kids are fun

Tay and Noah make me laugh...like alot. They are both silly in their own little ways. Since my mind seems to be going a little more with each pregnancy, I thought it best to write down some of my recent favorite Noah and Tay moments before they are too far gone. And yes, this post is all bullet points.

• Noah loves Spider-man. I really have no idea where his obsession comes from. Anytime we are at a store, he zones in on everything that has to do with Spider-man. It is actually quite amazing how he can spot him out of no where. So it came to no surprise that when I asked him who he wanted to be for Halloween, he said "pie-er-man". I was a little hesitant when we bought the costume, because he really despises getting dressed up. But when he put it on, it was like he transformed. He kept saying "I pie-er-man" and then proceeded to run around like a crazy man knocking things over and acting all tough. Here is the crazy part, he has never seen a movie, cartoon, or show of Spider-man. He has seen pictures, that's it. I guess the inner boy just knows that Spider-man has some crazy awesome superpowers. I must get a video of him in action.

• Mark's birthday is tomorrow. Now that our kids are getting older, I wanted them to pick a gift out for Mark. My plan was to head to Target and let them each pick out something from the dollar bins. But when I asked Tay what she wanted to get him she said "roller skates". Now if you know Mark, you know that he has been wanting roller blades for a long time. He talks about it frequently and is always on the hunt for a good deal. So when she said that was what she wanted to get him, I knew we at least had to look. To my pleasant surprise, Target had a pair that happened to be in Mark's size. We bought the blades and I had a "let's keep this a secret from daddy talk" with Tay. I told her that we had to wait for Daddy's birthday and let it be a surprise until he opened it. From what I could tell, she was completely on board....
  However, within 5 minutes of Mark getting home from work that day, Tay says "Daddy I have a secret". Tay then goes on to say " Daddy we got you roller blades. They are like really big. Noah and me made you a card. It's for your birthday". Total birthday secret fail. I guess I should have known that no 4 year old is really capable of keeping a secret of this magnitude. 

• This baby in my belly has really decided to make an appearance over the last few weeks. I come across this wonderful idea on Pinterest to take a picture of my belly every week. I don't quite make it happen once per week, but at least every other week. It is sort of miraculous how much I grew in just 5 short weeks.   

• We are hoping to have Noah moved to an official big boy bed sometime over the next few months. My initial plan was to keep him in his crib forever, but now that he can freely climb in and out I had to move on to plan B. Our first step was to see how he did in his crib which we converted to a toddler bed. He watched us convert the crib while we told him about his new "big boy bed". He was super pumped and it was quite cute. After it was converted I put him down for a nap. Before he went down he said "Dido (his beloved dinosuar lovey), Daddy. He wanted to give his dino to Mark as part of his big boy transition. If you know Noah you know how much he loves his dino. If we ever lost him, I think Noahs world would come to an end. So for him to want to give it up, was really surprising...and funny. However, this new founded big boyness did not last long. Withing 20 seconds, he was ready for it back. And we are happy to report that so far the big boy bed is working out quite nicely!  

• We took a little neighborhood trip to the fire station. Of course the kids thought is was some kind of awesome. Noah made sure to get up in the fire chiefs face and ask for dump trucks on several occasions. You can't win them all.

The first week of preschool…

was 2 weeks ago, but better late then never, right?

I had all these “great” photo ideas for Tay’s first day of preschool. But unfortunately, our nice camera quit working. It was a set back, but at least I had the old, small back up camera. And then…we arrived at her school, she posed all cute like and the back up camera wasn't working. Complete fail in the picture department.

BUT, thankfully I have a friend whose little boy happens to go to the same preschool. Yay!! She took some pictures for us. Of course I would have been all paparazzi like and taken and overload of pictures, but maybe this worked out better for all involved :)

Taylor did wonderful. She walked right in, found her name, sat down, and started coloring. 

She seems to really enjoy school, although I don’t get to hear much about her day. I am going to have to get used to having her gone 2 days a week, but I have to admit, it’s a nice break and a good excuse for some one-on-one time with my little guy.

Day 1 - Tuesday, September  4th, 2012

Day 2 - Thursday, September 6th, 2012

Ice cream treat to celebrate the first week :)

go go Thomas

Is anyone else signing the Thomas the Train theme song? I sure am. This past weekend Thomas came to Nashville! Noah has been a Thomas fan for a while so we decided to take him out for a little train fun. Of course when Tay overheard that we were going, she had come too. No issues with that...Christmas presents for both the kids!
It's one of those things that I am glad we did, but will never do again.

Later that afternoon, we had birthday fun with the Blairs to celebrate their oldest girl (and my niece), Addie, turning 6! There were games, water, and cake involved so of course the kids had fun.
The object of the first game was to stomp other kids balloons to try to pop them. Noah was NOT happy when his burst.And I promise that we do feed him. He is just really skinny. I blame that on his dad.

oh, memories…

Last week was our first (of hopefully many) Blair family Christmas vacations. That’s right, I said Christmas. We asked my parents if instead of getting gifts at Christmas time, we could take a family vacation. This year we decided on the beach.

It started out with a bang…and some smoke. Mark and I bought our first min-van one week before the vacation. About 2 hours into our trip the RPM’s started revving up and the engine started to smoke. Our transmission went out. That was fun.

3 hours later, we had been loaded into a tow truck (which Noah thought was AWESOME), towed to a service company, had a rental car and were back on the road. It was not the best way to start our trip, but at least we were on the road again.

Not long after, a friend of mine called and said “You know that Isaac is predicted to become a category II and is heading straight towards the gulf.” We knew it was a possibility, but we were really hoping the tropical strom would settle down and not cause us any trouble.

Well, Isaac turned out to only cause us a few problems. We made it to the beach everyday (even if for only 15 minutes), and it really only rained one day. Double red flags were up from Tuesday through Friday, so we could not get in the water, but we made the best of some sand time.

In the bottom left picture, you can see that the water made it almost all the way up to the stairs of the houses. 

And yes, the kids are in their PJ's.

The kids had fun, we were able to relax and enjoy the water, and the few days that the sun did come out we took full advantage. We even made time to go to a carnival and hit up the outlet mall. 

Now to decide what we should do next year…