we are all part alexander!

It's been a fun week and spent the evening of black friday hanging out with 2nd and 3rd cousins. It's definitely a rarity to know your 2nd cousins, much less communicate with them and even more rare for your kids to know their 3rd cousins. So the common denominator here is that myself, Lilli, and Kate (mom's of the kids) all shared the same great grandmother because each of our grandmothers were sisters...

Third Cousins:
Sulley, Benjamin, Simon, Jane Bell, Rache, Colton

Thanksgiving 2010

thanks to gigi and big d who spent almost a week with us leading up to thanksgiving. we had fun even though we didnt do much. i was out of commission on monday and sick the rest of the week. we did make it to the mall and to merrifield for some flowers. dad did some yard work and blew the leaves and cleaned out our garage so that was awesome. not sure how we managed NOT to take any pictures except these two crazy pics from Thanksgiving at Aunt Martha's house.

yup, this is our child

this is what happens when you...

1) have a daughter obsessed with fashion accessories and
2) you disappear long enough to get breakfast together

This is not Kansas, it's North Arlington

It's been an exciting 48 hours around here...because we experience our first "mircoburst." Greg and I awoke at approx 12:45 am Wednesday morning to high winds. the next thing we knew, we heard branches hit our window and glass come flying through our bedroom window along with leaves and other debris. Power went out. We just both sat there in bed saying, WTF just happened? so next we naturally went downstairs to grab the broom to clean up some glass in case the kids tried to come inside our room during the night or early morning... that's when greg decided to look out the door and realized we couldn't even open the storm door because a tree was blocking it. yes! you guessed it! - our neighbor's tree fell on our house and my car. So at this point, we run to put on our shoes and go outside to assess the damage in the dark and as we make our way over the tree, we see our neighbors standing directly in front of us looking dumbfounded. as we all left the yard, we realized our OTHER neighbor had TWO trees fall and come entirely uprooted. it was a warzone. thank god no one was hurt and in the grand scheme of things, there was minimal damage done to houses. any house could have been easily chopped in half by these big old oak trees but for some reason, everyone was spared major damange. Most of the damage is roof repairs, gutter replacements, screen repair, and window and car repair in our case.

our neighbor's mama jamma tree that fell...
went almost to the end of our street into a total of 3 yards.

part of "the tree" that totaled my car and wrecked our house

aftermath

More fun with leaves!

Fun with leaves!!

lollipop lunatics

it's not even 7am and we've located the lollipops

we are so funny...and proud of ourselves

oh, you don't think it's funny?

but i'm still cute, anyways...

Sunday at the Jefferson

mud pits at "the pit"

We love going to "the pit" to play so we decided to spend saturday morning there. It was lots of fun but suddenly became even more fun once the kids discovered muddle puddles...and how fun it was to splash in them.


The fun lasted probably 10 minutes or so until they both started complaining of being cold and wet. so what did we do next? took them to lunch at jud and ing's pantless and then to costco, again - minus pants. classy, i know.

my studious one

a mouthful of raisins

as we continue to try and allow our kids to only eat what we eat for dinner, we are constantly surprised at their likes and dislikes. for instance the other night, both kids made a great effort at having butternut squash risotto. sulley was having so much fun with it, than she in fact asked for a "leaf" for her risotto. of course, i gave her a piece of my spinach salad and the next thing i know, she's rolling risotto up in the leaf. uh, whatever. tonight, colton was calling the carrots in his beef stew - hot dogs. again, whatever works. food continues to be very hot and cold with my two but these days, i have to say i'm proud of our progress.

I snapped these two pics the other day when my kids suddenly decided they LOVED raisins.

not so flattering

her raisins almost look like she's got a mouthful of "chew" in those cheeks.