“Let’s talk about food,” Baby E said as he plopped down on my lap. “What’s your favorite dinner?”

“Sushi,” I replied.

“Ask what my favorite dinner is?” he said.

“What’s your favorite dinner, Baby E?”

“Hash browns and syrup!!” he said with a huge grin on his face.

This is a conversation we have often, near daily really. His answer is usually the same for every meal. Breakfast? Hash browns with syrup. Lunch? Hash browns with syrup? Snack? You guessed it! Hash browns with syrup. Every once in a while he will throw me by switching out the syrup for ketchup, but nearly all of his answers are hash brown related.

So tomorrow guess what we are having at breakfast?

Hash browns and syrup.

As I laid in bed with C this evening I asked her if she would stop growing. She smiled at me and said “no!” I don’t blame her, really. Growing up is so much fun.

It’s late at night and that’s usually when I get the most sentimental. I miss my little squishy babies, but I am so very thankful I get to be with them everyday!

This summer we had hoped to send the kids to summer camp for at least a week, but that ended up not working out. In lieu of that, I have been trying to find interesting and unique things the kids can do from time to time. That’s why I decided to sign them up for archery lessons!

In our family we have zero bow and arrow experience, but I’ve always thought it would be a really fun skill to learn. Their lessons are about 45 minutes from the house and we didn’t tell them until this morning where they were going. Their eyes got so big. They got even more excited to learn they would be shooting real arrows and not toys.

When we arrived we went over the safety instructions with the kids. C and Big E were the only ones old enough to shoot, so Baby E will have to wait until next year. The instructors took a lot of time with the kids to make sure they knew what they were doing and that they were handling the equipment in a safe manner.

The kids took to it surprisingly quickly. They learned how to hold the bow, load the arrow, and shoot. They did a pretty good job of hitting near or on the target. They tried out a couple of different styles of bows and landed on ones that they really liked. I think they are both looking forward to their next lesson!

This afternoon while I was working, I let the kids play some video games. Baby E wanted in on the action so I made the big kids promise that he could play a few rounds of their game. I told them to make him stick to the tutorial. He was so excited. When I came down to check on them, it was Baby E’s turn. The look of concentration on his face was adorable as he mashed buttons, leaned into every movement, and constantly ran his character into walls. Despite being completely unskilled, he had a lot of fun and had the other kids rolling with laughter.

Over the past several weeks I have had a great deal of editing, which means the kids and I haven’t been able to do the amount of adventuring that we would like. They have handled it well, and while I am locked in my room editing, they are usually playing with neighbor kids and friends. But I have missed my time with them, so I decided that today I would take a few hours off to do something special. We met up with friends at the local pool.

It was such a difference since the last time we were there. Before they had been very hesitant and wary, especially of trying any slides or other activities, but today, they jumped right in.

I’m thankful for the friends we have made out here and the way they have welcomed us into their lives. My previous friendships spanned years or decades, and they were comfortable in their familiarity. There have been many times over the past year that I have missed the easiness of those relationships and have longed to have those friends near. However now that we have hit the year mark in our new town, my friendships here are starting to feel that way too and that familiarity feels so nice.

The boys have a bunk bed. That means two levels of sleeping, right? Not these boys. They’ve decided sharing the top bunk is the way to go. Thankfully they put Baby E against the wall because otherwise he would definitely roll out of that bunk and head dive to the floor.

When C was a baby, Tim brought her to work one day to visit me and while she was there, the professional photographer in the office did a photoshoot with her. She wasn’t much over a year old at the time. After the photoshoot, the photographer came in and told me that when he was first looking at the photos, he thought there was something wrong with the camera because C looked yellowish, but when he compared her to me and Tim he realized that was just her coloring.

We had noticed a few weeks before then that she was looking yellow. I had planned to ask the doctor about it at her one year appointment, but when he walked into the exam room he took one look at her and said, “I see you like your vegetables!” Puzzled, I asked him how he knew that and he responded, “She’s yellow.”

Apparently when babies eat a lot of vegetables it can change the tone of their skin. At the time, C’s absolute favorite food was squash and she ate it all the time: hence her yellow coloring. Over the following year as her diet expanded the yellow began to fade. But every once in awhile I will come across a photo of her ‘yellow’ phase and it makes me smile.

Nope it’s not the camera… it’s just my kid.

This picture pretty much sums up my day. It was the kind of day where nothing really bad happened, but a lot of little annoying things did. But instead of focusing on my lousy day, I’d rather spend a few minutes smiling over how cute and little my babies used to be. Wow, I miss them at this age!

When the kids were very little we took them to a county fair during a visit to Ohio. It was a fair that my husband had grown up going to and so for nostalgia’s sake we decided to go. Big E was only months old at the time and C was not yet two years old. It was the first time we had done something like that with the kids. We spent some time watching a tractor derby and then we wandered around the livestock buildings to see the animals being judged. C found the animals completely fascinating. She looked at chickens, turkeys, rabbits, cows, and pigs. At one point we walked into a building with sheep and goats. As we neared a pen, a sheep charged at the fencing, straight at C and made a loud baa-ing sound. This absolutely terrified C and she started to cry immediately. We explained to her that she was safe, but she wanted nothing to do with the farm animals after that.

When we got back to the great-grandparents’ house, C immediately started to tell them about the ‘goat’ that scared her. At the time she had a very limited vocabulary, so she was just rambling gibberish until she spit out the word ‘goat’ and ‘baaaaaaaaa’ with a look of bewilderment on her face.

This was her story and she told it all the time. “Gibberish gibberish gibberish GOAT gibberish BAAAAAAAA gibberish!!!”

It took quite awhile for C to start trusting farm animals again, but thankfully she finally came around!

Sometimes you just need a lazy day and today was one of those days.