Fasten Your Seat Belts...

...this re-cap has the potential to be very bumpy (for me and some technical issues) as well as long. 'Cause it's been FOR.EV.ER since I did a day-to-day type blog.

I haven't a clue where to start. I know! I'll look at some of these bazillion and one pictures. Okay. Here's where I'll start:

That's weeks ago at Old Navy. I was there with just Dalton and Autumn so E must've been at school. He wanted me to take his picture. He's adorable.

Let's just continue with the camera phone a bit longer. Like this one I snapped of my boys being best brothers playing a game of Star Wars Trouble so sweetly in their room while I nursed Sister next door:


And this impressive shot of Easton scaling our brick house. The bricks just barely stick out in a couple of places. Dude is impressive:

I believe our 7 year old neighbor was shouting, "That's high enough, Easton!" from across the street. If it wasn't that day, it was a different one.

Here's Autumn playing peek-a-boo behind the aquarium at Easton's sick visit not long ago:

Poor guy was sick with a 103 degree fever, sore blistery throat on his 3rd day of kindergarten. The boy made it through two years of preschool only having to be absent once for illness...then he has to go and be sick the third day at public school. But, goodness that was a long time ago. Like 3.5 or 4 weeks, eh? Anyhoo...

I feel like I'm just sitting here on my couch with all of you saying exactly what I'd be saying if you were here casually looking through these pictures with me. As in, "Oh here's one I thought was cute when I looked back and saw sleeping beauty's little crossed ankles":


And hitting up Hobby Lobby sans the kindergartner:




That day was so way cute. We were heading to check out when Autumn spotted some Beanie Boo's and fell in love. I've seriously never seen her so excited about a toy like this:

I told Jason about it the next morning and showed him that picture on my phone. So he found some images on Google or something. Well, probably Bing knowing him and his faithful self. But anyway, he was showing her some pictures and she was so excited again pointing and "talking" so animatedly. Jason hadn't seen her like that either. And that settled it: she had some birthday money and I had a Hobby Lobby 40%off coupon and we went up there straight away to let her choose one for herself. Well it was just me and Easton and Autumn. Dalton was at school and Easton's school was out for assessments/testing of all the students.

Easton and I lined up the only two choices that Hobby Lobby had: the panda and the monkey. She chose the monkey. She loved on it. We went to the grocery store afterwards and I tried to leave it in the car but she yelled, "My!!! Myyyyyyy!!" at me so I let her bring it and she clutched it all through the store and all through picking up Dalton. And all through the night:


And nursing the next morning:


Precious, no? It came with the name "Tangerine" but the boys have started calling it "Bamboo" (even though it's NOT the panda) and that's kinda sticking.

In other news...she also walked right over to a set of Barbies at Target the other day and started banging on the box:


I'd say this "girl stuff" is fun, but my boys like all that "girl stuff" too...like her stroller. They play with it when she's not pushing it around:


That was the day we went to Texas Roadhouse for dinner. Easton colored this, which I thought was decent:


And silly D-Bug wanted me to take a picture of him as we were leaving. No idea what his pose was about.

I think I knew at the time but it was awhile ago, people. I've been slacking something fierce.

What else we gots? Hmmm... Oh here's some of the boys outside Wal-Mart the other day. The boys like pictures. Easton climbed up the wall and posed as a surprise, I think:


Then another...

...you can see little Diddles running up behind him all upset that he's being left out.

But he wasn't left out:


Bruthas!


Here's Easton walking into school by himself for the very first time:

I think more tears fell out of my eyes that morning than on his first day of school! On the first few days of school we'd escort him all the way down the hall. By Labor Day they were strongly encouraged to be doing it all on their own. So to transition we'd start by just walking him inside the door and standing at the office to watch him walk aaaaaaaaaaaalllllllll the way down the hall. The kindies are furthest away, what's up with that? After a few days of that it was the Tuesday after Labor Day and I just pulled up to the drop off lane and a teacher helped him open and shut the car door and off he went. Inside the school. All by his little self. :(

Okay now all my pictures in Photobucket are all jumbled up and I don't know what's next or in what order or what. So here's this random one:


And Easton wearing a napkin and a bib to protect his school clothes:

We only did it that day when he was drinking hot chocolate. Somehow he always seems to dribble when he's drinking hot chocolate and I couldn't have that on his second day of school.

One night we had pancakes for dinner. I made someone:

I've got a long way to go on my pancake art.

Uh here's a sampling of work Easton did his first couple of days of school.

He is so bored with it. This is the kind of stuff he was doing two years ago...cutting and tracing for handwriting and coloring and pasting pictures of objects that start with "ssss" or "mmmm". In that book he was to circle the "I" on each page but he can read the whole thing. He was a good sport about it at first, now I think he'd prefer to sleep in and stay in his jammies a bit longer then go up for recess. :)

With those assessments they did not too long ago I'm ready for them to individualize things a bit more. Easton likes a challenge. His teacher and I talked via email the other day and she says he's always asking when they're gonna do math. And if he can leave with the ELL students who "get" to leave the room for a 30 minute English lesson every day. :) She says he's happy at school and participates and is making friends. Side note...one day he told me about a girl in his class who "is, like, twice as cute as my sister." Hee hee! He's always happy when I pick him up. Like he's had a good day. He would tell you he likes school. I want him to love school, though. Don't we all want that?

Okay, switching gears. I had mentioned that our penpal friends sent Autumn a special birthday gift? Check out this amazing box she made for Autumn Violet's room:




And this special little card...check out the details like that little violet bow on the giraffe:


She opened it herself, as I'd said, and went through the cute outfits tucked inside:


Here she is modeling one of them:


And then that night we babysat Emily and Wyatt and all the kids went to town on the bubble wrap from the package. Look at Miss Miss hanging with the big kids!


My boys being cute brothers again:


Okay I'm gonna have to wrap this up for now. Jason is heading to bed....before me! And that just does not happen around here. So I have to go. I wouldn't know what to do...

Bye!

CyC Photography

I totally forgot I had wanted to put up way more of the photos Claire did. Whoopsie!

Here's some more:


I really love the muted color on this one:

However, Autumn is looking at a very drunk man who came to bother us while we were out shooting. He made us nervous but Autumn liked him. He asked if we wanted to use his bench. Eek! We went far far away.










Love her little toes up there!




She's on the trampoline in our backyard in that one.





Okay, that's nearly all of the ones I've seen. Enjoy! And don't steal any of them. They're Claire's copyrighted images. :)

Blossoming

How much do you love this picture??? I know! :) My friend Claire of CyC Photography recently did a photo session with Autumn to add to her portfolio. (Claire's portfolio, not Autumn's). That image is by far my favorite one. I love it!

With the big bloom on her head it's also perfect for this stage in her life as she really is blossoming herself these last couple of weeks. She's eating better, walking more (she still crawls some), she talks more...she's funnier, she's smarter, she's sneakier...

For her birthday we gave her a little stroller that she can use as a walker. And she's so cute pushing it all around the house:


She loves that little Violet in there:


But that little goober has started pulling down the baby gate:


The other day I turned around to see her little stroller had been pushed to the stairs, she'd pulled up the gate, and she was waiting for me to find her on the landing.

As soon as I did she laughed and sped away towards the next set of stairs, laughing all the while like it was the most fun game of chase ever.

Another day I thought she and Dalton were playing in the living room....till I realized I was hearing him in the living room and her on the baby monitor upstairs. Ack!

Here she is opening a birthday present from our pen pals friends Andrea and her boys.

She knew just what to do!

My little girlie is now working on her fourth tooth (finally!):




She's loads of fun:
...









She can get herself into a standing position now, without having to pull up on something:


When she's walking she still falls quite a bit but oftentimes she'll just stand back up and keep going, rather than finishing by crawling.

And I said she was eating better. She really is:


Oh...and she can be a bit sensitive. She was throwing food on the ground and burst into serious sobs when Jason and I told her "No":

She was full-on crying, unable to calm down for quite some time. Poor girl. Dalton was the same way.

Okay...finally I've blogged again. Lauren had been missing me.

There ya go. Enjoy!

Autumn's Actual Birthday

The night before, Autumn Eve I like to call it, I had my final cake decorating class (took a basic one up at the craft store). And I made my "final cake" for Autumn's birthday...

It was french vanilla cake layered with strawberry preserves. It was that exact flavor that got Autumn saying "Num num" to begin with. I did it up with pretty pink and purple for my girl. There were cute little pink polka dots all over the sides. I was pretty proud of it.

But...
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.
.
.
.
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it didn't survive the trip home:


I actually thought it was pretty funny although I was admittedly bummed. But I knew it wasn't the end of the world. Jason said, "You passed cake decorating but failed cake transport." :) Thank goodness her big public celebration was a few days prior and also thank goodness she is only 1 and won't remember or care.

We had cupcakes leftover from her party but I took those to small group the next night. Luckily there were two undecorated ones in a Ziploc baggie that I'd forgotten about. I used some of my leftover icing from class and frosted those puppies up for the next day. Problem solved! I just wanted my girl to have Num Nums on her big day.

In the morning, we had to wake our sleeping beauty up (some birthday!) because both brothers had school. We all dropped Easton off then went to take Dalton for his first day. I already mentioned that Autumn and I hung out in the car. She'd nursed some and hung out on the floorboard some:


I'm telling you, this birthday was off to a smashing start. Not.

But soon school was over for D. Autumn got to come home to nap while we waited on Easton. When he was home and she was up we dug into some presents from family (us and her out-of-town grandparents):




Yay, a girl who's excited by clothes!






Then we took her up to Target for her one year portraits, some of which you've seen already. After her picture session we couldn't decide where to go for lunch or what to do. We wanted to go somewhere that was somewhat special where Autumn could eat something nummy like ice cream. Instead we came up with Gunther Toody's:




But she did get to have some slurps of chocolate cherry milkshake off a spoon:






We thought about taking the kids to Little Monkey Bizness (like we did for Dalton's birthday) but really, Autumn was tired again and we thought she could come home for a nap and maybe we'd go for a swim when she woke up. So that's what we did:


We headed up to the indoor pool at the nearby rec center. We're members there so it was free. We had fun. Easton and Jason took turns on the diving board with Easton doing dives and flips into the water. Diving team here he comes! As I've said before, he's been able to "swim" for a couple of years now but it's rather impressive (to us, anyway) how strong a swimmer he's becoming. And the lifeguards at that pool were remarking on how brave he is. Brave...insane. Same diff.

Autumn, who the outing was all about, had fun too. Lots of fun. She did some back floating with Daddy and she just really enjoys the water like her brothers.

After about an hour and a half or so at the pool we came home. Jason had worship band practice that night so it was just the kids and me. I took Autumn's monthly pictures. She had other things in mind. I think you can get away with a lot more while wearing a tutu:

I'm going to think about getting one for myself. :)

We had a simple dinner of grilled cheese (with leftover party cheese), chips (also leftover) and fruit (yup, more leftovers). Then we capped it off with a couple of cupcakes between the four of us and sang Happy Birthday. I don't love my singing voice but the boys are cute as is Autumn:

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

I took the video since Jason wasn't here for it but I'm sharing it with y'all.

And with that it was bedtime. The kids went down easily and all you could see was the remains of the celebrations sprinkled around the house:


Empty boxes waiting to go to the garage. Clearly Fisher Price stock must be going up:


I think Autumn felt very loved and had a great first birthday!