Soccer, Baby Bellies, and The Plague

James' fall soccer season has officially started! He had his first practice last Tuesday and he had fun with his coach from spring. There were a few familiar faces on his team, but a lot of new kids too.

 Standing to the side and observing. He definitely likes to hang back when he is getting used to a new environment or group of people.

 They practiced stopping the ball and putting their foot on top of it. James refused to do this last season, but he gave it a try this time. He has a really hard time keeping his balance, so he resorted to just sitting on it last time. This time he didn't do that once! Progress!

 Trying to put his foot on the ball:

 He finally got it on there and kept his balance! His coach is putting his foot on his imaginary ball :)

While watching him practice we realized that he gets so distracted that he doesn't listen to his coach unless his coach says, "James" before giving an instruction. His poor coach is going to be repeating himself a lot over the next few months.

Unfortunately, after coming home from practice and getting ready for bed, he came down with a high fever. A day or so later he developed a rash and we realized he had hand, foot, mouth disease (Rett had it first, but we didn't make the connection until James caught it). He missed his Thursday practice because we have been quarantined in the house since then. Definitely don't want to pass this thing around!

Rett loves to lounge around right before bed and cuddle with us after drinking his bottle. He usually has his baby belly hanging out of his shirt because nothing can contain it! :)

He has definitely found his voice! He babbles and laughs and coos all day long! He says "Dada" and "Mama" pretty frequently now and if you smile at him, he ducks his head and grins like he is happy and shy at the same time. I swear this is the happiest baby ever made. He is working on his third tooth, one of the front top ones and chews on everything in sight. He has also started pulling up to standing and then letting go for a few seconds! He is on the brink of walking, but I'm not sure I want to encourage that kind of mobility :)

James is still the boy of 1 million questions. He has started asking us questions about the songs on the radio, like "Why they say that word Mommy?, or "Why they say_____(he repeats the phrase he heard)". The funniest one yet was when the song, "All about that bass" came on. The lyrics go, "I'm all about that bass, no treble." James piped up from the back seat and asked, "Why they say "All about the best, no juggle? Why they don't juggle mommy?" Anthony and I died laughing! We had to make up a story about how they aren't good at juggling just to satisfy him (otherwise the questions wouldn't stop). Now he gets all excited when the "juggling" song comes on the radio.

Another night I was snuggling with James in his bed and he was petting my hair and checking it for hair ties (don't ask me why, but he likes to check). My hair was on top of his teddy bear and he started to feel his fur. He looked shocked and asked, "Mommy! Is that your brains???". So I had a 10 minute discussion with him about what brains are, how they work, and how they are inside our skulls. Then he told me that he wanted to look in the "hole in my eye" so that he can see my brains. I got him to compromise and agree to looking at pictures of brains in the morning. He didn't forget! The next morning he asked to look on the computer to see what brains look like.

I'm not sure which kid did this. It could have been either one of them, but for some reason James' rain boots became the new home to Captain hook and a broken compass.

I saw the movie "Mom's Night Out" recently and I loved it! All the parts about being a stay at home mom and what it feels like were sooooo true. Plus, it was really funny! In the beginning of the movie she had a really rough day and her husband found her hiding in a closet after the kids were in bed, eating chocolate and watching something on the computer. She said she was hiding from how messy the house was. I paused the movie and looked around. I had had a really trying day, I was eating candy and watching a movie while my house looked like this. Can we say deja vu?

We did a clean out of all the old primary boxes and closets at church and I found an old Gospel Art Kit that nobody wanted, so I got to take it home! I have been looking for one ever since James was little but the church doesn't make them any more. It has been great for our family home evenings and scripture reading and James loves flipping through the pictures and talking about them. For family home evening we talked about the story of the 10 lepers and being thankful. Since James has a gross rash, I think he was able to relate to the story of the men with leprosy a little more :)

 After we talked about the story, we played a thankful game where we laid out a bunch of pictures of things we are thankful for. Then we took turns closing our eyes while James took one away. Then we opened our eyes and tried to remember which one was missing. James loved this game! (We played it for sharing time, so I just reuse my materials). Although James did insist that we didn't need to be thankful for houses because "the house is brown and our house is not brown". He also really liked the picture of food and tried to lick the picture.

 Then we acted out the story and used scarfs as bandages for our sores and "booboos" on our skin. James did not want to participate when I said we were doing this and he ran to the opposite side of the room and said he would just watch. I pretended I didn't know how to wrap Anthony up and I needed his help. After showing him how horrible I was at it, James sighed dramatically and said, "Ooooohhh kay Mommy. I guess I will help you." :)

Wrapping Daddy's arm:

 Anthony with his face, neck, and arm bandaged.

 James thought it was funny, but it was also kind of creepy...

 Once Anthony was healed, we asked James what he should do. James turned around and said, "He should say thank you to Jesus!"

My turn to get wrapped up:

These boys sure do make our life interesting!

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.