Pumpkins, Ponies & Pals

fashion forward

Why yes, those are bras hanging from her neck.

tunnel time

Rainy day fun with a cardboard box!

Coco had to go first to make sure it was safe

tumbling

T had her 1st tumbling class down at the park district this morning. I signed her up with the expectation that she would burn off some energy over the colder months and she sure did that.
She was everywhere and on everything and hugging everyone! She really does have an issue with respecting other kids' personal space. We are working on it.
Really, at what age do they sit nicely and listen? When do they start to follow directions? When?! Will that day ever come?

She did have a great time and at least she wasn't the only kid under age 2 running amok.

On a side note, the class was a little odd. The instructor was like 75 yrs old and could still do the splits. I, on the other hand, can barely touch my knees.
She kept playing this weird circus music on the CD player but her CD kept skipping...over and over and over....it was a bit much.

Here's to next week!

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autumn

Book Meme

Apparently, the average American has read 6 of the following books. How many have you read?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -I have read most, but not all
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen
69Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

The ones I've read are in bold :)

1. I dance...alot. Never in public (unless drinks are involved) but I love to dance around the house and in the car. I love to make up moves. I'm not very good and it totally embarrasses Ryan.



2. I embarrass easily. Everything embarrasses me and I even get embarrassed for other people. For example, I love the show Curb Your Enthusiasm, but I have a hard time making it through an episode without turning the channel or hiding my head under a pillow.



3. I am scared of the phone. If it rings and I don't know who it is, I won't answer it. I have been this way since I was a kid. I also loathe calling people (ordering pizza, making appointments, you name it) I become a little panicked!



4. I am obsessed with picking my dogs' eye boogies. I know it must be bad because now T will try to stick her fingers in the dogs' eyes :)



5. I cry...alot. I've cried at just about every movie I've seen. I also cry at commercials. That Frontline commercial with the puppies at summer camp? Forget about it. The Invisible Fence commercial where people are looking for their lost dogs? I am crying just thinking about it! And once I start, I can't stop!

6. I have to eat the crusts off of sandwiches first.

7. Speaking of sandwiches...I absolutely LOVE PB & J!!! I seriously eat one daily...if not twice a day. Sometimes, I will make triple decker PB & J....yum!

I tag everyone who hasn't yet been tagged!

Too funny

What is it about this guy?

Elmo? Really? Personally, Grover has always been my favorite...Elmo, not so much. I don't hate him....I just don't particularly enjoy him.

So, you can imagine my dismay when he appeared on the TV (as he always does) when we take a trip to Sesame Street and T yelled "ELMO! ELMO! ELMO!" and proceeded to "hug" the TV.

Who teaches them these things?

I always ignore Elmo when he is on, always careful not to draw any attention to him, and I always play up the other characters, such as my friend Grover.

So, how come when we swung by the store to pick up diapers "someone" again started yelling his
name? She had spotted a pair of slippers in his likeness.
And when we got home and she was in the bathroom washing her hands, "ELMO!".

I guess I failed to notice that he and others were on her toothbrush.

It's as if she's become an Elmo addict overnight!

I am holding my ground, no Elmo is to intentionally enter our house:)

http://www.redroom.com/blog/tim-wise/this-your-nation-white-privilege-updated

I scored an abysmal 27% on this game. Granted, it was my 1st time. I'm working on it :)

Update

Our tubby times are pretty much back to normal-thanks to all who gave suggestions!!!

We have permanently moved them to the upstairs bathroom and I only had to get in the tub with her 2 or so times. So far so good :)

She is so funny-the upstairs bathroom is the newly remodeled one and every time she goes in there she points to the floor and to the walls and says "Nice, niiiiiiice!"

Bummer of a week....

and it's only Wednesday!

On Monday we went to the children's museum because the weather was so crummy and on our way home we were broadsided by a very old couple in a very large Mercedes....going very slow.

I saw it happening but couldn't do anything. This woman was like 90 yrs old and was sitting at a red light. We were just crossing the intersection (slowly because of construction traffic) and I see the woman start to pull out, stop and then continue to slowly roll into us! Our light was still green and hers was still very red. She basically tapped us-thank God because it was on T's side just behind her door. No damage except a tiny scrape on my wheel and thankfully, no injuries. The woman was a huge pain in my ass but I was on my best behavior and was nice.

Fast forward to yesterday. We are at Caribou with friends, I am enjoying my pumpkin latte and T is enjoying some banana bread & playing with toys. Suddenly, she decides it's time to leave and heads for the door. I get up, grab onto her hand & we start to walk back to our seat. She walks about 1/2 way with me & then decides she's not going any further. She proceeds to throw herself to the ground and I'm still holding her hand.....yup, dislocated elbow...again. This time I knew what it was so I didn't panic. We headed over to the doctor and he fixed her right up. While we were there, a nurse that I had never seen before kept commenting on how cute T is. Yes, she is cute and a comment or 2 is fine but this woman wouldn't stop!

It started with "Are you the mother?" to which I responded "Yes, I am THE mother" and went on to "she's so cute", "oh my, look how cute!", "She has such cute hair!", "Oh my God, I can't believe how cute!". And on and on and on. All this while my child is screaming in pain.

Seriously?!