Saturday, October 31, 2009

Pre-Halloween Fun

Tonight is Halloween but it's looking like we may not get to do a lot of trick-or-treating due to the rain. We have had fun this last week getting ready for Halloween though. Last weekend, Patrick and I went out on the driveway and carved our pumpkin. I expected him to last a few minutes then get bored but he ended up loving the entire process. He was a big help in getting the "gook" (his word for it) out of the pumpkin.

He also found out that pumpkin gook is very slippery and by the end of the carving he was covered in it from his waste down after slipping and falling in it over and over.

At the end of it, he was excited to see a face on the pumpkin and because it had a face, it needed to be kissed...several times.

Despite attaching a personality to the pumpkin because of the face, he still tried to eat the insides. Judging by his expression, I think Patrick found out why we don't eat the inside of our pumpkins.


Today, we were going to let Patrick have a pumpkin cupcake for dessert in celebration but he spotted them early and was determined to have them before night. So, we let him have the giant pumpkin cupcake for a snack. He of course made a big orange frosting mess of himself and everything around him - as he should. Here are a few pictures of the fun:

Welcoming the cupcake with open arms. He looks so inviting and happy to see it.

Diggin' in.

He looks so angry!


Just burped after finishing the cupcake off. At least he was polite and covered his mouth.

So hopefully we'll be able to go out tonight at least to a couple houses. Patrick is going as a fireman instead of the originally planned lion (he wouldn't keep the hood of the costume on for more than a minute). I put up a photo album for Halloween 09 with a few more pictures from the pumpkin carving. We'll also be putting the pictures we take tonight up there. You can find the album here.

Hope everyone has a good, safe and dry night!

Monday, October 19, 2009

This Looks Promising

Yesterday was Aunt Anna's twentieth birthday (crazy). We had planned to have a combo birthday party for Angie and Anna at Grandpa and Grandma Flowers' house yesterday afternoon. Sadly, Ang was feeling terrible yesterday and had to stay home so she could rest. But, Patrick and I still went to the party and returned with a very welcomed cake and some of Grandma Flowers' awesome lasagna.

Before the party, Aunt Katie had requested that we bring the sonogram video over so the whole family could watch it. Not wanting to disappoint (and happy to use any excuse to watch the video of my baby girl) I brought the video. While we were watching the video, we told Patrick that it was his baby sister on the TV. Patrick went to the TV, put his little hand on it and said "baby", and then tried to hug the baby and give her a kiss. Once he knew it was the baby on the TV, he had to touch it every time he walked by it. Luckily, Uncle Jonathan snapped a picture of it one of the times.


So far, he and baby girl are off to a good start.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Zoo Trip

Last weekend we went to the zoo with our good friends, the Barkers, and their two kids, Andrew and Jordan. Luckily the weather held up this time and it was a beautiful day. All the kids had a great time and we had a really fun time watching them enjoy it.

Patrick's favorite part was the petting zoo where they had goats, pigs and sheep for the kids to watch, touch and generally follow around. Patrick has learned by teasing Roxy that one way to get an animal to move is to go up behind it and hit its tail. He tried this MANY times in the petting zoo as you'll see in the pictures.

He was pretty excited everywhere we went in the zoo because he's seen all of these animals in the books we read and thought it was great to see them in real life. As you can tell from the pictures, his pointing finger got a good workout as he tried to show us everything he saw. Here's a slideshow of some of the pictures we took:

Thursday, October 8, 2009

It's a Girl!

Well, the title of the post kind of says it all. Today Angie and Patrick and I visited the OB where Ang had a sonogram done that very clearly revealed our bun in the oven is a little baby girl! Obviously, we're both ecstatic and can't wait to meet our daughter (...that's really fun to say).

The sonogram was very cool, as our little girl was active and seemed to be trying to put her hands in her mouth. The doctor said everything looks great, she has a healthy heart beat, is measuring well and is already about 12 ounces; which puts her in the sixty-fourth percentile.

We have the whole video recorded onto a VHS (!!1992!!) so I'm going to try to convert that into a digital format that I can post on here. We also have a few pictures that we'll scan in and see if they look like anything. If they do, I'll post those up here as well.

In lieu of a video or pictures of the new baby, I'm going to post the pictures from when we told our families we were pregnant with #2. Here's how it went down...

We started with Grandma and Grandpa Flowers. They came over for dinner one night and right as they were about to leave we told them we had taken some cute pictures of Patrick earlier that day in the wagon they gave him. We showed them a series of three or four pictures and ended it with this one:


Of course, they were surprised and happy and mad that I waited till they were about to leave to show them the pictures. Then we had to devise a plan to get the rest of our family together to tell them. More on that in a minute though.

Next up was the Suskays. We were all going to Ocean Isle for the annual trip so we thought it would be a perfect time to tell them. One night as we were finishing dinner I told everybody I wanted to get a picture of the whole group together. They all posed and I said "1...2...everybody say "Angie and Toby are pregnant again!..." and then started taking pictures. It was great. We got everyone's reactions on film and it's hilarious to see the order of who catches on the quickest. Before I show the series of pictures, I'd like to point out in advance Aunt Abbie's face. It's priceless. It remains the same for the first several pictures while everyone else around her reacts. The first thing she said when she saw the pictures afterwards was "Oh my gosh! That's not how I felt!" Perfect. Here they are...








Those seriously never get old to me.

Once we were back from the beach, Grandma and Grandpa Flowers helped us hatch a plot to get all the siblings together. They told everyone we were having a back to school dinner and dessert like we used to do when we were little. It was a tradition in our house that every summer right before we went back to school, my mom would bake a cake and we would all go out on the back porch and eat it with our hands. Kind of a last hurrah before we all took the bus back to serious town.

So, we all got together and when it was cake eatin' time we pulled the same ol' trick since it had worked so well the first time and got everyone together for a picture. Apparently I mumbled though and Brandon and Jonathan thought I said "Angie and Toby aren't pregnant again!" Which isn't so exciting*. Thus, their reactions are a bit lackluster. But Anna and Katie and Tom are all fun to watch. Here they are...








And that was that.



*Actually, in retrospect, that's hysterical that they thought I would announce that and trying to imagine what was going through their minds is very funny to me.

Monday, October 5, 2009

Angie's Birthday and Fall Festival

Hello again! We had planned on posting some pictures from the zoo a few weeks back but ol' Mother Nature must have known the animals were going to be lame that day because she poured a bunch of rain on us that forced us to postpone our zoo trip. Ol' Mother Nature must have also known that we wanted to sit in traffic for hours and have our ceiling ruined right above our front door, because she went right from squashing the zoo trip to flooding most of the state and testing how water proof our roof is. Test results: 90%. Which is good because that means our roof got an 'A' but bad because that means 10% failed and started leaking. But that's the kind of teacher Mother Nature is. She throws a pop quiz on a Monday afternoon and even when most of your house doesn't leak, she still makes you file a claim with your insurance company. I think I'm mixing my metaphors now.

Anyway, this last weekend we celebrated Angie's birthday with the Suskays up at the cabin. And on Saturday we went to the John C Campbell Folk School Fall Festival (or the JCCFSFF as I never referred to it even once). We had a lot of fun and saw tons of crafts and handmade whatnots. Patrick also got to experience a lot of firsts at the festival too.

Here are just a few:
  • First pony ride
  • First (but hopefully not last) encounter with an alpaca
  • First funnel cake
  • First fried cherry pie
  • First drum circle
  • First time mistaking a dog for a lion and roaring at it every time he saw it
  • First clogging show
  • First opportunity to catch whatever diseases you would get by touching horses then immediately putting your whole hand in your mouth
The highlights were definitely the pony ride, the alpacas and the drum circle. Patrick wasn't so sure about the pony at first but warmed up to it after a lap or two. I'm actually not even sure he realized he was on one until after the first lap.

Then there were the alpacas. For those of you that don't know what an alpaca is, it's a cross-breed of a llama and a Jonas Brother. I saw it on National Geographic so I KNOW IT'S TRUE. Also, this picture proves it:

Patrick spent a lot of his time near them trying to figure out if they were a sheep, a horse, a big dog or something else entirely. Sadly, alpacas are really shy and tried to stay as far away from us as possible so we didn't get to touch them.

We ended the festival with the drum circle. Angie recorded a few minutes of a Sesame Street the other week that has a "drum school" on it and Patrick has fallen in love with it. Every day he picks up my little hand drum, walks it to the middle of the room and points at the TV and asks for drum school. So we were pretty excited about him getting to see a drum circle in real life with a bunch of drums he could bang on. When we first arrived it was more of a drum triangle with just a few adults. But once we got closer they invited us into the group and then more kids started showing up. They had a few extra drums that Patrick got to bang on and some tambourines he could play too. He had a great time and it was a good way to end the day. Needless to say, he slept the whole way back to the cabin.

In Baby Number 2 News, we'll find out the gender this Thursday! Which will be great because then we can finally stop calling the baby "Baby #2" and refer to it by its real name. We're really excited to find out if this will be a boy or a girl. We've been rearranging the house and playing room-function-musical-chairs as we turn the guest room into a nursery and the drum room into an office and our garage into a dump. Just for now though. That'll get cleaned up in a couple weeks.

As usual, there are far too many pictures to work into the post so here are a few more from the weekend and then a slideshow. As always, if you'd rather just go straight to the picture gallery, you can click right here. There are some really cute ones of Patrick getting into the cupcakes, showing us the moon he found, dancing to the cloggers and more.



The Group.


Patrick taking Bo for a "walk"


Patrick's gotten very proud of his fork skills lately. He did this with every bite he took that meal.

Drum circle.