Liam at Age 4

Liam- Age 4

How old are you?  4

What makes you happy?  Playing with Darth Vader

What is your favorite animal?  T-Rex

What is your favorite thing to eat? Pizza with no stuff on it

What is your least favorite thing to eat? Cheese hamburgers

What is your favorite thing to do?  Drink water

What is your favorite TV show?  Mario

What are you really good at?  Reading “The Peanut.”

What is your favorite movie?  Jack (Nightmare before Christmas)

What is your favorite color? Red

What is your favorite song? This is Halloween

Who is your best friend? Kuya

What do you and your mom do together? Play

What do you and your dad do together? Eat

What is your favorite sport? Soccer

Where is your favorite place to go? Toys R Us

What is your favorite book?  The Peanut

What do you want to be when you grow up? A train guy

What is your favorite thing to eat for lunch? Chicken Nuggets

What is your favorite place you visited this year?  Basketball camp

If you had a lot of money, what would you do with it?  Get a new star wars house with darth vader and the emporer and their light sabers.  

If you had a whole day to do anything you wanted, what would you do? watch zig and sharko

What is your favorite dessert?  Ice Cream (chocolate chip)

What are you scared of? Monsters

What is your favorite thing to do outside?  Go to the playground

What is your favorite holiday?  Halloween

What is your favorite snack? Applesauce

What is your favorite cereal? The colorful Captain Crunch

What is your favorite drink? water

What is the most important thing you've learned in life so far?  Hakuna Matata

Eli at 6!

How old are you?  6

What makes you happy?  Legos

What is your favorite animal?  Fox

What is your favorite thing to eat? Salty chips

What is your least favorite thing to eat? Sauce

What is your favorite thing to do?  Build legos

What is your favorite TV show? Walking with Beasts

What are you really good at?  Soccer

What is your favorite movie?  Home

What is your favorite color? Black

What is your favorite song? What does a fox say

Who is your best friend? Blake

What do you and your mom do together? Play

What do you and your dad do together? Play

What is your favorite sport? Football

Where is your favorite place to go? Restaurants

What is your favorite book?  Predator Showdown

What do you want to be when you grow up? Police

What is your favorite thing to eat for lunch? Nutella Sandwich

What is your favorite place you visited this year?  Build-a-Bear

If you had a lot of money, what would you do with it?  Buy legos

If you had a whole day to do anything you wanted, what would you do? play with people

What is your favorite dessert?  Sundae

What are you scared of? Monsters

What is your favorite thing to do outside?  Play sports

What is your favorite holiday?  Christmas

What is your favorite snack? Cupcakes

What is your favorite cereal? Fruit Loops

What is your favorite drink? milk

What is the most important thing you've learned in life so far?  Trust

Brielle at 19 months

Dear Brielle,

At 19 months, you are QUITE the handful.  You are a very, very determined little lady and there's no stopping you when there's something you want.  Your favorite things at the moment are: playing with the controllers for the TV and changing the channels, climbing the bookshelf to get the DVD cases so you can open them and run around with them, open the oven and try to climb in, take things off of the counters, open drawers in search of markers so you can run around and color on things/eat the tops off,  hit/kick Liam to make him cry, carry your sheep stuffed animals ("SHEP! SHEP!") or blankie around and run as far away from me as possible when it's time to get dressed.

You love eating chicken and steak and fish sticks and pizza and pretty much throw everything else I give you.

You love your baba and ask for it every morning and night.  You can hold it yourself now and it makes you happy to do that.

You still LOVE LOVE LOVE shoes.  You squeal with glee when you see new shoes.  You also love mommy's wallet, purses, etc.  You are a girly girl, but a tough one who prefers to play with superheroes and tackle things/people.

You can say "MOMMY!" now, and I love when I come home from work on Saturdays and you come running to the door screaming it.  You still can't say Liam, but you call eli "y-eye y-eye."

Liam in August

There are lots of little things about my little guy that I don't want to forget.... here goes:

-He says "Mommy?" and waits for a response and then "know what, mommy?" about 47,000 times a day.
-He insists on getting dressed himself but still gets his shirts confused a lot and always, always puts his underwear (and sometimes pants) on backwards
-He loves wearing his firemen boots and chooses them 99% of the time.  He wears them on the wrong feet.  I love when he picks them because he puts them on super quick and I don't have to help him.
-He prefers red because "raph-be-el" is red
-He says the following about 25 times a day "My birthday is June 15th.  I want the big emperor Zurg for my birthday.
-His favorite thing to watch is The Nightmare before Christmas... he calls it the Jack movie.  He loves singing "This is Halloween, this is Halloween."  He's told me numerous times that he wants to be Jack the skeleton for Halloween this year.
-He is obsessed with Star Wars.  He loves Darth Vader. It would be his ultimate dream come true if we got him a light saber.  (not going to happen...they would seriously injure one another.)
-He has learned how to take the top straps off on his car seat and likes to do it whenever we stop (even if it's just at red lights, etc)
-Cliff Kids chocolate chip bars are his favorite thing in the world to eat.
-He always bargains for more time the wrong way.  Tonight, I told him I was going to stay with him in his room at bedtime for five minutes.  "NO!  MOMMY! I want FOUR MINUTES!  FOUR!" ok dude, you've got yourself a deal.
-He likes to tell everyone that he's "wee-um" and he's three years old.  Today, he was asking everyone "What's your name??"
-He will not sit still in the stroller in a store for more than 10 seconds.
-He is actually finally able to sit down next to me and listen to full books!  He loves Berenstain Bear books like his brother.
-He likes when I sing him "you are my sunshine" and knows most of the words
-At the end of the ABC song, he always says "know my know my ABCs...next time won't you sing with me?"

Eli's First Day of Kindergarten

Today was the day!  Eli's first day of Kindergarten!  He's in Ms. Freeman's class...she has 20+ years of teaching experience, so as one of the other parents pointed out, there's nothing that these kids can do that she hasn't seen before :) 

We walked over to school and lined up on the Blacktop outside the school at 8:30.  His teacher knew him right away (she said she studied the pictures over the weekend) and greeted him and put a name tag on him.  All of the kids were standing so nicely in line... all with HUGE backpacks.  They were excited and nervous and did a great job of staying still.  (wonder how long that lasted).  Then it was time to go inside.  One teacher went first and then when Liam realized that they were leaving, he became frantic, yelling "KUYA ELI! KUYA ELI!  BYE! BYE!"  He ran over to give him a hug and it was the cutest thing ever.  Liam REALLY wanted to go to school, too, and was not happy about having to go home. 

We picked Eli up at 3 and I got verrrrry little info from him about how his day was.  He told me he played with a boy named Blake.  He said for choice time, he picked Playdough (which explained why his nails were blue).  That was pretty much all I got out of him.  

Throughout the day, I learned the following... his teacher is really nice.  The most important thing he learned all day was not to put his mouth on the drinking fountain.  He used the bathroom.  He liked the cafeteria because it was really, really big.  Someone read him the note I wrote (Dear Eli, I hope you are having fun on your first day of school.  I love you!  Love, Mommy)... he said it was one of his friends who read it.  He had fun at recess and played a game (Tetherball) that was REALLY FUN where there was a large steel pole and a ball tied to it that you would hit and whoever caught it got to throw it again.  They went to the library and met the librarian who read them a story (Kindergarten Rocks!).  They weren't allowed to touch anything there.  His teacher also read him a story, but he can't remember what it was.  He had spanish class, where he learned how to say "Muchas Gracias" from his spanish teacher.  He chose Blue playdough for choice time and made some letter Ds out of it.  

All in all, a pretty successful day!  He said he wants to go back and is excited about it, so that's a win-win!  

Quick trip to Ocean City

The summer is coming to an end (what?  When did summer even start, let alone end?) and one of my biggest regrets about time passing so quickly is that we didn't make time for Ocean City this year.  I've ALWAYS gone to OC every summer and I want to continue that tradition with the kids, so when I woke up on Sunday I realized it was going to be our last chance to go.... needless to say, we made it happen!  We left late, 10:30, and got to the beach around 1:20.  The weather was perfect, we got a spot, and the beach was not crowded at all.

Eli LOVED the water. He was running all around, jumping, splashing, kicking and loving every minute of it.  Seeing him SO filled with joy and having so much fun was worth every second of that drive for me.  Liam also loved the water, but was more timid and wanted me to hold his hand.  Brielle was scared of the water at first, but when I jumped her a few times, she was loving it, too.  During part of the time, I was holding both Liam and Brielle's hands for the wave jumping, which made it very tricky when big waves snuck up!

The kids loved playing in the sand and the boys loved chasing each other and pushing each other down.  We spent about 2.5 hours on the beach, got the kids showered and then headed over to Dumsers for dinner and ice cream.  We then drove down the OC strip and headed out of town.

Short trip, but SO great.

Liam at 3 years, 2 months

Liam is, without a doubt, the whiniest child I have ever come across in my entire life.  This makes for quite the challenging day.  He prefers to communicate in a high-pitched squealing voice all day.  Mike raised the excellent point that we are probably going to give him a complex about speaking if we continue telling him to "stop talking in that whiny voice" and so we are now attempting to switch over to the "please talk in your big boy voice."  Sigh.  If he doesn't get his way, he cries cries crieeees.   He can dish it out to Kuya Eli but can't take it back.  Since they fight/play fight 90% of the day, this makes for a challenging time for mommy.

He also continues to be the sweetest little guy ever.  Tonight, I gave him a Toy Story bandaid for his foot and he said "Thank you, Mommy! Thanks for getting that for me!" a million times and followed it up with "Thanks again, Mommy, for getting that!"  He loves cuddling and giving hugs and being tickled.  He loves playing the "rockabye baby game" where I rock him like a baby and tickle him.

He continues to LOVE his stickers.

He is now really getting into reading, which is fun to see. As long as the books are simple and not too over his head, he will actually sit still and read them with me.  Tonight, we read the new pigeon book three times in a row at his request!  He also loves the Miss Nelson books and books about the avengers.

His newest favorite thing to do in the car (other than to ask if we need to get gas) is to say "you know what another really dangerous one is?" and name an animal...  all because he recently learned what deer crossing signs mean.  It's very cute and he gets really excited about his choices.

Sometimes he can be a pretty big eater, but most of the time he's not.  He doesn't tend to eat much food when we go out to restaurants, which is very frustrating.  His most favorite things to eat are applesauce pouches and cliff kid bars.

He loves playing Wii, especially the sword game.

He is obsessed with Darth Vader again and because we were at the playground with boys who had/shared light sabers, that's all he talks about now.  He's also obsessed with Ninja Turtles, especially "Raph-be-el" and likes all things to be red because that means it's the "raph-be-el" one.

Every single day, I hear this about 20 times:  "My birthday is June 15th. That's coming up fast. I want a big emperor Zurg for my birthday."  Most days, that's the very first thing he tells me when he wakes up.

He puts his shoes on the wrong feet 50% of the time.

He has become terrified of bees and won't go in the pool if he sees any bugs floating in there, especially ants.  Although, he has no problem picking up ants from the ground or pointing out ants that are on the ground.

He still lets me dress him in whatever I want, though most of the time he would prefer to be wearing his ninja turtle or batman shirt/jammies.

I signed him up for a karate class for 2-3 year olds called "Tiny Dragons."  He starts in September and I am super excited for him to finally be able to take a class!