Our Christmas Lights

For the first time in

almost 8 years of marriage & 7 years in this house, we finally put up Christmas lights! I'm loving the candy canes on the walkway...I think I want them up all year! (By the way...that's the moon up above the house, not a flash or something)

Raking Leaves video

For the first time ever, I think, we were able to rake leaves in the front yard and the boys could jump in them. In years past, we always had wind that blew them out of the tree and yard before they turned colors...or it would rain and they'd get all wet and nasty...or we had a dog and the leaves would, well, they'd hide stuff you really didn't want to jump into. This afternoon, after school, the boys and I raked the leaves and they jumped into them. Joshua had a blast...Nathaniel wasn't sure if he should throw the leaves, jump into them or what. I got a short video clip with the camera of them doing Buzz Lightyear's "to infinity and beyond" jump into the leaves...Nathaniel wasn't too sure of what he should do...I don't think he was too keen on diving face first into the leaves!

Joshua's School Picture

When I opened up Joshua's Kiwi Pack today to get out the homework for the week and whatever notes his teacher had sent home, I was pleasantly surprised to find his school pictures there. We did the retakes about 3 weeks ago or so. I had to go with him and be there with him so that he'd let them take his picture. His smile is slightly faked/forced but it turned out nicely! I think he looks older in the picture I took on the actual picture day in September, but he'd just had his hair cut for that one and in this one he was well over-due for one. Still he's a dang cute kid and I'm so glad he's mine!

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was at our house this year - at least for some of the family. Carrie came over after work Wednesday night (well, it was really Thursday morning by the time she got here) and Sarah and Dave came over Thursday afternoon. We fixed a turkey breast, stuffing (good ol' Stove Top...I'm not a stuffing person, so I just make something for Brian and whoever else likes it), rolls (homemade crescent rolls), mashed potatoes and gravy, green bean casserole and pumpkin and apple pies. Sarah brought her grape/fruit salad that is so delicious and Carrie made a no bake cheesecake with strawberry topping. It was all good - minus the green bean casserole. I tried to make it without the onions since they don't do well for Brian's stomach or mine and added cheddar cheese, but they just didn't taste right. They were also too runny, I was in a hurry and I think I added too much milk. Try again at Christmas.

After dinner, while I put away leftovers and did the dishes, everyone played games. After dessert and Nathaniel's bath, we played Guesstures. I think Brian and I have played it once in the years that we've had it...it's more fun with more people than just the two of us. When that was done, it was time for Joshua to go to bed and me to get Nathaniel down. Nathaniel, however, had taken a late nap (after we had dinner), so he was not ready for bed at all. Brian was teaching Sarah and Carrie how to play Sequence and Dave was stretched out on the living room floor sleeping, so I had nowhere to let Nathaniel run around to burn off the energy. Eventually, once everyone left, I was able to feed him and get him to bed. By then I was ready to crash. Carrie left early Friday morning to get to work and Brian and I rearranged our linen closet and food storage closet. We ended up switching them because we need a lot more room for our food storage than we do for our towels and stuff. That took almost all day - between rearranging, sorting, cleaning, tossing old cans of food and other stuff and of course, taking care of the boys. Brian added a shelf to one side of the food closet and it looks wonderful. It took up a good part of our day, but in the end it was worth it. Now, I just have to remember that the towels are now where the food was and the food is where the towels are :)

We got an additional side rail up on the top bunk for Joshua yesterday. He fell out of the top bunk (or something) a week a go Sunday. Since then we've had pillows piled at the side of the bed by the ladder railing. The railing was protecting, but I guess the way he squirms and moves in his sleep, he scooted around it or something. We had shifted the ladder down slightly from where it had been when he first started sleeping on the top bunk when we put Nathaniel in the bottom bunk last week. Now, with the side rail, we've scooted the ladder further down, but there's no way he'll fall. And now, I've got more room to reach over the side rail on Nathaniel's bed and get him into bed which is nice. A couple of weeks ago I also finally made the curtains for their room that I've had the fabric for for quite some time (less than a year, I think). Joshua had picked out Star Wars fabric...I'd thought he'd go for Cars since his comforter is a Cars one, but no, he wanted Star Wars. I was happy with how they turned out and so were both boys. Nathaniel says something and points at them almost every time we go into their room.

Here's our Wreath of Gratitude. This is the third year that we've done our wreath for Thanksgiving...it's a fun way to talk about being thankful with the boys. Also, here are two of Joshua's work pages from school. This one says, "Yo doy gracias por mi familia" (I give thanks for my family) and the other is supposed to be a list of things they are thankful for. Brian was working in his classroom the day they did this assignment and said that these were the things Joshua's teacher wrote on the board...which explains a lot because I didn't know how he'd come up with CARROS (cars), DINERO (money), REGALOS (gifts) and PERRO (dog). Our dog has been dead for almost a year now and when we talk about being thankful for things at home, he's never once mentioned cars, money or gifts...it's usually family, house, friends, church. I did ask him about his "thankful list" and he said well, he was thankful for money because it got him things...which is something I've never heard him say before. I guess that's what they talked about at school.

A New Obsession

Nathaniel has become completely and thoroughly obsessed with turning on and off the lights. The other day Joshua was sitting at the table doing a craft project and Nathaniel woke up from his nap earlier than expected. While he was running around playing, he discovered this tote full of clothes that was sitting in the dining room waiting to go back to storage.

Of course, mountain goat and daredevil that he is, (he climbed up on top of my scrapbook desk twice last week), he climbed right on top of it! And the reason he did this, besides the fact that he climbs on everything, was because he knew that it was right below the light switch. So he proceeded to turn the light on and off several times. In the second video, you can see that he figured out he could do it really quickly. Joshua, in the background, is busting up laughing. So, of course, Nathaniel continued because he knows that if he's got Joshua laughing, he's doing something right (and vice versa).

Every few seconds, Nathaniel would stop, put his hands on his knees, bend over and laugh really hard, then straighten up and do it again.

Sadly, the videos are sideways. I don't know if there's a way I can fix that. If there is, I haven't figured it out yet. I keep forgetting that when I'm taking a little video clip with the digital camera, I can't turn the camera vertically, I have to keep it horizontal!

The bruises, by the way, aren't from this incident. The lump on his forehead is courtesy of a friend grabbing his overall straps last week and yanking on him and him losing his footing and smacking his head (right where he hit it hard in September) on the door jamb. The lovely black eye happened about half an hour after the first crash when he climbed up on the footstool/toy box and slipped and hit right under his eye on the window sill. The eye didn't look too bad until Sunday when it turned that lovely yellow. The boys were both trying to do me in last week...the day after this, Joshua unbalanced the ladder on the bunk bed and it crashed down on top of him as he climbed out of bed...knocking him to the floor from half way down. Luckily just a few days before we'd moved Nathaniel from the crib mattress on the floor up to the bottom bunk (he loves having a big boy bed like Joshua). Joshua and the ladder landed right where Nathaniel would've been sleeping and that wouldn't have turned out well. That afternoon, Nathaniel tripped and fell and hit the sliding shelf thingie that this keyboard sits on and whacked the opposite side of his head on the corner/edge of that - two more scrapes/cuts/bruises/bumps. And then Sunday morning, about 5:30, Joshua somehow managed to fall from the top bunk. We don't know if he fell head or feet or if he was half-asleep and slipped coming down the ladder, but he has a goose egg on his forehead from that. I've told them NO MORE BUMPS and BRUISES.

Random stuff from last week...

Not much has gone on since Halloween, just your usual everyday life. But, I've got some cute pictures to share about everyday life, so here you have it :)

At the end of September we took the boys to a Build a Bear store in the mall in Fairfield. Each boy made a puppy. We gave Nathaniel's dog the unimaginative name of WOOF, mainly because it's one of the words he can say and that's what he calls dogs. Then Joshua, boy of the huge vocabulary, etc. chose to name his dog SPOT. Yes, just plain old Spot...I was expecting Eragon or Hagrid or some Star Wars character name. But no, he wanted Spot. Each of these dogs comes with a birth certificate. And, scrapbooker that I am, I made scrapbook pages using these certificates. However, they are very large, so it doesn't leave much room on the page for pictures. So I decided to just use a wallet-size picture of each boy with their new friend. I have Nathaniel's done and you can see it here. But I still needed to get a picture of Joshua with Spot - without Spot's clothing on (we bought him a $1 Halloween T-shirt at Target out of their dollar bins...and also gave him an outgrown shirt of Nathaniel's.). I finally got that done last week. And as soon as Nathaniel heard me tell Joshua to go get Spot, he went running for Woof. He wanted his picture taken too, so I snapped this one. I love it! I about died laughing at the expression on his face...I don't know what he was trying to do or say, but this is one of those photos I'm going to love for years.

Also, that day I took pictures of Joshua and his sugar skull that he'd decorated at school for their Dia de los Muertos celebration the week before. With him being in Spanish immersion they are going to be celebrating different Mexican holidays. Hmm, I wonder if I can get them to do any Spanish holidays - fallas would be fun :) But bonfires and kindergardeners are the best combo! Anyway, he wasn't overly impressed with Dia de los Muertos...he said that the "dead bread" wasn't anything special to eat. The first I ever heard about Dia de los Muertos was in Trixie Belden (Brian thinks I can link anything and everything back to a Trixie Belden book...he's pretty close to being right about that!) #6 and the Mystery in Arizona. True, Trix and the gang went to Arizona for Christmas (I've done that!) and Dia de los Muertos is in November, but it managed to tie into the mystery and be informative also. So, between that and teaching a majority of Mexican students for 5 years, I had enough of an idea about Dia de los Muertos and how it's celebrated in Mexico to make Joshua think I knew everything about it. So nice sometimes when he thinks I know everything. The other day when we were doing homework and he needed a word (in Spanish) that started with ba, be, bi, bo or bu and, while doing a couple of other things, I pulled the first word out of my head that fit that category and it was babosa (slug). He was so impressed that I knew the word for slug in Spanish that it prompted him to ask me if I knew every word in Spanish that there was. Sadly, I had to admit to him that no, I didn't and that I've forgotten so many words, but still, he assured me, I knew more words than he did. And he drew a lovely picture to go with that babosa - a beautiful rendition of Jabba the Hut (because he's just a big slug, you know) and carefully (because of my insistance) wrote babosa underneath the drawing.

More Halloween Catch-up

When I read Carol's blog yesterday (we both seem to have been bitten by the not-posting-in-awhile bug) she mentioned carving their pumpkin and how Geddy wasn't too happy with them cutting up his pumpkin and that he sampled raw pumpkin and thankfully DIDN'T like it. Well, then I realized that I hadn't posted our carving pictures. So here are a few pictures. Nathaniel, as you can see, entertained himself for a good part of the time with a lid to a box.
He did enjoy sticking his hand inside the pumpkins though

He did kind of lick his hand, but nothing like what Joshua did on his 2nd Halloween

Joshua - October 2003 - 18 months

Joshua carved his own pumpkin this year - he wanted to make it look scary...but once he was finished decided it wasn't that scary and next year he'd make a scarier one!

Brian and I got creative this year and used stencil things to carve our pumpkins...Brian not only carved the front of his, but also the sides.

Brian's pumpkin - all sides.

My pumpkin

Joshua's pumpkin