Right Now

If drool, smeared pumpkin-apple puree, mushy bananas, and a runny nose make you nauseous, you may not want to look at the rest of this post.
But to me it is adorable!
In the second picture, she is making that face, because she was trying to copy me saying "boo!". She ended up making more of a "vuh!" sound, but I was pretty impressed.

The younger two kids and I are homebound today, since they seem to have colds. That hasn't seemed to slow them down any more though. Collin has spent the past 20 minutes giving us karate demonstrations, and Eden is in her usual stealth mode, roaming the house for things to get into. She is an amazing walker. She took her 1st steps a couple months ago, and has been walking as her main form of transportation for a few weeks now. She's so little, its funny to see other people's surprise when she suddenly gets up and walks across a room. Its quickly coming back to me how much they are suddenly into when they can walk. She loves to open any cabinet or drawer and throw every. single. item. onto the floor. She also loves climbing onto things. We have already found her on the top step of the kids' bathroom stool and on top of the box of diapers in our bedroom. Whenever she gets caught, she just smiles with pride.

Eden also tries to run. When Dave was trying to sneak into the other room for a nap the other day, Eden apparently realized his plan and tried to run after him. She also likes to try to run away from us when she knows we are trying to keep her out of or away from something. I say "try to run" because it isn't the most graceful movement, and she usually falls after a few steps, but it is so cute!

In other news, Collin is mostly potty-trained. Potty training is a long, drawn out process in our house, but he is finally doing pretty well. He is only day-trained, and he does still have an accident every 2-3 days, but I am just relieved for the progress. I'm already praying that its an easier process when its Eden's turn.

I know its super late to announce this milestone, but I forgot to mention that we officially became a pacifier-free house in May. Eden had never really been interested in a pacifier, and we finally ditched Collin's in May. I had told him that I would take him to the toy store and he could pick a big boy toy and then we would throw away his pacis, since big boys don't use pacis. He agreed and talked for days about the toy he wanted (I can't even remember what he wanted). We gathered all his pacis and put them in a ziploc, and headed to Toys R Us. We searched that store up and down and of course, they didn't have the toy he wanted. He decided he only wanted to get rid of the pacis if he could have this one toy. Ugh! Then we realized that he was no longer carrying his little ziploc. Oops! We spent another 30 minutes combing the store for that bag of nasty, used pacis. We finally gave up, and after a few tears, he decided a light saber would be an adequate big boy toy. He would still cry for his pacis for awhile, and he actually ended up getting sick the day after we lost them. It was a tough few days, but I have been so glad to be rid of those things from our house. I definitely had a major love-hate relationship with them!

A quick Brynn update:
She is absolutely loving school! She has made lots of friends there, and she has a great teacher. I try not to get offended on the weekends when she talks about how much she misses school. I am so proud of her! She has always needed me to take her by the hand and basically hand deliver her to her teachers (at preschool, church, dance, etc), but she will now walk from the sidewalk where I drop her off and up the walkway to school. She has grown so much since she started school. She is learning to read, and can read and spell quite a bit. She loves to write little notes for us, and sound out the words she sees when we're driving in the car. She just made the 100 Club at school, which means she can count to 100 by herself. She also asks tons of questions, and won't settle for the answers until she understands each detail. I am already afraid of all the deep questions I know are in our near future. That girl will keep me on my toes!

I feel so blessed to have these 3 little ones in my life! There isn't a day that goes by that they don't make me laugh and smile with something they say or day. It is the funnest thing to get to experience the world all over again through a child's eyes. They are amazing little people!