Happy Halloween!

Matchy-Match

It's a good thing I took photos, since by 11:00, Cecily was back in jammies for the day.

Parker's Movie Night

For the past 6 months or so, we have had the hardest time getting Parker to stay in his room at bedtime.  So, a while ago, I started a marble jar for him, he can earn marbles through the day by doing chores & being helpful, and then if he comes out of his room at night, we take away a marble.  It's been very helpful at getting him to get dressed in the morning and do a few simple chores, but as far as getting him to stay in bed, it's been a total flop.  He's been more than willing to "trade" a marble for the chance to come out & see what Mama & Daddy are up to.

But, with that said, Parker finally filled up his marble jar on Tuesday, so his prize was a dinner & a movie night.  Parker got to pick the movie (Planes) and the dinner (chicken nuggets) and he LOVED it.

Half-way through dinner he told me "Mama, tomorrow, we can watch the Frozen movie, okay?"  Um, I think you're missing the point little guy, this is a special treat, not every night.

But, they had a great time.  Of course, by the end, it had degenerated to this:

...in other news, Cecily has learned how to take off her jammies, so she can now frequently be found streaking through the house.

Parker & Cecily sayings

I realized it's been a while since I wrote down some of the stuff these kids have been saying, so here goes...

From Parker:

For the most part, Parker speaks like a big kid.  One of his new favorite responses is "sure!"  He uses it for everything: 

Parker, do you need to go potty? ~ Sure!

Parker, did you clean your room? ~ Sure!

It doesn't necessarily mean that he will go potty, or that he actually did clean his room, but he gets points for enthusiasm. 

From Cecily:

Her favorites are:

"I do it all by myself"

"No I not" - Anytime you accuse her of ANYTHING, her knee-jerk reaction is "noInot"

I recently filled out one of those "how many words does your kid say?" surveys from the UW for Cecily.  She has an amazing vocabulary, that girl uses almost all the words in the survey.  One of the last questions is "what is the longest statement/sentence your child has put together?"  I did a similar one for Parker 2 years ago, so this time I knew it was coming and wrote down a few of her longer statements over the past week.  I think that at this age, Parker's longest statement was something like "More milk, please"  Cecily's was "Yeah, I would like to go in the backpack."

Cecily still continues to call everything either a "baby" or a "dinosaur", or occasionally, Parker is "baby dinosaur Parker"

Zoo trip.

We had a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon, so we met some friends at the zoo.  Costumes were a bonus.

Where's Cecily?

Pumpkin Patch!

Our church did a pumpkin patch as our Fall Outing this year, so we headed off to Snohomish to check out the pumpkins.

Parker LOVED it, Cecily looked like this most of the time:

It was kind of drizzly and really slippery, so neither of the kids loved the actual pumpkin part of the adventure, but Parker loved climbing on all the stuff they had outside.  Again, Cecily pretty much looked like this:

Silly Kids

I'm sure the baby-doll stroller was totally designed to ride the kids around...right?

I don't have a picture of it, but Parker spends just about as much time sitting in the stroller as Cecily does.

Costumes!

I was at the Goodwill the other day looking for Halloween costumes for Cecily.  I wasn't really interested in dressing her like a pumpkin or a princess, so the pickings were a little slim.  Finally, I found this kitty cat costume, which seemed kind of perfect since Cecily is pretending to be a kitty cat 90% of the time.  Then, I found the most adorable bumble bee tutu costume (Parker's friend Emi had the same costume several years ago), but it was missing it's antenna & wings.  I probably spent 10 minutes staring at the two costumes in the store trying to decide.  I figured I could pretty easily make the antenna and wings, but eventually I decided it would be a lot easier to just buy the kitty cat costume that Cecily would prefer anyway.

...although the next day I realized I should have bought both, since now what are Cecily's friends going to wear when they come over?

Fortunately, there seems to be no paucity of costumes in our life right now.  Someone brought a pile of costumes to MOPS to hand off to other kids.  I brought the unclaimed costumes home, I think both were about 2T in size, but Parker insisted on trying both on.  He nearly has to dislocate his shoulder to get the cookie monster costume on, but he still spent the entire day in it (we will not be keeping it however, that's too much effort to get it on & off).

..as a side note, I've discovered that I can get my kids to eat absolutely anything if I serve it to them in a cupcake wrapper.  Why didn't I think of "fancy lunch" earlier!?!

Cecily also found a cuddly dinosaur costume.

Date with Mama

Keith & Parker went to the NAIOP workday, so Cecily & I got to spend the morning running errands & hanging out.  But her very favorite part of the day was stopping at Starbucks for a "lollipop"

We don't go to Starbucks often, but she knows what she's doing; as soon as we walk in the door, she starts saying "cake pop, cake pop?  lollipop?"

Playdate

Parker had a friend over for a play-date, which, of course, requires costumes.  ...good thing I picked a few up the day before at Goodwill.

She's cute

Cecily picked out her own outfit today (take special note of her sparkly tennis shoes, they complete the outfit.):