SUMMER 2010

Wow! Look at me! I’m blogging! Truth be told, I’ve been INCREDIBLY bored all weekend! My house is clean (or clean enough anyway), I have very little homework to get done (and very little motivation to do it), and there is next to nothing on tv so…here I am. Blogging. Yay! Looks like I have quite a bit of time to catch up on (as usual) so I’ll just dive right in! Maddie finished up her softball season in June and to her extreme delight she earned a medal. Here she is at her last game posing in all her softball glory and showing off her hard earned medal.









Our little Bubba had a pretty rough August! He was sick 3 different times that month! Mostly, he just had fevers and mild colds. There was one night that we were up together until about 1:30 in the morning. He always sleeps about 12 hours at night so he slept in until 1:30 the next afternoon. I really missed my little buddy, but I let him sleep as much as he wanted and when he finally did wake up he was very happy!



All that sickness made me a little nervous for this winter! At his one year check up his doctor commented on how easy his first winter was in comparison to our expectation for his first flu season but, he said, the immunities that he had built up from the pregnancy and from being around us, are going to wear off at this point so he will be left with only his own immune system to rely on. With that in mind, August got me really worried for him but, luckily, he has been perfectly healthy every since! Here’s hoping for a uneventful winter!

Here are a few other random pictures of our little family this summer.























































































Our little Maddie cakes started kindergarten (tear) this August but her school offered a summer school program for new students. The goal was to get the new students acclimated to the curriculum and introduced to the school. Since Maddie is so painfully shy and nervous in new situations we figured it would be helpful to her to get to know her new classroom and a few of her fellow students during the summer when there were few other people around. We hoped that this would help her feel more comfortable for the start of the school year and it seems to have worked. By the second day of the regular school year she was begging me not to walk her into her classroom. Here are a few pictures of her on her first day of summer school. She’s dramatically posing, as usual.











The first grading period of the school year just ended for Maddie so she is enjoying a few days off. She just told me today, though, that she is excited to get back to school tomorrow. She is loving kindergarten and is learning SO much! WAY more than I learned in kindergarten! She’s been in school for 6 weeks now and she is already reading on her own! And to Ben’s delight (my chagrin) her favorite subject is math. She opens her homework folder everyday whispering, “Please be math, please be math…” Here are a few pictures of her on her first day of the school year.













Also this summer was Bubba’s first haircut (or, first two haircuts). The first one was a little hard for me so I had her cut off VERY little. In fact, when I told her how much I wanted off she replied, “Ok. I’ll PRETEND to cut your son’s hair.” Luckily, she’s my friend so it was a funny comment but she was right. Just a week or so later his hair was once again very long! We had a few questioning looks and a couple inquiries about his gender before I finally decided that it would be ok to chop off more than a centimeter. Luckily, his little curls survived the cut and now it is once again a constantly crazy mess! Here are a few pictures of his first hair cut…or pretend hair cut.







August is a pretty big month for us since both kid’s birthdays fall in the third week (Maddie on the 19th and Hayes on the 21st). This year we had three celebrations. One for Maddie on her birthday, one for Hayes on his birthday, and one in September when we could get some extra family over and extra money saved up for presents!

I can’t believe Maddie turned 6 this year! She is growing to be such a sweet, smart, cute(!), dramatic(!) little girl. She loves her brother and he absolutely adores her! We have found that she’s not a big fan of dogs (although we have two), she loves to write in her journal, and she rides her bike as much as she can (now without training wheels). Here are some pictures of Maddie’s 6th birthday!






























Even more shocking to me is that our little Hayes is already 1! The last year has flown by but we can’t imagine life without our crazy little bubs. Hayes is all boy! He loves to run (or stumble around quickly), climb, yell, and throw everything! He has absolutely no stranger or separation anxiety and spends his days running circles through the house, often changing his course before he reaches his destination because he thinks of something else to get into before he can fulfill his original thought. He is mostly in a diaper because all that running around makes for one sweaty boy! For the past couple months I’ve been working with him on learning some sign language and so far he can sign “eat”, “drink”, “milk”, “night, night”, “please”, “more”, “all done”, and “banana”. It’s so fun to be able to communicate with him! Here are some pictures from Bubba’s 1st birthday last month.



















































And here are the pictures from their joint birthday party a few weeks later.






















Another fun thing we did this summer was paint our apartment! We asked the apartment manager and she said that as long as we paint it back to white before we leave there would be no problem with us painting. We plan on being in this apartment for the next three years so I figured that was worth it. I did most of the painting myself but Ben did pitch in and help in the end since he saw that I was going to be up all night. In the end, we were both up all night! We finally headed to be around 4 am (after about 16 hours of painting) but we were glad to get it all done in 1 shot! We painted most of the living room a beige color. The smallest wall in the living room we painted a dark red, and the kitchen is painted dark brown. We love it! It makes it feel a bit more cozy in here, and definitely makes our apartment our own.









Okay, that’s all the pics for this update but I’ll end with a little word about what Ben and I have been up to. School! Of course, fall semester is upon us again so Ben and I are busy, busy, busy with classes. Ben is really enjoying this semester. He usually has one class that really stresses him out but it seems that he escaped that this semester. He says he has less homework but I haven’t noticed any less studying than any other semester. My classes are also going well. Taking three classes with two kids isn’t as crazy as I thought it would be and it has encouraged me to consider taking a full load next fall when Maddie starts going to school all day instead of half the day. That way I could graduate a semester earlier than planned. Wouldn’t that be nice?!?

Other than school, life is pretty mundane and routine around here. We are excited for the upcoming holidays (Maddie is planning on being a ballerina for Halloween)! So…that’s all for today. Talk to you in about 3 months or so (I’ve obviously given up all hope of regularly keeping up with this blog)!