Giving of Thanks

This year we had a great Thanksgiving. It was our first time ever staying at home. Since we've been married we've been to London, Mesa, A Caribbean Cruise, New York City, and Jamaica. Each year has been so fun but with nothing really planned and two little ones, this year we settled on our home in Florida. It was great for a change, I really liked the feeling of having Tyler at home with us with no distractions for the whole break.

Trying Hot Chocolate, he wasn't so sure about it...

I have loved baking with pumpkin this year. I kind of went a little overboard actually... I made pumpkin cookies (4 times) pumpkin bars, pumpkin bread (2 loaves) and then finished it off on Thanksgiving morning with some Pumpkin Pancakes. Jackson had 5 I think... and this was a after his first obligatory banana he has every morning.

Tyler played some football with guys from our church at 9 am and Jackson and Abbie played at the park and watched. When we got home we watched the parade! Last year we weren't able to watch it so this was my first time watching since we'd been there. Not going to lie it made me tear up. I always loved watching the parade growing up (other than that year in high school I slept in until noon and missed it). Now watching with Jackson and Abbie at my own house was too fun.

Pumpkin Pancakes on Thanksgiving Morning

He loved all the marching

Shady boy had 5 pancakes and came and stole bites from me!

And she thought she could read a book in peace...

He loved the rockettes and tried to kick like them with his arms behind his back. You've almost got it buddy!

Loving the "basketball guys"

For Thanksgiving dinner we got together with 2 other families, the Whites & Farrars. Both have a 9 month old baby so there was lots of rolling and babbling. The Farrars have a 5 year old girl so she and Jackson were able to play too.

This rug was THE place to be for babies on Thanksgiving this year.

Tyler made the turkey & gravy, I made mashed potatoes and yams and apples. The Farrars brought two kinds of stuffing, rolls & pumpkin pie & the Whites brought green beans, cranberry sauce and chocolate pie. It was a great dinner that all happened way too fast. Jackson would not sit down to eat dinner but it was a different story when I put 2 slices of pie on a plate :)

The only picture I took of myself.

 The last guest didn't leave until after 10 and I was exhausted. It was great to have it with other families and split up the cooking, but I was left with a lot of cleanup. There was no way I was heading out for Black Friday shopping. Jackson didn't take a nap that day so by 8, he was so exhausted he fell right asleep. He slept in until 9 the next day! Too bad Abbie woke up at 6:30 when it was still dark outside. She was ready for a nap by the time he woke up. But Tyler slipped out early that morning and did a little black friday shopping, got some good stuff for us and the kids, but a few things were already sold out... you snooze (til 6 am) you lose I guess.

He woke up pretty dang happy!

 That day we hung out at home and went on a walk around our neighborhood. The weather was perfect! That afternoon Tyler went to see the James Bond movie with some guys. The movie was a little long so here is Jackson and me waiting for him to have our leftovers dinner! I think I took this picture to text him and show that dinner was ready but never sent it..

 The next day we went to animal kingdom and had a great day!

My growing up kids

My kids are growing up. Yes they are still 2 1/2 and 7 months and one day I'll look back at this and wish they could be so little again, but they are changing so fast I can hardly believe it.

Oh and Disney is already decked out for Christmas!

 Abbie is eating solids and loving it. It's still hard to get her to stay focused to eat baby food but when I do get the spoon in her mouth she always will open and swallow it, thats good right? But she really would rather do it all by herself. And thanks to these handy new pouch baby foods she can do just that. Most of the time I will still feed her with a spoon but I'm starting to give her the pouch and she's doing better than I thought. Tonight for dinner she downed half a pouch on her own.

I've been buying Plum brand and Pumpkin Banana & Mango Sweet Potato are her favorites

Opened a new can of puffs and she started digging right in.

 But she prefers real food, I just give her puffs and the other baby foods like yogurt melts that will disolve in her mouth. In the past month she has gotten so good at picking them up individually off her high chair. She also loves getting real bites of our food like yogurts, mashed potatoes, bananas, beans and apples to suck on.

This week Abbie started crawling. I was really not expecting her to learn this so soon but I guess it makes sense since she's always loved being on her tummy. Jackson didn't crawl until 8 1/2 months. But Abbie is now on the move! It's not pretty and she's still working on her form but she can move from one side of the room to another if she wants to. 

She had been trying to crawl all over me for the past couple weeks and now she's moved beyond.

This means that I get to babyproof the house all over again! I don't know why but I never thought about the fact that I'd have to do this again so soon. I was kind of thinking Abbie is in baby mode and then she will soon be in toddler mode and run around and play with Jackson. But we are now in this wobbly learning to crawl/cruise on furniture/walk phase that involves lots of falling, crying, and getting into things. While Jackson is definitely a busy crazy boy, he was not much of a trouble maker or mess maker as a baby. He never got into a toilet, hardly ever got into drawers or cupboards he shouldn't and I just tied rubber bands around our kitchen cabinet knobs. I'm not sure it will be so easy with Abbie but hopefully it will. At this point she just wants to crawl to get Jackson's toys. His cars, trains, puzzles and books have been catching her eye for months now, and she can finally do something about it.

Getting so tricky!

She's not staying on the blanket anymore...

 This brings me to Jackson. He is growing up too. Just this afternoon his sister crawled over to his train track and started playing with (aka sucking on) his wooden bridge. He was doing a puzzle at the time and didn't notice right away. Until she started banging the bridge on the floor. He noticed then, and ran over immediately. He grabbed the bridge from her and tossed it aside. "No Abbie! No eat my Bridge!" he told her. So she then scooted over to the rest of the track and was about to take apart the pieces. At this point I'm assuming he realized this would probably be worse than sucking on one wooden bridge because he than ran over, got the bridge and handed it back to her. "Here Abbie, Bridge."

He is really getting mature and beginning to reason and understand consequences much more than before. I feel like we have had less tantrums since he is able to reason and understand timeout and taking away privileges. For example he really has an opinion on what clothes he wears. Meaning most days he'd rather run around naked or in his jammies. At first it was really hard to get him to change his clothes but now I tell him he can't ______ until his clothes are on and he will normally cooperate right away and say "ok ok shorts on!" He understand the concept of time also, which helps when I tell him he has "one more minute" or "we're going tomorrow."

His communication is getting better too. I am able to understand him 90% of the time, while others might not hear his words quite as clearly, I have learned Jacksonese. But his language is beginning to make much more sense now that he can put the endings on his words. One day this week he just started saying, "juice" insted of "joo" "please" instead of "peeh" "bus" instead of "buh" "crash" instead of "crah." etc etc. I have been emphasizing the last sound on those words for months and now all of a sudden he got it and says them all. It was quite the dramatic change, I'm not sure what clicked but I'm so grateful it did and I can tell he is proud of himself too.

A new favorite, his FIRE TRUCK puzzle!

He's getting way good at puzzles. Forget the little wooden peg puzzles, he has grown out of those and now does 10-30 piece puzzles. He has about 5 of these harder type of puzzles that he'll rotate between and do probably 15 times a day. He has memorized where each piece goes and can do them so fast!

I can see potty training in our future! A couple months ago I saw no light at the end of the tunnel, he showed no interest in the toilet, and didn't even speak much diaper or toilet words, but now he is learning to sit on the toilet and will tell us when he needs a change. I still think he's a couple months out, but I'm planning on tackling the beast after we get home from holiday travels in January.

He's going there someday

Oh and sometimes he calls me "mommy" now. It used to always be mama and for some reason Mommy seems like a big change for me and I'm still dealing with it. But I shouldn't complain because he has recently started calling Tyler "Dad" and sometimes just "Tyler"

Sometimes he's ok skipping his afternoon nap. I really don't like the idea of him losing his nap, but I've come to terms with the fact that some days he doesn't need one and will just hang out in his crib for "quiet time." These days I can just push his bedtime up a little sooner and that's ok with  me too. But I learned last week on the days after the ones that he doesn't take a nap, he will definitely need one that day..

Organizing his tootsie rolls and suckers

Something funny things from just today.. This morning I took a shower while Abbie was taking her morning nap and Jackson was playing. Normally I'll put a cartoon on tv while I shower to keep the peace but today he was playing nicely so I decided I'd hop in without a show on. Well I had a feeling this could have been a bad idea when I remembered the back door was open so he could go outside if he wanted. Not that he can get outside our yard, just that that opens new possibilities for injuries. But when I was done and peeked out of my room I found Jackson riding his scooter around the kitchen. I had to stop myself from laughing honestly, it was so funny to see him doing that. I started to say, "Jackson what are you doing, you know that scooter stays outsi__" when he looked up and said, "Sorry, sorry!" And quickly put it back outside. He then showed me that he thought it was cool when the scooter goes over the big bump (the small door jam/step between the house and patio). So I showed him a way to do a big bump outside too and hopefully we dont have the scooter inside again.

But that situation just made me realize how mature he is. He did something wrong but then handled it so calmly and understandingly. He's smart (or sneaky) enough to realize oh I can ride my scooter inside while Mommy is in the shower, but mature enough to understand it was not the right thing to do and put it away without a fuss. While some days I count down the hours til bedtime, most days I love spending all my time with the kids and am trying to enjoy these precious moments while they are here.

Hanging out at Epcot

Halloween Day

The two days before Halloween Florida was getting much cooler weather thanks to "superstorm" Sandy. This resulted in bundled up Abbie wearing socks and sweaters for the first time! Oh and Jackson refusing to wear long sleeves or socks but insisting to run outside and play barefoot. Fast forward 24 hours and he woke up with a bad cough and runny nose. We had planned to head down to the town of Celebration to trick-or-treat with some friends who recently moved there. We'd heard it was a great place to trick-or-treat and were excited to go but had to change plans when Jackson wasn't acting up for it. It would have been a long drive and night for the buddy so we ended up just keeping it simple and went down a couple streets in our neighborhood with some friends here instead. 

Of course we started out with "Mickey & Minnie's House" These people (who legally changed their names to Mickey & Minnie) go all out and this year even had the high school student council helping with the carnival games. Jackson's pumpkin was 1/2 full after this house alone!

Tyler took this Panoramic style from his fancy new phone to capture the whole yard

Walking past the graveyard section

Playing Carnival Games in their garage

Normally smiley Abbie looked overwhelmed in all the pictures we took!

After a little while Jackson told us he was all done, he looked beat.

Came home and looked at all his candy, and honestly the only thing he likes are the dum dum suckers.

Our good friends the Whites had their baby Allie dress up as a ladybug too! It was too funny when i asked her what her costume was and she said ladybug. Abbie and Allie get confused a lot in our ward, they are exactly 2 months apart, pretty much the same size, and both are lacking in the hair department. :)

We had to get a picture to document :)

This picture won't rotate! will try to fix later ... hopefully...

Halloween Week

So since Halloween was on a Wednesday this year, I feel like the holiday lasted a long time! With the weekend before being "Halloween Weekend" we filled in lots of time for all things pumpkin. We had Tyler's parents with us the whole week and got to spend some time with them at downtown disney, animal kingdom, epcot, a pumpkin patch and our ward's Trunk or Treat.

Tyler & Jackson in heaven on the train at DTD

Our Pumpkin

"mama it's heavy!"

"A pumpkin for Abbie and a pumpkin for Jackson"

Tried so hard to get her to smile and not eat the hay!

Mama and Beauty girl

What's this? A family photo? Luckily we had grandma to snap the pic and grandpa to entertain the kids!

This year Jackson was a pirate and Abbie, a ladybug! I thought about doing the kids in a coordinating costume theme but I went with color coordinating instead. Just kidding, I actually didn't even plan the colors to match - is that random?

But I decided on Abbie being a ladybug partly in honor of my first car, the red beetle aka ladybug and love for all things ladybugs. She has inherited a couple of my ladybug stuffed animals and her ladybug music box is probably one of her favorite toys to snuggle with. I digress, but anyways she was a ladybug and her costume was even kind of partly home made which is totally not my thing normally :)

And Jackson is very much obsessd with pirates right now, mostly thanks to Jake & The Neverland Pirates show. I thought about a few other ideas but I was a little concerned that he wouldn't want to dress up in anything. Luckily he ended up proving me wrong :) But he is pretty particular about hats, shoes, socks, jackets, long sleeves, itchy tags, etc etc and not a real dress-up type of kid, so that's what I was going off of. We went to party city and I thought I could get him excited about being a pirate by getting him a sword. And oh how he loved that sword, and of course picked the biggest one they sold. But I tried to have him try on the actual pirate costumes with the stiped pants and puffy shirts and he wouldn't even let me try it on him. So we decided to go with the one size fits all hat/vest/belt/hook/eyepatch set. A lot of accessories that hopefully he'd wear a couple of.

While he had his concerns at first he eventually let us put everything on him when he learned he'd get candy! He didn't love it at first but he wore it, and now he loves putting on his pirate costume at home just for fun. 

The pirate arrives at trunk or treat

I think they love the little ladybug :)

Filling his pumpkin with Grandma!

"This way Grandma!"

The only family photo of the night