Month: June 2014

Love these kids, but thought this series demonstrated the progression of sibling “love” fairly accurately.

Exhibit 1

Exhibit 2

Cutie pies, right? So sweet to one another, right? Making Mom & Dad so proud – well behaved, playing well together, check, check.

Exhibit 3

Smothering each other? Check. 66.67% (2 out of 3) isn’t so bad, right?

If there were an Exhibit 4 it would undoubtedly be someone crying because they got hit or hurt, physically or otherwise. I’m so glad we have these two – their personalities are night and day from one another, but so perfectly them that it fits. Love them both more than more.

Goodnight, love,
Mommy

These are two of my favorite people in the whole wide world together at the lake house today:

It was a pretty sweet day. I’ll post lake pics, but I couldn’t withhold the sweet reading ones. Beyond blessed, that’s for sure.

There isn’t much to summarize for our weekend – a party, a wedding, & housework – not too awfully exciting, or really even resulting in a slew of pictures like normal. But I couldn’t let that stop me from my “streak” of recent posts, so here goes nothin’! 😉

My beautiful girl in a new beautiful dress from Auntie Nicci (beautiful hair courtesy of Hannah). She was all dressed up for her ‘graduation’ party for the kids moving on to kindergarten from preschool this year:

And the “boy” wrap-up too of course…

A day wouldn’t be complete without Crashy messing with something until it breaks or gets dangerously close to breaking (or eventually small enough for him to put in his mouth). I laughed a little at this video I took on my phone Saturday morning while I attempted to continue to lay down in bed after he was awake by bringing a few cups for him to play with. It worked for probably 10 minutes, which might seem measly, but is a pretty good amount of time for this 15-month-old busy body! It just shows how he messes and messes (and messes…) and figures out how things go together and come apart and…yeah, you get the picture:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6H80_AMeXc

Here’s his sweet face in non-moving form from the same morning:

And then, big finale of a pretty boring post (apologies, I’ll work on our wow-factor!)…drum roll please…spaghetti dinner. Always a favorite around these parts. Crasher’s favorite move is the “smear-across-my-face-and-nose”. He’s clearly getting really good at it:

Happy Monday, all.

Mok (rhymes with poke) is our vicious pit bull mix. He’s actually a big cuddly ball of sweetness – the best “kid-friendly” dog I’ve ever seen. He’s amazingly tolerant with Selah loving on him and Crashy terrorizing him (mostly simultaneous events). He also refuses to believe he isn’t a lap dog and insists on proving it when he gets the chance.

This series of photos on my phone from last week cracked me up when I flipped through them tonight. Just picture it: Selah begging him to cuddle in the patio chair with her, Asher climbing up and attempting to “ride” him, then getting down and proceeding to threaten them both with a wood block (never know when mundane items are going to become projectiles with that kid). It’s not the photography that gets me. It’s how these less than mediocre photos tell the story of maybe a 2 minute period of simple joy. A memory captured of laughing with my kids and enjoying our messy life together. Our messy, beautiful life:

A few weeks back we bought a little “learn to read” box at Costco and asked Hannah to maybe work with her on it when Asher was napping in the mornings…and she just started & Selah is pretty amazing (you know, biased Mom speaking!) for how long she’s done this. I’ll just stop writing and show the sweet video Hannah sent this AM:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OApBg17LS-8

In other news, Ashy got to interact with a pretty cool frog last night. Hannah was taking some frogs for a friend overnight and he was pretty into it. That is – until the frog jumped off Hannah onto Selah and she FREAKED out. You’d have thought she broke her arm. Or maybe cut off a limb. Not sure, having not experienced either of those, but basically a shriek of unhuman tone, loudness, and length emerged from poor Selah that sufficiently made Asher wary enough of the frog to really not want to get too near. Although, the curiosity was still there. I got some pictures prior to the scream, but only managed to get video after, which makes him appear much more disturbed by the frog than he actually was. Here’s both:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC6iQV5KrrA

Today we visited the Butterflies Alive exhibit at the Natural History Museum. It’s a favorite of Selah’s, so it was her pick. It was sunny so the butterflies were out and active. Thought I’d share some iPhone pics of the action. Notice Crashy isn’t in a lot of them – that’s because what wasn’t pictured is Mom trying to save butterfly lives by avoiding contact with our “not-so-gentle” (ie. NOT butterfly safe) toddler boy. But fun was had anyway, and as Selah put it: Mom, these butterflies sure do like me. 🙂

By the end, Crashy was pretty sleepy:

And Selah wanted to “help” him get a photo:

After the butterflies, we went to the “Backyard” – a sweet play area in back of the museum that they have a stream that pumps water for the kids to play with buckets, climb on rocks, have boat races, etc. It’s my favorite part of our museum, and apparently Crasher’s too. He immediately went in fully clothed, to fill, pour out, and repeat. For probably the next 45 minutes straight:

This isn’t my best cinematography, but I was trying to catch how mechanical he is – he had it figured out how to put the bucket under the biggest part of the stream, fill it up, then stand up and dump it. He was getting really tired, so by the time I video’d, it was pretty zombie-like, but thought I’d post for memory-sake at least:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULuhj3nEvfQ
He also LOVED the Smokey the Bear exhibit that you could drop golf balls in to simulate rain falling from the sky, into a river, and through rocks, sticks, etc. It was a great exhibit actually, even if he wasn’t getting the picture of the precipitation part!

And a similarly boring video, but again, it’s my way of documenting my kiddos, so here it is:
http://youtu.be/gvOLuXLgVQc
Thanks for joining our museum visit!

Selah is pretty predictable, but every once in awhile she’ll surprise me. It happened yesterday at the pool when she, unprompted by me, decided she wanted to jump off the diving board! She did it about 20 times in a row and could even manage to swim all the way to the side by herself. Proud Mama here. (And feeling better about our “investment” in swim lessons, haha).
I apologize for the screaming in the video (you may want to turn off the sound, seriously) – Crasher was not as impressed with his sister, and wanted Mom to take him in the water! Poor Hannah basically had to hold him to the ground in order to video since I wasn’t comfortable having Selah do it all by herself quite yet! Here’s one of the many jumps:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlt-T0-fniQ

And one with Hannah after I placated Asher:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyjxe8QFi84

So excited she loves the water! A girl after my own heart…even though I had to force her into a few years of lessons to make her that way, ha ha. 😉

Now, Crashy? That boy would go off the diving board right this minute if I let him! No fear in that one, so I’ll be getting him in lessons soon to protect him from himself! 🙂

Love those kids more than I could have imagined, different as they can be, equally as loved.

I’ve been wanting to film her singing with Hannah because she gets really into it, but Selah is more into the moment than into the camera – in fact, rarely when we pull out the phone does she even continue. So today Hannah video’d her when we were driving. It isn’t the full “performance”, but it’s still cute and entertaining so thought I’d share. Here’s the ever-popular ‘Let It Go’ courtesy of our own Selah Rae:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6DWR3A7zdc

Happy Sunday 🙂