At the park

Slide racing.

After the fire station we went to the park for a picnic lunch.


Playing restaurant.

Enjoying our cousins

In a stroke of genius, my mom played match maker to her nephew and the daughter of one of her dearest friends, thus making a legal familial bond between our two families. Here is me and my kids with Elaine (the afore mentioned daughter) and her kids (which makes them cousins twice removed or some such awkward title). Elaine is in town for a couple of months which equals FUN! We brought the kids to the fire station.
Hannah is the age of her oldest, and then Jacob is the same age as her middle child, and then she has a little girl.

Going to West Virginia

Tauni had surgery and needed help for when Cat had to work so being the good sister that I am I went up to WV (beautiful) for a couple days last weekend. Funny thing is that somewhere during the planning Tauni was under the impression that Jacob was coming with me. I didn't say anything at first when she expressed her excitement about him coming because I thought maybe I had misunderstood. I mulled it over and decided that I didn't want to bring a 2 year old on a 7 hr car trip (twice) by myself. I was going to tell her, when I got an email from Tauni gushing about how much Jacob would like to see all the trains they had near her house and how excited she was to see him. Being the INCREDIBLE sister that I am, I decided to bring him. Hannah couldn't come because she is perfectly capable of talking the entire car trip and she would miss preschool. (Both unthinkable choices, one for me, one for her).
So my little man came with me and it went great. He is a rather low maintenance travel buddy and he kept me company. He loved seeing Aunt Tauni and Aunt Cat and their animals, and we enjoyed having him with us. I didn't take as many pictures as I wanted to but here's some to enjoy! Hannah asked when she gets to go with me and visit next time.

The Yard Sale!!

Glad to have done it, glad to be done, until next year!

Here is one of the items donated for the yard sale. It is a unicorn pegasus Halloween costume. I had tried to keep all the kid stuff out of sight from the kids but they found a bag full of fun stuff and had to try it out. As luck would have it, my next door neighbor's granddaughter wanted to be a unicorn for Halloween and they were thrilled to purchase it. Jeff saw the little girl wearing the costume as she left to go home.

The Breakthrough

Thursday Hannah and Jacob had a breakthrough at the burger king. They both went up to the 2nd story part of the play place and slid down the slide all by themselves. Hannah hasn't done that before and Jacob hasn't done a big slide of any sort by himself before. This spontaneous burst of courage was very timely because Saturday Jacob went to Lucas' birthday party and he just climbed right up that slide, flew down it, and landed in the pool. I was so proud of him. The third time his face went under the water and he was done.

So now I have this dilema, I don't want them to lose this new skill (it is so sad to see your 4 year old trying to convince other kids to play ring a round the rosy at the play place while they zip by her to climb up, or to see other kids invite her to come with them and she tells them, "I'll wait for you at the bottom of the slide") but I don't want to go to Burger King. Not the hugest fan of their food, don't need the calories, hate spending that much money for lunch. Ughh. What to do.

Preschool

My first lunch box note. I kept it simple so she could read it. :)
Here is Hannah on her first day of Preschool! She did such a good job! We walked up to her classroom and she was a little nervous but when she found that she was starting in the Polly Pocket station she was good. I didn't even think about how Jacob would react. He began to cry as we were walking back to the car and said: "Her need to come out of there." ( I told Hannah about it when we picked her up and she said: "I can't come out of there Jacob, I need to go to school!") I gave him one of his Christmas presents that I bought early- jenga blocks and he was okay. By the third day he was no longer sad when we dropped her off.