Halloween

I have to say, this year for Halloween Charlotte really outdid herself coming up with a costume idea. She annd Paige were cheetah princesses!  Charlotte was a pink cheetah princess and Paige was purple.  I thought it was a terrific idea, for two reasons: 1. the creativity, 2. barely any effort for me!  We already owned every single piece of the costume, so when 5:00 rolled around, all I had to do was paint a couple of faces. Easy peasy!  

Taking a lap at full cheetah speed!

Jacob was Superman.  So handsome!

Mr. Dan, our sweet next-door neighbor, patiently listening to Charlotte explain her costume.

The gang: Cana the pirate, Paige and Charlotte the cheetah princesses, and Parks the dragon. Now, pirates and dragons are some of C's favorite things, so I anticipated a bit of costume envy, but it never occurred to Char that their costumes were anywhere as cool as hers was.  She was very proud of her get-up!

Paige was perpetually lagging behind everyone else.  The poor kid was really dealing with some major allergies and did not feel good at all. She ended up being carried most of the evening.

Paige the artist

Paige LOVES to draw.  Any scrap of paper laying around the house in her reach range will end up with tiny, intricate scribbles all over it.  She is seriously obsessed.  Mail, notepads, letters, bills, anything.  Inside the laundry basket, on the couch, on the chimney, on the dishwasher.  Anywhere.  Except books.  No clue why, but luckily she doesn't do it in books.  Very often, it's the first thing she does in the morning.

It used to be just pens she used, but now she loves markers.  Which drives me nuts, because she leaves them uncapped.  I've watched, and sometimes she'll try to cap it, but she's not strong enough yet, so we inevitably end up with a box full of unlidded markers.  On the plus side, the piece of paper ends up looking strangely beautiful with so many colorful doodles. We keep one framed on the fireplace now!

It's also fun that she likes markers because we very often get to hear her singing, "Mokka por meee," which is Paigish for "marker for me." 

Her art is profuse.  She has LITERALLY filled four different spiral journals.  Every page has scribbling on it.  When you flip through, it looks a bit like a kaleidescope. If you give her one in the car, you won't hear a peep out of her the entire drive. It's amazing to see how she was born with this, because we never did anything to particularly encourage this, and Charlotte has no similar interest. She is starting to draw more now that she sees Paige do it all the time, but it's much more casual.  Paige can be downright intense when she is drawing!

Sweet, sweet days

What sweet days these are.  There is so much love floating around.  It's easy to miss it through all the crying and fit-throwing and begging for attention, but it is always there.  I love watching the kids love on each other.  These are definitely the times I want to remember!

The girls sometimes literally fight over who gets to put their head next to Jacob's.  The middle picture above is the girls pushing their heads against each other and screaming, " I can't see him!" kinda half fighting, half laughing.  A good morning!

It's funny to watch how Charlotte and Paige fight so well and play so well together.  Paige has started calling Charlotte "Char-Char" all the time.  It comes out more like, "CHTAH-CHTAH" - that kinda captures both pronunciation and volume...

This is a tent they made with Jacob's play mat.  Just further evidence that Paige lives at least 63% of her life naked...

Happy birthday daddy!

Happy 33rd birthday, Daddy!

Since Jacob was barely a month old, we didn't have anything extravagant planned, but we had a bit of fun nonetheless.  The girls helped make Mimi's chocolate chip bundt cake, and helped clean the bowl afterwards. For a present, we got 33 craft beers. Charlotte helped arrange them so that they looked just right. (For those of you who are counting, that's 6 1/2 6-packs of beer. I recieved quite a few weird looks pushing a cart FULL of beer and two toddlers, with an infant strapped on the front me!) 

Charlotte and Paige both thought Dady would like some balloons for his "party," so we scrounged up some extras left from Paige's party and taped them on a few bottles.  They were so excited to put the candles in the cake that we did that next, even though it was just out of the oven.  BIG mistake!

Turns out a steaming hot cake melts candles just as quickly as a match.  We were taking a picture of the set-up when Charlotte so sweetly asked, "What are the candles doing, mommy?"  I look up from behind the candle and notice they are all falling over in slow motion.  We pulled all of them out as fast as we could, but the damage was done.  If you look closely at the candle picture, you can see they all look like they have wicks on both ends.  That's because they do.  Each left a sizeable portion of wax in the chocolatey goodness below:

Beyond that, though, the rest of the evening was very enjoyable.  No one let a little wax get in the way of devouring half the cake.  Especially not Paige. Who needs a fork?  Or small pieces?

Parks and Charlotte

These are just two random pictures of Charlotte and Parks, but they are actually still, so I figured I'd better get these in here or we'll never have a non-blurry photo of the two hooligans being silly together.  And to top it off, they are actully being studious here - they were spelling words together on the fridge.  But of course they felt the need to be super cool for the camera.  I guess making weird faces and semi-gang signs for the camera is "being cool" when you are almost-4 and 5....

Nap time for all animals

So, Charlotte rarely naps anymore, but she does have quiet time by herself up in her room while Paige naps.  Usually her quiet time is anything but quiet.  You can hear her animals yelling for help, fighting, falling, you name it.  It's always a lot of fun to go up and get her at the end of it to see what world she concocted, but it's usually me who gets the honor since Koby is at work.  However, he has done it every day lately because he's at home on paternity leave.  He came down particularly tickled one day and told me about this scene:

All her animals had to take a nap.  If you look, they all have blankets, an animal mask around their neck, and a toy to keep them company.  Even her giant pink pony had a friend to snuggle with! She has hit the imaginitive stage for sure. I'm pretty sure she told Koby the masks were their party hats!