Too cute

You can't get any cuter that a stinking cute little boy in a hospital gown.





p.s. don't be alarmed-it was his 2 yr. "physical".
p.s.s. pictures taken with my blackberry. that explains it.

From Out of the Vaults

(I know I got back from my Houston trip a couple weeks ago but never followed up on my first post from the trip. So here's my follow-up)
HOW SWEET IS THIS EASY-BAKE OVEN? If that doesn't have 1980's written all over it I don't know what does.
In my recent trip home I found that my parents had found this in their attic, along with a few other childhood toys and I was way more excited than Carter to play with it. I kept trying and trying to convince him to use this thing and finally had to wait for my nieces to come over to whip it out. Believe it or not, I did not even have to change the 100 watt light bulb. And it only took 20 minutes to cook one single cookie (or rather, to burn it on the bottom and leave the top completely doughy) Anyway, it was awesome.



Next, check this out. This is a picture of the lake where my parents have a lake house in Houston. Now maybe you will see why Southern California looks really, really, really dead and brown to me. I like green.


This boy is the cutest thing.


No, wait. This boy is the cutest thing. Okay, they are tied for first. We took out the boat and fished our little hearts out, cutting worms with our teeth and catching loads of sea weed fish. Finally we caught one and I let him reel it in. Needless to say he was busting his little life jacket buckles.


The four boys cousins. They had a blast together.


Pap and Nolan on a boat ride.


He loved the boat. The rumble almost put him to sleep.


And pretended in the sunset that he was driving the boat dock. This time of day at the lake is impossible to catch on camera. It is too gorgeous as the sun shines through the tree and reflects off the water....just beautiful.


Every night Papa read the boys books. He doesn't read a word but tells them his way with voices and all. Carter was in charge of sound effects and knocked on the wall every time the wolf would knock on the little pig's door.


And I got Carter to look happy about using a girl toy.

Everything's exciting to a kid...

...so I took my sweet time, like I always do, when Carter was going, "MOM! MOM! COME LOOK! THERE'S A SURPRISE IN THE GARDEN!"
I was thinking he was going to point out the 1/2 dead pumpkin that he didn't notice before or some bug but was pleasantly surprised when I walked around the corner and saw these, which had come over the fence for a peek in my garden.







And I thought about the little things in life and how they bring me so much joy and lift my spirits. Little tender mercies...

(You have officially reached the caboose of my train of deep thought)

Halloween

Okay I know I'm late on this and that everyone else is already over Halloween but whatever, here's my post, WITH PICTURES- Wahoo!
We got back from our trip to Houston yesterday and had a fantastic time. I have plenty more pictures to follow but I'm gonna have to do this in installments because I have SO MANY pictures to sort through and edit. It's gonna take me DAYS.

These adorable pumpkin lights are really on their last legs. Most of the paint has chipped off and some of the eyes have broken out and stuff but I love them and I'm pretty sure I've had them since I ordered them from one of those super cheap catalogs from China when I was in high school. So I'm kindof attached. I hung them on the railing of my front porch and enjoyed them SO MUCH and then my kids broke the lights and the light string wouldn't work. (And I may have been PMSing and I may have almost broken down into tears over it.) Spencer came home and saw my distress and I checked EVERY BULB while we watched some TV to no avail. The next day I went to Michael's to replace my lights and went to Time Out for Women before I had time to hang them bak up (same weekend my purse was stolen) and when I returned he had hung them back up for me and their snaggle-toothed smiles welcomed me home.



The night before we left for Houston we carved our pumpkins. Carter would NOT touch the goo and Nolan wouldn't NOT touch the goo. And who the heck didn't invent those pumpkin carving kits when I was young? We used pens, steak knives, tablespoons, corn holders, chain saws, and any other useful kitchen utensil and it still took hours. This year we got all pumpkins de-brained and carved in like an hour. Plus they are WAY COOLER than the ones we used to carve. Seriously, how cool is Spencer's pumpkin on the right? I have NO IDEA what it's supposed to be but who cares? it's sweet looking.


Now on to the real nights...(I say nightS because the night before Halloween we went to a trunk-or-treat party at my parent's)
First, lemme splain this outfit......
In my hurry in packing I accidentally packed two pair of pants and no black shirt for Nolan's "BumBum" (aka Batman) costume. So I improvised and he got to wear Carter's inside-out star wars shirt.
Second, we didn't have black shoes.
And third, all the orange jack-o-lantern candy buckets were gone. So we got yellow.


Carter got to be Spidy and had gloves that were about 3 sizes too big, which was really weird because the costume fit perfectly. So maybe he just has stumpy fingers, i dunno.






We hadn't been there for 5 minutes when Nolan got scared by a mean witch and didn't stop crying for the next hour (*note tear on cheek)


(*note really really sad face) (and the cutest witch and pirate there)


*note terrified eyes of hate. He hated it. Nolan, that is. Not my dad, who luckily did not pull this face all night.


But he finally figured it out.
Say "A-TREEEETTT!!!!!" REALLY loudly and get loads of candy. And then he was off and happy. And so was I.


HOW WAS YOUR HALLOWEEN??