Carter is almost 4! His birthday isn't until Thursday but we pretended his birthday was this past Saturday. His daddy won't be here for the actual day and Carter will be going back to the hospital so we pushed it up a few days.
He has wanted a Spongebob birthday cake for months now.
He arranged the "Happy Birthday" candles all by himself.
He wanted to invite the kids from his sunbeams class because they are all "so nice!"
Yum!
We had his party in our backyard. Have I mentioned that we love our spacious back yard? Cause we do. Dennison has been doing a lot of work back there and it's looking really great. Now if only we could get some summer weather to really enjoy it...
The one gift that he's been longing for is a Spongebob fishing pole. This was the look on his face when he finally got it :)
He played with it for hours.
And he got a lot of other really awesome presents from his friends.
Including these awesome sunglasses.
Peek-a-boo!
And some binoculars.
Did I mention that Grandma came for the party?
Relaxing after a rip-roarin party.
Me with my birthday boy.
Still loving the fishing pole.
So, what was Jude doing during this party, you ask?
Our angel baby is 6 months old today! She's still just as sweet and easy-going as ever. She is just so go-with-the-flow. None of us can get enough of her around here!
Her thumb is in her mouth more and more these days.
Her latest tricks include but are not limited to:
bringing a smile to everyone's face
sitting up all by herself for several minutes
holding toys and passing them from hand to hand
grabbing everything she gets her hands on
and ARMY CRAWLING!
what?!?! I was not expecting her to be an early mover. She's been scootin around for at least a week now. We have a sunken living room so I keep it free of baby hazards and just let her go. She rolls and crawls around all the time. She finds her way over to the step, puts one hand up and whines because she wants to get up there.
Here's a video:
This should make our weekly hospital visits interesting... Hmmm, not sure how we'll keep her entertained without letting her crawl all over those yucky hospital floors. She already gets up on her knees sometimes so I'm sure crawling for real is just around the corner.
Vienna is just the sweetest baby I've ever met. She's a beautiful little thing :) We are all thrilled that she's in our family. Dennison and I totally hit the jackpot in the kid department.
I haven't even scheduled her 6 month check-up so I don't have her stats yet. I'll get around to it sometime...
Yesterday, Dennison turned 33! Yikes, I know. We had a really fun weekend together as a family. Fish hatchery then backyard swimming then date night on Saturday. Church, naps, dinner, walk on Sunday. He tells me he had a great birthday, so I think he did :) I love him.
Starting this post, I only intended to put 2 pictures up. But the deeper I got into my picture file, the more I realized how little I've put on this blog lately. So I had to include ALL of my favorite pictures from the last few months. Don't worry, they're really awesome.
Jude fell asleep with Grandma's phone in his hand. He's just so cute! It was questionable there for a while whether he liked Grandma or her phone more. But the verdict is in, and it's.....GRANDMA!!
I just love this picture. They are so cute together. It's no question that she's going to be spoiled.
While Grandma was here last time, we started a new tradition of "Monkey Monday". The kids wear their monkey hats, eat bananas, and we even had monkey pancakes (pancakes shaped like a monkey head). Grandma made them monkey masks, too.
Vienna getting in on the Monkey Monday action. Complete with the banana peel she grabbed out of her daddy's hand.
My mom made these darling aprons for my boys. They love to help me cook so they were very excited to have their own boy-ish aprons. Jude's is on backwards... :) And I'm happy to announce that our walls are no longer that ugly dark mustard yellow color. I'll put pictures of it's new look as soon as we finish.
Ok, I really love this picture. It's just so perfect. The boys have been wearing "night-gowns" (my t-shirts) to bed lately. They always seem to have the most energy right when we're trying to get them to go to bed. Funny how that works.
Vienna just makes us all happy. Carter and Jude both just love to be close to her. And share their toys with her. And give her countless hugs and kisses. You get the point.
Carter took this picture of her in the car.
Like I said before, they love her.
At the zoo, Jude was riding on Dennison's shoulders. Anytime he had something to say, he'd lean down like this to tell him. He always cracks us up.
Jude doesn't like to sleep in his room alone when Carter's at the hospital. I usually let him sleep in my bed (see next post) but sometimes I give him the option of sleeping wherever he wants. One night, he chose Vienna's crib. He didn't even tell me he was going to bed or that he was going to sleep in her room. I just hadn't seen him for a few minutes and I found him already asleep in here. What a goofball.
She is just so cute! There's not a doubt in my mind that she was sent to our family right now to make us all smile and laugh every day. She's really good at that :)
This was in the hospital last month. Those are his "blood-bug eating monsters" with his dolphin and turtle on their heads. He set them up like that so they could watch him play his computer game. I just love him.
So there you have it. The best of the best from our lives recently.
We all do things for our kids that we probably never imagined doing before becoming a parent. Here are just a few recent examples from around our house:
Dennison was mowing the lawn and Carter kept telling him that he liked it long. So Carter stood on this spot, right in the middle of the front yard, and said, "Don't cut this grass!" So he didn't. One long square of grass is a small price to pay for a happy little boy.
Whenever Carter's in the hospital, he pretty much gets his way, um.... 100% of the time. He wanted to pull Vienna around in the wagon. So we did. All the nurses thought it was the cutest thing ever. It was pretty cute.
What a man! Vienna strapped on and pushing the stroller while the boys jumped in and out of it. This was our day at the zoo.
After eating Nacho Cheese Doritos or Cheetos, Jude does not want us to clean off his hands because he likes them to be "orange like a tiger". Whatever.
When Carter's at the hospital, Jude has a hard time sleeping in his bedroom by himself. I usually let him fall asleep in our bed and sometimes let him stay there all night. He's not the best sleeping companion seeing as how he sleeps sideways, usually with his feet in my stomach. But he's so cute and it makes him happy, so...
Ok, so this is the best one. We've been talking with Carter about what he would really like to do that he's never done before. He's eligible for a "wish" from the Make-A-Wish Foundation since he has a life-threatening illness. He keeps telling us that he wants to swim with fishies. We can't really think of any good way to go about something like that. Since he's still so young, snorkeling or scuba diving is out of the question. So this was our solution. We have this pool that we set up in the back yard and then we went and bought 12 goldfish. Funny side story: As he and I were getting back in the car after purchasing said goldfish, Carter was holding the bag and it somehow came open on top and some water spilled out along with 4 fish. I found 3 of them on the floor of the car and put them back in the water quick enough so they were ok. I could NOT find the other one. I searched and searched but it was no where. I thought maybe the girl had miscounted while catching them for us. So we started driving home and about half-way there, Carter tells me that he thinks there's a fish in his shoe. I laugh and tell him it's probably just water and feels slippery like a fish (he was wearing crocks). He insisted that it really was a fish and I just couldn't imagine that it could be. A minute later, the bag slipped off of his lap onto the floor so I pulled over to retrieve it. When I opened Carter's door, he had his shoe off and a dead fish in his hand. Gross! I could not believe that a fish had somehow landed in his shoe and he didn't notice until it was already dead. We had a good laugh about it and then he threw it out his door. He told me that it's ok if a car runs over it because the fish is already in heaven with his friends.
So anyway, back to the picture. Right when we got home, he dumped the fish into the swimming pool with him. He loved it for a couple minutes but the pool is so big that the fish were just hiding on the side. So Carter decided that he wanted them back in the bag. He grabbed the bag and a minute later he had scooped one back up! I was so surprised that he caught one so fast! He caught 6 of them and then I helped him catch the rest so they could all sleep in the house that night. We played that game again the next day and now the 7 strongest of the bunch are on our dining room table in the biggest bowl I could find.
She weighs a woppin 12 pounds(14%) and is 25 3/4 inches (92%)
As I'm going through pictures of her, I've noticed that most of them are of her and Carter together. It seems that these two are always close by each other.
Carter ran to her room to get a hair bow for her and then put it on all by himself.
Carter reading to her after our picnic.
She is still a little angel. She can roll over both ways and doesn't hate tummy time as much as the boys did. She's getting really good at grabbing things and is very interested in everything going on around her.
I put her hair in pigtails for church today and Jude told me, "I don't want Vienna's hair like that!"
