Clay Dough!

 Our nephew turned 3 a few weeks ago (while we were on our cruise) and so the boys and I took over a gift of play dough one afternoon.  He was so cute and kept calling it "Clay Dough".

Love

Bath Time!

 Our hot water heater went out last weekend.  I realize this is very much a first world problem, but we realized how lucky we are to have hot water and how much we rely on it!  Luckily we were able to get a new heater Monday and so we've been slowly getting caught up on dishes, laundry and bathing!  These three are too funny together in the bath.

These three

Our big guys are very independent in many ways (as they should be!), but sometimes they just play baby games with their little brother.  I love this picture of them "cooking" baby B style.

Cruse Pics

 

 

Baby B

 The last stop on our cruise was Disney's private island, Castaway Cay.  It was so much fun with lots of activities for every age.  Baby B found this splash pad and spent quite a long time in it.  He fully mastered walking on this trip so it was extra fun to watch him.

Time to Give

One thing that has always been important to me as a parent is that I teach my kids to give to others.  Its something I make a priority in my own life and something I try and model for our kids.  Its also a reason we chose the school we chose for our kids, they align with this value.  LT's class adopted a family for the holidays.  The kids are then raising money (extra chores, bake sales, raking, shoveling etc) and then piling that money together as a class.  Next Monday several other parents and I are driving all the kids to Target to buy things from the family's list.  Last Friday LT and his friend decided (at the last minute, as in 1 hour before they wanted to start) that they were going to bake goods and sell them at City Floral (owned by LTs friends family).  Together they raised $88.00 in one day!  

Adler's class is giving toys and laundry detergent to families that are living at the Ronald McDonald house over the holidays.  They asked the parents to take the kids shopping to choose a few things, but Adler wanted to raise the money himself.  He wrote a nice email and sent it out to close friends and family.  He raised $55.00 and yesterday I took him shopping to buy things.  Unfortunately I had to front the money because of a bad stomach bug we all got which prohibited the baking from happening before the toys were due, but oh well.  

Cousin time

 We went on a cruise over Thanksgiving to celebrate my parents 40th (woah!) anniversary.  We had a great week all together, but one of the best parts was watching our three boys with their big cousin.  They had so much fun together.

 Dinners were long, but they managed to entertain themselves well.

 Sometimes by the afternoon they were wiped and just snuggled.

B was a trooper and napped on the go sometimes.

Halloween Friends

In a post a little while back Kari mentioned the difficulty of getting these four in one picture together and I found this one of them on my phone that isn't too bad.

Dance party when dad was away

 We had a fun dance party one night while Brian was in Korea a few weeks ago.  

Before long we realized B wasn't with us anymore.  I found him heading quickly towards the toilet.

The boys

Names

As Brian and I discussed naming our children, we both wanted unique names, but I wanted to make sure they were spelled phonetically.  I love my name, but I get tired of spelling it for people and or correcting when they mispronounce it (Carrie, Corly, Cara, trust me, if it starts with a "K" sound, I've probably been called it).  Brian's name was not mispronounced, but so common that he often turned his head when he heard it only to realize he heard another Brian being called.  Thus, our children's names are somewhat unique, but not hard to pronounce or read correctly.  My boss sent me this little clip about my name, which I find too funny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9JkGNhwxb0

Big week at school

This has been a busy week at school!  The boys each had a big event in their classrooms.  LT had the "Invention Convention" where teams of two or three kids invented something.  There were inventions that turned on light switches, dropped laundry down stairs, turned on TVs, carried cats to the vet etc.  LT and his partner invented a machine to water plants.  See below:

https://youtu.be/FVYwXIzRs9Q

Ads had "Musical Morning" in his class.  Kids could perform in a variety of ways, singing, playing an instrument etc.  Ads read two poems.  See below for one of them:

https://youtu.be/gKxQhEDDH68

Shades

Happy birthday Elsie

 We celebrated what would be Elsie's second birthday by releasing pink balloons with messages from each of us (as we did last year).  

We also visited her tree with cousin Wesley and then my brother invited us over for a family dinner.  This has become an important tradition for the boys and us.  She's very much a part of our little family and always remembered.  

Lycra fun

 Some friends had us over for dinner the other night.  They have layers of lycra hanging from their ceiling that the boys and lots of friends played in while the parents had time to talk upstairs.  This is how I found Landon when I went down.