Halloween Monkeys

Michael and Sophie have a couple of new best friends.  Thank you, Uncle Nick and Aunt Molly!

Halloween Party

For the second year in a row, Mike and I took the kids to a Halloween party at a small farm.  Here's last year for comparison.

This year the animals were a much bigger hit.  However, learning "moo," baa," boo," and "bye-bye" all around the same time can be tricky.  Cows sometimes say "boo" and sheep occasionally say "bye-bye."

Gotta love the tippy-toes.

Watching the kids dance around one day, this costume idea came to me.  Ten minutes later, I'd found Sophie's Gymboree poodle-skirt costume complete with tags and Michael's leather jacket on eBay.  Right sizes, right prices...ours.

Sophie looooved this rocking horse and we think she'll be asking Santa for something similar this year.  Perhaps his elves should make two?

Mike's parents and my mom came along today.  It was Mike's dad's first real outing since his illness, and it was great to see him getting around so well.  I suspect the photo above will become Grammie's desktop wallpaper very soon.  :)

More peas, please!

Instead of saying my twins are a boy and a girl, I might start saying one's an herbivore and the other's a carnivore. 

Check out the trays, a pretty typical dinner time scenario.


Both kids were given cut up pork chop and fork-mashed peas, and both were asking for "moah" (more) when their trays looked like this.  If you can't tell, Sophie still has plenty of pork and Michael has a toddler-sized handful of peas at his reach. 

They're both good eaters, but they clearly have their preferences!

Bye-bye Summer

Sunday was an unseasonably warm October day, and we found ourselves grateful for the late taste of summer.   



Mom-to-Mom Loot

Sophie "bowling"

I sold in a fall mom-to-mom sale and made about $200 off of Sophie and Michael's 6-12 month gear. But if you subract what I paid for the tricycles, wooden puzzles, and outfit for Sophie that I bought at that sale...and the stuff I bought this morning at another sale...I'm only up about $100 in the mom-to-mom game. Seems fair enough to me, though.

These are the tricycles.  While setting up my own stuff at the sale, I spoke to the seller as she priced them at $35 each.  She said she paid about double that, and online searches confirmed that's the average price ($50 + shipping was the best I could find for them new).  Michael and Sophie aren't tricycle-ready yet, so these will probably make an appearance under the Christmas tree or after birthday cake in April.

Above is what picked up this morning at our neighborhood elementary school's mom-to-mom sale.  Aside from more shoes and boots, we're all set on clothes right now, so I came home again feeling like Santa.  I'm sure I could have done better if I'd haggled a little bit, but for $25 I picked up a wooden block train set, a wooden puzzle (see my obsession below), a soft bowling set, a Five Little Monkeys board book with finger puppets, five other books (three of my favorites and two holiday ones), two CDs, and two drum/maraca/tamborine sets.  Like the tricycles, I couldn't resist the instrument sets because there were two of them, one pink and one blue.  I'm hopeless in that scenario.  Let's hope I never encounter a pair of ponies for sale.

My latest obsession at these sales and at resale shops is wooden toys.  The ones above were all purchased used in the last few months.  While Sophie and Michael certainly have their share of plastic toys that we love, health and environmental concerns drive me to keep them to a minimum.  Toys made of other materials tend to be pricey, so buying used seems to be the way to go. Since plastic toys are easy to clean and giving them a second go around keeps them out of landfills, I suppose it's better just to buy everything used!

We've spent a lot of time having fun with the new toys today, especially the instruments and the train.  I didn't get a chance to really show Sophie and Michael how the bowling set worked.  I had about five of the animal pins set up when they started knocking them down with their hands and feet.  That produced enough giggles for us to consider that "bowling" for now.