A great weekend

Todd took our two big girls out to the desert to camp this weekend, which gave me a wonderfully quite weekend. Tell me, do you know any other man who will go camping alone with two girls?!? (Besides my dad, I don't know of any other man this brave). I love that he takes them for some daddy/daughter bonding time. Rylee loves to come back and tell me "you'll never know how many marshmellows dad let us eat, and he even forgot to brush our teeth!!" Reminds me of that Bill Cosby episode "Dad is great, he gave us some chocolate cake!" That is the type of dad Todd is, I love it! I enjoyed the weekend alone with Kennedie. We ate cheerios, played ball, went shopping, and watched Barney, fabulous!




Here is daddy. The only thing that could make this a sexier pic is if he was holding a vacuum or scrubbing a toilet.














Here is my little daredevil. She now guns the gas and stands up while weaving in and out of trees and cactus!















Here is Maddie, who loves to dress like Daddy. This is one of her favorite shirts, you can't see well in this pic, but it has a bloody skull on it and she wears it constantly so she can look like Todd.












Maddie adores dirt. She can sit in dirt for hours and dig, talk to herself and fill buckets up. What a life!

Home is where the heart is, the mall is where you poop!

As the mother of a 10mo old, 2 year old, and 5 year old I spend many hours talking about, cleaning up, and listening to talk about bodily functions. My conversation with Maddie today went like this:
Me "Maddie do you have to poop?" (trust me, a mother knows, and the answer was yes!)
Maddie "yes"
Me "Then go in the bathroom please, call me when you're done" (yippee, lucky me!)
Maddie "No, I want to go to the mall"
Me "Okay, we can talk about that after you poop"
Maddie "No, I Wanna go Poop at the mall"
Me "Huh?"
Maddie "Yah, I poop at the mall now, in the store with the fridgerators (Sears)"
Me "No, we poop at home, because we are at home"
Maddie "But it's more fun to poop in the store with the fridgerators!"
Me "Well, we have a fridgerator here at home, and we'll go to the mall later, so that's gonna have to work, go poop!"
Maddie "Otay, but you're bossy!"

No idea where this one came from...we really don't make a habit of going to Sears to poop, I promise!

Thank you Leah!

My good friend Leah is starting her own photography business and let me bring the girls over to her in-home-studio yesterday for some practice. She took some amazing pictures! It was so nice to have their pictures taken with professional backgrounds/lighting/etc... but in someone's house. They could run and play and eat snacks in between shots. Check out their pics on her blog:
http://handsandfeetphotography.blogspot.com/

Maddie's new TV

My posts seem to be about Maddie alot, being 2 1/2 is just too entertaining!

So I put her to bed last night and she tells me "I wanna watch TV." I explained that we were done with TV and it was bedtime. She said "NO, the TV in my room." I explained "You don't have a TV in your room." To that, she said "Yes I do, it's up there" pointing to the ceiling. She then asked me to turn it on so that she could watch "My Little Ponies." So I acted like I had a remote, pointed it to the ceiling, kissed her goodnight and walked out. I checked on her about 20 minutes later, and she was still staring at the ceiling singing "My little pony, my little pony, what will today's adventure be" ( A song I know very well). I told her in my big-girl-mama voice that it was time to really go to sleep. She looked at me and said "but I waiting for you to change the channel, it's over and I wanna watch Caillou." I found myself yet again, pointing my magical hand at the ceiling, thinking "good gosh, I hope she knows we are pretending," told her to go to sleep and walked out. She started yelling about 15 minutes later "mama, come turn it off." Apparently Caillou was over and it was finally time for bed. I'm thinking that maybe next time daddy wants a bigger TV, Maddie and I will show him just how affective her approach to TV watching is, who knows, she might have been watching her shows on a 60 in plasma too!

Ding Dong, the facial hair's gone!!!!

Yay!!!! He shaved, he really shaved!! I'm such a happy girl, now that my man is back to looking like an upstanding citizen!

Kennedie

Our little Kennedie is now crawling! We now have 3 mobile children......agh! Time to tighten up the zone defense!

Maddie's well paying job

So we were outside playing the other day and I was with Rylee, looking at the neighborhood cat ("milkfish") down at the greenbelt. Maddie was following two of the kids around (yes, one was the little boy she almost killed a few weeks back), and the two kids took off running home. Maddie took off after them yelling "don't wowwy guys, I comin!" I went up to check on them, when Maddie came running back yelling "look mama, they payed me a money!" They had given her some pennies. She went back into the greenbelt and played by herself in the grass, then went running back to their front yard, and came back with more money. The next time she ran up to their yard, I went too, only to hear them saying "here she comes, get more pennies!" She would run up to the yard, and they would hand her pennies and say "now go play in the grass for a little while." Nice. She actually loved it though, and made some money off of them. So now she asks to go outside and "play the money game." I'm thinking I should start that at home, "go in the playroom and play nice together and I'll give you a penny." I've never gotten to be a daytime talk show junkie, but I might actually get to watch Oprah or Maury or something if I start the penny game at home. Ooh, or maybe I'd have time to make dinner that didn't come from a blue box with a cheezy packet inside! Just imagine...

Kids are so funny, the recent conversations I've had with mine just remind me of how different they are:

Maddie has been on a toe-nail kick. I was driving the other day and she screamed in an excited voice "Mama, I have toenails, do you have some too!?!?!?" I look back to see her holding up her finger nails and say "those are nice, but they are your finger nails, your toe nails are on your toes." She looks down at her feet and screams again "Yes, there's more down there!" Maddie also had a fit the other night because I wouldn't take her toenails off before she went to bed. Yup, that's right, she kept yelling "take them off, I put them on in the morning!" Where in the world she came up with that I'll never know!

On the other hand, Rylee told me today that she wasn't sure about our financial decisions "you know, if you are paying a whole bunch for a new house, you might not want to put Maddie in preschool and have to pay for that now too, do you think it's smart to do those things at the same time?" I explained that Maddie doesn't start until August, but she is still questioning the decision. Good things to worry about when you're 5!!!