Phone pictures and a trip in the Harvey

James has never really been interested in learning the alphabet, especially if it involves a structured activity. I finally found a game I can get him to play to help him learn his letters. We pull out the alphabet poster and I put a candy or a fruit snack on each one. If he knows the letter, he gets to eat the candy! He likes playing the game most of the time, but once he gets one or two treats he stops paying attention to the letters and will just say, "I don't know" without even looking at the one I am pointing to. This time we used individual nerds candies and he was able to eat them so fast, that I think it helped him focus and be ready for the next letter instead of getting distracted while eating.

 Mouth full of sweets:

 We spent last Sunday afternoon pretending to roast marshmallows in his pop-up tent. We found some skewers and I cut up apples in a marshmallow shape to put on them. James loved it!  Then we got to thinking and realized that James has never had a marshmallow before! I had a bag of mini marshmallows, so I gave him one to try. When he first touched it, he laughed and said, "Its soft, like a tiny pillow!". So he had to use it as a pillow first.

 Then he ate it :)

 Rett had a marshmallow too. He licked it and got it all sticky, then he spread it all over his fingers and his mouth. That kid has a special talent for being messy!

 Our little chunker reached the weight limit of his infant car seat and boy could we tell! Carrying him around in the car seat was getting to be waaaay too heavy, so now he has graduated to a big boy car seat! Since he is still rear facing, the only way his car seat fits in the back seat is if it is in the middle seat (otherwise the front seats have to be pushed all the way forward. Not good). James can reach him better in this car seat, so we have already had to break up some tiffs between the two of them. Brothers.

 On their way out of town, Anthony's parents made a special stop so that James and Rett could take a ride in their RV (which James named "the Harvey" because "RV" and "Harvey" sound exactly the same to him). James was so excited! We climbed in, got buckled up, and took a ride around the neighborhood.

Then we came back to our house and had cookies and juice in the Harvey. James absolutely loved the cookies. Can you tell?

 As if that wasn't enough, then Mimi and Papa had a surprise present for James! They gave him a child size camping chair with a shade for him to use at his soccer games. He loves it! Last night when we went to meet his soccer coach for the fall soccer season, he kept asking us if we were bringing his chair.

 I've started to find some interesting things in James' pockets when I do the laundry. He just loves to collect and carry things around with him wherever he goes. In the past I have found dead earthworms and lizards that he put in there alive (!), but luckily I haven't found one of those lately. I decided to take pictures of the things I find in there. (Each picture was a different week's find). Can you tell he loves those promotional keys that come in the mail from car dealerships? It's his favorite thing about the mail!

Rett has finally started walk around with this push car we have. He gets so excited!! He just laughs and giggles and goes so fast! This video is from one of the first times he did it. Such a cutie!

Everett is 11 Months!

Another month has flown by with our little munchkin. More hair, more chunk, more to love!

 He pulls up on any and everything: walls, legs, bookshelves, chairs, you name it. He will cruise a little bit along the couch, but mostly he just drops to the floor and crawls when he decides he wants to go somewhere.

His appetite just keeps growing and growing. He loooooves food. If you are eating something and he doesn't have any, he will cry and whine and protest until you give him some. It is hard to keep up with the demand at meal times, it is a delicate balance between not putting too much food on his tray (he tries to stuff it all in his mouth at once and gags) and not putting enough and he demands more before you've even taken a bite of your own food.

 He eats any and everything.

 James wanted to take a turn at taking pictures of Rett. (James has started calling him Retty)

 Blowing bubbles at us:

He is crawling around and getting into everything. He loves to pull ziplock bags out of the box and leave them all over the kitchen floor, investigate Anthony's aquariums, pull all the books off of James' bookshelf, and open the kitchen cabinets and pull everything out of them. He also has become our little vacuum cleaner and he loves to find little crumbs and crackers left on the floor.

Now that he loves to crawl around and explore, he has become much more wiggly and hard to contain. Church has become somewhat of a challenge! James is still really hard to handle during sacrament and if I have to take out Rett, James wants to crawl around on the floor with him. We went to a ward pot luck last night and it was somewhat disastrous. Trying to manage feeding both boys and ourselves at the same time, while making sure James doesn't run off and play all around the church (in the water fountains, in the toilets, etc..) was not fun to say the least. We need to come up with a better battle plan when it comes to outings with these boys!

What we've been doing

We have been chugging along through the hot, hot summer! Now that Rett is so much more mobile, keeping up with these two boys has become quite the challenge! My house is constantly in a state of chaos. If you were to drop by on any given day it would probably look like a tornado just went through, but I swear I clean it! My work just gets undone at lightning speed :)

One hot afternoon after running with the boys in the stroller, James got a few juice boxes to rehydrate. I was totally expecting him to bring me the second one when he was ready for it so I could put the straw in, but instead he figured out a way to do it by himself. He took the straw from the first one and just popped it in the second one. I never would have thought to do that! Smart as a whip, that kid.

After trying out the local YMCA with a friend, I decided to join. They have free daycare while you work out and an awesome zero entry pool with fountains for the kids, all included with the monthly fee. It has definitely been worth it! James loves going to the "playroom" and it gives me extra motivation to workout since it also means a break from the kids :) My 5k training is going great, I even ran a mile in 11min 30 seconds this morning and it wasn't even that hard! I can't wait to get even faster.

Since we have been spending a lot of afternoons at the pool, I've noticed that Rett's hair always ends up extra crazy from the sunscreen I put on his head. Anthony thinks his hair is too long and wants to cut it, but I think that might actually kill me. I love his curls so much!

(Yes, that is James' fort in the background. It is a permanent structure at this point)

Rett finally cut his first two teeth at the same time, his bottom two. This is the best picture I could get of his two little white bumps:

He loves swinging at the park, but we haven't been in awhile because of the heat. I will be so glad when the weather cools down a little bit so we can get back to visiting a park almost every day.

Our 6 year old TV started to go bad a few months ago. They don't even make that type of tv anymore, and it would cost as much as a new tv to fix it so we decided to get a new one. I stalked the prices of the one we wanted online and finally found a great deal on amazon. By the time they shipped it, the price had gone up by $200, so I was really glad we snatched it up at the low price!

The baby gate we keep in front of the tv covers a lot more of the screen than on our old one so we decided to mount it on the wall. Putting it up is going to be a nap time project for sure! We definitely can't tackle that with little ones running around.

We spent another morning at the bouncy house place and Rett loved crawling around in the toddler area! He wants to scale everything!

The picture is a little blurry, but I love my munchkin's face :)

James has become the master of thinking up excuses and reasons to talk to us when he is supposed to be in his room at nap time or bedtime. One afternoon for the third or fourth time I checked to see what he needed and he looked up at me and said, "oh. I forgot I needed to sing you happy burfday". He then proceeded to sing happy birthday at the top of his lungs, even after I closed the door. I didn't even know he knew that song! Never a dull moment around here.