Yup.  That's right.  A year ago today we welcomed Jack to our family.  As I was saying good night to my little handsome man I could not believe it has been a year already.  A year later finds him eating the same foods as we eat, taking only a couple of bottles a day, walking more than crawling, starting to talk, and, one of my favorites, holding his ground against Anna but also accepting her loving hugs and smoochies when she's apologizing.

Of course we had a party for him and Anna.  I can't speak for everybody that was there but I'd like to think that everybody had an enjoyable afternoon of watching the kids play and breakdown because they had late starts to their naps.  

Of course we have pictures from the even to share with you but there have been techinical difficulties to posting them and once my computer has a working operating system on it and I have a spare bit of time I'll share with you all the fun we had today.

And once again, Happy Birthday Jack!!!!

I wanted to take this opportunity to wish everybody a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend……and share a cute story of course.

Today was a beautiful day.  Some may say cold but when I took some garbage out I thought ‘why aren’t we at a park?’  So after a stop at Starbucks we went to the park.  Not the usual park though.  Anna ran around and climbed and went down the big slides with Damion and alone.  Jack walked around and crawled around and went down the small slides feet first on his belly and down the big slides on my lap.

Damion decided we would take to a walk to the lake to maybe see some geese (one thing that excites Anna when we pass them driving).  As we stopped to throw rocks from the bridge she didn’t see any geese but when we got to the open field area there were approximately a hundred of them for our viewing pleasure.  Anna of course wanted to catch one but they were just a bit faster than her so she decided to herd them instead.  Then she and Damion went running into the little groups causing them to fly away, which peeked Jack’s interest because there was suddenly a bunch of motion and lots of honking.

The geese only flew away to the lake a hundred feet away and ofcourse we followed them.  On the lake with them were almost a hundred mallard ducks.  We started across that bridge and at the center Damion & Anna threw little rocks at all the creatures.  I’ll admit it was cute the first time but then I got a bit annoyed, until Damion through a handful that caused the ducks and a couple of geese to gather together.  Now this was funny to watch because the lake had a thin layer of ice on it and have you ever watched Canadian geese walk and try to stop on ice?  If you get a chance you should.

After that we went back to the Jeep via the swings and went home.  Unfortunately Thanksgiving is at a time of year were the weather is so varied from year to year (well at least in Central IL) because I think it would be fun annual tradition to spend Thanksgiving morning at this park. 

These are two companies that most of America are familiar with.  What I would like to know is why they apparently don’t make products that work with each other.

See, this morning Anna was left in the living room using markers on paper.  I went to do something a returned about a minute later to find this……

….Simple solution?  Take pictures to commemorate my bad parenting and then an bath.  And not one of those fun play play play baths.  One of those scrub rinse scrub rinse baths.  Well that didn’t work because apparently the kid friendly Johnson & Johnson soap does not want to wash off the washable Crayola marker.  So Anna got to participate in a scrub rinse scrub soak play scrub soak play rinse bath instead.  After about 20 minutes of bath time she was mostly flesh colored again.

Okay, and this is where I take a deep breath and admit that I’ve apparently decided to take several parenting vacations (stupid facebook) in November and this incident occurred during one of those vacations.  Realizing that they are all my fault I documented them for some reason and yup, I’m sharing the documentation with you.  Each album does have a brief description of what occurred should it not be too obvious.