We made it to another week! By the skin of our teeth. This week was filled with a brutal unresolved cold, pots flares/intense fatigue, UTI/cystitis flares, urgent care visit. Just kind of a bleh/survival fog over last week. Jack is having a hard time being nice to Alice ever since school started, which is tough. At least the kids both seem to be enjoying school. Jack's having a fun football season. We aren't moving this fall for the first time in 3 years! The weather is wonderful. There is a lot to be grateful for.
^^The kids wanted to decorate for Halloween this week. Alice loves the Halloween decor. She loves the costumes, the spooky, all of it. Jack doesn't care for Halloween at all, except the candy part. So I probably shouldn't have encouraged this prank Alice played on Jack snuggling a skeleton into his bed, but I couldn't help myself. He did not appreciate it. Alice really thought he would love it though, so the intentions were good.
In direct defiance of our exhaustion, we planted three trees in our backyard over the weekend! We're novice gardeners, but everything we add makes the backyard feel more layered and complete. Next year we'll probably add a few fruit trees too, and I'd love to do a pumpkin patch if we have the space. Now for some pictures:
^^getting out of the house to try and reduce after-school conflicts😌
^^alice wants to be an astronaut for Halloween. Jack's old costume is big on her but she'll probably change her mind by Halloween anyway.
Alice turned 4 this week! We adore this sweet, spunky, creative lil comedian. Still blogging on my phone so I'll save most of the Alice milestone updates for her journal, but it is so fun to watch her come into her own personality now that she can understand and communicate so well. She always asks me to sit outside the bathroom door when she needs to go potty, so we can trade jokes back and forth. It is fun and sweet and a little sad to see her jokes making more and more sense as the months pass. Humor is such an interesting cultural concept and I can see those connections being made in real time. Now she can guess the answer to my jokes sometimes (they are usually rooted in a simple word play). And sometimes she'll get me with a good one I've never heard before too (mostly her jokes still don't make sense and she's using me as her joke laboratory, but I love that).
Alice just says the darnedest things. Sometimes I notice she'll take a specific phrase from a TV show, but other times it truly seems like she's made up her own lexicon. Today she wanted to put up some Halloween decorations, and she was delighted when I added a big fake spider high up on the wall. She gleefully exclaimed, "Mom, our house is going to look so haunted!" And then later when she was admiring the pumpkins taped to the wall outside her room she said, "It looks haunterific up here!" From the time she first started talking my mom noted that I should keep a microphone on her all the time to capture all the funny things she says. This is still true, and I need to be better about writing all the Aliceisms down--it's just that so many of the things that come out of her mouth are excellent one-liners, that i sometimes don't even register them.
Alice can be incredibly firey (and quite competitive, but I strongly believe this is due to having Jack as her example), but is at her core incredibly considerate and sweet. When I'm sick or otherwise not feeling well, she somehow knows just what I need even when I don't know--sometimes that's drawing the curtains or fluffing an extra pillow behind me. Sometimes it's making me a get-well "soup" out of milk, pepper, and diced carrots. I never quite know what I'm going to get but it's always delightful. Alice still loves making her own creations in the kitchen. These are usually terrifying, so I've been meaning to set aside a drawer or bin at her level filled with ingredients i'm ok with her using together. Homegirl LOVES a spice cabinet.
A few things Alice has mentioned wanting to be when she grows up: astronaut, ballerina, singer, doctor, princess, teacher. Can't wait to see which direction she goes. She's doing great at preschool lately and has recently really taken to the letter sounds and is sounding some words out. I wouldn't be surprised if this next year she starts doing some beginner reading.
She recently transitioned from her crib (I know, I know, I'm just a chicken) to a big girl bed. She is doing pretty well! She does come to our room at some point most nights, but one of us will walk her back to her room and she goes back to sleep without a fuss. This is a big upgrade from Jack's transition out of his crib so I'll take it. We added white Christmas lights to her room and hung a pink tent canopy above her bed. It is the coziest place to be.
I could go on about Alice forever, but it's getting late so I'll get to the pictures:
^^Signature sheepdog bangs. She's getting a trim next week--i asked if she wanted to grow her bngs out but she passionately declined.
^^on her birthday she chose her own birthday outfit for school--a sparkly black dress, hello Kitty Halloween socks, and black loafers. 10/10 birthday outfit.
^^She asked to go ice skating for her birthday, but the public skate hours didn't line up with our schedule on her birthday so we ended up having Alice go on a date with Grandma and Grandpa, and then we had chik-fil-a and opened/played with presents at home. We'll go skating next week. She had a blast with the presents anyway.
Not many jack pictures this week, but he's thriving as well (except for attitude after school, but what are you gonna do). His flag football team is undefeated this season, which is a first for him and fun to watch. He loves to be involved and has requested to be signed up for battle of the books, chess club, reflections, and martial arts...all within this last week. That one's going to keep us busy!
I'm annoyed. I wrote a long post detailing our adventures in Sundance for a medical conference Jared went to. But the phone blogging is temperamental and after an hour of typing it out and adding pictures, it got deleted. I need my computer fixed!
Ok to make short(er) of it, we had a fun weekend in Sundance. Also exhausting and painful, but it's a trip with kids so what do you expect? We had the best apple crumble with fresh whipped cream I've ever tasted. We took a scenic ski lift ride up the mountain and nobody tried to climb out! We visited the Sundance swimming pool which was just stunning in the mountain setting.
Also I took a solo hike to Stewart Falls where I ended up slipping at the very end and banging my lower leg on a rock so badly that I couldn't bear weight. As I crawled to the nearby stream to try and clean it up and figure out how I was going to get back, the biggest moose I've ever seen appeared right across the stream from me. You've never seen an injured hiker hobble away so quickly! That was painful on the leg, but on the bright side, when I scrambled around the corner, there was the waterfall. So at least I got to see that. I knew I needed to figure out a way to get back to our cabin before dusk/more moose arrived, so I grabbed a nearby long stick and made it into a walking stick/crutch. Without it I couldn't have hiked back on my own. As I started hopping back down the trail, I frantic little boy came sobbing out of the woods toward me and told me he was lost and couldn't find his family. I knew I wasn't the right person to be able to help him so I found two women who could take him from there and call trail patrol. It was the weirdest hike I've ever been on. The leg was really painful for two days (probably did some muscle damage), but I'm grateful it feels fine now. Ok, pictures!
^^After I helped the lost little boy find some hikers who could help him find his family. Wondering what was going to happen next on this weird hike (a snake appearing on the trail in front of me is what happened next)
^^We checked out the new Sundance Lodge on our way out and it was very cool. Moody Ralph Lauren mountain hotel vibes.
Everyone is ill. Even Savvy somehow. I'm aware that this happens when school starts, but it still sneaks up on me every year. To be fair, i'm pretty sure none of our maladies this week came from school, but they did keep kids from going to school. No stars for that.
My week began with a painful...lymph node? On the back of my head? Jared thinks it was a response to something viral. A few days later I was down with a UTI. So I was pretty much down and out for a a chunk of the week. We had a fun Labor Day weekend, but both of my kids came off of it with bad colds, and Alice had to stay home from school with a fever. At least no one is throwing up, and hopefully she'll be back to school by the end of this week.
Labor Day was nice. We had dinner at my parents the night before, and the day before that was spent with Jared's parents who were in town. On labor day we invited my family over for lunch and later ended up at our pool for its last open day of the season.
If I had a working computer I'd have more to say, but it's tougher to type it all out on a phone...which is probably for the best anyway😂 So we'll get to the pictures now!
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