Carving pumpkins

Daddy was gone for a few days, and the kids were missing him, so I decided we needed to do something fun.... we'd had our pumpkins just sitting outside our door, so we brought them in and carved them. Josiah wanted to know what we were going to carve, so I said, "Oh, we're just going to put some silly faces on the pumpkins." I emphasized silly rather than scary... Our neighbors all have tombs, skeletons, spiders, ghosts, and Halloween lights all over their houses, which kind of creeps the kids out. I've never lived in a neighborhood that goes this crazy about Halloween. No joke every house on our street has more decorations for Halloween than most normal people do for Christmas...seriously. Anyway, Josiah immediately said he wanted a pumpkin with his tongue sticking out... Notice there are no shots of the actual pumpkins. Mommy is not the world's best pumpkin carver!

A few good ones...

I did manage to get some cute ones though! Here are a few...

Fall Foliage

Every year I try unsuccessfully to get cute pictures of my kids playing in the leaves. This year was no exception. I should have known better... truly. Madelyn missed her morning nap due to a Women's Bible Study, and had just fallen asleep for a much over-due nap when we arrived at our destination. I let her sleep for a few minutes in the car while the kids ran around, and then hoped she would be okay with a short catnap. No such luck. She was not a happy camper. Did I mention she's stubborn? She literally had a show-down with Josiah without speaking one word! I told Reagan and Josiah I wanted them to walk Madelyn up a big hill of leaves so I could get some cute pictures of the back of all three of them. So they obediently grabbed Maddy's hands, and tried to walk her up the hill. Madelyn wasn't in the greatest of moods to begin with, so having people pull her where she didn't want to go was not a good move. She jerked her hands out of their grasp and then proceeded to yell at them in baby gibberish. I told them to try again, and this time not only did she pull her hands away, she dug her heels in as well. Reagan and Josiah are both getting frustrated, and so is mommy. I tell them to try AGAIN, (I really want this picture!), Madelyn gets so frustrated she pulls her arms away, sits on the ground, and cries. Now Josiah is extremely frustrated, and he mumbles, "I'll just walk MYSELF up the hill!" and he marches up the hill with Reagan trailing behind. Not exactly the picture I had in mind...

In The News

Reagan is on the front page of the Kindergarten website for her school! Here is the link so you can check it out: http://www.cdaschools.org/skyway/kindg.html


We have a friend who is a teacher at Reagan's school, she'll send me emails every once in a while saying, "Reagan looks cute today!" It's nice to have somebody that can keep tabs on her for us. Just recently she sent me an email with some pictures she took of Reagan during school. They're so cute! It pays to have friends in high places! =0)

Madelyn - happy, fiesty, sweet, rough n' tumble girl.

New Milestones: four new molars, walking/running everywhere, totally out of the crawling stage.

Madelyn is a mixture of opposites. I always tell people if she were a firstborn, she would be the sweetest little thing. She is generally very happy, and playful, but with two older siblings bossing her around and trampling her she is becoming VERY tough. A nursery worker put it perfectly the other day, she said, "Boy, Madelyn can hold her own..." That's for sure. I predict out of all of our kids she will be our athlete. She's tenacious. If somethings out of her reach: bathtub, toys, cell phone... she finds a way to get it. Even if she has to lunge off a couch, or dive headfirst into the bath tub...she never gives up. I think a lot has to do with birth order, seems like a lot of the third and fourth children I know have a stubborn streak, but some of it, she was born with. As a baby she loved to be swung upside down, twirled around in circles, or thrown up in the air. Whereas Josiah, even though he's a boy, and everybody assumed he would like that kind of thing, never has. He's our cautious one. She also loves to body slam whoever is lying on the floor, and runs FULL speed when wrestling with daddy! So fun to have three kids with all COMPLETE different personalities.

A day downtown

After our pumpkin patch trip we heard they were doing free hayrides downtown, and the kids could also paint pumpkins for free. So we headed downtown, and finished our family day by taking a hayride, painting pumpkins, and playing in the park.

The Animal Farm

When we got to the pumpkin patch, you also had the option to feed the animals. We decided we would splurge and enjoy our family day by treating the kids to this fun experience. Little did we know the terror it would involve. Poor Reagan was too scared to feed the big horses. She wavered long enough back and forth that the horses were beginning to get impatient. Finally mommy fed them and showed her their was nothing to be afraid of, but she still wasn't interested. She finally got brave enough to feed the sheep, but at that point the horses were wanting more food, and one particular over-bearing horse was letting her get no where near the sheep she wanted to feed. She decided to stick with the littler animals: pigs, rabbits, turkeys, chickens, and geese.

Pumpkin Patch

It was a perfect warm beautiful fall day yesterday, and since Halloween is only a week away we decided that it was about time we make a family trip to the pumpkin patch. We heard that some of the bigger pumpkin farms were running low on pumpkins, so we decided to go to the pumpkin patch right across the street from our house. We think we might make it a family tradition! Not only is it close and convenient, but it also has tons of farm animals the kids can feed. The kids were in heaven! They each got their own little wagon for their pumpkins, and started out on the hunt for the perfect pumpkin. Along the way, Josiah found a rusty old tractor and wanted to "drive" it. We plopped him on top and for the next 10 minutes proceeded to listen to a long monologue of him talking like a farmer. So cute! The kids ended up finding great pumpkins, and mom and dad ended up finding an ideal location!

Another Hair-raising Event

Reagan may make a great hair stylist someday...she just needs to perfect her technique a little. She needs to learn less is more. Less chunks out of the bangs, and more along the lines of a trim. This time instead of only cutting her hair though, she also cut the hair of her two friends! Normally I would think, "Aww no big deal, hair grows back." But this hair cutting had incredibly bad timing. Reagan had school pictures the next day, and we were supposed to have family pictures the day after. We did neither. And it gets worse... her two friends were flower girls in a wedding two days later! Thankfully the mom was a good sport, and just laughed, or I think we would have all cried! I gave Reagan a very stern talking to and thought it hit home. Lately she's been saying how embarrassed she is about different things so I tried to relate it to that and told her how embarrassed her friends were going to be when they had to stand in front of a huge crowd of people with no hair in the middle of their foreheads. I thought she was remorseful and she understood the importance of not cutting other people's hair. But as we were waving good-bye to her friends, she yelled really loud, "Come back soon, and I'll cut your hair AGAIN!!!"

Reagan starts riding the bus!

A few weeks after school started Reagan kept asking to ride the bus. I wasn't sure I was ready to face yet another way I needed to "let go", so I kept stalling by saying "Someday..." Finally after finding out from another mom that if she rode the bus home from school, it was a Kindergarten bus only, and it went straight to our development. I figured I could handle that. So the next day I introduced Reagan to the bus driver, and asked him a few questions. When the big day arrived I went to school and took a picture of her getting on the bus, then raced home and took some pictures of her getting off the bus!

Psalm 121

When Reagan started school, I figured since she was memorizing so many things, she might as well start memorizing something worthwhile. So everyday we started "Mommy and Me" time while the other two kids took naps. It's pretty much just talking about our days, reading books, and memorizing bible verses. Reagan loves it because she gets snacks, and I love it because we can spend some one on one time together.

Josiah

Josiah. My handsome little man. Sweetest thing on earth. Lover of monster trucks, trains, and all things with wheels. Cautious. Sensitive. Energetic. Sweet.

Ahhhhh Josiah.... There are so many things that make my heart melt when I think about him. For starters, everyday he tells me how beautiful I am, and how he's going to marry me....what else can you ask for...really? Just to give you an idea of what a sweetheart he is - The kids have been having this ritual in our house of telling me how "not cute" I look with my glasses on. (For the past 7 months my eyes have been giving me problems. It's hard for me to wear my contacts, so I've reverted back to wearing glasses). Now I know I don't look especially cute wearing them, but there's not a whole lot I can do about it, so instead of stumbling around and bumping into things, I wear them. Reagan started the trend of saying, "I don't like you with your glasses on." or "You don't look very beautiful with your glasses on." And Josiah jumped right on the bandwagon. Everyday I wore my glasses I was reminded how "not cute" I looked. One day I decided enough was enough, so I said, "You know what, it's rude to tell mommy that. How do you think that makes mommy feel?" It was quiet for awhile, and neither of them said anything. A few hours later, long after I had stopped thinking about the issue, Josiah snuggled in my lap and looked up at me with sincere little eyes and said, "I think you're beautiful any way you are mommy. I love you and I'm gonna marry you!" Talk about having me wrapped around his finger!

He is definitely our "physical touch" boy. Every morning at the breakfast table he says, "Can I snuggle with you mommy?" Of course I can never resist, so he moves his plate right next to mine, lays his head in my lap and says, "I love you mommy. Your my best mommy." Wonders for the self esteem! I can tell you now he won't date until he's 30, or at least until the girls realize what a true gem he is. Don't get me wrong, he's also "all boy". He races his monster trucks around the house non-stop, uses the couch like it's a torpedo launching pad, and has accidents fairly regularly just because he's too busy playing. But it's okay though he says, "because the pee doesn't go all the way to my socks." Not sure how one gauges what a "true" accident is, but Josiah seems to have it all figured out.