Christmas Decorating (and a birthday party yesterday!)

We decorated the house for Christmas today. Now I know why we've always set the tree up during nap time and not when the boys were up like we did today. . . YIKES!!! There's not a lot of my Christmas decorations I trust with a 2 and 4 year old. BUT they were able to help with their own little felt tree! They can do as they please with this one!

And here is Reese (shirtless, what a surprise!) arranging his Little People Nativity set. 

Then yesterday we were at Darrel's cousin Nicole's daughter, Victoria's 1st Birthday Party! Her brother Everett is a little younger than Clayton and they enjoy playing together. They loved to take turns on Tori's new riding toy!

Happy Thanksgiving

From the Branz Boys! Here are all their Turkey preschool projects.

Reese's turkeys:

Clayton IS a Turkey:

And Clayton made this with a foot print  and hand prints:

Rough housing with Daddy

This is from Wednesday. . . I'm not sure what led to them thinking they needed to strip down to just diaper/underwear, but they were having so much fun! Poor Reese kept falling off and bonking his head, but that didn't slow him down too much. You can even hear Clayton say once that he's gonna "take you down" to daddy.

33 Degrees, heat wave!

We finally made it outside to play for the first time in what feels like weeks!

Wrestling and Some Random Pictures

Here are just some random pictures I took these week! Most of them have been on facebook, but here there are for my non-facebook users :)


After the Middle School wrestling meet on Monday night. Dunno why I didn't just take video. . . it was so cute how they wrestled each other!

Then they helped clean Daddy's white board in his room before heading home!

I decided to take a picture before yelling at him for touching Mommy's sunglasses, because he's just too stinkin' cute

A train! Clayton the conductor, a coal car full of kitchen toys and a Reese/BryLee caboose!

Dancing (to Mannheim Steamroller) this afternoon

I don't know why he's so upset with such an awesome hair style!

Happy Birthday To Papa!

Papa Doug's birthday was today and I had Clayton make him a card. He's been doing really well with trying to write letters, so I gave him a marker, told him which letter to write next, and he was able to write Happy Birthday pretty recognizably. I'm so proud!

Happy Birthday

On the inside he drew a picture of Papa driving his tractor. You can see the large back wheel, the smaller front wheel (I'm guessing all the lines are the tread on the tires). He drew a steering wheel, and what must be a picture of Papa, but when I asked what he was doing at one point he said that he was making lots of hair. I said, well Papa doesn't have that much hair. . .  (Sorry, Papa! lol)

Papa driving his tractor

And on the back he signed his name. He does better with a line and smaller space, but the "n" is there above the "o." Also, the "y" is just two lines, that's a harder letter for him, but they haven't made it that far yet in preschool either, they are only on the letter J this week!

"Clayton"

We got to deliver it in person, but silly Clayton had decided that it was HIS and insisted on taking it home with us and wouldn't let Papa keep it. That's Ok.

We did get to have some birthday ice cream sandwiches though!

The County Fair

Yes that's right, I'm making a blog post about our trip to the York County Fair on July 31st. The boys had a lot of fun, but mommy was feeling so terrible with the morning sickness. I'm just glad I actually TOOK pictures and video even if I didn't blog about them! (Until now)

Petting the baby chicks at the petting zoo. (I heard that Reese also might have thrown a turtle at some point...... )

Watching the Antique tractors drive by

Riding on the rides at the midway!

And a little video collage for fun!

Preschool for Reese!

All last week Reese has been going to the little preschool program that Clayton attended last year at the high school. He goes for an hour (10:45 to 11:45) on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday for about a month. I'm sure there will be more posts to come about it. So far his favorite things are playing with PlayDoh, the turtle (Mr. Tittles) and the Fish. (There is actually a beta fish in a bowl and a turtle in an aquarium).  He is by far the youngest there not being 3 yet, but still fitting in OK I think. I was hoping that he would have more potty training progress at this point and hopefully this preschool setting will help, but he is still refusing to even try wearing pull ups. He will use the toilet pretty regularly but insists on wearing diapers.


Here he is walking into school on the first day (Monday, Nov. 3rd). He looks so tiny with that giant back pack on!

New Dishwasher

Well the Branz family had to get a new dishwasher, and it was quite the ordeal!

Last Sunday Daddy and Papa picked up the dishwasher (thankfully Darrel's cousin Nicole and her husband Austin had a dishwasher they didn't need and let us have for free!). They took the old one out and tried to get the new one in. Well it only sort of fit, but we were able to have it hooked up and functioning all week thankfully.

The boys of course needed to help figure out how to unhook it!

Finally got it out, and this is what the kitchen floor used to look like... yikes!

Then on Friday Grandpa Mark was able to come help get it hooked up properly and all the way in (it had been sticking out from the counter a few inches). So now it works and everything is great! The boys of course enjoyed his visit!

Helping putting away tools probably

Of course he took time to build an awesome Lincoln Logs house with Clayton!

Clayton played with it for a little bit, but it's a good think I took a picture of it when I did. . . 

Because THIS happened several seconds later! 

Combine Ride!

Last Sunday the boys got to visit the farm and ride on the combine with Daddy. Of course they had to climb up the ladder all by themselves. They sat in the combine with him for a good hour and a half before they wanted to ride in the tractor pulling the auger wagon with Papa. They are such good little farmers!

November 4, 2014

I took these pictures and made this collage to announce on Facebook and the Blog that I was pregnant with baby #3 back in March, but so sadly never got to share them at the time. Today was supposed to be that baby's due date, so as I sit and go back through those memories today because I wanted to share them now, I look and see that the date I took these pictures is March 2, 2014 - and what do you know, my rainbow baby is due March 2, 2015. So today this mommy has tears that are bittersweet, mourning what might have been but still feeling joy for what I have and what is to come.

It turned out too cute to never share!

Clayton's 4 Year old Pictures

The boys had their pictures taken at Penny's again on Saturday. We had a different photographer than we had all the other times, and they day wasn't planned ahead at all, very last minute.... The boys could tell and they were not on their best behavior. They were pretty goofy and didn't want to sit still for any nice pictures. There are maybe 2 or 3 decent ones, but nothing too exciting.

Here's the link to look at them (and possibly order any) if you want:
https://viewimages.jcpportraits.com/sharealbum/sharealbumlist?rndId=AgIFBwhPXg==&uId=BQUDBgRAUA==

And a few of the "best" ones:

He refused to hold the 4 so it wasn't backwards!

Being GOOF BALLS! (At least they're happy, right?)