Cute Muscle Men

Here are two recent videos of our cute boys.

Charlie really likes to hide things recently, and also wonder where missing things are.

Showing off their muscles

so excited

Alec could hardly wait for our Thanksgiving trip.  We had a countdown chain and everything. The night before, I told Alec that in the early morning I would wake him up before the sun woke up and carry him to the car with his blanket and we'd drive for a long time. He immediately said, "carry me to the car right now!" I told him that we had to wait for daddy to get home and then he said, "Set the timer, you carry me to the car. Set the microwave timer." Eventually I left his room and he was quiet. I continued packing and cleaning and about a hour later Chris got home and Alec was still moving around. Chris went in and Alec asked over and over about the timer, "timer ring yet?" It was almost another hour before Alec finally went to sleep. Excited? I think so.  We're all excited to see family.  

wrong side of the bed

Pre-nap Alec was normal. Post-nap Alec was not. Oh goodness, I had to take so many deep breaths today and the fun still hasn't stopped. I guess I can be grateful that he at least took a nap? Where is the silver lining? While I'm at it...dinner is so difficult recently. Bed time is worse. I can either not care if he eats anything and then deal with complaints of no dessert or I can harp at him every minute. I can either give in to every little device to prolong the bedtime routine or I can deal with a screaming kid for hours. I don't see any happy mediums here. Ugh.. this isn't helping. I'll try to recap a cute story of how the morning started...

Alec has been waking up in the middle of the night (sometimes more than once!) and coming into our room, thinking its morning, and gets mad when we pick him up and put him back in his bed. But wait, this is supposed to be helping me calm down. * deep breath #87 * Ok. Alec eventually fell back asleep and slept in until 7:30! Charlie woke up before that and started making noise. I went in to get him out so Alec could keep sleeping and Charlie didn't want me to take him out of the crib. Instead, he kept pointing to his pacifier that had fallen out. So I gave him his pacifier, put my hands out and Charlie slinked away to lay back down. Confused, I sat in the rocking chair to see if this was going to be a peek-a-boo game and I eventually walked out of the room and returned to my bed. Later when Alec started moving around, so did Charlie. Apparently Charlie doesn't want to get up if Alec is still sleeping and as soon as Alec us up and out of the room, Charlie is chomping at the bit to join him. These two brothers are sure cute together.

sorry for no new pictures, I've not taken any recently.

little decisions

The other night, Chris had to stay late and arrived just barely in time to leave to go pick up the missionaries for dinner. Then directly after dinner he had to drive the missionaries home and go straight to school for more TA work. It was a long day, busy dinner prep/house cleaning and I felt fully justified to put on a movie for the boys to kill that long hour between dinner and bedtime.

Then. I remembered my sis-in-law's recent blog post about lessons learned through the recent, surprising and tragic death of her (and Chris' ) cousin. She said something about being present and playing with her kids. It got me thinking how precious my own children are, and how my time would be better spent in giving them attention and basking in their youthful energy and joy. So Alec, Charlie and I blasted country music (something we can't do with Chris home) and played an ABC cake-walk game with leftover Halloween candy. That evolved, of course, into a dance off. Not only did I burn all the Halloween candy calories with my crazy dancing but I spent an hour watching my boys smile. Something I don't do enough. Thanks, Jess, for the post. Thanks, Heavenly Father, for my wonderful, vivacious, sweet boys.

I know I will choose the movie another time ... I just hope I decide to chose the dance-off more often.

The unrelated picture for this post: We took the boys to the Stanford Golf Course practice greens on Halloween. Alec really takes his golf seriously and could've stayed for hours. Charlie liked taking the flags in and out

Reading to Charlie

Charlie loves us to read to him. He'll bring us a book and then squeeze onto our laps whether there is room or not. It's rare for him to be able to sit through the whole book. Usually he's squirming to get off after a page or two.

protective big brother

The other day out on the playground, Alec was pushing Charlie in the swing. Charlie just loves this because half the time Alec will fake get hit and do a silly reaction. This time, one of Alec's friends was digging in the sand nearby and he noticed if he held the shovel out just right, it would get close to touching Charlie's feet on Charlie's upswing. Alec thought that Charlie was going to get hit and immediately stopped Charlie's swing, scowled up his face and shouted, "Don't do that to my brother!" I didn't know whether to delight in the sweet brotherly love, or seriously suggest he use kind words. It was really cute. I couldn't help but smile.


Lest any of you get too jealous let me say that this picture was taken in the summer. No we're not wearing shorts and a short-sleeved shirts still. We at least wear pants. :)

Halloween Bash

Since we already had a tiger costume that would fit Charlie were were throwing around some ideas like Jungle Book and Winnie-the-Pooh; however, Alec wanted to be a lion so we worked with that. I found a lion jumpsuit at Savers and threw together the rest.

In the early afternoon we practiced trick-or-treating along one of the main streets around here that had the businesses pass out candy. Charlie got the hang of taking candy out of a bowl, but didn't really want to put it in a bag... not when his mouth was ready for it! Then we had barely any time for naps before going to our two-ward party/carnival. Alec was mostly scared of everyone costumes and the crowds but had that bizarre fascination where although he didn't want to do anything by himself or even let go of our hands, he also didn't want to leave. It wasn't too hard to convince him to head on over to our courtyard party with words like, "watch a movie outside, pizza, friends, jack-o-lantern contest, costume parade, caramel apples and more trick-or-treating."

I actually got to relax at this courtyard party for a few minutes. It helped to have two other awesome CAs and to have the children basically immobilized with a movie. Alec was a pro trick-or-treater, said "thank you" and even happily gave ("just one") candy to other kids who came to our patio. Charlie, having already mastered the grabbing part, perfected the stashing part, yet still had trouble with the stopping part. Luckily most people let him take a few handfuls before Chris had to tear him away. Overall, it was a fun Halloween.

Alec was crying from something seriously trivial and my mind wandered from concern to "we don't have very many pictures of this face even though we see it daily" I couldn't resist.