out last year in the rain.  Elin was his side kick and as long as he was with her she was up for anything.  We went around our block and then headed home to dive into the loot.  Halloween 2013 will go down in the books as a success!

Elin is 18 Months Old

How quickly things change and all of a sudden, or 18 Months later, Elin is not so much a baby anymore!   She is sure full of personality and it is really fun to watch how much she is changing, learning and growing every single day.

Elin is a little chatter box and has a lot of vocabulary words and she also is starting to put 2-3 words together to communicate her thoughts or needs.  She loves to copy anything we say and will very often repeat things we ask her.  She knows all the farm animals and what they say, most of her body parts (including eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hands, feet, knees, elbows, hair, toes).  One of her favorite things to do right now is to sing our night night song  to her babies. She is still working on all the words but she will sing portions of the song and it melts my heart.  She can say “night night baby, (mama, dada, grandpa, grandma, Thoma) loves you much, night night).  She is able to follow multiple step directions, find age appropriate vocabulary in books, have a simple back and forth conversation and ask for “help.”  What can I say aside from I am so impressed with her communication, which makes this mama so so proud!

Elin is an active little girl and she does her best to keep up with her big brother.  She is a very skilled climber and we have to watch her very carefully or she will be on top of something.   She can walk up and down the stairs by herself holding onto the railing, she can jump up on two feet, run, hold onto things and pull her legs up and climb ladders and stairs.  She in fact is able to play on most play grounds and knows her own limits, usually Mike and I are close by for supervision.

She is a happy little eater but OH MY is she messy!  I mean messy, she smears, dumps, throws and sometimes it feels like she even eats her food.  She is eating everything we are just cut up a bit smaller.  I can not wait to get out of this dumping and throwing phase, because it will make clean up that much easier.   Elin still is nursing a few times a day and a couple times at night.  She now nurses mainly to go to sleep and if she isn’t feeling the best.  The last few weeks she has started to do a 5-7 hour stretch of sleep at night, which has been amazing.  She has 16 teeth at this point and we are just waiting on her 2 year molars and then all of her baby teeth will be in. 

Things she loves to do are: climb, ride bike, swing, play with her brother, play with her babies, color (mostly herself), and read books.  She loves walking her babies in their strollers and being outside.  Thomas or (Thoma) as she calls him is her favorite favorite.  They are getting along how siblings do, happy one minute and then wrestling and fighting the next.  Elin however is a tough little cookie and she can hold her own with him.  She will tell him “no” and “be nice” and if all else fails she is a hair grabber!  She is also is very into fashion and “pretty” things.  She is currently into rockin’ no diaper and “poke o’ dot” socks, where a couple months ago it was tutus and layer after layer of pajamas.  When we are out and about she will notice girls and their hair bows or their shoes, it is so wild how quickly she notices too.  She has started to get some wild girl hair and is in the “who knows what we are suppose to do with this mess” stage, if we don’t just let the chaos flow I have put a few piggies in to try and tame the madness.  She has been doing very well with going potty on the big girl potty chair.  She is about 90% successful if she isn’t wearing a diaper with pee and we are working towards being able to poo on the potty.  With this new awareness we even have been waking up with her so she can go potty.

Anyway this is a a small snapshot of Elin.  She is our spirited little love that we couldn’t imagine how simple and incomplete our life would be without her.

Thomas Starts Preschool

Thomas started preschool in Texas today.  He is attending the Children’s Discovery Center at the United Methodist Church in Plano.  It was referred to us by a neighborhood friend and I immediately felt great about the school, set up and curriculum upon further research.  The only downfalls I found were it was 3 miles and about a 10-15 minute drive from the house and the class ran a little later than I was looking for ending at 2 p.m.   After looking at a couple other options and talking with Mike we decided that this after all was the best fit for what we were looking for. 

Thomas started in the Tuesday/Thursday classroom and was very excited to go to class the first day.  Mike took the morning off from work to help with drop off as we didn’t know how smoothly it would go.  Thomas excitedly said goodbye and got busy with his new classmates. 

Can’t wait to see how he changes and grows during this school year. 

Catching Up…June and July…Done!!!

I am working on getting this thing up to date!  Slowly we are getting there!  June and July are done, so if you’d like to see them scroll down to the bottom right of the page.  If you click on the June or July tab it will pull up the entire month of activities.  Onto August…September and oh wait October…

Pumpkin Patch and Fall Fun

Thomas, Elin and I joined our friends Anna, Tripp and Boston at the local pumpkin patch for some fall fun.  The kiddos played in the bounce houses and hay mazes and burned off their energy.  Then we went for a hay ride through the old town that was decorated spooky for Halloween.  Thomas and his buddy Tripp enjoyed a pony ride and then the highlight for the kids was feeding the chickens, sheep and goats.

Super Heroes

Dance Off