Sitter

I feel like we can officially say we have a sitter! And yes, she did just turn eight months old. We like to take our time around here. Bentley can finally sit for long stretches of time and eases into a slow lean/fall to the side when she's done. It's so nice. There's not a lot else to report on this girl. She keeps us on a constant roller coaster. Luckily we are in a good stretch, but it feels like every time I say that or feel that way she turns into crazy baby again. She's been doing well for about a week. The few weeks before that, not so much. She remains consistent at sleeping through the night for the most part. Occasionally she'll wake up crying in the wee small hours of the morning, but we don't budge from our bed and just let her work it out and do her thing until it's time to get up, which for her is any time between 7-8am. Her naps were not going so well though. She would sleep for a half hour to an hour and then wake up screaming and no amount of time left in her crib would lull her back to sleep. The eating thing has been an enigma too. She LOVED food at first, and then for those few weeks she cried almost any time we gave her solids; any solids. She would eat a few bites and then scream. And I do not use the word scream lightly. The type of screaming that makes you think you're going to go crazy and makes people shake babies, scream. Then she would only scream at green things that she had previously loved. And now she is back to liking almost all solids again, including green things, well, at least green beans. What she consistently loves is oatmeal. We have to feed it to her last because she gets all excited and greedy when she gets it. I have started to give her little bits of table food and she really really loves that; noodles, rice, pretzels...
She likes to be social and does not appreciate time on the floor, especially for any length of time by herself. She loves bath time and has recently discovered the joy of splashing with her legs. She is little and yummy and has big beautiful blue eyes that captivate people wherever we go.

I do love this child of mine. Especially in the evenings when I nurse her, unrushed, uninterrupted, and I get to rub her downy soft head and smell her still sweet baby smell and she looks up at me with those big blue eyes and waits for me to return her gaze just so she can give me the biggest toothless smile and she'll do it over and over again. And that's why I get up in the morning and do it over and over again.

Pumpkin Carving 2011

What more can I say? Except that Taytum just sat and ate the pumpkin guts, literally, the entire time we carved pumpkins. Yum! It also took about five minutes of coaxing to get Carter to clean out his pumpkin. He did not want to get messy!
And PS... maybe the rest of you are way smarter than I, but a dollar store disposable table cloth is the perfect canvas for carving pumpkins on. Why didn't I think of that before?! Nothing seeps through, it was cute and festive, big enough, and I could just bundle up all the guts and toss it out at the end.

Carter is so bright! He really is just blossoming in school. He is quiet and soft spoken so I worry sometimes he may get over looked. His teacher however has not over looked him. We had our first parent teach conference last week and Mrs Sahni had nothing but shining remarks for him. He met or surpassed all of the benchmarks for his grade. Mrs Sahni said he was very aware and respectful of all the other students, that he always raised his hand to speak, and that he was really good at keeping his eyes on the teacher. I have witnessed this first hand volunteering in his class and he really is awesome. In fact, Mrs Sahni said she wishes she had more Carter's in her class.

Last week she sent home a "challenger homework" packet, meaning that Carter finishes his work really fast and needs a little more to do. There were probably at least ten pages in there, some with new concepts, some with cutting and gluing, some with familiar concepts. He sat down to do "a few of the pages" one day last week. After a couple of pages I asked if he wanted to be done and work on them another day, he said "Nope." I asked after every couple of pages and he just wanted to keep trucking. He had the whole thing finished in less than an hour. I was super impressed and he completed it all perfectly. He is very self motivated and quick to pick up new concepts.

And though I am so very proud of how well he is doing in school, I am even more proud with how he conducts himself in class and on the playground. He is so kind to everyone, so good at taking turns, so good at being respectful to everyone, and such a great example. That is way more important and I am so glad he is the boy that he is. I am so lucky to be his mom.

K town in the fall

Summer and I took a little getaway a few weeks ago. It was kind of last minute, but she and Josh decided to drive up here to Meridian, and the next day us girls loaded up and drove all the way to Klamath by our lonesome. We did really well... and so did the kids. We had walkie-talkies so that we could talk on the drive and make comments about, oh I don't know, say trucks stopped in the middle of the road wielding guns around out their window. We then spent about four fun filled days in Klamath. The weather was absolutely perfect. We did some of the staples: walks, four-wheelers, horses, playing outside in the clubhouse, driving the John Deer, out to eat, delicious food... the norm. We did take the kids to see Lion King 3D and were the only ones in the theater, thank goodness. Okay, they actually did really well.
Alli played hookie on Friday so she could spend the whole day with us and get our craft on.

My mom also helped the kids make carmel apples.And on Saturday we went to a pumpkin patch. The kids all fell at least a dozen times from getting their feet tangled in the vines. It was highly entertaining. And we all brought home ginormous pumpkins.
As always, whenever I spend time with my family I am reminded how lucky I am to have such an amazing family!

Fall Soccer 2011

Carter played on his first soccer team this fall and loved it! Not to mention, he was a pretty good little player out there, if I do say so myself. Carter is so fun to watch. He isn't the most aggressive, yet. It really goes against his nature to steal the ball from someone. He spent a lot of time at the beginning of the season running around the magnet ball, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing. By the end of the season the team was starting to pass and spread out. He scored a number of goals and was excellent on defense. Whenever the ball would go out of bounds Carter would run and pick it up and hand it to the ref. Every time. I am pretty sure he was the fastest kid out there every game. The kid can run! And run he did. He bounced around and did funny little runs and jumps most the game out of excitement. Several times during every game he would look over at the sidelines at me and Jefferson and give us a big smile and a thumbs up. We would return the smile and thumbs up and he would return to play. We are glad he had a good experience and hope to spend many more hours on the sidelines of his games.
His biggest fans:
Soccer Dad:
Soccer Mom:
The only time I have ever seen Carter worn out:
Their cute little team (minus Anna):

Erin, Luke, Carter, Emma, Zach, Jamal

I would not leave anything delicious on our counters in our house, say zucchini bread or a friend's chocolate birthday cake, or else this may happen:

Taytum will go and get the step stool out of the bathroom and help herself to whatever delicious, unsuspecting morsel awaits her on the countertop. Sneaky sneaky.

Busy Bees Class of 2012

School Carnival

We had our very first ever school carnival! It was a lot of fun. The kids had a blast and the weather was absolutely beautiful. We enjoyed carnival games, hot dogs, & face painting. We were pretty much there from start to finish. We got down to about the last hour and I was volunteering in the first aid station for the last hour and we had oodles of tickets left, so Jefferson took Tay and Bentley home and I stayed with the older kids. We played more games, ate cotton candy, snow cones, popcorn, and such. The kids thought it was pretty cool that we were out when it was so dark.Monster.
Parrot.Butterfly.