#3

Well, since everyone that I know is on facebook, I know that this is already old news, but just in case...we are having another baby! This definitely wasn't our plan, so we are still really, really shocked, but mostly really, really excited! I have never wavered on wanting another baby...but I had SERIOUS issues with the thought of being pregnant again. I just really thought to get our third that we would adopt...which I'm still TOTALLY open to...but apparently, that's not what God had planned for us right now. We were planning to go ahead with a vasectomy and getting rid of all of our baby gear this month, but instead, here I sit, seven weeks pregnant! It really is crazy!
It was so much fun telling the kids...I really do regret not videoing them when we told them...they were SO excited! We started the conversation with, "we're really sorry to tell you both this, but we aren't going to Disney this year after Thanksgiving." And after their protests, I said, "instead, we're going to be getting ready for a new baby!!" They were over the top excited! I knew that they would be happy, but I had no idea how crazy that they would go! I wish that I would have anticipated their reaction so that I would have had it on film!
We wanted to tell the family in a fun way (like THIS when we found out we were expecting Sawyer), but we knew once Addie Grace and Sawyer knew that they would be telling everybody, so we decided to just go ahead and call everybody! I woke several people up awfully early on that Saturday morning!
A few weekends ago, we had a girls getaway with some of my friends from college. They were so sweet and threw me a surprise shower and I was so surprised!! We had such a great time and I loved getting to celebrate this blessing with those special girls! I didn't take pictures of the shower with my camera other than my cake, which I thought was really funny, so this is all that I've got. Some of the other girls were taking pictures with their cameras, so I'll have to get those.

Both Addie Grace and Sawyer are deadset on having a little sister. Sawyer won't even have a conversation about having a little brother. He said he wants a little sister and he wants her name to be Addie Grace, too. I think that's a huge compliment to his sweet, big sister!
Anyway, that's our big news, and we would definitely appreciate your prayers!!! Brace yourselves for early December!! We are!!

SIX!

I'm having a hard time believing that my baby is SIX!! She truly gets sweeter every single day and I'm so thankful that God chose me to be her momma! I have so many stories that I would love to tell you about from the last couple of weeks that make my heart just swell with pride, but I'll be kind and spare you! : ) I will just save those for her baby book that I still write in for her!
She's a blessing, that's for sure!!

We were in Nashville on her birthday and she wanted to go to Rainforest Cafe to eat lunch and then go to Build-a-bear to spend her gift card from Gram and Grandaddy. That night we had a little family birthday party. It was a great day of celebrating my sweet girl! Here are some pictures.

going to bed as a 5 year old...

waking up as a big SIX year old!!


getting her birthday spanking...


at Rainforest Cafe...we didn't know that they were going to sing to her...she didn't quite know what to think of that!

Leaving Build-a-Bear with "Sweetie" in her house...

birthday party at Nana and Pappy's...

Her mean Aunt Tanya bought trick candles that wouldn't blow out...my poor little girl couldn't figure out what was going on!!

Sawyer thought she obviously didn't know what she was doing and offered to help.

It looks like the house was about to burn down!

Happy, Happy Birthday, sweet Addie Grace!!!

my little cheerleader...

I was looking through some recent pictures tonight, and I saw these few shots and they made me smile.

Our friend, Shelby, had her birthday party this past weekend (which was SO much fun). The party had a magic theme and so they were playing a relay game where they had to wear a top hat, cape, and carry a wand while racing. Look at these pictures of Sawyer running...cute, right? But my favorite thing about the pictures is his doting big sister in the background, forever cheering him on!! I LOVE how much they love each other! I am such a proud, proud momma!

Remember me??

I know...I've been gone awhile. I have blogging issues. I wish blogging didn't seem like such a chore to me, but for whatever reason, it does. Most of the time when I don't blog, it's because there is rarely anything going on in our lives that is super exciting...just a whole lot of ordinary moments. Even though I treasure all of these ordinary moments and they are spectacular to me, simply because they are mine, I sometimes feel silly writing about them here for you to read. Well, at the request of my mother-in-law, I'm going to try and get over that and blog despite that fact. This weekend she gently nudged me to blog, so once again, I will put forth a little effort...Peggy, this is for you! : ) Here are a few of my ordinary, spectacular recent happenings...

For the last couple of months Sawyer has been begging to go bowling. We pass a bowling alley on the way to church every Sunday and Wednesday, and everytime we pass, Sawyer begs to go. A few Saturdays ago, we didn't have anything going on so we took him. He had a great time and he's actually a pretty good little bowler (with the bumpers up). Here are some pictures...



Both of the kids were pretty happy with their bowling skills! I was pretty unhappy with my lack thereof.

A few days later, spring finally sprung (temporarily) so we were spending lots of time outside. Addie Grace decided that any self respecting almost 6 year old knows how to ride a bike without training wheels, so we are working towards the goal. Training wheels are still on right now, we'll keep you posted on how that goes! Here a few pictures from one of our training sessions...



"Look, mom! No hands!!"
I was trying to get him while waving at me...this was the best that I could do!

Stay tuned...

Our Toothless One...

Addie Grace FINALLY lost two teeth. I guess technically, that's not right. She had two teeth pulled. She had a tooth that had been loose for awhile, but wasn't quite ready to come out. After the permanent tooth started to come in behind it, we told her the baby one had to come out. She wouldn't let us touch it, but since she knew that her friend Shelby had pulled one of her own teeth, she was pretty sure that Shelby was qualified to pull hers too. Shelby, however, wanted NO part of that!! Here's Addie Grace trying to get Shelby to pull it.
Since Shelby wouldn't help us out, we were forced to go to the dentist, and she ended up having two pulled! Addie Grace was so excited!

Before she would go to bed that night, she had to leave directions so that the tooth fairy would be able to find her bed in the house. The arrow is pointing directly to her bed. I'm sure that helped the tooth fairly alot!
When we finally got her to go to bed, she got up a couple of times because she was worrying about how the toothfairy would get into the house...it was a long night! The tooth fairy almost went to sleep before she did!

The tooth fairy came and left her 6 shiny gold dollar coins ($5 for her first tooth and $1 for all of the rest) and Addie Grace was a very happy little girl. Later in the day, she started missing her teeth though and she is now in the process of writing a letter to the tooth fairy to ask her to bring one back! : )

Parental Boast Alert...

Chunks of Addie Grace's days are always spent with her drawing. We spend a small fortune on paper for her to perfect her masterpieces all day long. She even has a wall in our foyer with some of her work framed and it makes her so proud!

As most of you (my three blog readers) know, we have started a new school. One of my favorite things about the school is the art class. I LOVE that this week she is learning about Henry Ossawa Tanner and learning how his art was different than Mary Cassatt's work...the artist that we learned about last week. And I LOVE that she has to do a project where she duplicates the style of each artist that we study. One of her projects was to show what she thought Edward of Edward VI as a Child would look like a little older with his family. I love her picture! I think it's great! Her assignment was to color it with oil pastels and she was not happy with how that turned out but I love it!

And one day, we were sitting and just chatting about the ocean and she sat doodling. I looked at her picture when she was done, and look at it! Amazing! (from a completely biased mother!!)
Well, as incredible of a little artist as I think she is, looking through these mother eyes, that's not a new realization for me or the point of this post. My new realization is that I think she has a little brother who is following right along in her footsteps! We were sitting in the living room a couple of weeks ago and Sawyer, who normally sits and scribbles right along side Addie Grace, brought me this. I wasn't even paying attention to him drawing, he was just sitting and doing his own thing. He came over and said, "Look what I did, Mommy! It's you!!"
And look!! IT IS ME!! Maybe not on my best day and with a really exaggerated wrinkle on my forehead (thank you very much, Sawyer!), and bald...but ME, none-the-less!!! This isn't something we've ever worked on or anything! It's just amazing to me!

He also drew this one... (and lest you get giddy thinking that he aged me enough to have a NEW wrinkle on my forehead in just one week, he told me this time that it was my hair!!)

And then he told me that he was going to draw a rainbow...AND HE DID!!
I don't know. Maybe this isn't unusual for a 2 year old (well, 2 1/2 next month), but it's new and unusual for Sawyer and it makes me proud. Mainly, because HE is so proud. He's growing and changing so much and I love watching who he is becoming. He is a joy and I am so ridiculously thankful that he (and she) are mine!!

This is Halloween, Halloween...

(My title is from The Nightmare Before Christmas, in case you're wondering why I wrote Halloween twice...which you probably aren't). : )
Well, I probably just had my last Halloween where I get to choose what Addie Grace and Sawyer dress up like...although, I do have an idea for next year that I want to beg them to do for me, but I'm not going to hold my breath!! This year Sawyer wanted to be Lightning McQueen. Since I had no idea how to pull that off, I had to make other plans. For his third birthday, I'm planning a cowboy party. Since I was going to get him a costume for that, I decided to go ahead and get it and they could just be a cowboy and an Indian! Great idea, huh? Well, no-one shared my enthusiasm. Really, Sawyer didn't protest too much, especially since I let him carry a Lightning McQueen trick-or-treat bag. However, Addie Grace did NOT want to be an Indian, she didn't know what she wanted to be, but she knew that it was NOT an Indian...that would have made things MUCH too easy!! I wasn't going to make her, so I was beginning to get really bummed. The only thing that saved me was a hand-me-down Pocahontas costume!!! I had to do a little work on it, but it was well worth it to me, because you can't beat free!! Thanks, Holly!! And Addie Grace was thrilled! Any costume with the word princess thrown in, and she's good! So, everyone ended up happy! Especially me! Along the lines of free, but not free...I had really been stressing about Sawyer's costume because I really wanted a pair of cowboy boots and a cowboy hat for him, because you CAN'T be a cowboy without cowboy boots and a hat! The problem was, even for used ones, people wanted $15 or $20 bucks for the boots and another $10 or $15 for the hat, which I just didn't want to pay for a Halloween costume!! Well, enter my friend Krista, who just so happened to have a trip planned to Texas to help with her sister's consignment sale! She ended up getting me some boots for THREE DOLLARS and a cowboy hat for THREE DOLLARS! Hooray for Krista! I'm not really sure why I felt the need to mention that. It just made me happy, so I thought I'd let you share in my joy! I'm sure that you are reveling in it.
Anyway, Halloween was a really busy day! Jack came over and spent a few hours with us and then we took them to our friend Sydney's birthday party. After that we went to church for the fall festival, and then we went back to our friends Jill and Bill's to trick-or-treat and to have dinner, and then we went to our friend Krista's for one last special stop! We got home ridiculously late for our kids who have 8:30 bedtimes, but we had fun and we all survived!
Sawyer was so funny! As I'm sure you know, he never really jumps right in and wants to do any activity. He's more of a stand back, get comfy and THEN he'll typically join in. Well, NOT with Halloween! He was all about it! He loved going around and yelling, "trick-or-treat"! He thought it was the best thing in the world that everybody kept giving him candy. He marched right up to every house anxiously awaiting his treat! Even the houses that people dressed up like scary things...a witch in particular...we figured there was no way he was going near those houses. Nope, we were wrong. He made Brian carry him to the first one, but he kept saying, "come on, Daddy. Let's go." He wasn't excited about it, but he was NOT going to miss out on going to get some candy. The second house that we went to where the lady was dressed up like a witch and sitting on her front porch, he looked at her and then said, "Daddy...I WILL go and get the candy". And he reluctantly walked up, grabbed his candy and ran! His bag was bigger than he was, but he would NOT let anyone carry it for him. He was too funny!
And Addie Grace was just thrilled to be able to trick-or-treat with Shelby (one of her favorite people in the world)! It was such a fun day!
Anyway, enough of my jabbering...here are some pictures!

I told Brian to make them smile, so he started acting like a monkey. Instead of smiling at him, Addie Grace decided to join in on the imitation. Sawyer was unimpressed with his father's antics and found a different activity to entertain himself, and I think Jack was telling him that his lame imitation and all of these pictures were making him want to cry.
silly cousins...
I don't know what they are doing here...it just makes me smile.


Some of my very favorite girls at Sydney's birthday party...


And here's sweet Sydney! I'm so sad that this picture turned out blurry. I still love it of her!

Sawyer giving a friend a gentle nudge while trick-or-treating so that he could get to the candy...

Lastly, here's Sawyer wrestling with his heavy trick-or-treat bag while not wanting anyone else to carry it. I don't know why I'm posting this...I just like to hear his little feet clicking along in his cowboy boots and hearing him grunt and huff trying to carry his bag. I also like his grunty, angst-ridden protest of Brian trying to carry his bag. What I don't love? My loud, nasally, country voice. Sorry.
Hope you had a great Halloween, too!