Just for fun

Because I'm too wrapped up in getting organized for this baptism.  And I've been running around all evening with poor Louie all fussy in the back seat of the car while I take care of boring errands like buying paper plates and napkins in my chosen color scheme and stopping at the bakery to order the cake.

Because my mom spontaneously offered to take Gus overnight.  My dad is on travel for work and truly, I think she's a little lonely after a week in the house by herself.  (Within moments of deciding on it, she was already talking to him about sleeping in her bed tonight so they can snuggle.  So sweet.)

Because Gus being at grandma's and Louie sleeping means Dan and I have some free time and it would be really nice to just veg out in front of the TV.

I wish we had beer.

Anyway, so just for fun here are some pictures from a forgotten summer weekend.  Because it never happened if I didn't blog about it, right?.  My parents, my brother, and his wife spent a weekend in July with us up at Dan's family's cabin, and it was loud and fun and I'm sure exhausting, though the pictures never sufficiently tell THAT story, do they?  :)

I am so tired

The excitement of yesterday had me up until midnight last night, glued to the election coverage.    Midnight.  That is so stupid.

Louie is seriously up like every 45 minutes to two hours all night long these days, and that includes during the time between when he first goes down for the night and when I go to bed.  It's ridiculous, but familiar.  Feels like it was just yesterday that it was Gus pulling this crap with the constant night-wakings.

I really don't get it, why do my kids do this stuff, and other kids just... sleep?

I don't know.  I admit I'm firmly in the camp of parents that just prefer to roll with it with the baby sleep "issues", hoping for it to get better on its own.  I'm iffy on the sleep training stuff and probably more than anything else, I'm just too lazy and tired to do anything more than zombie my way out of bed and retrieve my baby, prop myself up with pillows in bed, and nurse him back to sleep.  (Louie doesn't like to nurse side-lying!  Why baby why?!)

Not like the "do nothing" approach really worked with Gus.  He finally started sleeping better sometime between 2 and 3, and still today he doesn't sleep through the night very often.  I can't help but wonder sometimes, is it them or is it us that is the problem?

My saving grace, the thing that gets me through it and helps me convince myself that Louie will outgrow some of this stuff earlier than Gus, is that he can totally put himself to sleep.  Really he does it pretty consistently, with very little fussing, and believe it or not, has never once been rocked to sleep in his ten months of life.  If he's in the mood, he will fall asleep nursing.  If not, then he's arching away from me and practically leaping out of my arms to get into his bed.  No bedtime or nap time snuggles for this baby boy.  

If it wasn't so convenient that he went to bed on his own so well, it would make me sad.  I do love me a good rocking chair baby snuggle session.

Oh well.

He is so lovely though.

They both are.

I hate to complain, truly at this point it's sort of a fact of life, though that doesn't really make it any easier.  It just means I'm more numb to it all.  Someday, we will sleep again, and it will be amaaaaaaazing.  I will never take a full night of sleep for granted again, so long as I live.  

Election Day

I can't write today and not talk about it.  That's not to say I really want to either, it's been a really long, sometimes disheartening election year, and like many, I'm pretty burnt out on it.

But that doesn't mean my heart wasn't pounding in my chest at 7:00 am this morning as I walked through the drizzly rain down the sidewalk and into my polling place.  There's really no doubt about it, today it feels good to be a part of the system, to cast my vote, to have my say.

For the twenty minutes I was at the polling place I felt camaraderie with my neighbors, there was a calm, quiet, yet buzzing excitement as we all waited patiently to cast our votes.  It felt like we were all in this together.  I was proud.

And then later I went on Facebook.  Ugh.  No, we are decidedly NOT all in this together.  It'll be difficult to forget some of the things that have been "said" over the past few months, but especially over the last week or so.

There's a difference between disagreeing with someone on the best way to grow our economy and spewing offensive and broad stereotypes about the intelligence level of anyone who votes a certain way.

Just, lots of gross out there.  Sometimes I'm good about ignoring all of that "noise", and sometimes I let it get to me.

This year there's even more at stake, with the proposed amendment to our state constitution that would define marriage between one man and one woman.  That this is even on the ballot makes me sad.  And ANGRY.  Since when are we, as citizens of a free country, in the business of writing discrimination and hatred in to our constitution?  I just don't get it.    

One of my favorite things I witnessed this morning at the polling place was an election judge, an older woman, reading the ballot to a young blind man, assisting him in voting.

She read the Amendment verbiage and then said, "Do you want me to explain what that means?  What the Amendment would do is..." and he stopped her.

"No.  I know what it means.  And I vote No."

I don't know why, it was just the one guy, but it made me so happy.  As I was there to cast my own "No" vote, I guess I wanted to picture everyone around me voting the same way.

Still waiting, still hoping, watching all the election coverage with knots in my stomach.

And tomorrow is tomorrow, no matter what.

They just called Ohio.  Holy crap.  YES!

Oh my god.  Not just Ohio. Obama has been reelected.  YES!

Okay.

Signing off.  A celebratory glass of wine is in order.

A stupid fight

I'm pretty sure 99.9% of Dan's and my arguments are due to poor or lack of communication.  Yesterday we got into the STUPIDEST fight.

To paint the scene:

We talked in the car on the way home from church and I said something along the lines of, "So this afternoon, I'm thinking at some point today a trip to Target or Costco or the grocery store is due, we need some crap.  Yeah, and we definitely need to get going on some laundry, the kids are out of pajamas."

To which Dan said (something like), "Yeah, and I was hoping to get some of that yard work done today that I keep talking about."

So we've cone home, eaten lunch, and Dan is outside doing yard work, I know he keeps talking about the yard work he needs to do before winter up and surprises us all like it sometimes does in November, so all I really know is that he's doing that stuff.  

I have little knowledge as to what specifically needs to be done, how long it will take, and what his expectations are for what gets done today.

As soon as I get the boys down for their naps, I head downstairs, straighten up the kitchen a little from lunch, and then take 25 minutes to pound out a blog post because as we all know, I'm doing that every day this month, and since Gus is napping I know he'll be up late and I won't end up with any kid-free evening time to do much of anything. (Sad face.)

Louie is awake and pissed almost immediately after I've hit publish.  ARRGH!  

Oh well, I try to stay zen, and decide to take Louie and run that errand for that crap we need.  Dan can listen for Gus on the monitor, and he must be nearly done with his yard work by now. 

Or not.  

I get Louie bundled up and we head out, and Dan and I have this conversation as I'm getting Louie in the car and he is working on something in the garage:

Me:  "I'm going to Cub or Target for groceries, and then I was thinking of going to Kohl's to return that shirt we didn't end up using for Louie's Halloween costume."

Dan:  (Says nothing.)

Me:  "Is that okay?  Have you gotten a lot done?  Do you mind waking Gus up at 4:00 if he's not up yet?"

Dan:  "Well, I was hoping to mow the lawn, that's not going to happen now."

Me:  "I had no idea you even had to mow the lawn.  You can still do it, I'll skip Kohl's, I'll try to be quick at Target."

Dan:  "Do whatever you want Alicia.  I don't care, I just was hoping to get all this done today."

Me:  "Would you rather I just didn't go?  I guess I could wait until Gus is up and go with both of them?  I'm just trying to take advantage of the fact that only Louie is awake.  It'd be much easier to just take him."

Dan:  "Whatever.  Go to Kohl's.  I don't care.  Go wherever you want."

Me:  "Are you sure you're not mad?  You seem mad?  Are you sure."

Dan:  "Yes, I don't care.  It's fine."

This is paraphrasing, obviously, and I'm sure my personal bias is influencing the way I'm remembering the conversation.

Admittedly, part of my motivation to run this errand was that I really wanted to get out of the house after we spent all of Saturday getting $hit done at home.  Yeah, we had been at church that morning, but still.  I don't do well being at home too much.  Dan is much more of a homebody, and has much less of a desire to get out of the house just for the sake of getting out of the house 

Anyway, I went to Target.  Skipped Kohl's, knew that was unnecessary and wanted to try to make this trip short and get home around when Gus woke up.  But then got a call from my mom saying she needed a ride home from work.  

I arrived back at home within 50 minutes, truly.

Of course I walked in and Gus is downstairs just having one of his epic "You woke me up and I didn't want to get up and I am going to make you PAY meltdowns."  

And Dan does that thing we all do (or is just Dan and I?) when you're pissed about something.  He won't make eye contact with me and speaks curtly, sort of ignores me.  

I call him out on it, and then we get into a screaming match.  This doesn't happen very often, we're both PISSED.  The details don't matter, who said what doesn't matter, but we were doing this in front of our children.  Like right there in the basement family room, I was holding Louie, Gus was sitting on the couch.  There was swearing and it was an embarrassing display of stubbornness on both of our parts.  

It all boiled down to this:  Dan wanted to complete everything that needs to get done outside, TODAY.  It was going to take a long time.  The two hours he got before he had to go inside and wake up Gus were not enough.  Probably the remaining 40 minutes of daylight he had at that time was not enough.  

He was frustrated because he hates doing that stuff and hates having to spend his Sunday doing it, but even more, he didn't want to have to spend another weekend dealing with it.

I had no idea.  Truly.  

Ugh. If only we had just talked about this.  If only he had just told me, when he went outside, "See you at dinner, woman."  (Just kidding, he would never say that.)

Or, since that communication didn't happen then, it should have happened in the garage when I was leaving.  

Whatever.  Poor communication.  Stupid fight.  And after we both took some space, I went upstairs and made dinner while Dan folded laundry and hung out with the boys downstairs, he actually came up and apologized and we made nice, talked about what went wrong.  

Still, our children had to witness us freaking out on each other, which is just the absolute worst. 

My parents had a good marriage when we were growing up, still do, but of course they fought every once in a while, and they were loud about it.  They had ridiculous fights where my dad would use unnecessarily gross language and my mom would be super stubborn, and then one of them would say, "LEAVE!  I'm not even going to talk to you when you're being like this.  I can't even be around you right now!"  

I haaaaaated when my parents fought like that.  In front of us.  I remember how much anxiety it gave me, I'd go to bed that night praying to God that they didn't get a divorce.  Yelling like that is just terrifying to a child, even though it didn't happen very often, and would always blow over, I was legitimately scared every time that my family was falling apart.

  

And that's what we did to our kids last night, and I hate that.  I talked to Gus about it, told him that I was sorry that daddy and I were yelling, and that it is never okay to yell like that, but sometimes we argue and that doesn't mean we don't love each other.  

He didn't really respond, I don't know if I got through to him at all, or if he even was feeling nervous about it, but I guess I'm glad I talked to him about it.  And that's all you can do right?  And hope to do better next time?

Stupid stupid stupid fight.  MARITAL COMMUNICATION 101.  Like seriously.  Ugh.  Marriage is hard, no doubt.  

We're guaranteed to not always get it right.   

The Napping House

It's a quiet Sunday afternoon, after a morning of baby wrangling at church and talking Gus through the terrifying act of peeing in a public toilet.  Twice.

"I want to go potty at home, let's go home and go potty!"

We're getting there.

Then donuts and Sunday School and visiting with family.  I promised Gus that if he went potty at church we'd get a smoothie for him on the way home.

Really, I just wanted to stop at Starbucks to try the Salted Caramel Mocha that everyone keeps raving about.

Worth the raves.  Indulgent, yes, but also incredible.  Sweet, salty.  I didn't know a coffee could be both of these things.
 

Well now they're both sleeping.

We read Fireman Small (poor thing is going to be beside himself when we have to return it to the Library on Friday) and snuggled under the covers until he was fast asleep with his head in the crook of my arm.

Dan is on a ladder outside and I have dishes to wash and laundry to fold.  Life is good.

Getting $hit done

We had one of those wondrously productive days today and it was oh so lovely, and it is just occurring to me that it's day light savings tonight, there's a whole extra hour for us to get MORE DONE!

Nah.  Not going to happen, as soon as I'm done here, it's to the box of Chardonnay in the fridge I go, followed closely by some DVR cleanup.  Yippee!

So the baptism thing, that whole thing about having 50 people to my house next Sunday.  This has TOTALLY been stressing me out.  Honestly, it's not so much the planning, the cleaning, the cooking, and all that, it is 100% the space issue.  This old house, it just wasn't meant for 50 people to ever be comfortable in it.

As good of a problem as it is to have two huge, super close families on both of our sides, it has its challenges.  Thus, we were just going to do it, and I was going to try really hard not to apologize ten thousand times to each person about how cramped it was or how bad I feel that they have to stand while eating.

We have a new plan though.  Thank goodness.  After a mini panic attack at work last week I started calling community centers all over the city looking for available space, a week and a half in advance.

If you know me, you can probably guess how those conversations went:

"Hi, I'm calling about my son's baptism, it's on November 11th which I realize is suuuper short notice, and I'm soooo sorry for even asking, but is there any possible way your multi-purpose room is open in the late morning, early afternoon time frame?  I'm sure you don't have anything available,  I shouldn't have even called, I'm so sorry!

Oh it's booked?  Okay, I'm truly sorry for inconveniencing you with this request and even calling so late, thank you sooo much for looking."

Seriously.  I am so annoyingly MINNESOTAN.  I annoy myself, all that unnecessary apologizing.  I don't know why I do it, but I can't seem to stop myself.  Word vomit, it just comes out.  What do I think these people care?  This is their job, they are being PAID to have this conversation with me.

Yeah anyway, many many phone calls later I found a place with open space at a park literally six blocks from the church.  Woot.

There's still so much to be done, I can't even think about that right now, but this makes me so happy, my whole body feels lighter and my shoulders looser after officially making this decision and changing plans.  Almost everyone I talked to over the last few weeks during my obsessing about all this would say, "It's okay, it's fine!  People don't mind, they just want to celebrate with you, it's not a problem!"

But I know.  I would be wandering the house in a frenzy the entire party, noticing Dan's grandma without a chair or one of his brothers looking bored.  This is just better.  At least everyone will be able to freaking sit.

So I'm rambling, but this is one of the things I did today.  After breakfast I got the boys all dressed and bundled and we drove to the location, saw the space, discussed things with the attendant, signed the paperwork, and wrote the check.  Done.  Accomplished.  All before 11:00 AM on a Saturday.

Afterwards we played in the playground outside, and later my little mini-dictator demanded that I play basketball for like twenty minutes, which means Louie sat on the court mesmerized by the bouncing ball while  I attempted to make baskets with Gus yelling "Whoa, SO CLOSE!" or "YES, you did it!" every single time.

Mostly he was yelling the former over and over and over.  I suck at sports.

While we were out, Dan and his dad did some sort of plumbing something that had to get done in the porch, and then later I acted the part of dictator as I ordered Dan to hang pictures and hooks and bulletin boards and other random project crap all over the house.  The ideas I come up with and things I keep buying at Ikea to make our lives more orderly and Scandinavian (and thus better, obviously) have started to pile up.

One of my big ideas was that Gus and Louie need their own hooks for their coats and hats, so we hung one at their height in the living room near the front door.  It'll be nice to get Gus involved in putting his own crap away when we come into the house, and I suppose putting it on when we're leaving too.  He's already pretty good about putting his shoes away in the basket by the door.  This will be good for all that learning self-sufficiency stuff that we should be doing with him about now, and if nothing else, will help de-clutter.  Those boys' coats and sweaters are always just sitting on the dining room table being annoying.

(Yes, we got a lot accomplished today, cleaning up all this crap will have to wait until tomorrow.)

Inspired by Julia, I decided to hang one of those Ikea curtain wires in the basement family room to hang all of the toddler artwork that we have started to accumulate.  I've been taping it to the wall in the kitchen, and then it stays there forever because I don't know what to do with it.  I think this is just adorable, and a perfect use of space on big blank wall surrounded by a bunch of toys.  The first thing we've hung in our basement since we finished it two years ago.  :)  That's pretty bad.

We hung a bunch of things in Gus's room as well, but he's sleeping in said room right now, so no pictures.

It was a good day, not terribly exciting, but you need these days every once in a while.

Halloween

So even though Halloween was only two days ago, I'm already feeling totally over it.  There's just too much anticipation, too much hoopla, too many weeks full of Halloween-related events and errands and preparation   that now that it's all over, as totally awesome and fun as it all was, it feels like more overkill, and I'm almost bored to be writing about it now.

My almost immediate indifference must be attributed to this instant-gratification society we live in, because two days later it's like, Halloween?  What?  Meh.  It's November now, onto Christmas!  

Wait, NO.  I'm not done with fall yet, so no Christmas for me until after Thanksgiving.  

Also, after the fact, I can't help but focus on the tackiness and excessiveness of this ultra-commercial holiday, and be thankful it's over.  

I am such a buzz kill. 

Buzz kill or not, my kids were cute in their costumes this year, and really, that's what this is all about right?  

Last weekend there was the big party at Grandma's (Great Grandma to Gus and Louie).  After all that drama (and later guilt) of getting out of the house with Gus's costume (really just one of Dan's old ratty undershirts all cut up) actually on him, we really did go on to have a great night.  

He complained enough that within about 20 minutes of being at the party we allowed the costume (t-shirt) to be ditched.  Gus then shoveled two orange frosted cookies down his throat before I even realized what was happening, later ate a few pickles off the plate I made him at dinner, grazed on ridiculous amounts of candy throughout the night, and finally at about 9:00 PM, right before we were about to leave, the massive birthday cake came out, complete with the singing and blowing out of candles for those with October birthdays.  

Oh and ice cream.  

Can you see why the kids look forward to this party every year??!  I mean seriously.

There were a lot of good costumes, including a whole crew of The Price is Right contestants, which I found to be quite amusing, but one of the only pictures I took was of Kari.  Ohhhh Kari, I love this crazy girl.  I guess she is a "shapeshifter tiger" (?) here.  I don't know what that means exactly, but when you asked her to show you her costume, she would crouch down like this.  (That's a robe belt holding the giant tiger on her back.)  

Goodness, I can't wait to see what kind of quirky, interesting woman this girl becomes someday, the girl who told Dan she was going to buy a cat when she grew up and moved out so that he couldn't come over (he's allergic), the girl who orchestrated a funeral for a caterpillar, complete with a musical interlude on the recorder of "Greensleeves", the girl who told us for years with complete sincerity that she was planning on naming her first child "El Charro".  

Anyway.  The party.  

My nephew Matthew, such a happy, easygoing, irresistible baby.

Truly.  Look at that smile! 

It was a late night, but lots of fun, and my little baby who normally is asleep in our room by 7:30 every night was quite the trooper, a jolly fellow really, right up until we left at 10:00 PM.  Honestly I had no idea it was that late, I think I assumed I would know when it was time to go because the children would be falling apart, but that never happened.

Monday night we had my parents over for pizza and afterwards carved pumpkins in our under-construction breezeway porch.  (There's heat in there now!  Progress!)

Carving pumpkins with small children crawling all over you is quite the challenge.  At one point Gus was 

jumping around the room and I realized he was waving around a little carving kit knife.  

Uhhh, whoops.

Dan asked Gus what shape he wanted the pumpkin's eyes to be, and he requested hexagons.  So random.

Then on actual Halloween, I prepped myself on the way home from work for an evening of "going with the flow".  No pushing.  I had decided that if Gus didn't want to be a ghost, we wouldn't make him.  We'd offer suggestions, but no more than that.  This was supposed to be fun!    

Earlier in the week we had pulled out our box of costumes and remembered we had this cape that Dan's mom gave us last year, something Dan had worn when he was just a wee one.  Well Gus was way game to try that thing on and never asked to take it off, so we were hopeful we had good plan B. 

He was all about that cape you guys.  SO EXCITED to go trick or treating, running all over the house in excitement.  It was so fun to see him so enthusiastic and enjoying himself, talking up a storm about what we were going to go do that night.  

We had fun.  Trick-or-treating didn't last long because we got to one house that was all decked out with scary ghosts and goblins and tombstones, and Gus kind of shut down.  No way was he going up to the door, and after that he was pretty much done.  We drove over to Ben and Michelle's and the kids played with toys in their basement and it was all just very low key.  

And cute.  Of course.

Rawrrrr!

We had promised my grandpa this weekend that we'd stop by with the kids, so even though it was kind of out-of-the-way, and it was already getting late, and Louie fell asleep during the 10 minute drive over there, it was worth it for this moment for my grandpa and the boys at the end of the night.   

Worth the hassle.

NaBloPoMo

Can I really do it?

Every year around this time I start seeing other posts pop up about NaBloPoMo.  National Blog Posting Month, i.e. post something every single damn day during the month of November.

I'm way intimidated, but also, lately, majorly suffering from a lack of motivation to blog.  I attribute it to a general lack of sleep (for three years) in addition to just putting way too much pressure on myself to always be interesting, which is really hard since my primary hobbies these days amount to cleaning the kitchen, picking up sippy cups off the floor, worrying about how little breast milk my 10 month old seems to drink these days, wrestling a slippery baby and a lanky 3-year-old during ill-advised dual baths, filling up online shopping carts with cute clothes for me and my boys and then never actually buying them, and obsessing over how we are going to host 50 (yes, FIFTY!) people in our cramped house for Louie's baptism one week from this Sunday.  

So yeah, busy?  Full life?  Yes, and YES.  Truly, no complaints here, life is really quite good.  But interesting?  Sometimes not so much. I need to try to not care about that so much.  I write here for a number of reasons, I like having a creative outlet, I like the idea of being able to look back and remember little snippets of life, and I like that it relieves some of the guilt I have for pretty much abandoning the idea of baby books around the time Gus was four months old and officially stopped sleeping.  That was back in 2009.

Also I find the not-so-interesting stuff about other people's lives, especially those living lives that resemble mine these days, entirely fascinating.  So what am I so concerned with?

Anyway, I want to write more here.  I want to document more of our life.  I want to share more stories and more pictures.

So I'm going to do it.  I'm going to try to write every day during the month of November.  I don't really set goals for myself very often, because I'm a quite lazy person and I also hate to fail so setting lofty goals doesn't usually end well.  But whatever.

This may not end well, full disclaimer right up front.  But I'm going to give it the old college try.  And I'd like to think I could at least bring myself to post a picture every day right?  SOMETHING.

Let's do this.  

Because I can't NOT include a picture, here I am, fully engaged in one of my fascinating hobbies.

Pushing

I’m trying not to.  It’s so hard.

Oh my sweet Gus.  He really is his own self, and I love that about him.  He is so charming and affectionate, such a mama’s boy, and funny and rambunctious and really really smart.  And also… stubborn and strong-willed, oh yes.  And when you push, and don’t take the time to do it gently, he pushes back. 

This picture of our two boys from last Friday night, before the big Halloween Party at Dan’s grandma’s house… well it makes me sad.  Because this was taken after a half hour of pleading, reasoning, shallow threats, attempted bribery, and finally even shamefully saying things like, “All the other kids will be wearing costumes, don’t you want to be like the other kids?”

This was a battle that I didn't need to wage, because in the grand scheme of things IT DOES NOT MATTER whether or not Gus wears a costume this year.  It doesn't even matter if he goes trick-or-treating.  So why do I push?

I can’t seem to help it sometimes.  I was so frustrated on Friday night that he was still fighting me on this, even though I took his lead and went with the lamest costumes ever for both kids because he wanted to be a ghost “like Percy!” from a Thomas episode he recently watched.  

As I was doing it, the pushing, I was angry with myself for caring so much… caring about what other people would think?  Caring that I might not be able to post a cute picture of him in his costume on Instagram.  Caring that he would somehow “miss out” on something that might be fun for him (and us), but at the same time I was refusing to see or hear him in the whole situation.

I took away his power.  He is three, so there are not a lot of things that he has control over in his life, but his body, how he feels about doing certain things, those are his and no one else’s.  By pushing when I really don’t need to I am telling him that his feelings don’t matter, and that rather than thinking for himself it is more important to do what everyone else does.    

He was crying about 30 minutes before this picture was taken.  Real tears.  He hated having that big stupid white t-shirt on, he refused to wear the white stocking cap, he just wanted to go to great grandma’s house and see all his cousins and eat pumpkin shaped cookies and not wear something that made him uncomfortable.

Now I can see how stupid it was to push him on something so inconsequential, but in the moment, it was just another thing he was fighting me on.

And that picture.  His little fidgety hands.  His slumped shoulders.  His sad and unbearably sweet big blue eyes.  Oh this picture makes my heart hurt. 

…honoring his feelings and making sure he knows that it’s okay to be HIM, because there is only one of those, and its okay to be different… those things are so much more important to me than getting a fun picture on Halloween.    

  

So I’m working on it.  Next time I’ll do better.

Let's do this, fall

We are reeeally making an effort this fall, more-so, I'm finding myself obsessed with making the most of this beautiful yet short season.

That means that even though most days I look like this:

(Tired, un-showered, possibly stinky, literally willing my eyes to stay open after a night of dealing with a baby who refuses to go back to sleep for more than an hour after waking at 2:00 AM)

I am still able to rally, all in the name of fall-is-awesome-and-super-fun-with-little-children-and-some-day-I'll-be-able-to-sleep-again-so-we-WILL-go-make-some-memories-and-WE-WILL-LOVE-IT.

Fist pump!

So this weekend we went to the pumpkin patch, and there were photo opps aplenty and loads of cuteness to go around.

My plans were not going to be ruined by a little drizzle.  Even though Saturday's weather was pretty gross across the board, it magically stopped raining mere minutes after arriving at our destination.  Thus despite the overcast skies and the muddy ground we had a great time wandering around and picking out the perfect pumpkins.  

Gus immediately went over to this little pile of pumpkins on display and sat down to cheese for us.  I was blown away by such an un-Gus-like cooperative attitude toward having his picture taken.  And then he patted the pumpkin next to him and said, "Louie, come sit here!"

I die.  

Instead I handed over the camera for once so it could be documented for the future by something other than the self-portraits on my phone that I was around during my kids' childhood.  ;)

HA!  The boys look unsure of being photographed with Ben and Michelle here.  

The baby-blue head-to-toe look was not on purpose.  Louie had fun at the pumpkin patch but for most of it he really really really wanted to get DOWN in the mud.  Ugh.  I forget sometimes how much wrestling is involved on outings like this with a not-yet-walking-but-fully-mobile-baby.

Dan steered Gus towards the pumpkins we wanted, it's nice that he doesn't have strong opinions about things like that yet.  

We picked up some little gourds as well, thought it could be a fun project for our artsy and motivated nanny to do with the kids.  ;)

Gus really loves this tower of pumpkins, and of course was obsessed with trying to rip it down.  Photo-op is redeemed by Louie's utter adorable-ness.  

He was equally distracted last year when I tried to get a picture with him and the strange pumpkin totum-poll thing.  Some things do not change.

The owner guy said OF COURSE! he can get up on the tractor, and even pulled out a towel to wipe down the seat.  Then, as if knowing the child he was dealing with, he pulled something off the tractor and pressed some button disabling the starter, "just in case."  

This guy clearly has known a few 3-year-olds in his lifetime.

Just wait you two.  NEXT YEAR! you will have your own squishy baby to wrestle. 

Both children were too interested in the corn to acknowledge their mother and her annoying camera.  I chose to share this one because I love that they both have the same expression of irritation/boredom/indifference with my "CHEESE!" antics.

Gus and Uncle Ben exploring.

Found a good one!