Ok, I fully realize that this is not even a tenth as exciting to anyone other than Jared and I lol, but I was just beaming with pride when he stood up by himself a few days ago, and then almost had a full on emotional breakdown when he took his first NINE steps unassisted yesterday! He was so proud!! It has been hilarious to watch this progression. For the last month or two, instead of crawling, he has been doing what we call, a “Mogli walk,” on his hands and feet. It made me laugh every single time that he did it. Then from there, he just shifted his weight back onto his hind quarters and carefully stood up lol. I know I say this all the time, but I cannot BELIEVE how fast he is growing up. Where does the time go?! Well, here is the evidence so you can all clap with tears of joy as you watch.
About a month or two ago, Jared decided to hire someone to help me with the housework. Only there is a slight problem… my new help is so so SO cute that I can’t stop watching him! It more than DOUBLES the time it would take me to do it on my own, but I just don’t mind. When he smiles at me, my heart melts. I want to spend the rest of my life with him. I love him so much that I don’t even mind when he helpfully takes every dirty dish OUT of the dishwasher, to inspect it, as I put it there. He is so dashing that I don’t bat an eye when he impressively cleans out the refrigerator and throws all of its contents on the ground, requiring a 15 minute pick-up and occasionally cracking glass condiment bottles. He is so charming that I can only smile dreamily as I watch him re-wash my clean glass patio doors with his tongue, creating a blurry mess that I then have to re-clean. And I love the fun game that he creates for me, where he takes every kitchen tool/appliance/utensil that he can carry and carefully organizes them for me. In fact, he organizes so well that I often can no longer find them, even after several days of searching. Ahh, I am smitten. He is by far, the BEST housekeeper that I have ever had. I would recommend him to others but I’m afraid I’ve hired him full time for… well forever. My life is good.
A few weeks ago we got the first snow of the year. It started out of nowhere and kept on coming. It all melted by the end of the day of course lol, but I took Sammy outside to have fun. He was quite thrilled, just like his mommy!
What a fun Halloween! Our icy, frigid weather let up for a night and was just the perfect amount of warmth to let the kids stay out longer, and chill to keep the sweat off their brows during the workout that they experienced. We got to have Riley for this Halloween!!! Yay! We don’t usually get to have him when a holiday arises so this one was extra special.
We carved fabulous pumpkins, about which Riley said, “wow, we are REALLY good at this” lol. We all gutted, Jared drew the faces onto the pumpkins, and I carved them. It was a real team effort lol. We made a Halloween treat, Almond Roca Bars, that Riley said was “quite possibly the best thing I have ever tasted!” lol. We watched “The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown” and then wondered why we watched “The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown.” lol It is a classic cartoon that teaches kids way too many fun “names” to call each other, like “stupid”, “idiot”, and “blockhead.” Which we get to hear constantly all throughout the film. Plus they just yell at each other the whole time, mercilessly tease each other, and are really mean. I don’t think that will be one that we watch with our kids every year lol.
We allowed the kids to steal the spotlight and look fabulous! Riley dressed up as Shaggy and I was completely SHOCKED at how many people knew who he was lol. Sammy was a gorilla and made me laugh every time I looked at his tiny hiney. We snagged a family picture and in it, you can see Sammy going crazy over the blinking, red, self-timer light on my camera lol.
Sammy didn’t exactly go “trick-or-treating” per say, but he did get dressed up and we joined his cousin Max for a walk to grandma’s which resulted in a dum dum sucker. I think Sammy thought he had died and gone to heaven lol. He had it in his hand (wrapper still on) and I turned around, took a couple of steps so that I could get a picture, and he had already put it in his mouth and sucked completely THROUGH the wrapper lol. After he tasted “sucker” it was all over lol. He refused to look at me for any pictures or pay attention to absolutely anyone around him. When he sucked the sucker right off the stick, he cried and cried that I wouldn’t let him keep sucking on the paper. It was so cute. So after a quick 45 minute neighborhood jaunt, Sammy and I came home, I peeled off his now-soaked-with-drool-from-his-sucker costume, and I snuggled him to sleep while dad took the first shift and set out with Riley on the longest Halloween night of our life. They took our neighborhood by storm and came back after a respectable 2 hour mission, only so that us “parents” could swap places and then go back out for another 2 hours lol. Riley came back with more candy than I have EVER seen a child get in one night. His bag must have weighed 25 pounds! You couldn’t wipe the grin off his face for a million bucks. He was beyond proud. But instead of racing home to “dig in”, he raced home to “count” his candy lol. Such a great kid we have! He carefully counted for what seemed like hours and then proudly proclaimed that he had a total of 275! Halloween sure is fun when you have kids.
