Our little barf baby

So Elise is 8 months old now, and still we can count on a baby barf incident about once every 20 minutes during the day. I managed to capture the end of one of these on camera, along with a few other awesome pictures of my kids:Good thing we have wood floors right?

the dark side

So I had the best intentions of sewing Stuart's batman costume this year. I got the cape finished during the summer for his birthday, but then it donned on me that I am very much a novice sewer. I broke down and bought him 2 star wars costumes (because a boy needs dress-ups too--and they were 60% off). He has never seen the movies or cartoons, but became enamored by the idea of space guys, so he was Darth Vader during the day at pre-school, and a storm/clone trooper at night for trick-or-treating.

We don't take a lot of posed pictures at our house, so when I asked Grace to smile and say cheese...this is what she gave me:

Here is a much more demure princess (yes, her crown/tiara says Happy Birthday, but don't tell her...she can't read)

We joined the Larsen kids for a great night of sprint-candy-collecting. I have never seen so many small children run so fast for a straight hour. The Sellers family (with all 5 kids under 6 years old) joined us too, so we were quite a parade. The kids had a great time (ok, there were a few tears along the way). It was a great bonus to have our first Halloween in 5 years without snow or sub-freezing temperatures.

Round and orange, scooped out clean, face all carved for Halloween

It seems like everything we do at our house we do with mental stopwatch ticking in our heads...how many minutes will we be able to do this activity before someone has a tantrum/gets hurts/gets punished/falls apart/etc. A few days before Hallween we decided to scoop and carve the pumpkins and our stopwatch broke a long distance record. Grace tried her hand once or twice in the pumpkin to scoop out the guts, but didn't feel it was dignified behavior for a princess, so she then moved seeds that were already scooped out into different piles on the table (happily). Stuart started out scooping with glee, then decided to display his knife wielding skills and raided the knife drawer every few minutes to find the right one for his cutting application (we approached a time out situation at that point), and the baby was squealing and flapping and making the funniest faces so long as her chair was pushed up in between all the gut slinging action at the table. I guess when things get boring this winter, we'll have to experiment with other vegetables.

because they say you should write it down or you'll forget...

Grace (who is almost 2 1/2 now) has a cold and said to me a few days ago..."Mommy, can you clean my nose, I am running out of air."