First Cereal

The first taste…

Yummy?

Maybe?

I guess not.

Ethan has been very helfpul with feeding Olivia. He always wants to help “give her bites” and he will usually help her hold her bottle while I am fixing the rice cereal.

The first few days of trying it she really hated it, but the last couple of days I have thickened it up more and she seems to like it better that way. I have also sort of half weaned her, we are rotating every other feeding between nursing and formula. It was just too hard with Jake being gone all the time and I wasn’t getting any work done, so he took her to his broadway practice at night so I could get stuff done. It has actually worked out really well because even when he is home he can feed her now which is nice.

Since she has been pretty much exclusively nursed up until recently she didn’t really understand how to hold her bottle but the last few days she has finally figured it out. She loves to have her legs and feet in the air and I think she would probably hold her bottle with her feet if she could figure out how! (Wow, there is a little too much pink going on in that picture, her daddy must’ve done that…)

(PS. Did you notice the eyelashes in the second picture? Just like Jake and Ethan.)

Trick-or-Treat

 

Ethan had a Halloween party at preschool on Thursday (we do 4 day school weeks here so no school on Fridays) and I think this is his “seriously mom, stop taking pictures of me and let me go to school” look.

I actually bought this costume off the internet last year right after Halloween. I was only a month or so pregnant so we had no idea what the baby was going to be and I figured a bumble bee was pretty gender neutral. I did make some little red bows to put on her antennas so you could tell that she was a girl. The costume is actually a size 0-3m so I was worried it wouldn’t fit by the time Halloween finally got her, and I put it on her about once a week for the last month just to keep checking and making sure it still fit.

We took this picture after the Halloween carnival but before trick or treating. Ethan (and I) had some yummy blue cotton candy at the carnival and that is why his face is so dirty. And the only reason he is smiling is because he couldn’t wait to go out and trick or treat! It was a very nice warm night and Ethan kept saying,”More houses, more houses!” I took he and Olivia out for about 45 minutes and then we came home and Jake took Ethan out for almost another hour. Of course, when he was done, I took out everything I like, and everything Jake likes, and put all the yucky stuff nobody wanted into our bowl to give out to the rest of the trick or treaters. 

This is

So Many Pumpkins!

We went to the grocery store on Wednesday and there was one lonely pumpkin sitting in the big giant box and Ethan really wanted it because it was big so I bought another pumpkin. When we got it home I realized that it didn’t have much of a stem and there was also a slightly molding soft spot. I knew it wouldn’t be good for carving so I spray painted it black and let Ethan paint it. He wanted me to draw a face for him, but he directed me where to put all the features and what shape and size they should be. Then he did all the painting of the face by himself. He was so proud of it that he wanted to take a picture and then we immediately had to put it on the porch so anyone who came to our house could see it.

Jake has been so busy this month with his singing group and also co-directing the school Christmas play that I wasn’t sure when we would have time to carve the pumpkins. Finally I decided to just let Ethan choose one of the pumpkins we bought for he and I to carve on Thursday afternoon. He chose the littlest one and said that we were carving it for Olivia since she is the littlest one in our family.

       Every year he seems to thoroughly enjoy taking the guts out of the pumpkins and then playing with them. I think it is probably his favorite part!

  The finished product, Ethan even helped me cut everything out with our little carving tools.

Since Jake is now on four day work weeks we decided Friday would be the best time to carve pumpkins all together. We got up, ate breakfast, and started carving.

 Here are Jake and Ethan just getting started with the carving. Jake is making a scary face, and Ethan is making his new favorite picture taking face (it’s his pout-pout face, for anyone who has ever read the book pout-pout fish).

 This is Ethan and I carving his pumpkin with the design he chose for his oddly shaped pumpkin.

  We didn’t want to leave Olivia out, so we brought her exersaucer into the kitchen where she sat and watched us pretty contentedly for about half an hour before she decided she was tired and I put her to bed.

We carved Ethan and Jake’s pumpkins in the morning and then we had to stop go to a funeral. When we got back from the funeral Jake decided we needed some more pumpkins and knew there was a family selling some out on their farm. I told him to pick up two or three and he came back with six! They were selling them for about half price and of course he couldn’t pass that up, so he bought three big ones and three smaller ones all for only eight dollars.

This is Ethan and Olivia posing with the pumpkins while still in their nice clothes.

    

Here are all of our pumpkins after all the carving was done and we set them outside.  I think Jake had a little too much fun…

The left side of the porch:

  I did the moon/haunted house, Jake did the singing ghosts, the O, and the portrait of Olivia, and Ethan and I did the little tiny pumpkin. 

The right side of the porch:

 Ethan and I did the two on the bottom, and Jake did the two on the top. 

So many pumpkins!

So many guts!

So much fun!

Vote for Olivia and Ethan!

*UPDATED* Vote for Olivia and Ethan if you think they’re cute! Just go to http://www.gap.com/castingcall and enter 906339810 to vote for Olivia in the baby girl category and 366339384 to vote for Ethan in the baby boy category

Fall activities

Our school had it’s 100 year anniversary celebration this year during homecoming. They had a big assembly where people talked about what happened in each of the decades and had musical performances pertaining to that decade. The group that Jake performs with every year (A Little Off Broadway) was asked to do something from the 70’s. This was his lovely outfit and they danced to Shake Your Groove Thing. I tried to record it but I had Ethan running around me and Olivia was screaming because they did it all on the football field and it was a little windy. They will also be performing it for their concert in a couple weeks so I will try and get a good video of it then. Ethan told Jake that he liked his hair like that and he should keep it for always. He also liked it so much that he had to try it on…

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Lately Ethan has decided his favorite show is Mulan and he wants to watch it every day. One afternoon while I was waiting for Jake to get home from school and trying to get some laundry done I told Ethan I was going to leave Olivia in her bouncy seat and to come get me if she started crying. He told me that she would probably rather sit by him and watch the movie because his pillow was so soft and big and there would be plenty of room. So I sat her there for a minute while I moved clothes from dryer to basket, washer to dryer, and hamper to washer. They were both just sitting there entranced in the movie when I came back out.

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The first weekend in October was the opening weekend of the duck hunt so of course we had to go to Delta. We drove up late Friday night after a football game and got there around 2:00am Utah time. Jake was exhausted but glad that we went because they ended up getting five big fat geese over the course of their two days hunting. While the men hunted, the kids and I mostly just hung out around the house. Ethan had a blast playing with his cousins and Olivia I’m sure enjoyed the extra attention. On Sunday afternoon we went over to Great-Grandma Lester’s house and picked a ton of apples.

Ethan really wanted to climb the tree but there were already three boys up there, so no room for him. Instead he busied himself with picking, and of course eating, the delicious apples.

 

Also that weekend, Ethan was out in Grandpa Steve’s garden and found a little pumpkin and decided to pick it. Grandma Sandie said he could take it home and every day since then he has been asking when is it going to be Halloween and can I carve my pumpkin today?  Well I didn’t want him to carve it so early because I figured by Halloween it would be shrunken so I decided to just let him paint it since we had bought some big pumpkins from the grocery store to carve. So thank you for the little pumpkin grandma and grandpa. It made a very fun afternoon activity for Ethan on a day when I needed a break!

(And yes, Grandpa Steve, boys do wear aprons!)