Growing Up Part II

The girls had a wonderful time at their party. They loved all the attention and sugar!!! A special thanks to everyone who helped me with the party.....I truly couldn't have done it with out you!

Kallie and Klaire are changing every day! Their hair is growing very quickly lately. We can do pig tails now....hooray!!!! They are jabbering all the time and are still taking steps here and there, but mostly crawling. They interact with each other in new ways...like shaking their heads 'yes' and 'no' at each other! Klaire likes to dance to music and Kallie has found that she likes to wrestle with Landon (gently of course and they pounce on pillows together:). They are having a little seperation anxiety lately, especially with me, which is adding something new to the mix, but other than that they rarely cry. Everything they do is pretty adorable and we are having so much fun with them!

I need to update Liam's quotes b/c he has been saying some really cute things, so you guys will have to hold me accountable to adding his quotes....then I will actually sit down and do it!! Landon is happy to be back in the swing of things at school. He missed his best friend, Margo:) They are getting married ya know......that's what they told their teacher and Landon came home and told us. And since then, they have decided to talk about kids and Margo wants eight and Landon wants a billion, but they both agree that the first will be adopted from China like Margo and the second will be adopted from Arkansas!!!! (Landon was born in Arkansas) They are a crack up.

Happy Holidays!

From our family to yours! I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas! We are still in Colorado enjoying time with family and snow and mountains and new presents and great food and the list goes on and on:)

We have many great pictures that I want to share, but this will have to suffice until I get home and go through them all. This was the picture we were going to put on our Christmas cards, but those didn't happen this year! And I have four really good reasons why........Landon, Liam, Kallie, and Klaire. Maybe next year!

The girls will offficially be one in less than 24 hours......sniff sniff. We are going to make some cupcakes today for a mini-celebration and then they will have a Thing 1 and Thing 2 birthday party after we get home. (We are traveling tomorrow...their real b-day) I can't wait to see what they think of chocolate cake and frosting!

Growing up

We are constantly being made aware of how quickly our kids are growing up, however Landon about made our jaws hit the floor when he explained pixels to us the other day. Landon to us, "Hey, mom you know that flower that is your screen saver on the computer?" Me, "Uh, yes." Landon, "Well that picture is actually just a bunch of pixels put together. And pixels are these little squares of color. Isn't that cool?"

And his reading has been shocking us as well. He can read paragraphs now. He will read out of chapter books and he doesn't sound words out anymore, he just says them. It is crazy, I will have to post a video of him reading a paragraph out of one of his books!



And our litte Liam has been saying things like, "Yes, that is interesting to me." and "Stop distracting me!" And he can write his name all by himself! His preschool teacher asked me what we did to get him to communicate so clearly...I said well we read to him but the rest is just the way God made him! And hearing big brother has helped out too!

We are so proud of our little boys! I plan to post about the girls soon!!

Oh November.

Where did it go? I'm not ready for Christmas?!? Shopping....I don't have time for that! Will someone do my Christmas shopping and plan the girls' birthday party pretty please?

Seriously can you believe the girls are going to celebrate their first birthday in 29 days? I'm so excited to reach this milestone because we kept saying it will get easier after they are one...no more formula..no more bottles....they can eat pretty much anything...they can face forward in the car...etc. But something tells me it isn't going to get too much easier! At least not until they are about three. Liam is easy and I keep thinking ok, when the girls can go potty all on their own and get their shoes on and get in the car by themselves and they can go up and down the stairs with out me worrying and I don't have to carry a diaper bag and no one needs a snack when we are just going out to run errands...then it will truly be easier!!


But, I am VERY MUCH looking forward to no more bottles and formula! I HATE our bottles. Thought I loved them at first, but that didn't last long. They leak all the time when they are standing up and when we are feeding! So you set a bottle down that has a little left in it and ten minutes later there is a ring of formula puddled up on your end table. Or the girls get drips of milk on their chest while they are drinking.....arhhgg. So for all you new moms out there. BORN FREE bottles are not all they are cracked up to be. Ours started leaking after only a couple months of use and there are FIVE pieces to clean per bottle. We have stuck it out b/c we didn't want to pay for a new set, so I think after the girls are fully transitioned to sippies I am going to take those bottles out back and line them up and borrow a shot gun:)


Ok moving on! I'm off my soapbox. Here are some highlights from this month!

(Kallie is the closest to the camera) The girls interactions have been just priceless the last month. They LOVE each other. They laugh at each other, make squishy faces at each other, follow each other, it is delightful. They take toys from each other and knock each other over occationally still, but they are over it in about 2 seconds.We got to watch Avery Kate one day and Kallie was enthralled to say the least. (Klaire was sleeping:)Kevin's parents came down for a long weekend and helped us with the kids and many projects around the house. Kevin and Dennis made these great planter boxes for the deck and Marnie and I made curtians and pillow covers for my room....(or should I say the master bedroom...nahhh it's pretty much mine:) I will post pictured when everything is complete! Oh and you are probably wondering why Kallie is just standing in this picture?!?!? Well, little miss thang 1 is standing all the time now and has taken some steps!!! Not long now! Klaire is standing some too, but is more interested in talking! Klaire says, "Momma, Dadda, and Nanna very clearly and tries to say night night, banana, bye bye, minnie, and a few others. She also turns pages in books when you ask her to and points and shakes her head. She does some signs as well. Kallie says, "Momma and Dadda" and she will sign for more and wave bye.We took advantage of Landon being home from school and we all loaded up to meet daddy for lunch and see his new office. His company switched to a new location and Kevin got an office with windows this time and a fantastic view of downtown!!!This was a very important and private meeting going on here. The real decision makers were very concerned about how much they could twirl in their chairs. Daddy and his sweethearts.(Klaire in front) I caught them sitting like this. Klaire smiles with her mouth open and Kallie grins from ear to ear. Their laughs are also different. Kallie squeals and Klaire cackles.


This is the jail. The have come to like it pretty well in there. And I let them out to explore every day, it's just nice to have them contained when I am cooking or doing something with the boys.

Sorry this picture is blurry, Kevin didn't know I had the camera on manual control. Those are elves hanging from the fan. Their names are Hollis and Hampden and they come to life at night and get into all kinds of mischeif. The boys wrote letters to Santa asking for some elves to come and help us get ready for Christmas and these two came and rang our doorbell the day after Thanksgiving. They will stay with us until after Christmas and then they will go back to the North Pole until next year. Kevin and I sure are having fun 'helping' the elves and we are getting a kick of the boy's enjoyment. Landon has asked a few thousand questions and it took a little convincing, but now he is jumping out of bed to see what Hollis has done. You can find out more at http://www.elf-magic.com/. (Side-note: Kevin and I are thinking about telling Landon about Santa next year way before Christmas season, so that he doesn't hear it from someone else. Anyone been in this boat before? It will be interesting to see if any of his kindergarten buddies tell him anything this year, so far so good. He is just the type kid that isn't going to believe for long and we aren't going to force the Santa thing after he questions it. Any advise on this one?!?!)

You can't turn your back for a second with these two. If one doesn't find it, the other one will.

My surprise visit to see miss Lindy Carr and her precious family! I told Kevin back in August (before my birthday) that the thing I wanted most for my birthday was a weekend to spend with Lindy. So he promised me that he would let me fly up there and he would keep the kids. Yes all four of them! So I flew up on her birthday and she was in shock! We talk all the time, but we hadn't seen each other since April of '07. Anyway, it was awesome. So glad I went and I'm so thankful to Kevin for being SUPERDAD and successfully keeping all four and Liam was even sick. At one point that weekend, he called to tell me he was in Wallie World with all four of them and they were all as happy as could be...he says, "This isn't so hard, I don't know why you don't want to take all four of them grocery shopping:)" Very funny hunny.

Well, if anyone has any birthday party ideas....send them my way. And feel free to do some Christmas shopping for me, otherwise all of you that normally recieve gifts from me are getting coal......or maybe giftcards:)

Halloween!

Well, as you can see we had Batman, Luigi, Thing 1, and Thing 2 at our house last week! I had the idea for Thing 1&2 a long time ago and I couldn't find any store bought costumes, so I had to make them, but it didn't involve sewing so I was good! I just bought solid red jammies (which hard to find by the way) and pinned on the felt circles I made. I bought washable blue hair gel from Sally's and I made the bows. The hair gel washed right out thankfully....I was a little nervous because I just dove in and covered their heads with out testing it first!!!

Landon was VERY determined to be a superhero this year, even though Mario would have been adorable!! We certainly wanted him to be what he wanted and trust me he LOVED being Batman. It was all I could do to get him not to sleep in that costume every night. Last night, some lady told him, "Thanks for keeping us all safe Batman." That was a highlight of his evening. He is so into the holidays now and if it were up to him our house would be decked out in holiday decor year round.

Liam would have been happy to be just about anything this year, I think this is probably the last year that he won't have a strong opinion. He was very familiar with Luigi because he plays Mario Kart with Kevin and the old school Mario Brothers with my dad. We couldn't get the mustache on him unfortunately. That would have been awesome!! He told everyone he was "super fast!"

The girls loved all the attention they got. I however, was not quite prepared for it! We had people stopping us for pictures right and left, it was crazy. I guess I'm not meant to be a celebrity:)

Klaire

Kallie

We are having a hard time keeping everyone healthy in our house. We are on round three of illness running through the family in the last 10 weeks. I know we are just 'paying our dues' for having four kids and two in school, but this getting really stressful and expensive! We've all had the swine flu, we've had sinus infections, an ear infection, a lower uti, and now croup. Fun. Fun. Maybe we will get the worst behind us before Christmas?

More coming soon!

Lots to catch up on

A lot can happen around here in a month! Let's see here...first things first. Landon LOVES school. We are so relieved and thankful, we have worried for the last couple of years about what school would be like for him. He is too smart for his own good and we didn't know if he would get bored and become the class clown or be overwhelmed by the chaos (we thrive on structure in our family:), but so far we are having no issues. In fact, he loves everything about school...new friends, computer class, art, music, p.e., lunch time, recess, circle time, centers, library, and of course his teacher! We have our first six weeks parent teacher conference this week, so we will get to know more about how it going from his teacher's perspective:) He has only had to pull his card one time and it was for something very minor, so we are thinking that she is enjoying him, just as much as he is enjoying her.

Now little brother is still adjusting to the whole kindergarten thing. Some days he just seems lost with out Landon, but preschool is helping. He likes that he is doing something similar to Landon...I think he enjoys having the same subjects to talk about.....teacher, backpack, lunchbox, projects, parties.....more than he does actually going to preschool:) None the less, it is good for him to have his own experiences and hang out with kids his own age. His teacher tells us that he is really sweet to the other kids he just sometimes gets grumpy.....well that didn't surprise us. He has had to adjust first of all to having two baby sisters, now big brother is off making new friends at kindergarten, he has never been away from mommy for a regular 5 hour stretch, and he just turned three. And for anyone of you that have boys, you probably know that boys typically are harder at three than two. That's been our experience at least. But all that being said, Liam is still really joyful and tender and we are still enjoying his innocence very much. I have been trying to give him my undivided attention during half of the girls nap time on Mon, Wed, Fri. We have been doing puzzles, books, alphabet & numbers, and computer games mostly because I still need work on my rocket skills:) He also still likes to cuddle with me often throughout the day...so he has me wrapped around his finger when he wants to! My favorite quote from him lately is, "Good thing the pooper lid is down." That is what he says when we take him number 2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, I guess since I am going in birth order I should talk about Kallie! Miss Kallie Layne has shown us in the last month that she is probably going to be more of a dare-devil than our other children! She went from crawling to pulling up and walking around things in like two weeks. Then I caught her climbing EVERYTHING and we had to buy a fence thing for the living room. And she doesn't care about falling, in fact she will just turn and dive and when she does get hurt she barely cries. She just keeps going. And she is not a big fan of the fence, she spends much of her time trying to maneuver her way out. She is crazy. Kevin let go of her this weekend to see how long she could stand up on her own, and it was amazing. The girl is going to walk way to soon.

Miss Klaire Elise (i have to use her middle name since i used kallie's....no playing favorites around here...:) spent the first part of the month jealous of Kallie's ability to crawl to mommy and beat her to their favorite toys. But then she started army crawling faster and then last week she pretty much went straight to a regular crawl. Then last Thursday she started pulling up on things! Now she is still a couple of weeks behind Kallie, but this girl is on the move now too. She will sit for longer then Kallie, they both are sitting up great, Kallie just doesn't want to sit still. Klaire has been more vocal lately...she says mamamama and nanana all the time and she has few others that involve grunting sounds. She gets very expressive when she wants something! They are both eating little finger foods and dairy now. Cheerios are like candy to them and like a babysitter for mommy:) They girls had been sick since my last post until last week we got them on some antibiotics for sinus infections and Klaire had her first ear infection. Kevin and I were about to go crazy when they were at the peak of their sickness, these kids are hard enough when they are healthy!

Kevin and I went on a three day vacation to a friend's wedding over Labor Day. It was my first time to leave the girls. I cried for the first two hours of the trip, Kevin thought he was going to have to turn around at one point, but I managed to get through it and enjoy myself for the rest of the weekend. Kevin has been super busy at work the last six weeks or so and I have been even more tired than usual with our new school schedule. Let me just tell you a little bit about our routine now. We get up btw 6:00 - 6:30, the kids get up at 7:00. I have to have myself ready and everyone's lunches packed before all the kids are up. Kevin leaves for work about 7:10 after he gets the boys up, dressed, and gets their breakfast. Then I dress and feed the girls, gather Landon's school stuff, the diaper bag, and my brain (this is optional most days) and get all the kids loaded up. Until Landon gets more comfortable with being dropped off, I am having to park, get all four kids out, get the double stroller in and out, and walk everybody up the hill to the back of the school to Landon's class. And on Tues. and Thurs. I have to get everyone out to walk Liam to and from his class at preschool. And we leave at 7:35 to drop Landon off, don't get home until 8:10, then I have about 25 minutes to get the girls out of the car, rediapered, feed their cereal, cleaned up, gather Liam's stuff, and we get back in the car and take Liam to school. Then the girls often fall asleep in the car and don't want their morning nap, so we get home and play for a while, then I feed them and lay them down 11:30ish. Then I clean up the disaster that we have made in our rush, feed myself, do dishes or start laundry, check email possibly, schedule appts., make calls, barely make a dent in my way too long to-do list, and then they are up again. So we go get Liam at 2:15 and then go straight from their to get Landon and we get home around 3:15. Then the girls get feed again and Liam goes down for a short nap. Then I try to get the girls to go down for a short nap from about 4:45 to 5:15 so that I can make dinner. Then at 5:30 I have to have the girls dinner ready and feed them and I try to have our dinner ready at 6:00. And Kevin gets home about then, we eat while trying to entertain the girls, then they get in their jammies at 6:45, bedtime bottle at 7:00, and bedtime at 7:15. Then we bathe the boys and read or play with them. Then they go to bed btw 7:30-7:50. Then we finish cleaning up and doing dishes. We started doing the p90x program two weeks ago, so we work out from 8:30 to 9:45, shower and go to bed unless we have a tv show we really want to stay up and watch. Anyone exhausted? I need a red bull just to talk about it. Thank goodness for weekends and having family close by to help out.

My brain was so over-loaded this morning that I drove away from school without the stroller. Yep. Just left it in the parking lot. The secretary called me and said, "Ummmm I think you left your stroller here. Some other mom brought it in and said it had to be yours." My first thought was how nice of someone to bring that into the office, my second thought was did I drive home with the back of the van open....no Laura that would have been ridiculously loud and you might be blonde but you did not do that, and my last thought was I am just known as the crazy lady with the double stroller who brings in her flock of children to drop her kindergartner off? Probably. They were probably thinking it's a miracle she doesn't leave it every morning!

Yeah our life is nuts. But I think Kevin and I are organizing it the best we can. It's a lot of responsibility, but we wouldn't trade it for anything.

Today marks one year that our nephew Drew has been up in heaven in our Father's arms. If you could please say a prayer for Kari, Jordan, and Peyton we would really appreciate it.

As usual, I have too many pictures to post, so here is an album full of TONS of cute pictures of the kids.

August and September Pictures