Connor

I've been meaning to write a bit about Connor. He says some pretty funny things, and I'm sure I don't remember even a small portion. He's such a particular kid too.

His favorite kind of "samwich" is peanut butter, nutella and jam. It has to be toasted and sometimes folded in half. 

For breakfast he has to open the cereal himself before you pour it, and after pouring the milk you have to pour "a little bit more and then a teeny bit more". You just have to do it his way.

He has been a bit confused about the meaning of "first" and "last". If he is the first to get his pajamas on he gets so excited and says,"I'm the last one with pajamas on!" And he always wants to race up the stairs and be the "last" one up.

His favorite books right now are the Bernstain Bears, The Bike Lesson and The Bear Scouts. You know, the ones where the dad is portrayed as really dumb and the kid is the super smart one? Not sure if that means anything to him or not...

He is quite the observer. Our neighbors got a trampoline last spring and he refused to even try it until recently. All the other kids would be on it and he'd just stand there and watch. For months. It is the same wherever we go. At Cornbellies all the kids were jumping and climbing on everything, and Connor watched a lot of the time.

He will always tell you what day it is, and you are usually wrong. One day it was Friday and he insisted that it was Saturday, then it was Opposite Day, then it was Sunday.

You know that joke where kids tell you to look under there and then make you say "underwear"? Yesterday Connor asked me to say underwear, then he laughed and said, "Ha ha, you said underwear."

Connor refused to say prayers for a long time, like over a year I would say. One day about a month or so ago, he decided he wanted to start saying prayers. So instead of him never saying any prayers, he all of a sudden insisted on saying all the prayers. Someone had to help him every time, until just recently when he started doing it by himself, and if it wasn't long enough, he would get mad that it was only a short one. The other day he said a cute one where he blessed the missionaries to be able to stay on their missions, and then he blessed them to be able to come to our house to get the pictures he drew for them.

We wrote letters and drew pictures for my parents and Sam and this was one of them. He's been drawing lots of jellyfish families lately.

I just asked him what he says that is funny, and he said, "Not anyfing funny, not any Spanish words eider."

Yesterday I said something nice to him and he looked at me at said, "Don't say any pretty words."

Connor has been going through the phase where he doesn't like to go to bed. Yes, I am calling it a phase in hopes that it won't last forever. I suppose we are just a bit tired as parents because we just don't want to fight him about it. Or Marissa for that matter. Remember that bed I made for her? She doesn't sleep in it. She either sleeps on our floor, the living room or Alex's floor. Again, too tired as parents to worry about it. Connor ends up sleeping in various random places. He's gone to sleep on the stairs many times. Only once has he fallen down when he rolled over.

 Then there are the other various places and ways that he sleeps.

 

There was the week that he wanted me to tie bandanas on his head like a hat. Like 5 of them.

And there have been many times when he just asked me to take a picture of him.

 

I do love Connor so much, even with his stubbornness and quirks.

Fall Birthdays

 

Wow. It is amazing how time flies. Sweet Hallie turned one on Sept. 30th. I love how easy the first birthday is. I made a banana cake for her, but didn't have any frosting, so it was basically banana bread in a cake pan. Erin put a play banana on top. Classy.

 She got some new toys (Topples and Duplos) for her presents and everyone loved playing with them for days. This picture was when we had all four couches in the family room while our living room was under construction. I don't miss how crowded it was in there!

 

Since it was kind of a busy day, I didn't have time to do anything for dinner (pretty sure I was canning apple pie filling with my sister in law that day). We ended up going to Dickey's for dinner. They just put one in right by our house (yay for new restaurants... still waiting for the grocery store though). They have free soft serve ice cream there and Hallie couldn't get enough of it. I figure since her cake wasn't really messy, at least she got to get messy with the ice cream. Funny side note:  when Hallie was just a couple of months old, I went to Dickey's with the Pin-Up Girls. I was holding Hallie while eating my ice cream when the whole thing fell off the cone and onto her face! It was kind of funny. Maybe she just really likes their ice cream?

 

Here's a bit about Hallie at age one. She is great at standing and has taken some steps, but she is a little scared to actually walk on her own just yet. She's almost there. She is great on the stairs going up and down. That's a relief to me. I was always so worried about her falling down the stairs, and we had the bar stool on its side for months to keep her from going up the stairs. Now she's free to go where she wants safely. I stopped nursing her the day before her birthday and she's been doing great with a bottle. I would even go as far as to say that she is doing better with a bottle than she was with me. After I took her to the doctor last time and we discussed how skinny she was, I started pumping her full of Pediasure and sure enough, she actually did start to fatten up. She's still small, of course, but I don't get the same comments I got before (although that could be because she's more bundled up now and people can't see her skinniness). Jared and I both noticed some fat rolls starting to develop on her legs. I can squish them now!

She likes to feed herself, which makes trying to figure out what to feed her hard sometimes, but we'll get through this phase. She likes to be in the same room as people and cries whenever you get up and leave. She is still into everything, like the silverware from the dishwasher, toilet paper and the contents of all the lower cabinets in the house. She says "dada" and "da" for that. Whenever I ask her to say "mama" she always says "dada" and then laughs. You can tell that her little brain is working when she does stuff like that. She is a loveable, happy baby that we all adore! Such a blessing to have her in our family.

Alex turned 7 on October 10th. He was lucky because that day was the first day of fall break. No school! At about 9:00 the night before he finally told me what kind of cake he wanted, even though I'd been asking him for weeks. He said he wanted pizza for dinner and then a pizza cake for dessert. I borrowed a 14" cake pan from my neighbor to bake the "crust" and picked up a pizza box at the food court that day. The sauce was red frosting, the cheese was grated white chocolate, the pepperoni was fruit roll-ups, the sausage was Whoppers cut in half, the olives were black frosting and the green peppers were kiwis (not that the kids would actually eat a pizza with those toppings, but it would have looked kind of lame with just cheese). Here's how it turned out. It was sooo easy to make. Good choice Alex.

 

Alex wore this monster birthday hat that he got from school almost all day. For dinner, he asked for the "You are Special" plate and determined that he could eat wherever he wanted on his birthday. He took the plate with some pizza and sat at the bottom of the stairs on the floor.

Instead of a birthday party, I kind of convinced him to take a trip to the new Lego Store. It was pretty awesome. We spent a long time just looking at all the Lego creations they had on display. And then we got to put a bunch of different mini people together. I've always been kind of a sucker for Legos. I let him decide which set he wanted, and was hoping he would choose something from the City series because that's my favorite. He ended up with the cruise ship. It's pretty sweet, if I do say so myself. He worked on putting it together, with the help of some of his friends, for the rest of the day and finished that night. It was a big set too, I was impressed.

He got another Lego type set (Kre-os) from his friend next door and finished putting that together the next day. All the neighbor boys love playing with Legos or Tri-os. I love watching them play together! I feel so lucky to have a great group of friends for him within 3 houses. Just another confirmation of how the Lord was guiding us to this particular house.

Alex is still kind and gentle. His teacher at school says that he is really quiet, which I believe. He has a quiet personality, but he is not shy. There's a difference. And he will be sure to tell you that (you just may not hear him say it because he is so quiet). I asked him if second grade was too hard, too easy or just about right. He said, "It's just about right. Sometimes it's too easy and sometimes it's too hard." I asked what was hard about it. He replied, "Well, sometimes when I finish all my work really fast, it's just hard to wait for everyone else to get done with theirs." Haha. He is a smarty pants!

We were going to go to Cornbellies that night with his friends, but it was too rainy and cold, so we went the next day. We have season passes this year and it's so fun. We've gone several times and done some really fun things. Jared, Erin and I even got to do the mechanical bull riding. I've always wanted to do that. Fun! (camera battery died so there's no proof of it--lame.) We got to pick out some pumpkins as part of our season passes and this picture was the best I could do to show it. It is nearly impossible to get all the kids to look and smile at the same time, especially with this many.

Happy Birthday Hallie and Alex, and Happy Fall!