Springtime

I have been wanting to make a dress for Emily so I finally had some free time and was able to make this in about 1 1/2 hours. It was super simple and I am pretty happy with how it turned out. I had to adjust the straps as you can see in this picture they are pretty far out, but besides that it came out perfect.

We had a lot of fun splashing in the puddles. This was about the only good thing that came from all that rain we had a few weeks ago. Our basement leaking was the worst thing. But we got it all fixed and are back to normal now. Lets hope this rain stays away for a while.

Evan had his promotion ceremony (graduation) from preschool on Wednesday. We were so proud of him. He sang a bunch of songs and was very excited to see everyone he invited sitting in the audience. Off to Kindergarten (eeeeek!).

Happy 1st Birthday to Emily

Emily turned 1 year old on March 23rd. It has been a really fun and challenging year. She is an amazing little girl. She loves to smile and loves to make everyone else smile too! That is unless she is getting teeth. She has been having a lot of trouble with her teeth, mostly because she usually gets 3-4 at the same time-OUCH! She is walking really good already, and loves to chase Evan around. She tackles him to the ground and lays on top of him. :) For her birthday, I did a ladybug theme. Here are the cupcakes and her cake that I made, which I got the idea from my neighbor. They turned out super cute. She didn't actually eat much of her cake, just liked to smash it up and drop it all over the floor.

She loved opening presents. She loved ripping the paper off, and when it was clothes, she would hold them up and look at them. She's definitely a girl!!

Evan has been an amazing big brother, he loves Emily so much and takes really good care of her. He is starting kindergarten next year, which I am very excited and anxious about. he is excitedly awaiting his 5th birthday this summer, and is way into Lego's.

Yes we are still alive!!

Yes, we are still alive here. It has been really hard to find free time with the two kids. We had a really nice Christmas. We spent Christmas Eve at my sisters and had an awesome dinner and lots of fun opening gifts. Then Christmas day with Noel's family doing a lot of the same.

Evan had a Christmas concert at his preschool and he did amazing. He sang all the songs and did the sign language too. He is really enjoying preschool this year.

The kids got lots of fun gifts for Christmas. Here is Emily in her new chair which she loves to climb in and out all the time.

And Evan got his Battle Zhu Zhu pet which he has been talking about since our visit to his cousins house at Thanksgiving and they played with them the whole week.

Here is Emily all dressed up in her Santa dress with her new cousin Natalie and her other cousin Oliver.

Emily has started refusing baby food and only wants to feed herself, so we have been trying all kinds of new things. This is her with her first taste of blueberries. She loved them.

And finally, the week of Christmas while Noel was home, we got inspired to put a backsplash in our kitchen. We remodeled our kitchen about 4 years ago and never put one in. We found these amazing tiles at Lowe's and Noel knocked this out in a few hours. He is so amazing!!

Fall fun

We've had a crazy couple of months with lots of fun and lots of challenges. The challenges included Emily having a double ear infection that took two rounds of antibiotics to cure and her getting her first two teeth. Needless to say no one in our house got much sleep for the past two months!! But now everything is back to 'normal' and we are enjoying fall a whole bunch. Here are a few pics of the kids.

Here's Emily at the Family fun fest. She was riding on the tractor all by herself!!

And Evan had fun on the super long slides. He is getting so brave!!

We have been trying to hang out with one of our favorite cousins/nephew, Oliver. He is 7 weeks younger than Emily and oh so cute. Evan loves him so much he always carries around pictures of him when we are home.

I started this quilt last year and found some time to finish it this year to hang on our wall. I am very proud of it, but have to give some credit to my amazing neighbor who's idea it was to do the spider webs on the black part.

This is us at the annual Haunted Hay Ride put on by the Farmparks. Evan had a blast and didn't want to leave, and Emily even seemed to enjoy the hayride.

Summertime fun

Sorry, it has been so long since I've posted. I haven't had a lot of free time lately! So here are all the fun things we have been up to this summer:

We spent a day at the Memphis Kiddie Park out by the zoo, with our good friends Morgan and Brenda. The kids had a lot of fun, and even Mom got to ride on the roller coaster! As the kids were on the last ride it started to down poor and so we called it a day.

We have been going to the beach a bunch with the Grandmas and Evan got to ride on Daddy's sailboat for the first time! He did really well, was not scared at all and even helped with the Jib!

Grandpa has been rebuilding an old dragster and so Evan had to give it a try. Hopefully he will not have the Petschauer gene of wanting to be a racer!! (too dangerous, and expensive)

We also went to the farmparks on one of their free days and Evan got to milk a cow, he did great and was even able to get the milk to come out!!

Emily turned 5 months old last week. We started her on cereal and she loves it. Hopefully she will be as good of an eater as her brother, so far so good!! She can roll over and does it all the time in her bed, unfortunately, she doesn't like it for very long and then she gets upset. We are convinced she is getting some teeth: she is gnawing on everything, and just overall pretty cranky.

Evan starts preschool in two weeks he seems very excited about it. We are looking forward to enjoying the last few weeks of summer, there are still a lot of things we haven't done that are on our 'to do' list.

4 Years and 4 Months!

WOW, I cannot believe how fast my babies are growing up.

We celebrated Evan's 4th birthday with a fun Super WHY! party. I made some fun games, the kids had to find 'super letters' hidden in the yard and put them in the 'super computer' to spell out a 'super message', then we played bag toss where the kids had to get there bags into 'Storybook village'. And I even found the time this year to make his birthday cake again.

This year, Evan has done so many fun things and is getting so smart and creative. He attended preschool, played t-ball, spent lots of time with his grandma's, is learning to swim with a life vest on, getting really good at riding his bike, and growing taller and taller and taller!!

Emily just turned 4 months old. She is also growing a lot. She has started making all kinds of fun noises. She is super strong and can stand up on her own if we lean her up against the couch. She was 'walking' today in the yard with me holding her hands. She is still working on sitting up on her own, and is great at belly time. She is melting everyones hearts everywhere we go with her beautiful smile.

I absolutely love my babies and am really enjoying watching them grow and change and learn.

K'Nex

We had this great opportunity to try out some K'Nex products for free. Evan already has some K'Nex and loves to play with them. They allow him to be completely creative and are super easy to use. Evan received three of the Sesame Street K'Nex toys, the Kick it Elmo, Swim Time Ernie, and Cookie Monster's Basketball. Here are some of the pros and cons that we found with the toys.

PROS:

*Very easy for Evan to figure out (age appropriate). The first one he had to look at the instructions and needed some minor assistance to build it, the second one he built completely on his own with the instructions and by the third on he was able to build it and didn't even take the instructions out of the package.

*Fun and creative, they are meant to build one character, but you can switch it up and create all kinds of funny things (as you can see from the picture).

*Improves hand-eye coordination

*Encourages imaginative play

*Encourages thinking and problem solving skills

CONS:

*They were more like LEGO's than the K'Nex toys we are used to. Not many of the pieces connected like K'Nex, but more like LEGO's.

*It is almost impossible to get all the pieces back in the original container, so you have to find a new storage container for them.