it's official...

We have a crawler!! My earliest crawler out of all three kids! He beat Lauren by a couple of weeks and Josh, well, he didn't crawl until he was about 13 months old.

He's off and going and does NOT want to be held back!

Look out!

thirty years

My lifelong friend, Brooke, came to visit us recently with her family. She and her husband, Adam, have three kids: Kiersten, 3 1/2, Vaughn, 1 1/2, and Bennett, 2 months. Sounds a little like our house, right?! Their visit was so much fun! The kids played and the grown-ups talked and relaxed. Think of that - six kids under four in our house! Crazy! It was a good crazy, though. It took a while for Lauren and Kiersten to warm up to each other, but once they did, they were so cute! I recall them playing "butterflies" where Kiersten was running around calling Lauren "mama butterfly". Josh and Vaughn were loud boys together. Logan was a little cranky, so he napped a lot of the time and Bennett, well, he slept and ate, slept and ate, slept and ate. You get the picture.

I was amazed watching all the kids play together. You see, Brooke and I were 3 years old when her family moved to the neighborhood and her house was two houses away from mine. So, we've been friends for thirty years!! We used to call ourselves "salt and pepper" because Brooke had blonde hair (salt) and I had brown hair (pepper). Sure, we spent our fair share of time fighting over who got to be Daisy Duke, who liked McDonald's better, who got to sing the Michael Jackson part to "The Girl is Mine" (and who got stuck singing Paul McCartney), and a thousand other things. But, we also spent an entire childhood creating memories that were great like walking to Ankeny's or the A & W, playing soccer, kickball and frisbee, drawing on the sidewalk with chalk, building snowforts, playing grocery store, singing along to my records, and many, many more things. I think that we both want for our own kids what we had: lasting friendships and a loving, safe neighborhood.

To see our children all play together was really quite a site!

And Brooke and Adam were such troopers. They packed up their whole family to come to Minnesota from Chicago to visit family and friends with their crazy crew and get this - NO dvd player in their car!! They are crazy!!! : )

We miss you and hopefully we will see you soon for playdate number two!

Brooke, Bennett and me

Lauren and Kiersten (Kiersten loves corn on the cob!)

Josh and Vaughn

miss organization

Hmmm.....I wonder where she gets that trait from?!

odds and ends

Here are a few of the latest happenings at our house:

• All three kids stayed with Grandma Marcia and Bumpa Smiley on Saturday night and all went crazily good...
• Lauren's imagination is really starting to take full force. She pretended in the car a couple of weeks ago that her blankie was a baby and then proceeded to ask me where babies come from.....
• Joshua's new favorite word is ridiculous. I thought he learned it from Sponge Bob Squarepants (it coincided with him watching the show) until my neighbor informed me I say it all the time. That's ridiculous....
• Logan is trying so hard to crawl and REALLY upset that he can't. He flops down on his belly and screams at the top of his lungs in frustration.....
• Lauren's favorite Disney princesses at the moment are "Sleeping Bleuty" and "Jasmint" (no, those are not typos)....
• Josh was doing awesome at potty training, going 3-4 times per day in the potty. Now he gets a sticker if he will sit on the potty without throwing a fit...
• Logan loves peas. I think it is his favorite food. He inhales the jar like it's going out of style.
• Brian and I went to my 15-year class reunion on Saturday. We didn't get back to my parent's house until 3am. Needless to say, Sunday was not pretty (especially for me!). Brian was a trooper and changed all the poopy diapers so I wouldn't throw up.....now THAT'S love!!

picnic