Finally Fall

We haven't been up to anything very interesting lately.  

A lot of going to school:

I can't get enough of them with their cute backpacks and lunch boxes walking in to school with me.  It's just so fun!

Huston had "Donuts with Dads" last week for the letter "D."  He really enjoyed showing Clarke around his classroom (and eating his donut, in case you can't tell from the picture).  When he was first telling me about how his class was going to do this, he said, "If your dad doesn't come, it's okay, because you can just have donuts with just you."  I'm assuming his teachers told him this so no one would be sad if their dad couldn't come.  Then he said, "I don't think Daddy's going to be able to come."  I assured him that Daddy would do his best to come and would probably be able to, and then he said with a quavering voice, "But I just like to eat donuts, too!"  I guess he thought it was either your dad got a donut, or you got one if he couldn't come.  He was a lot happier once he realized he was going to get a donut either way!

Last weekend we took the kids to see Finding Nemo in 3D.  I was a little worried about the shark scenes, but they turned out to be no big deal.  However, when Nemo first got separated from his dad and his dad was crying and calling out for him, Arden turned to me with her eyes pooling with tears and a trembling lip, and then burst into tears!  I mean, full on sobbing and crying!  It was so sweet and sad - she has such a tender heart.  I held her for the rest of the movie, and later, when Nemo got flushed down the dentist sink, Arden turned to me crying again and said, "I want to go home!"  Poor girl thought it was the saddest movie she had ever seen and she kept looking at us like, "I can't believe you've brought me to see this!"

After the movie, we bought a mattress for Arden's big girl bed, which Clarke assembled on Sunday.  I wanted to get a picture of her sleeping on it on the first night, but I was so mad at myself because it looked terrible - I had no mattress pad, no pillow, and the sheets weren't washed and ready.  And I bought a regular size box spring, which was way too tall and looked ridiculous.  So Tuesday I borrowed my mom's van and drove all the way to the Mattress Firm warehouse in Irving to exchange the box spring for a shorter one.

The height of the bed looks much better now, but I still have tons to do in her room.  I change the photo below to a sepia tone, because her walls looked so garish!  I'm tired of the stripes now, and want to paint it a calmer, more neutral color.  Hopefully I'll get to that soon!

Arden's doing great in her bed, though.  She seems to love it.  The first night she didn't fall out, the next three nights she did, but last night she didn't.  Hopefully she'll learn to keep her little body in that bed!

Here's a few more "playing at school" pictures from one of the first really chilly days we've had so far this fall!

Recap of September

I've been meaning to post for awhile, but I was having a hard time trying to figure out where to start.  If I wait too long between posts, it gets overwhelming to try and catch up!  Here's my attempt, anyway...

Arden and Huston have both been loving school.  Arden has the best time playing with all the things in our room and I just love having her with me all day.  Huston runs into my room at the end of every day just bursting with all the things he's learning.  He shows me in the air how to write the new letter and number they're learning, sings the "color" songs in his room at night (to learn how to spell the color words), tells me how many days they've been in school, tells me things he's learned, like that Norman Bridwell wrote all the Clifford books, and chants the letter sound chart that they are learning.  He just loves all the more "academic" things they've been doing in his class.

I try to treasure every day at school together, because I know this is Huston's last year in preschool.  One morning we were walking to the school and Huston said, "I like the way Arden's made.  I like that dress you put her in."  It was so sweet.  (And please note, Arden was wearing pants and a shirt that day, not a dress.)

Huston spends a great part of his days lately building with the magna-tiles we gave him for his birthday.  In this picture he told me he was in his "vacation house."  Notice he has no pants on.  For the past week or so, every time we come home from somewhere he rips his pants off and runs around in his underwear.  

He's been obsessed with playing the old video game "Streets of Rage" with Clarke and pretends to defeat a "Claw" that's on one of the levels.  There's also a conveyor belt in one part of the game that he alternately calls the "convigor belt" and the "convurtle belt."  I love how he says "zilver" for "silver" and how he pronounces "something" as "somesing."  He'll say, "I just think we should have pizza or somesing."

Arden loves to pretend that everything is her baby.  If we see a giraffe on tv, she'll all of a sudden have a baby giraffe.  If there's a bad guy on the video game that Huston and Clarke are playing, then she's suddenly nurturing a "baby bad guy."  Surprisingly, she doesn't really play with baby dolls, but instead just imagines that she's holding different babies.  Baby Junior is still around, but sometimes her other imaginary babies live on her feet, too, like Baby Hank and Baby Bonnie (her Aunt Emily and Uncle Topher's two dogs - Arden pronounces Baby Bonnie as Baby Bunny).  When it's time to leave the house, sometimes she'll gesture at her toes and say, "These little guys want to come, too!" referring to whichever imaginary babies or pets are currently residing there.

Every morning when I get Arden up, she says, "I want to have bre-fest."  I love how she pronounces it.  She also has the cutest way of exaggerating her r's, so that squirrel sounds like squir-rel.  When she pluralizes words, sometimes she adds an "is" sound, so instead of baby giraffes, it's baby giraff-is.  Or "Baby Junior-is favorite toys are puppy dogs," for example.

Arden pronounces all of the "th" sounds at the beginning of words with a /d/ sound.  So her "this" is "dis," her "that" is "dat," and her "then," is "den."  She also says "den" for "when."  

When she talks, it sounds like, "Mommy, do you see dis little baby I'm holding?  She is going to school and den she is going to eat dat little cookie."

Both Huston and Arden pronounces the "th" at the end of words with a /f/ sound.  With is "wif," and Teeth is "teef."  

I love how they talk!

Here's one final anecdote for this September wrap-up:

Huston told me one day, "Momma, I love you all the way to Pluto."

So Arden told me, "I love you all the way to Mercury."

Huston said in his best condescending big brother voice, "Well, Mercury's just not that far, Arden."

Back to School 2012

I was one happy momma when I got these first day of school pictures this morning.  I have NEVER gotten Huston to wear his backpack before.  And I mean, like never, ever.  Not even for one second.  I was so happy he wore his backpack for these pictures.  And so happy that the kids had matching clothes (passed down to us from our neighbors).  They have never matched before, and it was so fun!

 How handsome is my five year old?

And how beautiful is my sweet two year old?

I took these when we got to school this morning.  Huston kept making this crazy face, but I still like them.

We had a great first day of school!  It was fun having Arden in my room, and Huston seemed to really enjoy his class.  He told me he learned how to write the letter "A" and that they learned about Ants.  And that when they talked about the parts of the ant, his friend said, "That's their booottttooomm," and Huston thought that was hilarious.

Five!

I don't know how it's possible that my baby boy turned five on Tuesday.  This past weekend we celebrated with an outer space birthday party for him at our house.  It was a blast!  (ha, ha, puny!)

Huston under his birthday balloon wreath that I made for his Up! party last year.  He wore his space shuttle shirt in keeping with the space theme.

I hot glued little flag signs identifying the food to toy astronauts we already had.  We had planet cookies that I made and iced using my mom's recipe, outer space goldfish, "Sun" chips (get it?), "Flying Saucers" aka Bagel Bites, "Asteroids" aka Chick-fil-a nuggets, grapes (which were unlabeled, but in my mind they were the alien heads, though Clarke thought that was gross and they should be the dwarf planets), cheese cut in the shape of stars with crackers, and "Rocket Fuel" - apple and fruit juice.

My mom made this great cake for Huston with all of the planets in their orbits and the sun on the left side.  He loved it.  In fact, he had a great time at the party until I decided we should sing him happy birthday.  And then he hid under the table and ran to his room.  Oh well.  He eventually forgave me and came back out to have a piece of his cake.

I'm pretty sure his eyes are crossed in this family picture.  He loves to cross his eyes.

We ordered all different sizes and colors of paper lanterns to represent the planets.  Clarke and Huston both insisted on as much accuracy as possible, so Mercury was a tiny 3 inch paper lantern, while Jupiter was over 22 inches.  Clarke and Huston painted the bands on Jupiter and made sure to include the Great Red Spot, and I made rings of aluminum foil for Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.  We actually found an Earth paper lantern on Oriental Trading, so that worked out perfectly.

Sweet friends, Caroline and Wyatt enjoying some grub.

I also ordered some cool planet sticker sheets from Oriental Trading for the kids to do - of course Huston perfectly lined up every planet on the correct orbit, while every other kid just slapped the stickers on the sheet.  I love his obsession with the planets.

We watched our traditional video montage of Huston's year.  I love this tradition!  I think it's so fun to look back over the year in pictures, and Huston and Arden always love watching their videos.

Huston's favorite part of his birthday, by far, was opening his presents.  This was the first year that he has been the one to ask to open his presents, and then actually be excited about it.  Other years he either hasn't cared, or has been too embarrassed to open them with people watching him.  But this year, he was beyond excited and he loved everything!  He got tons of awesome presents - including space books, a space puzzle, two handsome outfits, an awesome telescope, a cactus toy, cactus bank, and cactus books (his other obsession besides planets), an airplane, astronauts and shuttles, and lots of other things.

Clarke and I got him a book called The Three Little Aliens and the Big Bad Robot, which he had seen at his friend Gibson's house, and he was really excited about that.  We also got him a box of 64 crayons for his artistic side, a couple of planets books and stickers, and a set of Magna-Tiles, which are really fun to play and build with.  They were a bit on the expensive side, but totally worth it, I think.  I would highly recommend them if you're looking for a fun and creative gift.

He loved, loved, loved everything he got and it was so very fun to see him enjoying everything about his party (except for the singing bit).

I used some of his many pieces of planet artwork to decorate the bulletin board in our front entry.  Party favors were little bags with a glow in the dark slinky, glow in the dark planet and star stickers, and some glow sticks.

 I can't wait to see what fun obsession he'll have next year to plan his party around!  :)  Happy fifth birthday, Huston!

Poser

Would you look at this little girl?  How gorgeous is she?  Arden let me take some pictures of her on our bed this morning and I just think she's the most beautiful girl on the planet.  I love my sweet baby.

Lazy Summer Days

The kids and I have been enjoying these last few weeks of summer before preschool and Bible study start again.  This past Sunday some sweet friends from law school came over after church and we had lunch and went swimming together.  Unfortunately, I didn't take a single picture!  Last week the kids and I went with some other friends to see Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs at an afternoon movie for kids.  It was a really cute movie and we had so much fun!

Other than that, we've been hanging out at home.  Here's a collection of some random pictures.

Almost everyday I put Arden down for nap, she reads and talks for awhile, then I go in to rock her to sleep (or she would stay awake forever).  It is such a sweet time, and I really look forward to cuddling and rocking her.  She looks so big in her crib these days - we're going to move her to a big girl bed just as soon as I can pick one out.  It seems impossible that she'll be three in November.

 Huston helped me bake some cookies last weekend.  He was such a good helper and really loved turning on and off the mixer.  He picked up this dough hook that was sitting on the counter and said, "Look, Mommy!  It looks like a mystery!"  I like how he connected question mark to mystery.  :)

Last week we found out that Clarke's sister, Emily, and her husband are having a baby boy!  We're so excited to have a new nephew and can't wait to meet little Austin Brooks.

Huston and Arden have been having the best time with our couch lately.  They pretend it's their car, they build forts and houses with it, and Arden is always tucked behind the cushions reading books.  It's so fun to listen to their creative dramatic play.  They say the funniest things - if only I could remember and record it all...

Our friends, Josh and Heidi, were visiting from Chicago this summer and just had to go back.  The kids ran around like crazy playing together (Huston is super sweaty in this picture) and I was only able to take a picture of all of them when we put a movie on (which is why they're all staring straight ahead).

So thankful for summer days and good friends.

Reunited

Huston's beloved Dinah had been missing since before Clarke and I left for Puerto Rico - about 2 weeks now.  We looked all over for her but could not find her.  We checked everywhere we could in the house, outside, in our car, in Mimi's car - everywhere we could think of.  Huston tried to be brave, but would mention from time to time that he missed Dinah, and last night as I was tucking him into bed, he started crying and saying how much he missed her.  It broke my heart!  We prayed together that God would help us find Dinah.  Then I called Melinda and cried because I was so sad for him, and she prayed for us, too.

Today my whole mission was to find that dinosaur.  I was vacuuming, dusting, emptying boxes, moving furniture, looking under cushions, and praying the whole time.  As I got around to Huston's room, my eye caught this little custom night light box that my dad made for Huston when he was 2.  We call it his "H" light, because it has an "H" cut out of it, and a light switch and doorbells, and... at the bottom, two little doors that can be opened and closed.  I think it is completely miraculous that I saw the light and opened the little door at the bottom.  Sweet Dinah was inside!  

I know that by myself I could have searched the whole house and never found her.  And I thank God that he heard our prayers for something as silly as finding a toy dinosaur.  Huston was so happy to be reunited, and it was sweet to pray together and thank God for hearing our prayers.