Fall Pictures

We went on a walk around the neighborhood last weekend and took these pictures. I can't believe how big and grown up they look!

Jackson

Cullen

Field Trip

A few weeks ago, the boys and I went on a field trip to a local "farm" with the other preschool families. I read an article recently about agritourism and I think our visit to this "farm" illustrates agritourism at its best- or worst, depending on how you see it. It was more like an amusement park with a farm theme, but regardless of what you call it, we had lots and lots of fun!

Jackson

This giant slide was probably the highlight of our day. Jack and Cullen wanted to do it over and over and over. I finally had to put a stop to it because it was getting late, we'd been there for nearly 6 hours and we needed to get home for dinner.

I couldn't believe they wanted to go down by themselves. This slide was huge and they were the youngest kids doing it. But they're fearless! And, as you can see, they were thrilled with it!

Cullen's favorite area (besides the giant slide) was the "farm chores" area where he milked fake cows, pumped water from a well, and became enamored with gathering corn kernels, dumping them onto a conveyor belt and then re-gathering them after they were dropped back into the pile. He probably would have done this all day if I'd let him. Too bad we can't get him a conveyor belt for Christmas!

Jackson's other favorite thing was petting the goats. He chased them all over the place and shrieked with delight the first few times he got to touch one.

Jack and Cullen with some of their buddies

On the hayride

Jack loved watching this real cow get milked and he asked me to take his picture with it.

This is the first slide we went on, before we discovered the giant slide. I was still in denial that they were big enough to go by themselves so I went with them on this one.

The craziest moment of the day happened when we were heading to eat lunch with our friends. Cullen ran ahead of me and I lost sight of him for less than 4 seconds. I started freaking out of course, because the place was crowded and I had been worried about losing one of them all morning. But I knew he couldn't have gone far, it had only been a couple of seconds. I was looking everywhere around us when all of a sudden I spotted him... in the pen with the 1500 lb. cow we had seen getting milked earlier.

He had crawled under the fence and was running around in there (stepping in cow pies of course) and having the time of his life. It was a huge pen and thankfully the cow was at the other end looking annoyed that some little boy was invading his space. I yelled at Cullen to get out of there and thankfully he obeyed right away but when he got to the fence he didn't want to crawl back under because there was "poo poo" on the ground. Hmmm, that clearly didn't stop him in the first place. Well after I finally got him out, I wiped his shoes off on the grass and used up about a whole pack of antibacterial wipes on his hands and face. He still had some cow manure on the tops of his shoes and pants but I decided it wasn't worth going home early over. I'm not sure what that says about me or my mothering skills, but don't judge me unless you are also the mother of 2 year old twin boys. If you are, then you understand and you are probably de-sensitized to germs and gross situations like this too.

I can't believe I just told the story of how I lost my son, found him in danger of being trampled by a massive cow, and then let him spend the rest of the day with cow manure on his pants. I'm going to stop now before I embarrass myself more and just wait for CPS to show up at my door.

Motherhood is such a humbling experience.

Chatterboxes

Jack and Cullen are inching closer and closer to being three years old! They’re growing up so fast and changing so much all the time! The main thing that changes right now is their speech, they’re learning and saying new things every day! They’re speaking in full sentences now. And in September, they started asking lots and lots of questions. We’re officially in that stage now! They don’t ask why questions yet, just lots of “What dat thing there?” “What Mommy doing?” or “Where Daddy go?” They usually say ‘yeah’ instead of ‘yes’ now.

They also started using the word ‘I’ to begin sentences, but instead of actually saying ‘I’ they say ‘my/mine.’ As in, ‘Mine like candy.’ Their most commonly used phrase recently is, without a doubt, “No! Mine do it!” They want to do absolutely everything themselves! From putting their clothes on, to helping me out with chores, to turning the lights/tv/appliances on and off…. The only problem is that they often don’t know how to do what they’re asking to do. And since there’s two of them, they’re constantly arguing over who gets to do what. I have to keep a running tally in my mind of who got the privilege of shutting the front door last time or who got to put the Bible book back on the shelf last night. And they never forget anything. If I accidentally forget one of these hugely important details, they let me know by melting down into a fit of “Noooo! Mine wanted to do it! My turn!”

They also stutter a lot. They’ll sometimes say the same word over and over 20 times until they finally get out what they were trying to say. It started right around the time they started using longer sentences and it’s slowly getting better so I’m assuming they just need some time for their speaking skills to catch up to their brains.

They tattle on each other... a lot. Jackson will often tell me that he obeyed but Cullen "no obey." Same with Cullen, he likes to tell me when Jackson's breaking the rules and point me in the right direction toward his brother. I definitely sense a tone of satisfaction when they tattle. Uh oh.

They love talking on the phone or over Skype with our families. It’s like show and tell for them. They scrounge up every single art project, new toy, new library book or really any random household object (their potty chair, Mommy’s coupon folder, etc.) to proudly display. They show off their jumping skills or how fast they can run. They talk about pre-school, what they did that day, what they ate for breakfast… they’re little chatterboxes!

Basically, they just have me laughing all day. Here are a few of the funny things they’ve said recently:

As we’re walking into Target:

Jack: My go to the red store?

Me: Yep, we’re going in there. It’s called Target, Jack.

Jack: Oh, Target. My like that store!

Ahhh, a boy after my own heart.

After getting a candy for peeing on the potty, Jack ran over to the TV where a Thomas movie was playing, held his candy up to the screen and shouted, “Look Thomas, mine get a candy!”

Brandon: What did you guys do in church today? Did you read a story from the Bible book?

Cullen: Yeah

Brandon : What was the story about

Silence

Brandon: Was it about Jesus?

Cullen: Yeah… Jesus… on the fire truck!!

Brandon: I don’t think Jesus ever rode on a fire truck. Are you sure?

Cullen: Yeah, mine sure.

Me: “What do you guys want for breakfast?”

Jack: “Pancakes, oatmeal, cereal, eggs, cantaloupe and…. bananas!”

Me: “That’s a lot of food! Why don’t you guys pick one thing.”

Cullen: “NO! My want all of it!”

We’re potty-training right now but they were wearing diapers when we left the house at first. But the rule was, they were supposed to tell me if they need to use the potty. Well, I caught Jackson pooping in his diaper and I told him he needed to go sit on the potty. He frowned, waved me away and said “No Mommy, I go just a little bit of poop in my diaper right now. Ok? Go away.”

Cullen got a lollipop for dessert the other night. After completely finishing it, he set the stick on my plate and said he didn’t like it. So we had a little fun with him.

Cullen: Mine no like it

Me: Really? Because it sure looks like you liked it. You ate the whole thing.

Cullen: No like it

Brandon: Oh ok, would you like me to get you another one so you can see if you like it better?

Cullen: Yeah, mine want another one.

They’ve started asking to pray at bedtime, this is a pretty typical prayer for them: “God. Jesus. Mommy. Daddy. Train Station. Jackson and Cullen. Fire Truck.” Other people who sometimes get honorable mentions include Grandma, Grandpa, Scott & Ashlee, Nana, Renee & Jon, Rachel, Violet, Anna, Patrick and Teddy (the neighbor kids) and race cars.

Dancing Fools

We've been spending a lot of time indoors so the boys can get the hang of going on the potty. They had to burn off their energy somehow!

You can thank Brandon for this video, he and the boys love to have dance parties while Mommy's running errands!

Naptime=Playtime

Lately, Jack and Cullen view naptime as 2 hours of pure playtime, completely unhindered by Mom the killjoy. As a result, we've had a few afternoons this week that have ended up like this:



(Thankfully, he didn't pee on the carpet while he slept like this)

Halloween

We have been keeping busy still. But since today is daylight savings (and you can't set your kids' internal clocks back an hour) I have a bit of time to post some recent pictures.

Jack and Cullen went trick-or-treating for the first time and I think it's safe to say they thoroughly enjoyed themselves. Since they're obsessed with trains, I thought we'd go with a train theme for their costumes. We borrowed an engineer cap and bandanna to go with some overalls we already had for Jack's engineer costume. And I made Cullen's train costume out of boxes we had lying around. It cost about $5 for the spray paint and $2 for the records at Goodwill. Total out-of-pocket cost for Halloween for both boys: about $8. Yeah!

The only thing I didn't consider was that Cullen couldn't really go up stairs in his train costume and most of the houses in our neighborhood have a few steps. So we had Jack knock on most of the doors and get a piece of candy for his brother too. It only took Jack one house to realize that if he said the magic words, he would get a handful of candy. So he enthusiastically shouted "trick-or-treat!" at every house. I may be a little biased, but I think we definitely had the cutest trick-or-treaters in the whole neighborhood!

Afterward, we all put on plaid shirts and headed over to Chipotle for the $2 burritos. Besides free Chik-fil-A day, Halloween at Chipotle is my favorite fast food holiday!

Potty training has been going really well. It's been nearly a week since we had an accident in the house. Hooray! We're now working on wearing clothes around the house and still getting to the potty in time. And we've gone out front to ride bikes or to the playground a few times. I tell them before we go that we can stay as long as they want, but if they have an accident we have to leave. We've had an accident each time we went to the playground so far, but I think that's the only way they'll learn. We've started only giving them candy every couple hours that they stay dry and, since last weekend, they only get a Matchbox car after they've gone an entire day without any accidents. They're doing so well, it's like night and day from last week!

We wanted to enjoy the last day before daylight savings, so we went to our beloved airplane park last night. It was a beautiful evening- a little cold, but we had a lot of fun!