21 Months

Wow its hard to believe that in 3 more months we will be 2 years old. Where has the time gone? Well everyone is doing great. We have really been pretty healthy this winter. Little bugs here and there but nothing compared to last year. They are all wearing 2T clothes, we are not sure how much they weigh. We had to put away the high chairs this week because they started climbing in and out of them. So we are sitting in booster seats like big kids. Next it will be the cribs and we are so not ready for that! We have really taken to the country life. The kids love to go on walks down the dirt drive and feed Grannie and Pawpaw's horses. They love to go barefoot in the grass and dirt out front. Last week one evening there were a tone of moths flying around the porch lights, the kids are fascinated with them, so they got their little chairs and sat in front of the sliding glass door and just watched the moths.

Hayla

Miss Mam is what we call her. She loves to help out from clearing the table to cooking with me to folding clothes. She also like to take care of the boys, loves on them and then turns right around and tells them "no no". She is very independent and will play by herself most of the time. She is a girly girl which is so funny because I am really not. She loves to look at herself in the mirror and to show off her clothes and hair. This past week I had painted my toes and she had a fit when she saw them. She started pulling at her shoes and telling me she wanted hers done. After I did it she showed everyone 20 times. She loves music and loves to dance. She is saying new words all the time and combining them with her sign language. She loves sign language. We purchased some books with kids making signs and she will sit and copy the signs she sees.

Clayton

Clayton is our little professor. He is very curious and loves to explore. He is also our horse man. As you can see he is riding the horse without anyone holding on. My uncle walked right next to him but he wanted to do it by himself. The previous week the two of them went riding and when my uncle brought him back he cried and cried because he didn't want to stop. He has a natural seat when it comes to riding. (this is the way a person moves when the horse moves). He has a large vocabulary as well and can copy just about anything we say. He is still wearing glasses but now has to do some eye patch therapy. For 2 hours a day he wears a band aid like patch under his glasses in hopes to correct the lazy eye. The eye doctor says his eye isn't bad enough for surgery but it does need to be fixed so we are trying this and we will see what happens.

Dylan

Then there is our clown. Yes little Dylan loves to laugh and make others laugh. He is afraid of nothing and willing to climb anything. A few weeks ago he climbed up on the table got as apple and started eating it. He is the first to learn how to open doors. Yes nothing is safe in our any longer. The door knobs were our last baby proofing and the other night we were all in our bedroom and Dylan closed the door and then opened. Shane and I looked at each other and said surely not. Then he did it again so the next day we put door knob protectors every where. He is talking up a storm too.

Happy Valentines

For the past 11 years I have made chocolate covered strawberries for Shane. Well this year I thought it would be fun for the kids to help. They had a blast well the boys did anyway. As soon as Hayla got her hand all chocolaty she was done.

If you notice there was a lot of eating going on. They would dip then bite and somtimes not even dip. But they enjoyed it. I told Shane that they may not have been the best looking strawberries but there was a lot of love in them.

Stomach Flu

It hit us!!! Hayla started throwing up last Tuesday. What was weird though was she didn't run fever. At first I was in a panic because I thought maybe it was food poison with the salmonella scare. After about 2 hours of throwing up every 10 mins I called the Dr's office and they said they had been seeing a lot of the vomiting no fever stuff and just to keep giving her small amounts of fluid until she was able to keep it down. She didn't stop vomiting until about 12:00 am and at about 1:30 I finally went to bed. Shane and the boys never did get it but anyone who entered our house did and then they shared it with others. This is one mean bug I tell you, out of the 18 people in our family 5 people did not get it. (yet) And no one ran fever so you didn't really know when you were contagious so who knows who else we gave it to.

It's Potty Time!!!!

Just this week the kids have decided that they want to sit on the potty. Well who are we to agrue with that. So every night before we get in the bath they each take a turn on the potty. No one has actually done anything in there yet, but hey sitting is a start. Hayla even has to have a piece of toilet paper when she is through and wipes her self. The funny part is since we do this at night before we get in the tub we get undressed. So if you mention the potty durning the day they start to get undressed. Well have to work on that.

Merry Christmas

This Christmas was so much more fun than last Christmas. We weren't stopping every hour and a half to feed bottles and the kids could open their own gifts.

Our holiday celebration began Christmas eve at my parents house. After dinner and Christmas Eve service the kids opened their first Christmas presents. Their favorite was the cowboy hats and boots. Dylan especially loves his as you will see at the bottom of the blog.

Chirstmas morning at our house. We aren't at the wake up early age yet, thank goodness, so the kids got up at their normal time of 8 and we came out into the living room to see what Santa brought. He brought them plush rocking horses and real felt cowboy hats like daddy. The boys got mega blocks and Hayla got a new baby doll

Then we opened the presents from Mommy and Daddy. We got them Sesame Street fold out couches, clothes ( their first pair of wrangler jeans), and little fire engines to ride around the house on. They loved tearing open the packages.

Next it was time to celebrate with the rest of the family. We had breakfast with my mom's family and opened stockings and presents there.

Here are the kids opening their mega blocks truck and wagon.


And here they are trying out their four wheelers.

Then we went to Shane's family for the rest of the day. Here they got bean bag chairs and a tool bench.

Needless to say the kids were Christmased out by the end of the day and so were dad and I,but we couldn't be more thankful for the time spent with our family. We hope your holiday was just as wonderful.

Here is my little cowboy. As you can see Dylan loved his hat and boots.

Our Christmas Train and Tree

Shane's mom gave the kids her old Christmas Train to play with. So Shane set it up around the tree. We weren't sure how well it was going to work, but amazingly enough the kids didn't mess with it too much. Sure they accidently knocked it off the track here and there but that was about it.

They loved having a tree in the livingroom. They helped us decorate it. We put all of the breakable ornaments up on top and then ornaments that were okay for them to touch we put at the bottom. They did really well jsut looking at the tree. Every now and then someone would bring us an ornament that they had taken off but that was it.