Bella, Gabe and Josiah

A quick catchup on all the pictures I haven’t posted yet... Josy loves his blanket!! They had a pizza party at school. I don’t them East in the car, but how am I supposed to say no to that face??? We bought strawberry corn on the cob, so we decided to make it. Um, it was a lot of work, the kernels were tiny and didn’t taste any different. But hey, we tried! Lucy discovered Shelley. This could be a disaster. Gabe now leaves his door closed and I heard him pleading with Lucy the other day “Lucy, please don’t kill Shelley!” For the number of birds she can take down, um, I’m not sure Shelley is safe even with the lid on... I was trying to clean out the glove box. Someone thought he was being helpful... We found a house with ghost pirates. Gabe  thought it was wonderful! Gramps made Gabe a pegleg. He loves it! He insisted on wearing it to school to show his friends. I told him he could wear it and show them but then I would take it with me... More of this “I’m a big boy and I’m going to pla

We bought a pumpkin. I didn’t really have a plan on when we should carve it, but I figured it would happen eventually. Well, eventually happened when Gabe carried it into the house on a night that we had no other plans and asked if we could carve it. Sometimes it’s hard to say no to that kid... Josy was way more excited about the pumpkin this year than he was last year. He wanted to help cut it open, even trying to take the knife and cut it himself. I cut the top off and then he dug right in, pulling seeds out. Clearly the whisk was his tool of choice... One the pumpkin was cleaned out, I started working on dinner and Gabe was in charge of keeping Josy out of the pumpkin. That did not go well as sometimes that meant that Gabe was carrying the pumpkin around the house while Josy picked up the paper, spreading seeds everywhere. Oh well... Once we’d eaten dinner and put Josy to bed, I started carving. Clearly Gabe overestimated my pumpkin carving skills as he wanted a parrot. Um, I’m a sm

These two love each other so much! Josy is getting ready to move over to the toddler room, so he’s been going outside with the toddlers. Apparently they decided to join the preschoolers on a trip to the leaf pile so they got to play together. Can you get cuter than that??? This morning I asked Gabe what love was and he said “that’s a complicated question. Ask me something I know about. I know about pirates, firetrucks, medics, helicopters, knights, horses. Ask me about one of those. Ask me why we have stairscases. We have stairs so we can walk to higher places.” Silly child...

I actually didn’t know it was possible to jump into a pile here. I’ve lived here basically my whole life and have never once jumped in a leaf pile because we just don’t have the right type of trees. Apparently I’ve been missing out because at school yesterday Gabe found a leaf pile. And apparently after playing in the leaves they had hot chocolate and crispy bars, so that might make it one of the best school days ever!

We woke up the other day to our first snow! Gabe was thoroughly impressed, but that’s partly because he knows that the sooner the snow shows up, the sooner his birthday comes... As he ran off to get dressed he asked me to make sure that the snow didn’t melt any more while he was getting dressed. Um, I can’t promise that... It’s a good thing that one of my projects for the day was to dig through all of the winter gear and make sure that the boys had everything they needed. I found this “winter vest” that he was really excited about and I can’t get over how adorable he is wearing it. I’m not convinced that it’s crazy warm, but that’s a different problem.  I got Josy all dressed to go play outside and I had a different hat on him. Then he saw this one and grabbed it yelling “Huggie!” so I obviously had to let him wear this hat instead. Apparently “playing in the snow” just meant “playing outside in the backyard” as the boys insisted on playing baseball, trying to get into the sandbox and

Seriously, the things that come out of his mouth... M: Look at all those pretty clouds. G: They are pretty. Is it raining? M: I don't see any rain. G: They look like they have rain in them. Maybe it's a storm going to Russia. G: Mom, sometimes I get hungry. M: Okay. Well, it's a good thing that they have snacks at school. G: But Daddy told me I can't have snacks. M: I'm pretty sure Daddy meant before dinner, not at school. But we can clarify with him tonight. G: Do you remember that long walk we went on where I fell asleep? M: What walk? G: That long one. M: Were you in the stroller or did you fall asleep in the car afterwards. G: I was in the stroller. With Gram and Gramps. M: I don't remember which walk you're talking about. G: But you guys always say you remember stuff that happened a long time ago and that was a long time ago. Gabe was just explaining to me that Josy is allergic to raisins because the raisins go into his digestive system and into his poo

Every fall, we do our leaf project. This year I managed to almost forget about it until Gabe brought it up. Opps. It probably doesn’t help that it’s been so wet that the leaves haven’t been very good... On Tuesday we had some time, so after school we stopped and picked up a whole bunch of leaves. Josy thought it was great because he just took off running. I’m definitely not ready for this phase of life... Anyway, we were going to wash and press them before I want to my meeting, but then Gabe got his foot squished by the garage door and the rest of the evening was spent making sure that no actually foot damage had been done and trying to convince him to stop trying to run and jump on a hurting foot. He’s fine, but the leaves ended up getting forgotten.  On Wednesday I found some pretty leaves that didn’t look anything like the ones we’d already gotten, so I picked them up. Good thing I did, because the other ones had already curled and Gabe ended up throwing the old ones outside. We put

Big news around here! I was able to be at work all week last week!!! And I might actually get it all week this week too! Two weeks in a row is crazy talk... In other news, Josy is now the biggest kid in the baby room and they’re talking about starting to transition him to the toddler room. They were talking about doing it at the beginning of November and I think that’s now been pushed back a month, which is good. He’s doing really good at his walking and he’s made a lot of progress in the last couple of weeks, but he’s still just unstable enough that I’m not sure he’s ready to go hang out with all the big kids yet. And he’s definitely not ready to go on walks around the neighborhood all by himself. In another month and a half I think he’ll be there though. But that said, they are starting to let him play in the toddler room and go play in the toddler park. He’s actually now at the point where he runs to the toddler room if I put him down in the hallway, so I think he likes it there. Bu