We saw them off!
Goodbye big kids, hello my at home crew for this year.
And then we drove to school to meet them and walk them to their classrooms. Slightly ridiculous, but worth it.
Eleanor is in 1st grade with Ms. Weibel this year.
Bradley is in 2nd grade with Mrs. Prins.
And I'm at home with a cute baby and a sweet Patrick!
Juliet is crawling. Well, sort of. She army crawls to wherever she wants to go and she can make quite a distance if necessary. She completely destroyed the Loopin' Chewie game the other day and when I asked her if she felt sorry about it she did not look repentant at all.
She's also talking a bunch. We love it.
Juliet is a terror around tablets or phones. She knows they are good and hits at them a bunch. The kids are desperate to get away from her if they are getting some rare tablet time. However, the perk is that if I have to get something done I just leave my locked iPhone on the ground near her and she'll bat around at it for a while before needing attention again. No accidental emergency calls yet so we're calling this a success.
Juliet has been teething for what feels like a month and still doesn't have her first tooth yet, but we can feel it right under the surface. She can feel it too and has had a few nights where she's been awake for large chunks. I like to think I'm still able to function even with some sleep deprivation but the other morning Patrick found an Annie soundtrack in my closet and ran into his room to put it on his cd player. I soon heard Snoop Dogg singing about being hotter than a Crock Pot and thought "I didn't know he was in an Annie remake." Then I heard a commercial and realized Patrick had turned on the radio instead of putting it on the cd setting. Apparently I need more naps and I also need to monitor more closely which radio stations my young children are listening to.
Almost guaranteed they are watching PJ Masks together in this photo.
I'm doing some things right though. The other night Nathan was holding the ice cream scoop and asked Patrick, "What do you need to get ice cream?" Patrick jumped up by him and with a huge grin on his face said "Because I am so beautiful! And handsome!" Nathan paused and then said "A bowl." Then he turned to me and said, "What kind of training has this kid had?" Um, only the best kind?
Although we were listening to the radio in the car a few days ago and the song "Abracadabra, I want to reach out and grab ya" came on. Patrick hollered, "Abracadabra! That's a Pokémon!"
Patrick is still speaking a lot of "Spanish." The other day he said, "Ah bah doo na Mommy! … what does that mean?" "I will do whatever you say, Mommy." "Correct!"
Patrick has been very quotable lately. We got a new basketball hoop in anticipation of Bradley playing on the second grade basketball team this winter and Patrick has been eager to shoot some hoops whenever he has the chance. I was cheering him on as we were waiting for the big kids' bus to arrive and he had a shot that looked like it was going to go in and then bounced off the rim. I hollered, "you were robbed!" without stopping to think about my childrens' obsession with robbers. Patrick demanded I explain the phrase to him and then used it every time he missed a shot after that, except he would say "someone has robbed me!" and "someone has robbed me again!"
Here's Patrick waiting for the big kids to come home from their first day of school. Turns out the popsicles have the power to make an entire bus load of children jealous.
First day of school popsicle! Our neighbor Addison is responsible for making these bus rides go well for our kids. Eleanor has only missed her stop once when she was having too much fun talking to her friend Destiny and somehow missed her brother, Addison, and the neighbor girl Penelope walking past her. She told the bus driver who circled back around and dropped her off a couple minutes later. Bradley would have missed his stop several times if it wasn't for Addison hopping back on and hollering "It's your stop, Bradley!" Apparently there are some older boys who play cool games on their phones and Bradley is all over sitting beside them and watching. Sometimes they tell him to go away (Bradley can be very intense in his game watching) and then Addison and Penelope tell him he can come sit by them instead. We have such nice neighbor girls.
I told Patrick we needed to clean up and put Juliet is the new designated baby container. She said no thanks.
Juliet in the middle of the night. She likes reaching through the crib and grabbing at faces.
Bradley and Eleanor and I were reading together on the master bed one night when suddenly the room became incredibly stinky. Bradley giggled as Eleanor and I tried to shield our noses from the stench and I asked Eleanor, "Why are boys so stinky?" Bradley exclaimed, "I don't know, it's just how I fart!"
Eleanor doesn't quite sleep walk but she often has to go potty in the middle of the night and she's extremely out of it when she does. One night Eleanor walked into the master bedroom before we had gone to bed because the light was on in there. It was just Nathan in there at the time and he asked her what she was doing. She didn't have a response. So Nathan asked if she had to go to the bathroom and she nodded and without a word walked back out into the hallway and then into the kids bathroom. She went to the toilet, closed the lid which had been left open, flushed it, and then started to wash her hands. Nathan had followed her as we are familiar with how groggy she can be in the middle of the night. Nathan reminded her "Eleanor, you forgot to go potty." So she went back to the toilet and went potty. After going potty she went directly to the sink to wash her hands and Nathan reminded her that she needed to flush the toilet...so she proceeded to go to the light switch to turn it on, thinking it was the same thing as flushing the toilet. After Nathan stopped her from turning the light on that had been off throughout all of this (the night lights in the kids bathroom are good enough for most nights) she flushed the actual toilet, washed her hands and went back to her bedroom. She remembered none of this in the morning and thought that the entire story was rather hilarious.
There are certain keys to Eleanor's heart and a lot of them involve clothes and shopping. She has a favorite blue dress that she was trying to wear to school every time I washed it, so 2/3 times per week and I had to suggest that she limit it to once per week. I also have had to give a few other outfit tips, like guiding her away from giant shirts with flowy skirts or outfits that are all one color. So it was a joyful day when I let her wear the very fancy dress my mom had made with a white satin top and red sparkles all over the bottom for school picture day. "No reason that you're not the best mom in the world!" was my enthusiastic reward for allowing her to wear the frilly dress.
And we went straight from the party to the block party at our local Price Chopper! Always a good time, always lots of ice cream samples.
We have a lot of pictures in front of this thing, I don't think the kids have any idea that it's supposed to be a hot dog car.
Kids watching shows together. Juliet loves cuddles and siblings and PJ Masks.
Swing time! Strangers walking past lost their minds over how cute Juliet is. I don't blame them.
I mean, look at this darling child.
Juliet still has a rather … ambivalent attitude towards food.
Laughing a little because of siblings. But still. Hating food.
Mouth ... closed.
For comparison, here are all four children eating. Bradley needed a funnel, Eleanor wanted to bite on the spoon and thought she was hilarious when she did so, Patrick crammed it in, and Juliet likes to keep her mouth firmly shut.
Juliet is finally doing a bit better in shopping carts, especially when she has a big brother who offers up his face to be kicked in the name of entertainment.
So tired.
So hating food.
Patrick and Juliet get a lot of time together now that the big kids are off at school all day. Time to read.
Time to swing!
And time for Mabel. We went to Deanna Rose and it was so fun.
This kid. I can't stand how cute he is.
We had a community service morning put on by our church and we went and played a bunch of bingo at a retirement home. It was very cute and I don't know who had more fun, the residents or the kids.
I don't have a lot of pictures of Juliet sleeping on people because she generally prefers to fall asleep in her bed than cuddle to sleep. But Nathan remains the baby whisperer!
Video games, a sleeping baby, and a cuddly cat. Sunday afternoons couldn't get any better.
Bradley may be the sweetest kid in the world. I walked in on him laying in his bed and staring at the ceiling the other day so I asked him "what are you doing?" Bradley: "Imagining that it's the day before I have to pack my bags and leave for college." Me: "What!? Now I have to hug you!" Bradley: "It's a sad day." I've told him there are local colleges and even online options and that has perked him up a bit. Sweet boy.
I decided to put Juliet's hair in pigtails. She yelled a lot while I did this but the end result was very cute.
Eleanor was rather ecstatic to come home from school to find her sister with matching hair.
Sisters!
Patrick helping entertain Juliet when she woke up from a nap.
Tea party at the dinosaur museum!
So tired. Daddy works his magic again.
Here's Patrick showing me his "mustache."
If you look closely at Patrick's cheek, you can see a big bruise, the beginnings of a black eye. We went to a splash pad and a small child jumped up hard into his face. He did pretty well all things considered. First black eye of all my children!
I've finally started bringing a blanket to parks with me and Juliet is a fan!
Bradley is in heaven whenever he comes home from school and gets Juliet time. And so is she. She sees him and starts smiling and squirming with joy.
Baby time with Daddy! We've really been enjoying the near naked baby time we get over the summer.
Over at the neighbor's house over Labor Day weekend! They got mini pinatas, it was very cute.
Labor Day camping in the backyard!
They all had a blast, despite the slanty slope they slept on. No one got a ton of sleep but everyone had a ton of fun.
We didn't have time for 'smores before camping so we had a 'smores breakfast. The kids were super okay with this plan.
And kudos to Nathan for installing a basketball hoop so Bradley could practice basketball in preparation for playing on the 2nd grade team.
Nathan also did a baby pool full of water balloons for the kids. Juliet may have loved this the most.
Me and my baby. She's so sweet, it's ridiculous.
And Patrick has officially started preschool for two days per week now.
He has Ms. Phillips of the Mighty Monkeys at Awesome Kids Preschool as his teacher. He showed up with a healing black eye, tried to bring gum to school, and wanted a mohawk instead of spiky hair. He's so cute, he's having a blast at school.
We often stop by Ironwoods Park on the way to school, because it's so hot and we can get in 10 minutes of swings before dropping him off.
He's such a helper, even when we take Juliet to the library.
She's lucky she's so cute, she hates all the official baby food I've made for her but likes teething crackers at least. If you look closely at the photo below you can see the tear on her cheek from when I walked into another room without her.
How Juliet prefers to do meals. Fun spoon to play with, no food.
We have a new bath setup for Juliet. We put about an inch of water in the tub and let her splash around on her tummy. She loves it so much.
Reading to my sweet big kids at bedtime.
Juliet gets so tired.
I'm so glad I have Patrick at home with me and Juliet while the big kids are at school. We have so much more fun with him here.
But it's always fantastic when Bradley and Eleanor get home from school. You should have seen Bradley trying to read to Juliet, she messed with the books so much and he couldn't stop laughing.
Kids playing. I need to just sit and take sneaky videos more often, it's always stuff like this.
First day of MOPS. I guess it was pretty exciting.
We finally got a reasonably cool morning today and I went crazy on park outings for the kids.
Juliet liked it but I guess it could tire a girl out. Poor sweet baby. We're so crazy about her.
