Two Kids!

In new footies! Too stinkin' adorable. I wish you could see Matt zipping himself up into them and giggling the entire time and then his sprint into the living room to go show them off. Makes me laugh.

Festival!

Matt had a big day at preschool yesterday and was visibly wiped out. In the car on the way home he said he wanted to put his jammies on and take a nap. So that's what we did. At nearly 5 o'clock I went in to wake him and found him like this. The kid was out.
Yesterday evening his school was having a fall festival complete with petting zoo, rides, inflatables, pony rides, games, train ride and bake sale. Matt was again beside himself just taking in the whole spectacle. We found Ava, and those two got on the bee ride together. Adorable!
And there they go up some inflatable obstacle course. Matt spent many tickets on that one.
Matt's favorite by far was the large inflatable slide. You get two slides per 2 tickets spent, and Matt went down that thing over, and over, and over again. Again, Mommy! He'd hand his tickets off to the nice lady manning the station and then hop back up there. They came zooming down that thing! Lots of good crashes.
The bounce house was cool, too. That was clearly Ava's favorite.
After an awesome evening of non-stop fun, we went out to eat at EZ's where Matt wolfed down his entire pizza and a lot of his veggies. Granted, it took him forever because he was so distracted by all the things around him, but still...it was impressive.
And then here is my son the arranger. He lined all my things up on the counter and then moved them to the potty. Wow.

Weezer

Last night we went with Zach, Joy, Tim & Pam to see Weezer perform. It was a great show. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Those guys are great showmen and entertainers. They opened with "My Name is Jonas" and played lots of their old classics and some of their fresh stuff as well. My favorite were their matching Weezer red jumpsuits. I'm sure Matt would have loved a t-shirt, but at $35 a pop they can keep it. I could probably make one and he'd love it. Matt frequently requests to listen to Weezer and loves to stare at their album cover on ITunes. It's funny.
After the concert we went to pick up Matt at Joy's grandmother's house. He had done a nose dive into the corner of his pack & play and his feet were all balled up beneath him with his rear in the air. Hadn't seen that pose in awhile.

Timmy Tim Tim

Happy Birthday Uncle Tim! We celebrated Tim's birthday yesterday with some awesome burgers, cake and football watching. Notice how Matt's face is about to catch fire as he helps Tim blow out his candles. Eesh. He was really disappointed when he was not allowed any cake since he didn't eat his dinner. Am I a mean Mom? Maybe so, but he honestly didn't eat anything for dinner so I couldn't justify giving him cake.Before dinner the kids played a rousing game of tackle football in the backyard while Tim was grilling. That Ava is one aggressive little lady and can really wrap up. It's impressive. And entertaining. Plus, you must love the ballerina outfit embellished with a separate tutu.Matt & I visited another pumpkin patch close to our house this morning to get a few small pumpkins and then our large carving pumpkin. I love this picture with his classic hands behind the back pose. And he looks so dapper in his little shirt and jeans. What a handsome guy. He was amused by the pumpkins for a while but then turned his attention to what was behind those glass doors back there. This patch is located at a preschool so Matt gazed in the windows and lusted after all the toys he saw and begged to go inside. Later, I got this look. What is that?

It's Pumpkin Time!

We made our first visit of the season to the pumpkin farm along with Sarah, Caroline & Mary Claire. Matt had been looking forward to it since he first heard me talking to Sarah on the phone about it a few days ago. "I wanna GO Mommy!" "I wanna go to the pumpkin farm with your cousins." We got there yesterday morning and Matt made a beeline to the pumpkin decorating table. He picked out his pumpkin and we washed it and he then asked me to help him make it look like his pumpkin at home. The plastic jack-o-lantern pumpkin that lights up...he wanted me to draw the same face on it and then light a candle in it. Ha! I hope it turned out the way he wanted it, minus the lighting-up feature.Matt returned to the hand-washing station and proceeded to wash his hands no less than 20 times and play with the faucets until he threw a wall-eyed fit when I tried to peel him away. "No Mommy...you go stand over there," angry little hand pointing far off in the distance. It was funny. That was his only difficult behavior moment of the day, thankfully.The kids ran through the hay maze (Mary Claire had her purse on her shoulder the entire time) and then we took a hay ride out to a little picnic area where we stopped to eat lunch and let the kids run around. Matt went down that slide countless times.We actually got them to sit semi-still for a few pictures on the tractors.And then again in front of the largest pumpkins I think I've ever seen. We were all exhausted from our morning of fun so we finally headed out and stopped at Sonic on the way home for a treat. We had a great time, but we missed Audrey being there. She was with us last year and had such a fun time. Her sweet smile and sunny disposition will always be missed.As we were driving down our street Matt said, " I wanna put my jammies on Momma." I knew he was definitely tired, but he's never asked to put his pj's on for nap time. He kept insisting once we got home so I obliged. He slept all snuggly in his crib until I woke him up a few hours later.
And yes that's right...I said OUR HOUSE! We have at long last moved back into our house even though there are still things that need finishing on our bathrooms. Steven & I are living in the guest bedroom and showering in the guest bath that is mostly finished (we still don't have hot water though...). We decided that everything was close enough to being finished that we could go ahead and move back in. Plus, they had cleaned the house last week so I was much more inclined to get back in here. It's exciting for sure, but there is so much I have do around here. Today I've been washing ALL the clothes from our closet since they were covered in dust. Ick. Matt is definitely happy to be home, but whenever we are out somewhere and we are headed back home he asks if we're going to Tim & Pam's house. He misses them I know. We do too.

A new pal

I woke up Matthew from his nap yesterday afternoon so we could go to his friend Aiden's birthday party. He's a little boy that's in Matt's preschool class, and the two have become fast friends. I don't get many stories out of what Matt does at school, but he has told me that he and Aiden pick up sticks and throw them outside on the playground. Great! After Matt came out of his post-nap fog he enjoyed running around the playground and chasing after Aiden and including himself in the large herd of little boys. We arrived and Aiden was SO excited to see Matt. He said, "Momma look...it's Matthew!!!" Aiden's mom proceeded to tell me that Aiden is obsessed with Matthew and talks about him constantly; he even reports to her what he was wearing at school that particular day. I told her he must have a man-crush on my son. She agreed.

Matt was very privileged to get to actually sit next to Aiden while he blew out the candles on his cake. Matt stared in wonder at it all and grinned through the whole singing of "happy birthday". I swear he thinks that song is always directed at him.

He ate his cupcake (with black icing...his mouth was stained the rest of the afternoon) and slurped down his juice and was ready for action again.

He saw this circle of boys sitting on the ground concentrating on an assortment of toys and sat himself right down with the rest of them. It was pretty cute. It was very noticeable that day that my child is a follower. Aiden kept urging him to follow him and Matt quickly obliged. He was happy to go along with whatever everybody else was doing. Until he wondered off and found the hopscotch numbers on the ground and about burst with excitement. He touched and named all the numbers. So funny.

Belly baby boy is doing well. He woke me up early this morning. I swear he was breakdancing in there because my belly was visibly moving. Going back to sleep was impossible with all that funny-feeling movement so I was up. Steven just shakes his head at me like I'm some kind of alien.

Tomorrow is the TX-OU game...Hook 'em horns!!!! And as always, Stoops is Poops!

An Awesome Week

Where to start? It's really been a busy, super-fun week. I'll begin with last Saturday when we headed out to watch Caroline's soccer game. It was so entertaining to watch her and her teammates scamper back and forth across the field tripping over one another and trying to kick the ball in the right direction. Caroline did great, and she came SO close to scoring a goal in the end. It looked like she was having fun.
Afterward we all went out to lunch and then headed back to Bryan & Sarah's to hang out. Matthew donned the chef hat and set to work on creating tasty treats in the microwave once again. I bought a cake to celebrate and honor what would have been my mother's 57th birthday this Tuesday (10/7). We sang happy birthday and enjoyed reminiscing about all the wonderful memories of her and what an incredible lady she was.

Monday morning we made the trip to Dallas along with Joy & Ava. The kids were great in the car, especially after a stop at Starbuck's where they were rewarded with chocolate milk. It kept them thoroughly entertained in the backseat. That afternoon we headed to the park with Alison and Joshua and let the boys run around. And they literally ran around. Josh would take off screaming all the way and Matt would go bounding after him. Filthy from a full day those two took a very splashy bath together. Matt loved all of Josh's bath duckies. The next day Joy & Ava met up with us for what we thought would just be a morning at the Children's Museum. Turns out that said museum is on the State Fair grounds and that one must purchase tickets to the fair in order to attend the museum. It was all meant to be though because we discovered it was $3 Dr. Pepper can day, and Joy sprinted across the street to a convenience store to get us some cans to save us quite a bit of dinero. We began at the museum, and the kids had the place all to themselves since literally everyone else was at the fair.They played at the water table and had a fantastic time splashing and yelling.

Matt got to milk a cow. A fake cow, but still he loved it. What's funny is that he kept holding that right hand all funny because it had a wristband on it. It's like he had rendered that hand useless...hilarious! He asked all day to take it off. They played in the kitchen, crawled through tunnels, looked at scary reptiles, dug for dinosaur bones in the sand, and put on an awesome show in front of the silly mirrors. We then finally convinced them to go get some lunch. Corny dog here we come!!! Oh my Lord it was good. I don't think I've been to the Fair since college, so it was total memory lane eating that delicious treat. Matt was equally infatuated with it. That and his lemonade. Lunch powered us up for some rides, and I really wasn't sure if Matt would want to. When I first asked him he said, "No!!!!", but then once we walked to the area where the kid rides were he was all about it. His face through all of this was so priceless. He had never seen such a spectacle. The rides, the throngs of people, the food stands, the game booths, the smells, the music....he was just staring up at everything in awe as I dragged him along. It was so cute. He agreed to ride on the airplane ride next to Ava and those two had a blast! They were absolutely adorable sitting there next to each other gripping the bar in front of them. Matt exited the ride once it was over and wanted to get on again. It had to wait though because we were headed to the petting zoo!
Matt got to see all kinds of animals: pigs, a giraffe, goats, cows, donkeys, zebras, emus, ostriches, camels, etc. I bought a small cup of food for him to feed the animals and he dumped it all out in the pig pen first thing. Momma pig quickly gobbled it up.As a peace offering for Steven since he missed out on our day full of fun, we bought him his favorite box of salt water taffy. Matt sampled two pieces before we even left the fairgrounds.Here are the kids in their crazy stupor after possibly the funnest morning of their short lives.

We had a blast in Dallas! We came back yesterday afternoon. This morning we went to Bible study, and once Matt wakes up from his nap we have a birthday party to go to. The fun never stops around here!