I know I know I know! I’ll try to be better at posting!!
That said, now I can get on with catching up!! :) Every year on the Sunday before Halloween, we go to Russell and Jonnet’s house and carve pumpkins. EVERY YEAR I mess mine up and it is SO frustrating! This year I chose my pattern VERY carefully and FINALLY broke the mold! Mine is the owl and he looked AWESOME!! Clint’s is the melting face (his name was Pat E. Melt) and Madison’s was the flag with the stars. Next year I’ll learn and just have one pumpkin for Maddie and I to share because I’m always the last one at the table carving!
So we took the pumpkins outside to light them and Madison yells, “Cool pumpkins Mom!” and her echo yelled back. She paused… and looked around… and said, “Mom! There are friends out here!” Then she started yelling all kinds of things to her “friend”. When she was ready to come inside she yelled to her “friend” that she was going home. Of course, her friend yelled back the same thing and Maddie turned to me and said, “Mom, my friend is going home too!” She was SO funny!
For Halloween Madison decided she wanted to be Jasmine. She is going through this major Jasmine phase right now (intermingled with Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty), and we just happened to have a Jasmine costume from my sister Yvette that her daughter Braquel wore when she was 3 (she just turned 13)! We got SO many compliments on it and Maddie was the only Jasmine we saw. She loved her costume and had a blast at the Trunk-or-Treat and the Football game that night.
Madison went to her best friend Brittlee’s 3rd birthday party a few weeks ago and the whole thing was Princess themed. It was SO DANG CUTE! I stayed to help Michele and it was so much fun for those little princesses! They decorated foam crowns, learned how to dance like princesses, opened presents and had a piece of a castle cake, complete with Cinderella on the steps! Michele made it and I thought it turned out pretty darn cool!
Madison got a dollhouse from Jonnet and has amazed me at how mature her level of play is with it. She set up all the furniture so it formed a wall and sat all the dolls in chairs and faced them to different things, like the Dad was petting the dog and the daughter was watching TV and the Mom was in the bathtub and the baby was standing on a step stool looking at herself in the mirror while Maddie said, “Can you see yourself? You’re so pretty!” She is so smart it amazes me everyday… These random pictures are Clint showing his Rough Rider Pride, the cool moon we had the other night, and Madison chillin’ in Mom and Dad’s bed watching Lion King!
Now for the REALLY fun stuff! This last weekend we went to visit my family and to watch our local high school state football game (we lost, it was a really sad game). My sister Yvette and her husband Troy called us earlier in the week and gave us some pretty drop-your-jaw kind of news: they decided to give us a couch and chaise lounge set! These are NICE NICE NICE!! They are SO comfortable and so pretty and still look brand new – they’re the micro fiber or durapella fabric that lasts like a million years and still looks perfect. We are SO excited cuz the furniture we’ve had since we got married were hand-me-downs (a white pleather couch that my parents bought when I was in first grade and a pink chair my uncle gave us that was probably from the 70’s) that I had re-covered and were starting to look pretty shabby. And the chaise has been sat in more by Clint than by anyone in their family, so he’s super excited to have that here! Here are the pics of our NEW furniture!! WE LOVE THEM!!
While we were visiting, Yvette and Tawnya’s community had an HOA sponsored Fall Festival at one of their parks. Everything was free and everything was SO MUCH FUN! They had a Sponge Bob blow-up jumping/ball castle that Madison spent an hour playing in, a blow-up obstacle course that Clint totally cheated and beat me in (in the video, right after I fall – SO embarrassing by the way! – I turn around and tell the poor girl behind me “There’s some crazy lady on this thing! Look out!”), and a contest thing that is hard to describe, so just watch the video! It was so much fun! On the second try in that thing, Clint and I both hurt our heads, you can see us both reach up to rub them! But I beat him that round!! Then Madison got to ride a Shetland Pony named Charm. She thought she was SO big!
That night my poor sister Tawnya let slip a surprise 2 years in the making… My brother Ryan loves to give a "WOW!!" Christmas present every year, and this year he is giving us his car for Christmas! It’s a 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid… I know!! This car gets like 40 mpg and is SO pretty! I had NO IDEA and she accidently let it slip. I feel bad for her, and SO BAD for Ryan that his freakin’ AWESOME surprise got ruined. He was going to wrap up the key and give it to me when we go down the weekend before Christmas for our family party, and when I opened it and had that, “What the heck?” look on my face, he was going to tell me to look outside and have a big red bow on the car! How COOL would that have been? He said that when he bought the car he got it with the intent to give it to me when he moved back here from California. I’m really sad the cat’s out of the bag, but I’m super excited for my new car! His actual original plan was to give our car to my nephew Brad (who is turning 16) and have him open up our car keys, and when I was like “Hey! Aren’t those MY car keys?” then he’d give me the box. But our car is having problems, we just had to put $700 into it a few weeks ago. So Ryan didn’t want to give Brad a car that would cost more in repairs than it’s worth. Plus my dad just gave him a beater truck that he loves so now he doesn’t need the Malibu. SO, we’re going to sell the Malibu and use the money for Christmas or Clint’s truck or Adoption or whatever! We are SO EXCITED and I CANNOT wait for Christmas just that much more!!
I seriously have the most awesome family on the planet, don’t you agree?!
