Memories

I love what kids remember. Last week when we were up in Sacramento visiting my parents for Thanksgiving, we took a trip over to San Francisco to check out a museum at Golden Gate park. While walking around the park outside the museum, we came across several pieces of statuary and one made an impression on Nathan. Tonight while I was putting him into bed he said "Remember that man we saw that was naked? He had a sword and we saw his penis. " At this point he pauses and giggles. "At least he had a cape."
You're right kid. At least he had a cape.

Beautiful vs. Cute

Yesterday Nathan got his school pictures back and I was very excited to see them. I guess I was feeling a little sentimental because when I saw them the first thing that came out of my mouth was "Oh, Baby, you're so beautiful!" To which Nathan replied "Not beautiful. Cute."

364 days till Halloween

The morning after Halloween, while I was doing some cleaning, Joshua pushed the stroller over to me. It was out because we had used it the night before when we went Trick-or-Treating. After getting the stroller in place, Josh picked up his Trick-or-Treat bag, climbed into the stroller, and said "let's go!" I had a hard time explaining to him that Halloween is only one night a year.

Welcome Max and Diego

About three weeks ago, we had some new additions to our family. I was at singing practice while Richard and the boys were out buying supplies for our pets. Some how they ended up at the animal shelter and a little while latter we ended up with two kittens. It was a good lesson in delayed gratification for my boys as they had to wait a couple of days for the cats to be "fixed" before we took them home. Here is Joshua and Nathan looking down the hallway for the vet tech bringing the cats to us.
And here are the boys holding the cats. They were so excited to bring home their new pets.

And here are our new babies, Max and Diego. And yes, we can't tell them apart with out their collars. They are 11 week old brothers and we felt that a pair of brothers would be good for our two boys. I am trying to teach the boys proper kitten etiquette, but at least the cats will still play with the boys.

Happy Halloween!

I hope that you all had a good Halloween. We definitely did.
We began with a magic show at the local library. It started out kind of small, but by the end it was packed. The magician was really good with kids, in making everything really silly and with keeping them all under control. He had several of the children come up and help with the different tricks and Nathan got to be one of them. Here he and another little girl are tying up the magician. After the show, the library provided drinks, cookies, and little goodie bags.

After the library we ran home and got costumes on to go to our wards Halloween party. It was a more subdued affair than I have seen before, maybe because it was competing with the "big night" itself, but it was still well attended, well executed, and well enjoyed. After the party we still had a little time before I felt like it was too late to Trick-or-Treat so I took the boys out for a quick stroll around the neighborhood while Richard stayed home to man the door. We were only out for about a half an hour but were still able to get quite a bit of candy. Apparently it had been a slow night and many of the houses gave us large handfuls of candy just to get rid of it. Of course, now we have a whole lot of candy.
If you couldn't tell, Joshua dressed as Woody from Toy Story and Nathan was Wolverine of X-Men.

We did the pumpkins yesterday and Nathan helped out quite a bit this year. He cut most of the hole in the top, scooped some of the insides out, and drew his own design on the pumpkin. Maybe next year I will let him carve more but we will see. I did just about all of the work on Joshua's although he did tell me what he wanted as a design. Nathan's is on the left and is a walrus. Joshua's is of Elmo and I am rather proud of how it turned out if I say so myself.`

Tooth Fairy Visit

One of my favorite memories from my childhood is of when I had lost one of my teeth on the same day as my older sister's birthday slumber party. I was probably about 6 so she was some where around 11 years old. Now, I some how got to be part of the party (don't ask me how, I'm sure that most pre-teens wouldn't want their little sisters at their birthday party but I was very grateful) and we had all set up our sleeping bags out side in the playhouse that used to be in the backyard. We were having fun talking and playing around when I decided to check to make sure that my tooth was still under my pillow when I found that the Tooth Fairy had some how already visited. I was so astounded because I was already becoming jaded and had suspected that my mom was really the Tooth Fairy. But my mom hadn't been outside with us and as far as I could remember, no one had been around my pillow. It was proof to me that the Tooth Fairy really existed! Looking back, I realise that Mom must have recruited someone in the party (was it you, Jessica?) to play Tooth Fairy and I just hadn't noticed when the switch was made.
I bring this up because Jessica's daughter, Jillian, is spending the night with us tonight so that she and Nathan could have a sleep over. Jill has been losing teeth right and left and she happened to loose one tonight (I kind of think that she and Nathan must have done something to help it along). So now it is my turn to play Tooth Fairy and I hope Jill is just as excited as I was.

The best laid plans...

So, my sister's in-laws are having an anniversary party this weekend and my brother-in-law of course wanted to be there for it. The only problem was that they wanted to leave today so that they would have plenty of time and the trip wouldn't be too tiring. The hitch was my kids and who was going to watch them when Jessica and family left? Jessica told me about this last week and we discussed options. We worked something out, and then Jon worked something out, messages got crossed and Jon ended up in the doghouse for a little while. It all got sorted out and everything was set for today. Then of course, life happened.
Josh came to our bed early this morning, having been woken up by throwing up. I was hoping that it was going to be a one time thing and that life would go on normally. It didn't. Josh was sick again. And again. And again. I stopped counting when I got up to ten. So I called in sick to work, cancelled the babysitter, and kept a bowl handy for Josh to puke in. He got pretty good at it.
I thought that it ended up being a wonderful example of Murphy's Law. There had been so much work that went into making sure that we had a babysitter for today and it ended up that we didn't need one anyway.
Josh was fine by this afternoon and I'm sure that it was all due to my wonderful friend, Rebecca, who brought us Sprite and soda crackers since we didn't have any of either in the house. Thank you again Rebecca.