Gratitude Turkey

We did our annual Gratitude Turkey this year. On the nights I remembered, the kids added a couple things they are grateful for. My faves were chocolate milk, Crissmis and scooll.

Christmas Cuties

Love, love, love the Christmas outfits Grandma and Grandpa sent this year.

This is the best shot we got of the 3. Ben-O doesn't hold still. Ever.

This outfit was extra cute on Benny because he always sticks out his belly when he walks. So he looked like a middle-age banker. (Try to ignore his classy shoes. We were already late for church and I couldn't find his regular ones. )

Little Ladies Book Club

Lucy Goosy was bound and determined to have a book club all her own. She has heard me talk about the group I'm in and she got it in her smarty pants mind that she had to have one, too. She's been asking for over 6 months and finally I gave in and we had one the beginning of December.

Here's the group: Marina, Savannah, Caleigh, Audrey, Lana, Lucy, Kate, and Annie

Here's one of the invitations that we mailed out. I got out my old stamps and let her go. Lucy is such a little creator. She loves to draw and make things. She wanted very, very little of my help.

My help was also discouraged in the planning of the event. Over a week before the get-together, she already had the agenda ready to go. (Although, when she was put in front of the girls to "conduct" the meeting, she got shy and wanted me to help run the show.)

Lucy wanted everyone to bring their favorite book to share and talk about. Each of the girls had a turn to talk about their favorite part of their book. After that, they played a little pictionary using titles of well known books. We ended the party with chocolate chip cookies and the girls all played for a while.

All in all it was great! She started asking again today about when the next one will be. Doesn't someone else host it now????

You're 1.

Your big belly walk

Your beautiful blue eyes

Your super blonde hair

Your funny, spit-like talk

You love to climb in and out of the little rocking chair

You wake up early.....5:30 am early

Your big, bruised noggin

You sleep during church

Your gigantic smile.

You love hot dogs, pizza, goldfish, and green beans.

Your shy look when someone new talks to you

Your linebacker physique.

Your ability to eat all of the corn off of the cob.

You love the cell phone (only when it's open).

Your adorable singing voice you save for the car.

You love your walking toy.

You bring a smile to everyone's face.

You love your brother and sister.

You stole our hearts.

You are 1 (about a month ago, but who's counting?)

Learnin' her some 'rithmetic

I was looking through some of Lucy's worksheets that she brought home and I couldn't help but chuckle at one of her answers. It was a math problem that asked her to explain what happens to the tens digit and ones digit when you add tens. Here's her answer:

four pluse two ekwols six so twunty pluse fourty ekwols sixty becuse it stays the same ekseped you add tens.

Did you catch that?

The Costumes.....

Pirate and Pippi

We got the old Pippi Longstocking movie on Netflix for Lucy to watch. She loved it! She and Graham have been singing, "Scrubbing day is my favorite day..." for the last two months. All of the adults knew right away who she was, but none of the kids did.
We bought the coloring hair spray a week before Halloween. We were getting Lucy's costume ready for school on Friday and I read on the instructions of the spray, "Do not use on blonde, fine hair." Awesome. So, we went to Walmart and Target in search of a red wig we could maybe use. In the end, we decided to chance it. She had some red highlights for a couple days, but after tonight's shower, it's all gone.
We braided pipe cleaners into her hair for the Pippi effect.
This guy was hilarious! The whole month of October we kept asking him what he wanted to be. He would always say, "A superhero". Then it turned into, "A superhero that goes underwater and is green". What the.....
So, we went to Target in search of a costume for Grambo. The pirate costume was quite a bit cheaper than all the superhero ones, so Jason and I were able to sell him on it. I loved hearing him call everyone "Matey" all night.
This one is my favorite. After I got done drawing the beard on him, he went and looked at it in the bathroom mirror and laughed for a while. Then he kept asking me to come to the bathroom and see it. I told him that I didn't need to see it in the mirror, I can see it just by looking at him. He insisted that I needed to go to the mirror to see it better.

And finally....our adorable little monkey. The kids couldn't stop laughing when we put it on him. It was hilarious watching him walk around in it. Lucy liked telling people he was Mr. Neilson from the Pippi Longstocking movie. He didn't love having the hood on for very long, but if we gave him a rest for a few minutes, he didn't mind if we put it back on.

This guy is walking now! He figured it out the same week as his birthday. Maybe someday I'll get around to posting about that, too. Hope you all had a happy Halloween!

Halloween Traditions

I tried this year to start some simple traditions that we will hopefully continue each year for Halloween. Here's a few of the things we did the couple weeks leading up to the big day:

We decided to take some treats to our neighbors in hopes that we could chat with them and get to know them better. It worked! There was one Asian couple that didn't speak English very well. They kept wanting to give the kids candy and we kept trying to explain that we were giving them food. Hopefully they didn't think we were too weird when they uncovered the plates and found these eyeballs. This was my first time trying to make these gross little things. My friend had them on her blog and they looked fun. Lucy wasn't too impressed. I think her exact words were, "Those don't look like the ones on the computer." Thanks, Lucy.....thanks.

We made Rice Crispy treat snakes and cats.

Graham likes to make monsters instead.

Good times. I think my favorite part is snacking on the candy as we decorate.

We had a pumpkin pizza for dinner one night. No, it wasn't pumpkin flavored. We have homemade pizza at least once a week, so I just shaped the dough into a pumpkin. I know, I know.....I'm so creative.

We had Mummy Dogs the day before Halloween. I saw them on a website and wanted to make them. The kids weren't that impressed, but it was fun making them.

It was fun decorating my house this year, too. I'm ticked that I didn't take any pictures. I've never really gotten into it before. I found some sweet stuff at the $.99 store and the kids absolutely loved it! I cut out like 75 paper bats and taped them all over the house. It was really fun. Oh well. Maybe next year I'll get a picture and document it for posterity. Now they'll never know how incredibly cute my house looked on Halloween 2010.