a child's prayer

Toby offered the following prayer at bedtime tonight:

"Heavenly Father,

Thankful for this day. Thankful for our chairs, and our pillows, and blankets, and the doors, and for the walls not falling down.  Maybe someday they'll fall down... but not today. * Please bless mommy for preparing it. ** Thankful for our family. Please we have a new baby BOY sister in our family. ***

In the name of Jesus Christ- Oh I forgot- thankful for our tables, and chairs, and blankets, and all, all, aaaaallll our toys. [silence] Please bless mommy for preparing it.****

In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen."



*I think this is fallout from a nightmare he had 2 nights ago.
** This is a common refrain at dinner, and Toby has adopted it at bedtime as well.
*** Charlotte has been praying for a baby sister for about a month now, I guess Toby has decided another girl in the house would not benefit him.  Also, no, I am not currently expecting a baby.
**** Now he's just procrastinating bedtime.

Happy Mudder's Day!

(In case you haven't seen my facebook profile, I thought I'd blog about the Marine Mud Challenge that I did on Saturday.  Besides, I want to remember some of these details, so this is also for me personally.)  

First let me say that I had no intention of doing this.  A week ago a friend of mine posted on Facebook that someone had dropped out of her team, and she needed a new member.  On an impulse, I signed up.  The team was called "RMFAO" which stood for: Running My Fat BUM Off.  Since I have been trying to get to a healthier weight, this sounded like a good workout for me.  :)  And, well, it was.

The course is 5 miles long.  We started out running up a mud bank where a very nice Marine then shot us with a fire hose.  Then we had to run through some muck, up this mud bank, slide down the other side under the cargo net, and crawl out through the tunnel.  5 minutes in, and I was wet, muddy, and scraped up.  Fun!

The course had a lot of challenging obstacles... especially for a girl like me who has no upper body strength. I managed to do them ALL, except this one.  With some team assistance, I got my bum up onto the lower bar, but I was too scared to go up over the top bar and then drop down.  That bottom bar is about 8 feet high.  (I had to jump up to grab it.) I went over much higher things, but they all offered a little more to hold onto.  I was shaking like a leaf on this one, and it was the only time on the whole course where I was freaked out.

This was the first of many walls to climb over.  I had never climber over a wall before in my life and I was so proud of myself for getting up there!  Little did I know there were like 4 more walls to climb on the course.  Nathan and Eve were spotting me on my drop down, but I still managed to scrape up my knee on the wall and land on my bum in a pile of pine cones.  Also, a teenager from our church was racing just behind us and broke his leg coming over this wall.  He's having surgery on it today.

This was the taller of two sets of "stairways."  No problemo.

This was the beastliest thing, that I actually accomplished.  The tire wall was very high (15 feet?) and you climbed it like a cargo net.  That was tricky enough, but then you had to go over the top- and my legs weren't long enough to be holding onto anything as I scooted over the top, so I held onto that chain for dear life.  Then you had to climb down the other side.  

Running down the sand cliff. 

Wading through the "big pit" there were I think 5 of these logs that you had to climb over... funny that I don't remember exactly, but I was just very focused on whatever was directly in front of me. 

I'm in the foreground here getting ready to climb over yet another wall out of the last mud pit.  Eve is behind me.  The Marines were yelling at us to belly crawl through this mud... it was so thick and deep, it was hard to lift your feet out of it.

Go team!!  

I'm so glad I did this.  It was HARD, but it's great to feel like I can do hard things.  Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.  ;)

When i got home I was welcomed by 3 beautiful roses from my 3 beautiful babies.  Thank you sweet Rob for encouraging me and supporting me in all my dorky plans! 

After a long, hot shower we headed out with a picnic dinner to Lady Antebellum Amphitheater to hear the Symphony Orchestra of Augusta.  The kiddos danced and played to the classical tunes.

It's a lovely venue.

And I am a lucky momma. 

Best. Mother's Day. Ever.

boys and girls

These kids crack me up.  

Here Charlotte and Toby are modelling some pajama pants that I made them.  Charlotte's have pink and white stars and Toby's have pirate ships.  This dynamic duo can be unstoppable when they work together, but when they fight with each other, watch out!  I love seeing their relationship evolve as their individual personalities become more and more pronounced.

Toby is ever the engineer.  

We have these foam letters to play with in the tub.  Toby uses them to build interesting, and always symmetrical, towers and shapes on the tub wall.  Some of them have been very elaborate.  He will take anything he can find and use it as a building block.  I love seeing his ideas take shape.  Right now he is fixated on college.  He talks about going there every day.

Charlotte is the imagineer.

In this instance polar and lady bug were set up on a dinner date in her bedroom.  Charlotte comes up with elaborate play-acting scenarios with her brothers and her stuffed animals and can be very entertaining.  She also recently told us that when she grows up she wants to live in Paris and be a cook.  Guess we should start saving now for French culinary school?

 Even dress-up is like two sides of a coin around here.

Toby suits up in his Spiderman costume (over his swimsuit,) accessorized with a sword, shield, and a belt tied around his head.

Charlotte dresses as a princess and accessorizes with everything girly she can find.

I love their differences.  And I love that they find ways to play together while still being themselves.  I hope their special relationship continues throughout their lives.  :)

A Jakey update

Jacob is 8 1/2 months old now!!  If I haven't blogged in a while, it may be because this baby boy is keeping me quite busy. He is a speedy crawler, and a mischief maker.  He can also pull up to standing and is cruising around the coffee table everyday building up those muscles to take off running. 

Jacob is now self-feeding with little puffs, soft fruits and veggies (like bananas and peas,) and drinking from a bottle or sippy cup.  He is all about meal time and gets very cranky if you don't feed him fast enough or the spoonfuls are perceived as too skimpy.  

I like how his pinkie finger is raised in this picture- such good table manners.  ;)

One of his very favorite things right now is a tasty door stopper.  As soon as he hits the floor in the morning he makes a beeline to the nearest door stopper and either flicks it around to make a noise, or rips it off the wall and sticks it in his mouth.  I have a pile of them sitting on my nightstand right now.

He also has a taste for paperback fiction.  I've had the pleasure of fishing many book pages out of his slobbery jaws this week.  This is one subject that Rob and I disagree somewhat on- Rob thinks we should relocate things for the time being (I know this is traditional baby-proofing philosophy and would protect our books better.)  I prefer to leave things where they are (our every possession can't be out of children's reach) and work with Jake on a case by case basis... "no, no," take it away, relocate the baby, repeat.  We're doing a little bit of both.  

Jakey is still my cuddly Little Bear.  

He is such a happy boy.

I am so thankful for his sweet spirit in our family.