My Messy Ellie!

I've started to watch my friends baby, Hannah. I had the girls painting their pumpkins yesterday. Soon after, Hannah woke up from her nap and wanted a bottle. After I got her situated, I checked on the girls and found this disaster...



The other thing, is Elyana has been sticking things up her nose lately. When I picked her up from our PAIIR class today, she had obviously stuck a light green marker up her nostril. I took a picture because it looked so funny. There is of course the evidence of a recent snack on her face too. Oh yeah, the other thing is she has insisted on wearing her sunglasses a lot.


After the pumpkin finally dried, Ely has been taking it for walks in her stroller.

Fall Is Here

This weekend we played in the few leaves we managed to rake together. Sunday after Mikayla's swimming lesson, we all went to Northwoods Orchard. Their tiny Chesnut apples are ready to pick and are easy for the kids to munch on running errands. I discovered that Nate had never been to an orchard before so it was neat for him. Ellie loved to feed the little goats blades of grass and pet their baby bunnies. We even got to go on a wagon ride, just the four of us. Nice family weekend. I'm going to finish off this weekend by heading to the Mayo Fitness Center (I just joined last week) for a swim and a long sit in the hot tub and steam room. Anyway, here's some pictures of the girls I took of them playing in leaves. I try to take pictures of them the very first time each fall.

MP3 Players Don't Belong In Teeth!

After an hour of struggling with Ellie to get her to nap, I put in a movie for Mikayla and layed down. 10 minutes later, I'm wake up to hysterical crying. I bound down the stairs and find Mikayla sitting there with my MP3 player hanging out of her mouth. There's a little claw clasp at the end of the cord where you can attach headphones that go with it. That part was stuck good between her bottom two front teeth. "Why on earth did you stick it there?!" Her response was, "I wanted to listen to music!" "You don't listen to music with your teeth!" The more we pulled, the more I was afraid of a tooth busting or chipping and the more she screamed. Geez. So, what do I do? I call up Nate (like he would know what to do or something!!!) Here's his description of the conversation:

Phone call from Suzanne: "I have a situation and I don't know what to do… (crying in the background) Kayla got my MP3 player stuck in between her teeth!"

Crying, wailing, and gnashing of teeth/mp3 player and then later, Suzanne finally managed to pull it out. So then I overhear this through the phone:

"Mikayla don't ever put anything in between your teeth again!"
Kayla's response: "Why?"

Lessons learned, indeed.

Photos From Photoshoot

Here are a few of our favorite pictures that our friends Scott and Jen took to launch their new photography studio.

Raccoon

I had the urge to wonder through Walmart late last night and unwind. I got home around 11ish and as I pulled into the driveway, my headlights caught a raccoon crossing through our yard. Weird. A few months ago, we saw a fox. Anyway, I told Mikayla that I saw a raccoon last night in our yard and she dryly said, "Yeah, raccoons are nocturnal." Nate was as stunned as I was by her response and asked her if she knew what nocturnal means. She correctly defined it. Such a smarty!

First Day of Kindergarten!

She was excited until we got to the school and then was pretty clingy. I gave her a kiss on her left hand, Nate gave her one on her right. She "put" our kisses in her pocket to keep all day. Here's some pictures of this big event. When Kayla got in her line up, Elyana wanted to stand by Mikayla as you can see in the last picture.