Month: November 2018
I learned something today and it answers some questions I have had for a long time. Teague evidently wears two socks on each foot. No idea why or how long he has done this. But this explains why there are so many socks in the laundry and why occasionally they are tangled together when they come out of the dryer.
Total marks the end of a 10 year run (or almost). Ben took his last bottle. These bottles have been around a long, long time. I bought them when we realized Alex was going to be a formula baby. Alex, Harper, Mackenzie, Kaitlyn, and Ben all used these bottles. They are done. Babies are done. We are on to sippy cups and whole milk. Next up it will time to say good-bye to the pacifier, but I’m not quite ready for that battle yet.
I was sorting pictures from Thanksgiving and found this one. It’s a picture of Uncle Wade performing his famous “Burch Lock” on the kids.
He starts the kids off with a “Burch Lock 1” and then twists them into a crazy configuration that they can easily escape. They love it and continually ask for harder numbers. He happily plays along and several of the kids are up to Burch Lock 8s.
We are celebrating Ben’s birthday today because tomorrow is a travel day. What a lucky kid to celebrate his first birthday with family. I guess there are perks to having a birthday so close to a big family holiday. We had Chinese food for lunch and the kid who eats everything loved it all. Then we had cake and he ate that too. (He was my second child, after Teague, to dive for the flame of the candle instead of staying a healthy distance back.) I love this happy, constantly-on-the-go boy. He’s the best.
Before the day was over we did a “cake smash” just so I could get a couple of fun pictures. (Thanks to Aunt Lissy for all the decorations and arranging the cake!)
Then it was packing up and matching pajamas for the cousins.
The goal today was to keep all the kids entertained. The big kids (and Ben) had slept at Gram’s house so we had bacon and egg sandwiches for breakfast with Orange Julius (Alex’s second favorite breakfast at Gram’s house). Then we had cartoons and Legos (The Lego picture makes it obvious to me which sister is far superior at girl hairstyles). As soon as they opened we took the kids to Vertical Jump get the wiggles out. Kaitlyn spent most of her jump time napping in Aunt Lissy’s arms (Aunt Lissy hated it.)
Then we dressed everyone up and drove to Southern Illinois for family pictures. The kids were fabulous. We did pictures in all kinds of groupings. Then we went out for celebratory ice cream. What a day!
My sister and I are gifting my mom family pictures for Christmas. The pictures are tomorrow. We have learned (over many years) it is smart to do a trial run with the outfits to make sure really like how they look all together. Melissa and I have multiple options for every person in our family and have been shopping for the last month long distance to try to pull this together. What a lot of work!
We spent today enjoying Paducah. We had our traditional first-moring-in-Paducah-breakfast of Red’s donuts. Gram takes my car and all the kids in their pajamas to get the donuts. (I get to stay home and wait for mine to be delivered.) We lazed the morning away and the kids enjoyed all of the toys at Gram’s house and maybe a few cartoons too. Then we ventured to Starn’s for BBQ sandwiches for lunch. The kids thought eating at the counter was great fun. Later that afternoon the boys got out Gram’s change bowl and sorted money. The deal used to be that if you could count it out then Gram would pay you in paper money what you counted. We did inform the boys they were a little too old and advanced for that. They still had fun playing in the money. Kaitlyn worked all the puzzles. Ben took a great nap and then made a mess with all the toys. We spent the evening with some good family friends. Teague was in heaven riding the 4-wheeler with Buddy. I think he would have ridden all night if he could have.
We did get snow, but not enough to cancel school. The boys had been desperately hoping for no school for several reasons. They love to play in the snow and they knew that most likely meant we would leave for KY a day early. The snow was a wet snow – not great for playing. It was soggy and drippy, but the minute they were home from school they wanted to go outside. Normally I would race them out but I was packing for everyone and had no desire to go outside. Then I heard them laughing outside. I pretty quickly got Ben dressed and we went outside too.