How I Spent My Summer Winter Vacation

This is how we have spent the last month or so of our long, snowy winter . . .

We hibernated a lot, taking long naps wherever we wanted

We ate a lot, to store up for our long winter naps.

Because we are multitaskers, we did so while soaking up all the
extra vitamin D we could get from the rare sunshine.

We started getting a little goofy from breathing too much indoor air.

Too cool!

He called himself a rock star!

Mom on break.

This tourist stopped by once too!

This is as good as it gets with dress-up around here!

Every once in awhile we venture out of our cave and into the world. here we are at the zoo:

Elijah makes sure we know where we are going.

This wolf wants in!

Sometimes we even head to the "tropics" to see if we remember what green looks like.

These displays were more interesting than the animals!

Elijah convinced us to go on a "train" ride.

I think Evan had the most fun though.

Whne it is just to cold to go out, we sometimes bring the outside in:

Trucks in the snow

Evan was caught a little off guard

He was more interested in his mittens than in the snow.

Well, lucky for us, the groundhog said there would be 6 more weeks of winter. Ha, I wish we were that lucky!!!

The Runaway

3 1/2-year-old Elijah has been a challenge since birth. He is always coming up with new ways to stir the pot. He is predictably unpredictable whenever he is overtired or hungry. We usually try to avoid this, but sometimes that is impossible.
Just recently, while we were house sitting at grandma and grandpa's he decided at bedtime that he wanted to go home and sleep in his own bed. After an hour of trying to reason with him, and amazingly enough avoiding a full-blown tantrum, we new we somehow had to get him to bed soon. We took a gamble and decided to "allow" him to go home for bed. At first he thought that he would drive himself home, but we convinced him that that was not the best idea and he would have to walk home.

He got his bag all packed, and even though it was very heavy, decided to drag it all the way home.

We said our goodbyes, "I love yous" and gave kisses and hugs. He was on his way home. It was both humorous and sad at the same time. He actually thought that he was going to walk home!

He asked me which way home was. I told him that he just needed to follow the street. The poor little guy couldn't even see over the snow banks to see the street.

He dragged his bag halfway down the driveway and we watched from the window as he attempted to climb over a snow bank.
Finally, after about 5 minutes, he came back to the door and said he wanted to sleep at grandma and grandpa's for the night because it was too hard to get over the big hill on the way home.
Phew, we "won" one more battle and I think he learned a lesson about mommy and daddy knowing what is best.
This little incident gave us a small glimpse into the many struggles we will have in the future. Seeing is believing for Elijah. Although it will probably be hard, we are going to have to let him try and fail if we want him to learn. For now though we are happy that he doesn't truly want to runaway from us!

23 Weeks!

23 weeks, and getting bigger. It's a boy! The name should be announced soon, as we are still finalizing it in our heads. Or maybe we will keep it a secret!?!

A Little of Everything

Here are some pictures from the month of December.

This was the first big snow that we had at the beginning of the month. It was Evan's first time out in the snow. After about 15 minutes of getting him all bundled up he spent about 3 minutes in the snow before freaking out. Once he was "rescued" and brought inside he just banged on the slider door like he wanted to go back out again. Good grief!

Jon is showing Elijah how to make a snowball.

Another day Elijah helped me make sugar cookies.

He frosted and decorated one cookie, ate it, and declared he was done leaving me with the dozens of cookies to decorate myself. I don't think he is a very domestic boy! Jon helped finish the decorating when he got home because I had had enough!

Now here are just a few candid shots:

Elijah likes to wear Daddy's boots around the house.

Evan likes to get inside our new toy box to play, instead of just pulling the toys out.

A week before Christmas Elijah had his first preschool program. He is sitting in the front row in the red and brown stripped sweater. Our camera doesn't have a very good zoom, so this was a close as I could get from our seat.

It was really cute to see Elijah in his first performance. He looked so cute singing his songs and doing all the actions.

Here he is all excited after the program.

Elijah and cousin Lilly.

The next day there was a birthday party for Jesus at preschool. They started with a little nativity skit:

They then had the kids sing some of the songs from their program. Elijah was really excited to sing them again.

We then sang "Happy Birthday" to Jesus. Each class had there own birthday cake with candles.

They then got to have Christmas cookies. It was a fun little event for us.

Christmas!

We had another wonderful, snowy, and busy Christmas! Here are just a couple of highlights as I did not take too many pictures. Sometime on Christmas Eve it dawned on me that it would be cute to have a picture of the boys since they were wearing matching Christmas sweaters. I did not want to make a big deal of it since they rarely cooperate together. They did not prove me wrong:

Okay Evan, now this isn't going to be such a big deal. Calm down! Elijah, stop putting that screwdriver down your brother's pants!

Yes, look at the camera, put on your happy faces, and get that hand out of here!

Good job Elijah! Evan, not so much. Okay, let's try this one more time!

Okay I give up!

Here is Elijah on Christmas morning with his most coveted Dora Backpack. He has been talking about this since September, so even though mommy thought it was a little lame, Santa ended up bringing it anyway! He does love it though and takes it to bed every night.

Evan was happy, even though it was hard to capture.

There's that backpack again!

They also got this tunnel that came with a play tent that takes up most of our living room. They both love it so much though. Evan especially just went wild we opened up the tunnel. I think that might have been his favorite present!

19 weeks pregnant, one week late!

Following in the footsteps of many pregnant women before me I decide to document this pregnancy in photos. This is a picture at 19 weeks that should have gone up last week, as I am now about 20 weeks.



So, I think Jon got pretty annoyed with me while taking this picture. I kept directing him on how to get a better shot. I finally settled with this one and came to the conclusion that maybe that is just what I look like after all! Being it the third pregnancy and it being fairly close to the last one, most of what looks like "baby" is probably just leftover from the last baby! Oh well, can't worry about that now.
Stay tuned for more updates . . .

Play Time!

Last week me and the boys decided to go to Edinborough Park to have some indoor fun.

For some reason Evan got off to a rough start. He was excited about climbing but then started crying when he finally got to play. He recovered a few minutes later and then had fun!

Elijah had a lot of fun too!

The two of them enjoyed the mini bouncer. Evan could not stay on his feet so he only enjoyed it when Elijah was there to bounce him.

Elijah was hesitant about climbing up into the big area all by himself. There are six different levels and I was a little worried he wouldn't be able to find his way down. When I was playing with Evan I heard Elijah calling, "Mommy, Mommy!". I finally spotted him on the third level and sure enough he couldn't find his way down. After going down the "scary red slide" to get to the bottom he said a quick "hi" to me and headed back up. He then spent the rest of the time climbing up and down having fun. He found his favorite slides too, the blue ones.

Can you spot him?

We then went over to the gym. Elijah enjoyed being pushed in the roller chair.

He also found these hand-pedal carts that we haven't seen before. He was actually fairly good at getting around in them. His only problem was he would run into a wall and not know how to turn around without getting out.

Evan enjoyed playing with the balls and the colored cones.

We finished up the morning with a look at the one remaining waterfall. They both enjoyed looking at the water.