Piggies and Paws

I co-hosted a Piggies and Paws party on Saturday. It was a lot of fun! The artist drove in from Fort Smith and was really great! Piggies and Paws is a company where they paint either the hand or the foot (or both) and turn it into a picture which you will have as a forever keepsake. They have some of the cutest prints to choose from! I think she had around 300 designs. One of my favorites was the handprint and it looked like a moose with lights around the antlers and it has "Merry Krismoose" written on it. So cute! The party was held at LR First Baptist. I reserved it from 9:00-11:00 so the kids could play and have a good time. Ross had a good time playing basketball.Almost there Ross!Daddy and Buddy posing for their picture! Holten wanted to try and skate, with his Grandmother's help. He ended up more like this than on his feet. :)He decided to stick with the wheelies. Alex even got the hang of the wheelies. He was a champ at going backwards!
Alex's turn to get his piggie painted! He did great with his piggies but not so much with his paws! There was yellow paint everywhere! Next up was Ross. He was quite a pro at it. They do art like this all the time at school. His piggies are ticklish!Even Daddy got his paw painted. This is an example of what they do with the prints. It is a surprise of what Ross and Alex got. I wish I'd gotten more pictures of everyone else there but I got started visiting and forgot about taking pictures. A side bar comment is that all the kids at the party were boys. It was a lively time!

BREAKING NEWS!!!

I'm a little late with this post but still wanted to share. If you read below you can see that on Monday Ross "used potty!"!!!! I couldn't have been more proud. ha He has successfully pottied once a day at school every day this week! We still have to work on multiple times a day and using the potty at home but hey, I'll take any progress I can get! He has shown zero interest in using the potty except to flush it so when we found out his activities on Monday I'm surprised everyone couldn't hear us singing his praises!!! Hopefully the next breaking news will be that he's going twice a day! Better yet, and dare I say, 3 times a day?!? Goodness, there I've probably jinxed it. :)

Running the bases!

We went to another Travs game on Sunday. The weather was PERFECT!!!! Not long after we got there we tracked down Shelley to get a picture. Ross was really excited. He also looked for Shelley again before we left but Shelley had just gone "night-night". Papa and Granny also went! We got there late so about the first 50% of the game we spent in the Kids' Zone and the last 50% we watched the game (but only b/c they close the Kids' Zone after the 7th inning). Since we it was an early game we actually stayed for the end and Ross got to run the bases! He's still talking about it and in fact the "Pastor" specifically had his teachers write about Ross' great day at chapel yesterday b/c he was so excited to talk about his baseball game!

...and they're off! headed to 2nd base! ...still headed for 2nd. Ross took a minute to figure out what exactly was going on. Now he's serious! He even lost his hat b/c he was running so fast! Here they've just rounded 3rd base....and they're HOME! Ross ran so fast and hard he was tired!Look at that messed up hair from running so fast!!It was a good day! Love making memories!

Family photo day!

On Saturday we had family pictures taken. We had a super early appt @ 7:30. It worked out perfectly for us b/c Ross is quite the morning person. While I was getting ready he saw me put on a necklace and just had to have one as well. He also wanted a jewelry box. A few days ago he wanted to hold my "money" which is actually my American Express so I had to find him some "money". His is an old Blockbuster card and he is beyond thrilled! You can see below he is putting it in his pocket.Once we finished pictures we went to Murfreesboro to Granny. As I've written before Ross loves flowers. He had a good time smelling the magnolia tree.I got a picture of me and Ross. Notice he has my sunglasses upside down.Below are the first sneak peeks we've gotten! So excited to see the rest b/c I just love these two pictures. I also can't say enough about the photographer! She was fantastic and so much fun to work with. Check our her webpage!http://www.preservedphoto.com/

A few videos to share

I got a few videos of Ross pointing out his letters and singing ABCs. He recently starting trying to do sign language while singing the ABCs so you can kind of see him do that in the video. They sign to the ABC song on a Barney episode and Ross has picked it up. In the videos he only does it on part of the song but often he'll 'sign' through the entire ABC song. It is priceless!

Happy Mother's Day!

We had a great Mother's Day and hope everyone else did too! I asked Daddy to try and get a picture of me and Ross and the results are below. Daddy isn't used to taking pictures. We do have something to keep as memories for the day, which is better than we got last year. :o) Once again my brother also took some pictures of the activities for the rest of the day so I'll have to work at getting those from him.

Quite the Picasso

On Saturday Papa and Granny stopped by to visit for a little while. Ross wanted to paint them a picture. Granny was deemed to be the assistant. She gave him the colors as he requested. The finished product! I just love his abstract art! If anyone wants to study under Ross just give me a call. I think he'd be a great teacher. He can splatter paint like no other!On Sunday we painted again. He started out painting an abstract and then he saw me painting with the water colors and decided he wanted to give that a try. Only he didn't much like the water colors and wanted to use the other paints.He wanted me to make brown b/c he saw it as a water color option. Luckily his Mommy is quite good and mixing just enough of this and that to make the most beautiful brown you've ever seen! Perhaps he'll let me be his assistant for many years to come.I found this great water color tablet that the Melissa and Doug brand sale. It has the paint on top of the paper and you just wet your brush and go! Once the painting if finished you cut the paint part off and you've got a beautiful picture and you don't have to worry about anything else.

Storms!

This blog is a little late. I pray we are done with these awful storms for a while! Ross and I are quite sick of them. The first round of storms Ross and I were home alone b/c Monday night is a class night. Once it got to be close to Ross' bedtime he announced he was getting in Mommy's bed and since I wanted to watch the weather I didn't argue. I had the view of the TV. Ross had the view of Netflix on my iPhone. A win! win! situation if you ask either of us. (Though b/c of all these storms and Netflix watching I'm going to go over my data package, but oh so worth it!)This isn't the best pic but I love it. Ross' expression cracks me up. You can totally read his thoughts here. I imagine he was thinking, Please Lord don't let me have inherited her crazy gene! Cammack was hit pretty good with that round of storms. A lot of huge trees were uprooted. When we got home on Tuesday (early to beat the 2nd round of storms) our neighbor who had lost 3 big trees was having them removed. It was such a cool thing to watch. They backed this huge crane into her side yard and the work began.Huge sections of the trees were chained up to the crane and then the crane would swing them across the top of the house to the street. I would hate to be the person responsible for securing the chain.Now there is a huge opening behind her house for sunlight to break through and always a glare right into our living room. It is so weird to see all the sunlight behind her house now.Directly behind our house was more tree work. This man was way up in the tree cutting with a chainsaw. It was pretty cool to watch also. This tree is no longer there either.We finally got to enjoy the park yesterday! The first time in weeks b/c of all the storms and rain. Quite thankful that we didn't have any damage and we survived spending 30+ minutes in the super tiny closet on Monday night as well. :)