Another 6 months have come and gone already!

I'm late posting this one too... but Tyler has all but finished classes!  He has one more month in January and then he's done with classes, now it's just rotations, baby being born and boards, piece of cake ;).

In September Lyndi started Joy School again. I've loved doing this with the group we have.  Lyndi loves it and counts days in between until she can go back.  The other day she told me she wanted it to be preschool all the time so she could have fun all the time instead of just at preschool, haha.
We had a campout for church that was so fun!  The girls both miraculously slept all night, although Emerie somehow ended up going from in between me and Lyndi, over top of Lyndi's head in the tent over to Tyler's head by morning... without waking up... haha.  Lyndi wants to go camping more now.
We found out also in the beginning of September that our baby was a boy!  Tyler claims he knew it all along, well I guess so did I, but I think we both hesitated to say it out loud just in case we jinxed it haha.  He is an extreme wiggle-worm, stronger and more wiggly than even Emerie, which is saying something. I went with my friend Torrey to a consignment sale right after that and bought a ton of clothes for super cheap so now we're all set... for the first 6 months!  Well, as far as clothes go... I'm realizing now with 7.5 weeks left I have to lot to get still! We went to a Fall Festival with friends that have all moved away and on with their lives.  It was fun!  We bounced on these giant pillow things, went and picked apples, went through a haunted alien invasion house thing, and looked around at everything that had to see!  While we were waiting for the tractor to pick us up after we picked apples, Emerie was playing in the dirt and all of a sudden found a spot that was not dirt, but mud and slipped and fell in it!  She was covered in this weird mud and was crying.  Good thing she was new to being potty-trained because I had an extra outfit on hand.  After using about 100 wipes to clean her off she got some new clothes, but no shoes, I forgot extra shoes... It was funny and sad at the same time!

In October Emerie turned 2, which is crazy to me, but she milked her birthday for all it was worth haha.  She gets it!  Tyler also turned 29 in October!  We actually made sure we all got up before him and made him breakfast in bed, which is... 6  birthdays overdue!  Lyndi was so excited to make him breakfast in bed, she loves that kind of thing.  Emerie sang happy birthday to herself all day on his birthday too.  For Halloween we carved pumpkins and Tyler made one look like he was eating a fake arm that we had on hand.  Emerie did NOT like that, she cried and wanted to save the poor man that was getting eaten by a pumpkin!  We had a chili cook-off for church that was really fun! Lyndi was Rapunzel this year and Emerie was her side-kick Pascal, which nobody understood, I guess it's been too long since Tangled came out haha, and Emerie wouldn't keep her tail and hat on, so she just looked like she was wearing pajamas.  But it was cute!  Tyler and I even dressed up as mummies.  Emerie has issued with masks, or people with pumpkins on their heads, haha.  There was a boy with a clown mask on at the party and she grabbed on to my neck and didn't let go until I distracted her with some food.  The next night we went Trick-or-treating and we had a blast!  It was chilly, but the girls got loaded (since when is it tradition to hand out King-size candy bars, or handfuls of candy to each child?) and when we got home we broke open the hot chocolate and watched a movie.

In November we went out to eat with a bunch of Tyler's classmates and they threw us a baby shower, it was so sweet!  None of them have kids, so some of the girls were saying it was good to shop for baby things to get it out of their system haha.  I loved all the clothes and things we got!  Plus it was at the Hibachi Grill, so it was delicious too!  my sister, niece and mom came to visit for a week.  It was nice to see them!  I haven't seen my sister and her baby for a year and a half or my mom for almost a year.  We honestly didn't do much that week haha. We mostly sat and talked, which is was girls do I hear. My mom helped me go through baby clothes and get rid of a lot of girls stuff, sniff sniff.  My sister interviewed at 3 PA schools including Salus and got into all 3, of course ;)  We went downtown the last day they were here and it was gorgeous weather!  I love going to Independence Hall every single time.  It makes me feel so patriotic and strangely close to the people who started it all.  We went to my mom's for Thanksgiving and I got a lot of fabric to make receiving blankets, including a pattern with mustaches on it, it makes me giggle every time I look at it, it's hilarious!  After stuffing ourselves full of food every day we headed home and began December.

I felt like I had so much time in December and then it passed so quickly I'm not even sure what happened!  Tyler finished finals, and then we had Lyndi's birthday party and then he flew out to Utah for a week to bring us back a car, which I'm so excited for!  We are just about way overdue for 2 cars.  The day before he left there was a Christmas party at church, and the girls were both sick, but Lyndi wasn't as sick so she and Tyler went and came home with homemade ornaments with pictures of the girls on them.  They did the nativity with all the kids and Tyler said right before they went up on stage he told Lyndi he was going to give her a thumbs up, but she said that would be embarrassing for her so she told him not to.  When the kids were on stage Tyler gave her a thumbs up anyway and she yelled back down at him that he was embarrassing her!  Haha, such a funny girl.  That night we had Lyndi's birthday party and then Sunday Tyler flew out to Utah.  What a long week!  But we survived in one piece.  Makes me feel like I might survive maybe when he's gone doing rotations.  I took Lyndi shoe shopping for her birthday and she picked to eat out at McDonalds, and she LOVED shoe shopping!  She wants to go back :)  Tyler got home with his dad a week later and they brought gifts of home-grown canned food :)  I LOVE the apricot jam that they make.

Christmas was so fun this year!  We had friends over for a dinner on Christmas Eve and everything was delicious and the kids had fun with each other.  We might end up doing that more often, it was so fun!  We did the nativity for the first time with the girls after everyone left, which was chaotic and funny.  I wish we had a video camera!  Then we watched Frosty the Snowman and the girls went to bed.  Tyler and I stayed up finishing those last minute gifts and then went to bed.  We had planned on leaving all the Christmas lights on all night, but where the girls doors are glass, we decided it was better not to.  Then Tyler (the Christmas 5-year old) went and woke everyone up, as he does every year at 6:30 to do Christmas.  The funniest part was Emerie opening the movie Frozen.  I knew she'd react exactly as she did and I missed recording it!  She saw it, gasped, and squealed "I. got. FROZEN!!!"  Haha.  That afternoon we headed over to my mom's and stayed for a few days, ate lots of yummy food and candy, played games, went to see the last Hobbit BEFORE it came out on redbox, rare for us haha, and went over to my mom's friends house, where the girls were introduced to her dog, Emerie got licked all over her face and neck several times before she finally didn't like it and Lyndi didn't like it to begin with.  Granted it is an overly excited dog when new people come over!  We ate some really good cinnamon rolls, Tyler got some Playstation time in and then we went home.

Sorry, these always turn in to novels, but I don't ever feel like writing here more often. 

Happy Birthday Lyndi!

I'm way late posting this one... but Lyndi turned 5 on the 16th!  5!  I reminisce every year on her birthday. She was the girl who made me a mom.  I still can't believe some of the things that she is doing already.  She was born with more brainpower and maturity than most adults I know, especially me! ;) 

This year for her birthday we celebrated a few days early because Tyler flew out to Utah and was gone on her real birthday.  She picked out a strawberry cake and put yellow frosting on it and decorated it herself, complete with a half melted Ariel candle on top haha.  She kept asking when her friends were going to come over and what we were going to do for her birthday, but I decided I'm not the mom who does parties every year for every single child, so we are doing every other year for now.  So this year was just a family party, to which she proclaimed "This party is not as fun as my party with my friends last year."  Haha!  She had a candlelight dinner (compliments of Tyler's creativity) with Ramen Stir-fry and grapes for dinner, then we opened presents and Emerie was NOT happy about not being able to open anything or take away Lyndi's toys haha.  Then we sang to her and ate cake!  Happy birthday to this little girl.

This girl is so "old".  She is so much more mature and thoughtful than most kids her age and I've seen it ever since she was a baby.  Emerie will throw a tantrum because Lyndi's playing with her own toys and she will just hand them over in order to stop the conflict haha.  We get mad at her sometimes for doing it, because Emerie needs to learn not to throw tantrums... but Lyndi does it anyway.  She's so funny! 
She learned to read this summer and it's been so fun to listen to her in the car or at the store, yesterday she sounded out "Blueberry Smoothie"!  Her world is opening up for her.  She got a little lego set for Christmas and she was reading the "destructions" (instructions, I can't get her to say that yet). 
She seems to catch on to my panic and stress and will just jump in and do things for me without me even asking!  She will go in her room and clean it up or fold laundry or something and then have me close my eyes and she'll show me the "surprise" she did for me.  It's so sweet!  A lot of times Tyler and I feel bad getting mad at her when she does something bad because she's good and perfectly obedient 90% of the time. 

A few other sweet and cute things she does.  She asks these deep and thought provoking questions that I'm not sure how to answer, but makes me think we're on the right track in teaching her things, although no credit can probably even go to us, because that's just how she is.  She uses these huge words in random conversation, perfectly placed, it's so amazing to me.  She gives me hugs that are so gentle because she doesn't want to hurt the baby :).  She will have us do family prayer on the couch so I don't have to go kneel down on the floor.  She will sing Emerie songs at night when she's crying.  She draws pictures of me and Tyler with a big heart over our heads.  She asked a few weeks ago while I was eating dinner how the baby knows when to open his mouth when I'm eating.  That one made us laugh for a while.  She has named him Hercules, Arthur, and all kinds of other names.  She may be disappointed when she finds out it's not any of those names. She has the sweetest disposition!

Happy birthday to my "old soul"!  We love her so much and are glad we've had her for 5 years, looking forward to many more!