Getting Creative

Melanie told me today that I have to post something. I don't really have much good material lately, but we did have an interesting afternoon waiting for the delivery of our appliances to our new house. (Melanie knows because I called several times because I was so bored I kept thinking of dumb thoughts I wanted to talk about!) I hate waiting for deliveries or services because they always give such a large window of time. I feel trapped - even if I were not going to go anywhere anyway, I suddenly feel hostage. So, today, when I had to wait with three kids in our house that was not furnished with anything, it was especially torturous. The good thing was that it forced us to be a little creative. Here are a few photos of what we did. (I apologize for the disorderly hairdos!)


Ava found the Costco bag of toilet paper (the one thing I have taken to the new house) and put it on like some lovely shawl. She told me that she was ready to go to the costume party! (I'm not sure where she's ever heard that before!)

Natalie found some piece of packing foam and started talking on it like a phone. She doesn't realize this, but it really looked very much like those first model cell phones from the late 80's!

Ava took her turn too. You can see that the conversations were quite intense! (They were conversing with each of our extended family members.)

Okay, so this one was from home (at our apartment) where the tv is gone, so we decided to watch YouTube videos. Unfortunately, there are a plethora of extremely cheesy homemade videos people have made from pictures of their horses set to even cheesier music. I walked in on Natalie watching one of these and thought it was so funny how in love she was with this video!

Election Day

It's always really fun to try to drag my children away from the t.v. to go on errands that they are totally uninterested in. Okay, maybe not. A bigger challenge is to get them to cooperate when they don't even understand where we are going. So yesterday, when I was trying to convince them that they needed to get their shoes on and come with me so I could go vote, they probably asked me over a hundred times what we were really doing. It's really difficult to explain to a 4-yr-old and a 2-yr-old what it means to go vote, but they kept asking, so I just told them pretty straightforward - I had to go somewhere to let people know who I want our leaders to be. Of course, this just confused them more, and they just asked more questions. All along, I was trying to force shoes on their feet, getting people on and off the toilet, etc, etc.

So, finally we got to the elementary school where the voting was taking place. It was not bad at all, we probably got in and out in about 10 minutes. As we were leaving the gymnasium, Natalie excitedly asked, "That's it?" I was happy to tell her that it was and now we could go home. Suddenly Ava's lower lip turned down and her eyes opened up wide in that heartbroken face only she can make. Sure enough, the tears followed quickly as she exclaimed, "but we didn't get to go on the boat!" Poor thing, she had gotten herself all geared up for a boat ride! (Not quite the same as a vote-ride!)

Halloween

Sorry, Todd, I had to steal this!

This was our first Trunk-or-Treating experience, so we were kind of the losers that didn't know that you're supposed to decorate your trunk all fancy (we just opened our plain-old tailgate!). We also are not used to giving out so much candy, so even though we bought about 3 times as much as usual, we ran out early!

Natalie & Ava had a great time, though. You can see Natalie decided to use her little baby bassinet to carry her candy. Ava used her tiny little Cinderella purse, which we had to empty out after about every 3 cars, so she would have room for more!



Natalie had a Little Mermaid costume, but when Keith came home from his little work trip, he brought with him Tinkerbelle wings for the girls. Of course, Natalie had to wear those too, so she ended up as sort of a mermaid-fairy!


I can never seem to get enough of these curls!


Our little monkey! Taylor is so sweet and happy - even in a humiliating costume!


Halloween 2: Our girls were excited to get to do it all again - especially because this time they got to be with their princess cousins (including the beautiful Jeremy!)



Here we are after "Thriller!" Kimberly was AWESOME! That was so fun! I loved how some random guy (was it at a restaurant?) went on and on about meeting the "FAMOUS" Thriller dancer!