Growing Like a Weed

Ben-O at one month old
I can't believe how fast he is growing. At 5 weeks he weighed 10 lbs 4 oz. and was 21 inches long. He wore this outfit home from the hospital and it was drowning him. We sure love this little guy!

Cute Kiddos

A few weeks ago I sent the kids out to play with chalk while I made dinner. This is what I came out to see. I thought it was pretty cute.

These two funny kids make me laugh every day. I love hearing Lucy laugh her head off at the funny things that Graham says. Especially when they are pretending together. They fight A LOT, so when they are playing and enjoying each other's company, it makes me smile.

Tonight they watched Peter Pan and then spent the next hour becoming Peter and Wendy and running around the house. At dinner, Jason and I had to pretend to be Tinkerbell and Captain Hook.

It's been a rough few weeks here at the house and I haven't been a very nice mom to these two. But they still give me hugs and kisses and forgive me for screaming at them when they ask for another waffle. I'm so lucky to be their Mom.

Grandma and Grandpa To the Rescue!

What would we do without them? My Mom and Dad came to help us when Benjamin was born last month. They made our lives much easier and the transition to 3 kids a little less rocky. Here's Mom with child #1 and #2. This was right before Jason took her to the airport. I'm surprised I was able to snap the picture.....I was crying my eyes out!
Jason and Dad took the kids to the pumpkin patch. I don't think either of the grown men were too excited about it, but for some reason I had it in my head that the kids really needed to go to one or their October wouldn't have been complete.

We made these spider cookies for our FHE treat while they were here.

Don't you just love the toothless grin? She's lost 6 now and a couple more are pretty loose.

We are so grateful that Mom and Dad could come help us. I think of them every morning when I'm running around like a crazy person trying to get everything done before 7:30 am. When are you coming back?

Hanging out with Benjamin

With the flu and everything else that is going around we are not ready to take Benjamin to church. Today it is my turn to stay home with "Beno" while Maggie and the kids go to church. I decided to take advantage of the time alone to get some pictures of Ben and post them. I found this outfit in the drawer late last night after feeding him and thought it was really cute. I just finished feeding him and wanted to get a picture before he makes a mess of it. We have a hard time getting good picture in our house because the lighting is bad. So I decided to try the backyard on this blanket (courtesy of Aunt Shellie) that matched the theme.

Sweet Benny

Zippidee-do-dah!

Disneyland was awesome this time around. We had two full days to party it up. It was nice not feeling pressured to get every thing done in just one day. We had great company, too! Here's Graham and I finishing up the Mr. Toad ride. I have to say, some of the rides at Disneyland are kinda creepy. Mr. Toad is up there at the top of the creepy list.

We took the kids to Ariel's Grotto, which is a restaurant in California Adventure where you get to have lunch with all the princesses. Here's the kiddos with Ariel.

Here's all the kids with Aurora. Graham was pretty jazzed about the princesses, maybe even more so than Lucy.

He was especially intrigued by Princess Minnie. He watched her for a long time.




I think all the kids look so cute in this one with Cinderella. The lunch experience cost us an arm and a leg and so we probably won't do it again, but the kids had a great time and it was fun watching their reactions to everything.
Here's the fam after riding the Toy Story ride for the 3rd or 4th time. We really liked this one. Although, Lucy did not. She's a little harder to impress than the rest of us.



I love this picture! One of the nights we were there, Jason took Lucy and they went on the Matterhorn and then the teacups. She was pretty scared of the Matterhorn, but has since ridden it a couple more times along with many other big rides I wouldn't expect her to try.


There was a short line to get pictures with the Winnie the Pooh characters. Graham would only do a picture with Tigger and only if Dad was holding him.

What a fabulous trip! We loved our vacation at home with the Grunigs. They are such great friends and we always look forward to spending time with them. For days after they left, Lucy kept saying, "I miss when Peter was here."

Good times with the Grunigs

The Grunigs came to town!! We were so lucky to have them come and stay with us last month. We had a fabulous time and we can't wait for them to come back!We spent a couple days at the beach. The weather was great and the kids had a blast.

We spent much of the second beach day looking for crabs and star fish in the rocks. As you can see in the picture above, Graham was thrilled to be getting his picture taken.

We had dinner one night at Yolanda's. It's a restaurant right on the water. The food is pretty good, but mostly we go for the view and atmosphere.

Peter, Lucy and Abby
Our last picture as a family of just 4

We also went to Ventura Harbor while they were here. There's little shops and a huge marina with hundreds of boats. We stopped for a photo op at these funny murals.
We had to stop for some ice cream, too.

Here's crazy Graham enjoying his cone.

We had such a fun week! It was great watching the kids play and enjoy themselves. Jason took off work and we just played all day. It was like being on vacation, but we got to sleep in our own beds and didn't have to drive anywhere! We're so glad the Grunigs made the trip. We ended the week with two days at Disneyland! More pics to come!

Halloween 2009

We had a great Halloween this year. I have lots of posts I need to do before this one, but I thought it would be fun for the extended fam to see the kids in their costumes. Here's Graham in his Spiderman glory. The mask was a bit snug to begin with, so Dad had to cut the holes bigger and add some length to the straps.
Here's one of our attempts to get all the kids in a picture.

Sweet Benny as an adorable pumpkin. All three of my kids have now worn this costume for their first Halloween. The other two filled it out a little more, being how they were 2 months old when they wore it instead of 2 weeks.
Our beautiful Spanish Princess. Don't you love the model pose? She didn't like that she had to tell people what she was. She wanted them to just know. My favorite Lucy quote of the night was said when we were trick or treating. Her friend's house was out of candy and she said, "Well that's a thummer." She was meaning to say bummer.

Hammin' it up for the camera

We hope you all had a Happy Halloween. Doesn't Benny look like he did?