Tombstone Wars

Here are the 2 tombstones Braden had originally created for our awesome Halloween decorations.

We came home from church today and found someone had added to our collection.

Since that someone went to Davidson College, we've now expanded our graveyard by another.

Ah, how we love Halloween.

Otherwise today has been a pretty typical Halloween. "If you don't eat all your lunch, then you must be too full for candy." "If you don't take a nap, you can't go trick or treating." "If you guys fight, there's no trick or treating."

Everyone ate their lunches, and now all 3 kids are napping. Ah, how I love Halloween.

Bubble Time!

Blythe and Ethan probably won't be bathing together much longer. Once Brynn moves into the bath seat and into the big bath tub, they'll probably alternate who bathes with her (but 3 would be a crowd!).

So might as well make the most of these last times with some bubbles!

Dan Nicholas Park

Last weekend Braden headed to State College, PA for a meet against Penn State. So while he was there, I packed up the 3 kids and 2 dogs and headed to Gommy and Poppa's house. My godparents, Mike and Marcia, were there visiting as well. So as usual, a packed house!

I had thought about going to the Carolina BalloonFest, which is an annual hot air balloon festival in Statesville, NC. However, in reading about it, the balloons are only in the air 8am-9am and 4:30pm-5:30pm. Seeing as how it's an hour drive to get there, 8am was WAY too early. And 4:30 would mean we'd need to leave by 3:30 and that just wasn't meshing well with our schedules (esp. Ethan's nap schedule). So instead we opted to hit up Dan Nicholas Park in Salisbury. It was a BEAUTIFUL Fall day, and there was no way we were spending it inside!

So we did the playgrounds, rode the carousel, rode the train (which was temporarily the "spooky" train), mined for gems, and had a picnic. The gem mining was fun and a good activity for everyone to participate in. Blythe got some amethyst, onyx, fool's gold, quartz, and a bunch of other gems I don't know anything about. So it was a fun, fun day! Gommy took a bunch of pics, and I took none.

I think Ethan was little bummed about not seeing any hot air balloons, but he still had a good time. I had some TIRED kiddos on the drive home on Sunday, so the drive was pretty easy. Yay!

5 months!

Brynn was 5 months old yesterday! She's still a super GREAT baby, very chill and

go-with-the-flow. She can be happy just sitting on someone's lap (usually mine) for a long, long, time. Here's what she's up to:

• I weighed her on our super-unreliable bathroom scale and she is approx. 16 pounds. Length - have no idea
• Wearing size 2 diapers and officially out of anything 3-6 month or 6 month sized. Now into the 6-9 month and 6-12 month (though these are usually a little big).
• She started with rice cereal this month. Went okay for about a week and then it was yucky. So she has also tried banana, applesauce, and peaches baby food mixed in with the cereal. She's also tried oatmeal baby cereal. She may also have tried a bite of my chocolate frosty from Wendy's (bad mom!). Yesterday she tried applesauce by itself. Overall, I'd say she's not the biggest fan of food.
• This month she rolled over! Only once as far as I can tell (unless she did it again at day care late last week).
• Loves her feet and trying to eat her toes
• I think she might be working on a tooth. She makes a fish face all the time now like she's trying to feel her bottom gum. That and she has her fingers in her mouth all the time.
• I thought she'd be out of her baby bathtub by now, but she's not. I tried it once in the big bathtub with the bath seat and had Blythe in there too. She screamed the whole time. I think she was cold because I fill up her baby bathtub so even her shoulders are under water. Hmm.
• She's probably ready to sit in a high chair at a restaurant, but these days we only do drive-thrus. Usually Brynn is too tired at dinner time to even attempt sitting in an establishment (even if it is Taco Bell usually).
• Speaking of that, the past few days she's been so tired at about 6 o'clock in the evening, that she has to take a 30 minute nap (while someone is holding her). Then I bathe her and feed her and then she hangs out for about 45 minutes before going to bed. This helps avoid a 6am wake up, but kind of makes fixing dinner difficult.
• She can sit without support for a few seconds before falling over. She's good with a boppy around her.
• If I put her on her tummy with my leg under her or a small pillow under her, she tries to crawl, but I don't think she's all that close to actually crawling.

So anyway, that's about it. Another month went by way too fast!

Talon comes to visit

This past weekend we had some visitors from across the state. Tommy and Angie and their new baby Talon came to visit from Newport News, VA. Talon was born July 3, so he's not too much younger than Brynn. Big boy though! He seems to weigh just about the same as what Brynn weighs.

I think they had fun laying on their backs on the floor together. Brynn was trying so hard over the weekend to roll over and she seemed to try even harder if she had no diaper on, so there was one time when she showed Talon her lady parts in kind of an inappropriate way, but I'm pretty sure he won't remember.

Anyhoo, we jam packed our Saturday with as much as could fit in a day as possible. VT had their first swim meet of the season and the first one at the new pool at 9 in the morning that day, so I took the 3 kids to the meet where we watched for a couple of hours. Oh how nice it was to be at the new pool with plenty of seating (NOT on deck) so they could run around as much as they wanted. From there, I took the 3 of them to the parade on Main St. for VT homecoming. We got there late and Ethan had to potty, so we didn't see much of it, but the kids got a few pieces of candy and Ethan got freaked out by the weird-hokie bird-on-stilts-people, so that's pretty much what I had expected to get out of the parade.

Home for about an hour and then it was off to the tailgate for the football game. And we took ALL the kids to the game (and the tailgate). We went to the game about an hour early to meet up with the swim recruits and take them on the field to watch warmups, then we stayed until halftime (score was 49 to 21 at that point). All the kids did really well considering we had basically no naps that day (Brynn napped some in my arms).

As a side note - Brynn FINALLY did roll over for the first time yesterday afternoon at daycare. Tried to get her to do it again when we got home and she got real close, but she seems quite pleased with herself on her newly developed skill.

Disney on Ice

Last Thursday Blythe and I went to Disney on Ice: Princess Wishes with her friend Ashley and her mom and grandmother. It was a mother/daughter date long overdue! Ashley and Blythe are at the perfect age for something like this and they both dressed up in princess costumes (as did almost every little girl there). Ashley was Belle and Blythe was Ariel.




The show was good - basically had a little "clip" from each of the Disney princess movies (except Princess and the Frog and Pocohontas, which Blythe was a little unnerved about).

Here is a little movie of the dragon scene from the Sleeping Beauty part.

When I showed the clip to Ethan later, he said he wanted the dragon to eat the Fairy Godmothers (or whoever those women with the funny hats are). Nice.

So it was a fun show. I spent money only on the tickets, though Blythe tried to flag down the guy selling cotton candy (for 10 dollars!) and the snow cone guy and she begged for popcorn and for this light-up-spinny-thing (that was 25 dollars). So lucky for us the people sitting in front of us bought ALL of those things so that Blythe could keep on wishing she had just one of them.

As a side note, it was the first night I was not here to put Brynn down for bed. Things went splendid. Okay, so she screamed bloody murder until she was too tired to scream anymore and fell asleep. What can I say? She missed her mommy.

Beware the Holloway home on Halloween!

We're all decorated for Halloween now. Our neighborhood is pretty much the perfect Trick-or-Treating neighborhood. 42 houses, all fairly close together on one well-lit street that is one big circle that's all a one-way street. Takes about an hour and half for little kids to finish our neighborhood. Big kids could probably run through it in under an hour. So we get a lot of trick-or-treaters and we take our Halloween decorating seriously.

We had some left over plywood from our still-not-yet-complete basement cabinet project, so Braden used it to make a coffin. And some more of it to make a tombstone. Then Blythe and Ethan helped him paint blood marks on them with red paint. Actually there are 2 tombstones - one says "Cavaliers" and one says "Heels". He made the coffin big enough so he could fit in it (one of his many ways to scare the prospective trick-or-treaters).

And then there are the lights. Oh the lights. We've been adding to our collection each year (actually I'm pretty sure my mother-in-law has purchased all of them for us). We have: skeletons, candy corn, pumpkins, and now bats. Oh, actually Braden did buy some orange ones that come in a net to put up as well. Throw in a few decorative bats and we're all set.

Ha! Yeah, right...that's not it! On Halloween, we'll add some dry ice inside the coffin so the smoke filters out through the slits Braden left in it. And Braden will dress up in his scary Freddy Krueger costume and sit perfectly still holding the candy (until someone tries to take a piece!). And we'll add the scary Halloween music from the CD Braden already made.

Oh and duh - by Halloween I'm sure we'll have at least 5 pumpkins to carve. For now we just have the one seen in the picture. In exploring the neighborhood the other day, Braden, Ethan, and Blythe found that someone had planted a pumpkin patch in one of the common area flower beds by the front entrance. The nerve! Since they were in the common area, we picked one.

Ready for snow

It was 80 degrees yesterday in Blacksburg, which set a new record high for October 11. Yes, folks it had never been above 79 degrees on that day previously.

But apparently my kids are ready for snow.

This is what Blythe does when she's supposed to be "napping" on weekends. She searches her drawers and closet for things she can put on that she might not normally wear. Then she dressed up Ethan as well. Note that Blythe is actually wearing the snow suit that is sized 3T (and wearing it inside out) and she gave Ethan the 5T ones (that he has on backwards).

Time for snow angels!

Rice Cereal!

Last weekend we gave some rice cereal a shot. I wanted to start it on Saturday, but it's always hard to find exactly the "right" time. With Blythe it was a big event. Broke out the video camera and she had the full attention of Braden and I. Sorry Brynn, but as #3 you don't get the special attention. Actually we had a house full of people here to watch the VT vs NC State football game on TV. Braden cooked ribs and they were just ready and everyone was making their plates. Seemed like as good a time as any to squeeze in a "first solids" feeding. She did pretty well, but no one paid her any attention and no one got pics or video.

Braden grabbed the camera on Sunday though, so it's ALMOST a "first solids" video. Though actually she was a seasoned professional by then. Anyway, Sunday went pretty well too. Even with the sibling distractions she had to deal with.

In case you're wondering, Blythe had her face painted with a rainbow on her forehead and a unicorn on her mouth and chin. This was done at the neighborhood pig pickin that day. Here's another pic.

So anyway, we're now on cereal once a day. It's been hard during the week because I'd prefer she eat the rice cereal at home instead of day care (at least at the beginning while we get it going) but she's SO tired when she gets home.

First trip to the pumpkin patch (this season)

On Saturday morning I gave the kids a choice of going to the big new indoor pool with the big slide (I got "yes", "yes"!) OR going to the pumpkin patch to ride a pony. Hmmm....tough choice. They chose pumpkin patch to ride a pony, which I was happy with because it was a beautiful day. Save the indoor pool for days with crappy weather.

So then Blythe and Ethan were both going on and on about wanting to ride the ponies all morning long. We made it to the pumpkin patch around 11 in the morning and straight for the ponies. And then (of course), Ethan didn't want to ride one. So we had Blythe ride one first.

After Ethan verified that it was, in fact, safe to ride the pony, THEN he wanted to ride one. So now he's proud of himself for riding a horse.

Afterwards, the kids wanted to do the hayride out to the pumpkin patch.

We didn't really want to buy a pumpkin though. They are expensive at the pumpkin patch and they wouldn't even last until Halloween since it was only October 2nd. So we were hoping the kids wouldn't pitch a fit about not getting a pumpkin. Instead we told them we were just going to look for the biggest pumpkin we could see and the smallest. We found some big ones. This is the biggest one Blythe could pick up.

She "stole" the smallest one she could find (she put it in her pocket...it was SO small!).

We headed over to the petting zoo of farm animals (where Ethan was scared to pet any of them) and through the toddler maze and then we were done with our first visit to the pumpkin patch this season in just an hour and 15 minutes (we had to get home to watch the VT vs NC State game!)

Ready, Set, Go!

Blythe finished up her swim lessons this week. Although the videos don't show it, she did do a good job with her "big arms" and stays more horizontal while doing them and doesn't look as much like she's drowning. She also learned how to do the backstroke! Which made Braden quite proud (that was his stroke back in the day).

Anyway, apparently she does have a bit of competetive spirit in her. Who knew?

Here she really puts the nail in the coffin. Sorry 7 year old Asian girl. Dusted!