Helping Hands

I decided to shampoo the carpets Saturday morning since we were going to be gone for most of the day giving the carpets time to dry so Jerry took the kids outside with him to clean up the outside. Since it was pretty wet and dirty out, we dressed them in their Carhartt's and hickory shirts. Matching kids is always and excuse for pictures!! The kids helped Jerry clean off the deck and put all the outdoor furniture away and then Trey came in for a nap. Abby stayed out to help cut up the tree that had fallen down and from what I hear she was a great helper. She loaded up her kitty wheelbarrow with lots of leaves and helped carry off some branches to the yard-waste container.

Sibling love!

Cookies and Pumpkins

Fall is fun. It's cookies and pumpkins, costumes and candy. I love it. I'm a baker at heart and one of my favorite holiday things to do (for any holiday) is make cookies for the kids and I to decorate. It's a cheap, easy and tasty project. I let Abby help with the cookie making, yes it's very messy and takes 8 times as long but she gets so excited about helping.

Abby helping mix the dough, Trey washing dishes (keeps him out of the way!)

Sprinkling flour

You can never have enough flour on your board

or on your face

Working hard. It was so cute, she'd roll out dough for a bit then put the recipe down in front of her and "read" it, while making comments. She's just like her mama!

Pre-frosting

Decorating time. I got smart this year and we used paint brushes to paint the frosting on. So much easier for little hands to do.

I even let Trey decorate his own

Taste-testing

Black frosting...

makes a purple tongue!!

They got to do more cookies when they had friends over!

Pumpkin Patch!

Farmer Trey

Feeding the chicken

Trey chased that poor chicken all over

I don't think the chickens were too excited about being fed one little kernel at a time.

In the balloon pumpkin

a smile??

perfect size

yum-yum. he kept calling them apples

so happy!

I got not one picture of the kids looking at the camera together...except this one! I guess if you're only going to get one it should be the family one :)

Real men don't wear shirts to clean pumpkins

2 jack-o-lanterns and a princess castle (looks more like a haunted house)

At least it's in order...

I haven't been blogging as much but that doesn't mean I haven't had stuff to write about. So here's a rundown of some of the latest Gardner happenings + oodles of pics.

Waiting for Dad to come in. He hears the garage door open and if he's upstairs he runs to the window to watch Jerry back the truck in. And yes, it's 5 pm and he's still in his jammies. Some days (lots of days) we don't get dressed.

It was Bumpa's birthday this month and Abby was very proud of the card she made and the envelope that she put together herself.

Grammies make the best listeners at story time.

Trey has become a little monkey, there's not much he can't climb on, including the coffee table

A lot of rain + a lot of wind = no more tree. I was pretty happy about it as I have wanted them to be cut down for awhile. They're pretty lilac trees but too big for where they are and we don't need privacy in the front. I hadn't told Jerry my plan to get rid of them since I figured he wouldn't have time to do it until spring but nature took care of it for me. Now I'm just waiting for the other one to bite it!

What to do on a rainy day?? Get out the toy stroller and let the kids push each other!

Trey has developed a love for his blankie now. He's about the same age Abby was when she got attached to one. This one was originally a gift for Abby when she was born but it's one of my faves so it was passed down to Trey.

Yep, he still likes washing dishes. Would do it all day, every day if I let him. Jerry's coffee mug has been VERY clean since that's the one thing I let him play with in the sink

I quit trying to keep him off the couch. I figure if he falls off and hurts himself it might be more effective than me telling him not to jump on it.

Playing cars in the kitchen. Abby takes the bucket of cars and sits on the carpet zooming the cars into Trey who tries his hardest to send them back to her. Once the bucket is emptied they collect all the cars and do it again.

Abby has been on a roll with funny comments lately. She is really into the word "disgusting" and uses it frequently for anything. She gets the tone right and the word but has no idea what it really means. I put Trey's big-boy bed together in his room and she went to see it and said "Oh Mommy, that is disgusting", even though she was excited about it. And the other day we were putting one of her puzzles together and here's our conversation:

Me: Abby, could you go turn the light on so I can see better?
Ab: Okay, that's a good idea. I have tiny eye galashes (i think she meant eye glasses) so I need the light on to see the pieces better.
Me: Uh-huh (holding in my giggles.) You have tiny eye-galashes?
Ab: Yeah. Maybe when I'm a grown-up I'll have bigger eye galashes. But right now I'm small so I have little eye-galashes. It's hard to see the pieces with little eye-galashes but I'll have big eye-galashes when I'm older.

Eye-galashes??? Where does she get this stuff from?! I was biting my cheek so hard to keep from laughing at her. She was so serious about her eye-galashes. I'm not sure what she was even talking about but it was darn funny. And speaking of puzzles, she is amazing at doing them. We have two 300 piece puzzles that have two sizes of pieces. Regular size ones for adults and a bit larger ones for kids that go together in the same puzzle. She and I can do each one in well under an hour and I don't give her any help with her pieces and she's usually done with hers before I get all mine done. I'm hoping she'll turn out to be an engineer or an architect or something one day. She has great spatial awareness.