London-osaur

Yes I'm a pathetic mom to my little girl. She has two dolls and a toy purple mini van to play with. Other than that its trains, cars, plastic cockroaches and ants, and the ever popular dinosaur toys. I keep saying I'm going to get her girl stuff, but its just not happening. Then the other day I realized how bad it's getting because instead of being able to put on a princess dress and dance down the hallway like little girls do, my sweet little girl turns the corner and growls at me wearing a dinosaur hat. This is her idea of "dress up".


I finally convinced her to take it off for a picture, but not for long. She was enjoying being a dinosaur. At least she has a love of shoes... and has recently decided she also wants to pick out her clothes to go with her shoes and socks. So I guess that's a good girlie thing to do, it just that now she looks homeless all the time.

S.O.C.K.S

My high school Spanish teacher taught us one day that if you would just spell out the word "socks" in English, you would be saying, "that's exactly it!" in Spanish. Although I've never really heard it used by a native, it does make grammatical sense. I'm sharing this with you because we've had a minor problem we've been trying to solve and you could say the solution is "socks" because literally the socks are "exactly it!"


After trying bad tasting nail polish, cayenne pepper, Tabasco sauce and anything you could put on a thumb to stop a child from putting it in his mouth, we finally went to the expensive semi-medical device. The Thum-Guard was our last hope and we have tried it 3 times unsuccesfully because this unremovable device was removed by our two-year-old every time we put it on him. Well, Monday morning he came to me and the poor thumb looked like it was about to fall off. He had sucked the finger nail almost right off. He asked me for a bandaid and my mind went straight to the Guard. I told him it was a bandaid and he wore it succesfully for two days since I medical-taped it to his hand. It was not coming off. But after two days his whole thumb looked like it was going to fall of from being in this humity and in a plastic prison for 2 days. So last night I taped a sock to his hand and he acted like it was totally normal. He slept just fine not having his thumb in his mouth and hasn't tried to take the sock off. He has told me his finger feels better and he doesn't need the bandaid anymore, but I just tell him its not better yet and he says okay, and keeps it on. The answer was in my drawer all along-- socks! I will continue to employ the Thum-Guard when he goes to school, church or out in public because it is much less noticeable than a giant sock taped to his wrist with green dinosaur tape. Now I just need to do my part and keep it up and maybe the habit will disappear and his poor teeth will start to have a fighting chance!

Despite the fact that Brad was out of town this year, we had a wonderful Halloween! It started with the traditional Jack-O-Lantern pancake breakfast:



We went to the Ward Halloween party where London's friend just happen to be dressed as a bee just like her! These two sweet little girls followed each other around all night so we called them "the swarm". (This little girl's name is Scarlet, so her mom and I have decided that it would be perfect if someday she and Rhett got married... think about it, Rhett and Scarlet!)


I got lucky this year. The boys all asked to be something I already had a costume to. I didn't even have to coax them. It was their choice! If it could only be this easy every year! I did learn that our Utah winter costumes aren't going to work here. It was almost 90 degrees and most of the other kids costumes were more appropriate for the heat. (Earlier I had black tights on London and had to remove them due to the heat. The other boys just had to deal with it.)
We were invited over to our friends house to watch the Florida football game, eat dinner, swim, go on a hay ride and trick-or-treat. In this picture Rock's hair is wet because we just went swimming on Halloween! Usually we're battling the snow and chill! The hay ride took the kids around the neighborhood to trick or treat. They had a great time!


If you're wondering just how crazy these gators are about their football, here's a pumpkin of Florida's Heisman winning QB, Tim Tebow:

I thought this one was cool too!
For all you Twilight fans (and Cat in the Hat fans :)
In the car on the way home the boys were chanting, "This was the best Halloween ever!" It made me smile. The only thing that would have made it better was to have their dad here. But they have each saved him his favorite candy so when he gets home he'll have plenty to snack on. And by the way, it was a perfect night to set the clocks back, the kids were so exhausted from all these activities that they definitely needed that extra hour. And what luck for me, they used it!