Hello and happy almost-New Year!
He un-decorates and re-decorates the bottom half of it at least once a day. And he has to show everyone who comes in the house how the lights plug in to make it pretty. Which usually means he looks at me and says "Daddy, plug it!" then once I've 'plugged it' he says "Preeeeettty." I've posted a video below of him decorating it when we first put it up. He didn't really like to hang the ornaments on the branches so much as just shove the ornaments into the tree. He also likes to put just about everything in the tree as an "ornament." Over the last few weeks we've found random Christmas decorations, books, the TV remote, his toys and more in the tree.
Before Christmas' every Christmas Eve. There was another tradition that went along with the story though, which was this: at the point when it said "Away to the window I flew like a flash, tore open the shutters and threw up the sash", all the kids in the family would make the loudest and most awful vomiting noise they could muster, as if they were "throwing up" the sash. This simultaneously ruined the moment and, in a strange way, somehow made it all the more endearing. Year after year we do this, no matter how old we all are.
He started about an hour before we were planning on leaving the house for the cabin then kept it coming every 20 minutes or so for the next several hours. Still confused on the timing of it all, he acted fine the entire next day until about 6 PM when he gave it another try. I kept telling him "Not yet! Wait for me to read the story at least!" but the kid refused to listen. In fact, after that night, he stayed cool for the rest of the weekend until this morning when I went to get him up for school and found him and his bed covered in...well, we'll just call it "the sash." And I don't know if it was just motherly empathizing, or confusion over the tradition as well*, but Angie joined in on the fun Saturday night too. Way to give 110% to the spirit of Christmas Tradition, honey!
We had a great turkey day. We spent the morning relaxing at home making food and having Patrick paint hand-print-turkeys. Then we spent the afternoon and evening with the Flowers over at the Hopkins' house where we ate a great Thanksgiving dinner. Patrick had a fun time terrorizing the dog (mostly on accident), pointing at and naming everything in their house and just being loud and silly with his aunts and uncles. 
toys or reading books he just walks around the house naming things and telling us the story of what last happened there. Which is another cool thing he's started doing lately. He's made the jump from just saying words to actually trying to put the narrative together around his day using the words he knows. So, he'll walk on the front porch where I just recently put our garland and lights up and say "Daddy...garland...lights...up high...plug it in...turn on...preeeetty." It's so fun listening to him recount his whole day and see what he remembers from it. We'll try to get some video of him chatting and post it. 
Angie has officially entered the third trimester which is very exciting. Madelyn's doing well and growing right on track. They actually said our due date may be about six days off which would put her being born in early March. We'll be painting her room this weekend and then finally getting her furniture out of our dining room and up into her room. 
Everyone is doing great. Carson and Katie are both healthy and seemed to be getting the rest they need and Brandon has finally stopped shaking with excitement.
be crazy around then. We had an awesome weekend to ourselves at the W hotel and did a lot of relaxing, talking without ever having to try 6 times to get a full sentence out before being interrupted and a lot of eating without having to clean up or apologize to a waiter for the food on the floor. I did have Angie throw her vegetables over the side of the table every so often just to make it feel a little more like home. While we were enjoying the time together, Patrick was with his Meme and Papa Joe and, as always, loving every second of it.
name and spelling of the name. More on that below). We dropped Patrick off in the morning with his Grandpa and Grandma Flowers and went back to our house to start the fun. We quickly realized that we had done absolutely NO planning at all for the day and still had to put a tarp down, bring the paint up from the basement, make sure we had rollers, etc. You think we wouldn't be this out of practice since we just did this for Patrick's room a couple years ago. In the end though, we got the whole room primed (it was a deep blue color before and now it'll be a light pink on 3 walls and a greenish/grayish/bluish color on the other wall), the ceiling painted and all the carpets in the house shampooed. While we were painting, Grandma and Grandpa took Patrick to the Chattahoochee Nature Center where he got to see turtles, bald eagles, beavers and, his current favorite, owls. He had a really fun time and the next day was still telling us about the animals (he woke up saying "whoo! whoo!" and "beafer").
birthday. It was nice to be with everyone including our friends Betsy and Travis who came in from North Carolina. We spent Saturday on a long hike (much longer than Matt had told us it would be. Abbie, make sure to remind him of that.) to see the Raven Cliff Falls. The hike was beautiful, the weather was perfect and Patrick enjoyed seeing everything from way up high in the backpack. We carried him the whole way in and then let him run around and climb on the rocks once we got to the falls. He also discovered moss and became fixated on trying to get it off the tree with a stick. He loved climbing the rocks though and sitting on them all by himself. One of our favorite things in life right now is seeing him be proud of himself and we got to see a lot of that while he was climbing on the rocks. It was very cute.
having their little girl, Carson Danielle, on December first! It's hard to believe it's only a week away and that by this time next week, they'll be parents of a little girl. We're really happy for both of them and can't wait to meet our new niece. Please say a prayer next Tuesday that everything goes well during delivery and a speedy recovery for Katie.
I mean, come on. Is that not the cutest fireman you've ever seen? I've seen a lot of firemen*, but I am completely powerless against this little guy.
We had a lot of fun on Halloween. As everyone here knows, it rained almost the entire day so it made for a very soggy trick-or-treat outing. While it was still raining pretty hard and we thought we might not be able to make it to any other houses, we figured we'd practice trick-or-treating at our own house. I took Patrick outside and Ang stayed inside with the candy. Then we told him to go "knock knock knock" on the door and when it opened say "Trick or treat!" and then he'd get a piece of candy. Patrick latched onto the word "piece" for some reason and just kept calling the candy "piece." So he'd go to the door, knock on it (while yelling "KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK") and then when Angie opened the door he'd just yell "PIECE!", and go straight for the candy. Once the rain calmed down we took him to a few other houses and had to explain at each one why he was screaming "piece" at them.
