Duck Bump

Yesterday Austin was goofing around and fell. He hit his head on his chair which resulted in a big goose egg on the back of his head. Today he was goofing around again and I asked him what happened yesterday when he was engaging in such monkey business. He said he slipped and hit his head. At this point Carter chimed in saying, "Yeah, and you got a duck bump."

And now please enjoy a totally unrelated picture taken of them back in July after hair cuts and a long bath.

Stuff (May-July)

Wow, this is my fourth blog post in 2011. What can I say, I'm really good a blogging. Not really, but I'm going to try to do better.

This post is going to be mostly pictures. I finally downloaded our memory card so I'll probably cover a pretty big chunk of time. Here we go.....

This summer we spent some time at the beach. The boys love going to the beach. Here are some shots we took on Memorial Day.
Austin is our little "dude". It always makes me chuckle when he puts on his hat and sun glasses. He typically walks with a little swagger and has crazy hair but you add the shades and hat and it's a riot. (If you look closely you can see my big pregnant reflection in his glasses.)
Zach was very sweet to play life guard with the boys down by the water while I sat in the shade. For almost two hours Austin filled that bottle up with water and then would walk over to some hole Carter had dug and dump it in. Back and forth for two hours at least.

Carter is a ham for the camera. Almost every picture of him is goofy.

As a reward this summer the boys got to make oobleck (corn starch and water). They loved it. I would recommend making it but play with it outside to save yourself hours of clean-up.

We took our yearly trip to Six Flags. Zach's mom was a trooper to come along. I couldn't go on any of the rides so she got to go with one of the boys. It was great!

While Zach's mom was here we tried to get some updated pictures taken. This is the best we got.

We went to a Cubs Game.

Thanks to one of the partners at Zach's firm they were great seats.

The boys favorite parts were the foam finger/claw and the ice cream they got.

In July we went on a little trip to Milwaukee. It was a nice little escape.

While we were there we went to the Harley Davidson Museum. It was really cool, but hard to get a descent photo in there because of the lighting. This is one of the very few pregnancy pictures we've got of me.

We also went to the Jelly Belly factory. The boys loved it.

Popsicles on the porch are a summertime must.

I think I'm going to have to do this in two different posts to avoid technical difficulties. Watch for more to come soon.

Baking

Long time no update. Sorry. Get ready, here comes an update.

There's been some baking going on at our house. Aside from the kind that results in bread, pumpkin chocolate chip cookies and rice krispie treats (yes, I consider making rice krispie treats baking) I've been working on this little bun for the last 9 months.






Yes, we now have a baby sister at our house. The boys love her and constantly ask me how she's doing. We're all excited to have her here.

Here are the numbers for those of you who are into that ;)

Tessa Anne Holmstead
Born 8:42 a.m. on September 26th
7 lb 11 oz
20.5 inches long

Bullet point update

Here's an update in bullet point form. I'll try to pick up where the last bullet point post stopped.

• Zach's trial was CrAzY!! He was gone for three weeks before he came home for a weekend. He put in some super long days out there. On October 22nd I got a call from him. He said, "Trial's over, I'm coming home!" The judge stopped the trial because an expert for the other side was caught lying. Totally crazy. Zach was home for two days and signed up for another trial. InSaNe!!
  
• Carter turned 5 in October. Zach made it home just in time for his Birthday party. It was Carter's first friend party and he had a blast. (Kind of funny, the big threat at our house is, "You're not invited to my birthday party!" The boys say it to each other whenever they're mad or upset about something. It always makes whoever was un-invited upset and they come and ask me to make sure they can still come. My response has become, "Brothers are always invited")
• We stayed here in Chicago for Thanksgiving. We got together with a few other families and had a splendid time.
• We stayed here for Christmas too. Zach had to work every day up until Christmas. Boo! On Christmas Eve we went over to some friends but Christmas day we stayed home in our pajamas all day. It was nice. One thing I'll do different next year is get myself a book for Christmas so I have something relaxing to do while the boys play with their electronics. (Zach got a play station for Christmas and the boys got games for it too so there was a lot of play station time Christmas day)
• We had a party at our place for New Years. It was a lot of fun. The boys loved that they got to stay up so late.
  
• January 4th Zach left for trial in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was gone for two weeks before he got to come home for a weekend. This trial hasn't been as crazy as the last one. He's been able to come home for a lot of weekends. It's seemed really long though. I'm sure the fact that it's right on the tail of the last trial hasn't helped. Every time Zach comes home the boys are sad to learn that he has to go back again. Last weekend Zach was basically here for a day. He got in late Friday night, on Saturday we went to the Auto Show, and Sunday morning Zach was headed back to the airport.
• Austin turned 3 at the end of January. We found out Zach would be home a weekend sooner than we'd expected so we quickly threw together a birthday party so he could be here. I made super capes and masks for the kids. It turned out really cute.
  
• ZACH IS COMING HOME FROM TRIAL TODAY. He doesn't have to go back to trial but he does have to go to DC for some training next week but that's just for a few days.
• We're going on vacation. The first two weeks of March will be spent in Utah with our families. We're super excited to have Zach all to ourselves and to see our families.

I think that's it. I'm going to make my next post a picture post. I'll try to get that up before we leave.

Funny things the boys do

I have a small list of things that the boys have done or said lately that I need to write down in one place. They are currently on random scraps of paper all over the house. Here we go...

Carter has really been into drawing lately. He draws the cutest pictures of himself. It's been so much fun to have his pictures hanging on the fridge. The other day he drew a picture of himself really big. On the same piece of paper he'd also drawn a picture of a house that was small in comparison to the picture of him. Austin saw the picture and commented, "Carter, you can't fit in your house!" Carter's reply was, "My house is just a little far away." I had no idea that he understood depth perception like that. Very cute.

Yesterday we were headed to the church for play group with the other kids and moms. The boys were really excited and wanted to be there instantly and were asking how much longer. I started to list off the things that we had to pass to keep them occupied. As we passed the hospital that I had mentioned the conversation went like this
Carter: "I think that's the Chicago Hospital of Science and Industry." (he loves The Museum of Science and Industry)
Me: I chuckled and told him, "No, that's Swedish Covenant Hospital."
Carter: "That means they're sweet!"
Me: chuckled again "No, SweDish Covenant" trying to emphasize the "D" sound
Carter: "Ok, so they're kind of sweet" thinking I'd said sweetish.
Hilarious!

We have been working with Carter on reading and recognizing the sounds letters make. Austin has been paying attention too but he's not quite got it yet. He says things like, "I know what I want. It starts with the letter A, it's ck...ck...ck... CEREAL!!!" Or "I know, it starts with the letter B, it's ck....ck....ck....frosted snow flakes (frosted flakes)" It always makes me chuckle.

A while ago the boys had earned a treat and they had decided on gobstoppers. As I went to retrieve the bag of candy the boys had both named the color they wanted, green. When they looked in the bag there were no green so Carter said, "I guess I'll have red." and took a red one. Austin looked for a minute and saw two purple ones and said, "I guess I'll have two"

We had a Family Home Evening lesson on goals one night. The next day Zach was asking the boys what they're goals were for the day. Carter told him his goal was to have no 'time outs'. When Zach asked Austin we got an answer we were not expecting. With a very straight face Austin informed us that he didn't have any goals, they all died. Then he walked off. Later that day I brought it up with Austin again. He gave me almost the same response. He said he didn't have any goals because they all died and he flushed them down the toilet. I was rolling. He got the whole, "they died and I flushed them down the toilet" because of our fish tank experience. We got an aquarium and fish for Carter's birthday and have had terrible luck keeping the fish alive so we end up flushing a lot of fish. For some reason Austin felt all these things went together.

On a regular basis the boys turn on our Tarzan CD, strip down to their underwear and jump on Carter's bed singing at the top of their lungs. They strip down to their underwear because that's what Tarzan wears. They quite enjoy hanging out in just their underwear.

Well, that's it for now. I'm sure there will be more later.