The joys of being a kid

Dane and I went to the Harvest Carnival that his pre-school has every year on Halloween. It's always a blast and this year didn't disappoint. This video is bound to become a favorite in our house!

Getting ready for Halloween

Dane was very interested in decorating the house for Halloween this year. He wanted our decorations to be spooky (I'm pretty sure he doesn't even know what spooky means!) So since our Halloween box was pretty disappointing to both of us upon opening it, we decided to craft a few of our own.

Here are Dane's salt dough ghosts.

And our glass jack 'o lantern jars. Jaeger painted the smallest one, Dane did the medium sized one and I did the large one. The picture isn't that great, but they turned out really cute and the boys love seeing them all lit up.

These treat bags for Dane's class were as spooky as we got this year.


Here's Dane working on one.

And for the grand finale....our pumpkins. I'm sure you can tell, but these were both designed by Dane. For the one on the left, Daddy had Dane draw a face on a piece of paper and Daddy used that to carve the pumpkin. For the one on the right, we gave Dane free reign with a Sharpie pen. As you can see he drew a forehead, hair and the line going across the pumpkin is his body. I particularly loved the tiny eyes and eyebrows with the HUGE mouth! It's certainly not going to win any pumpkin carving contests, but it's all his. :)

We have a jam packed Halloween day with two parties, trick or treating and a carnival! Should be a blast!

One unique Halloween bag!

Look what we found at Home Depot last week.....


Isn't that Duct Tape AWESOME! Of course, Dane had to have it and it was hard to say no to our little firefighter. :)

After admiring it for a day or two, Dane and I got to crafting. I knew that you could make all sorts of cool things with Duct Tape thanks to my savvy niece Eliana (she made a very cool duct tape wallet for Dan several years ago that he loves.) So, we did a search online for all things super cool made with Duct tape and we found this tutorial for a candy bag.

Once we had the how-to we got busy. Here's Dane laying out the tape.


After we finished, we had to play a few rounds of Trick or Treat. Here he his digging down deep for his lollypop.

And here's the finished product.

Movie Monday

We introduced Dane and Jaeger to the world of Mary Poppins and they absolutely loved it!

And they're still thinking about it several days later!

The boys and I were reading books tonight and Jaeger suddenly jumped off the couch and started dancing. I had no idea what he was doing and then I realized that the page we had come to in the book we were looking at had a penguin on it.

With all the choices of movies out there, I'm so glad that our boys can be entertained with the classics. Of course, Music Man is on our list of classics to watch - any other ideas out there?

Hollywood to H.O.G.!

Anyone remember the Hollywood stage Dane went through?


Well, Jaeger Ray has found his own stage. Perhaps, we should start calling him HOG BOY!

A day in the life

It's been awhile since my last post and a super long time since my last video. So, I thought I'd share a recent video of the boys playing together. It's been so fun watching the boys learn to play together. Some days we definitely have a lot of tears and taking of toys, but then there are those days when they are so sweet and play so nicely together. It just melts my heart on those sweet days.

Jaeger's vocabulary has just exploded and it's so fun to hear how he says words. If we didn't know better, we'd think he was growing up in France. Listen carefully to how he says garbage. :)

Impressive...

**Disclaimer: This is one of those My Kid is so Brilliant posts. I try not to post too many of these, but I was truly impressed with what Dane did the other day.

First of all, Dane wanted to write his friend Kellen a thank you note for letting him come to his birthday party. How cute is that?

Secondly, he did the below ALL BY HIMSELF! All I did was give him the paper and pen.

If you're having trouble reading his inventive spelling it says From Dane - To Kellen.

Here's the final product. He stamped all the other images.


I was pretty impressed with my sweet 4 year old, but then again, I am his Mommy and that's my job. ;)