thanksgiving.

it was so fun to have gramma & grampa visiting us this week! highlights included: reading together in the mornings, daytimes & nighttimes, showing them around the aquarium, exploring the incredible bentleyville display of lights, sampling our local fare at the duluth grill, hanging a new bird feeder, wiring some new lights into our dark hallway, preparing & enjoying thanksgiving dinner with ALL kj's grandparents at one table!, playing around the house & yard, and generally, having them at our house each morning when we woke up. favorite new foods of kj's after their visit: wheat germ, shredded wheat & oatmeal (nothing green to add to the list, unfortunately =P). thanks for coming to our house to play, gramma & grampa!

breakfast.

kj is a breakfast-lover. she loves to choose her breakfast menu, help prepare it, and most of all, gobble it up -- in two sittings! first breakfast is early with dad, then second course comes after mom wakes up. we haven't found many breakfast foods that kj will turn down, and oatmeal is certainly a regular favorite. she is her daddy's girl!! ;)

belly.

believe it or not, this is the only belly picture we've taken so far of mama + baby jj. shoot! not to worry, though. this kid isn't getting ignored... no, he wouldn't allow that! we have kicks, high-fives, and hiccups a-plenty in the belly-action department. it will be so fun to see how his personality emerges in the next many months...

mohawk.

who doesn't love a [semi-private] bubble bath where you can sport the ever-popular bubbly mohawk??

line-up.

any suggestions on how i coral this organizational bent & use it productively in our lives?? ;) ps, just to be clear, this was kj's doing, not her mommy's or daddy's... =P

slumber.

seems like we took so many photos of this girl sleeping peacefully as a new babe... i had to capture this sweet, quiet moment & prove that a nearly-two-year-old does sleep, too. even better than a newborn most days, if you can believe it. ;)

smarties.

like most kids on halloween night, kj came home with way too much candy. ironic for a kid who doesn't really like candy... the real treasure of trick-or-treating as we parents see it, though, is in the neighboring... i actually think kj would agree with that-- she had more fun traipsing from house to house than she did sampling her loot afterwards!

anyway, we did the traditional dump-sort-and-count of kj's candy when we arrived home. as daddy and i were introducing her to the wide variety of treats, we listed off our favorites and she repeated their names to us. she took this job of learning candy names so seriously! but we couldn't help cracking up when it came to the smarties...

for though kj's pronunciation is fairly good for her age, she still has trouble with several sounds, including "sm." her "sm" sound often gets transformed to an "f" sound. for example, smoothie becomes "foovie" and smelly feet becomes "felly feet". you can only guess, then, how smarties might come out -- "farties!" and thus, our serious & focused lesson on halloween candy had been reduced to hilarity. ;)