Notes From an IPhone

No theme to this post other than a regular iphone dump.

The other day Norah found a bunch of bobby pins in my bathroom and asked me to give her fancy hair. I was totally impressed with myself.


We had a great evening carving pumpkins with the cousins. This is what you get after an evening of carving pumpkins with the cousins.

Really, can you ever get enough pictures of Louis' hair?

Every day I think crawling is imminent. Look how high he gets. He rocks on all fours like nobody's business. But then he flops and starts chewing the carpet. Oh well.

A little skeleton action.

Lou's crawling may suck, but his pincher grasp is out of this world. I give full credit to Reid and puffs.

Louis has hand-me-down Giants pj's from Caleb/Lucas. They are my favorite.

The other day at Amy's house I trimmed Lou's finger and toe nails. All was well until I got to the very last (pinky) finger. He jerked at the exact wrong time and I snipped the top layer of skin off of his finger. It bled. A lot. For a long time. At one point it crossed my mind he might need a stitch and I was going to have to explain to the ER that I mauled him with nail clippers. Obviously it stopped eventually and I think he's forgiven me. He cried so hard that he fell asleep in my lap while his finger was still gushing blood. That's trust, people.

We have a family history of being obsessed with Vicks Vapo-rub. My mom used to slather it on us when we were sick as kids and now I can't actually sleep at night without it. Norah has recently been introduced to the wonder that is Vicks and it appears as though the addiction has continued.

This was Norah's jack-o-lantern that she carved at her cousins' house. It was on the counter/bar in the kitchen and on Halloween night I went to change Lou in his room and returned to find this (those are plastic knives and forks). I like her style.

This past weekend we went up to see BVZ's new office and walk around the town square. His office is in an old historic building and I think it used to be a hotel at some point. Fabulous hardwood floors, exposed piping, brick walls. Very trendy and very cool.

We took the kids to an early dinner (4:45 pm. Sigh), at the popular Monument Cafe. Super fun vibe and great atmosphere. Food? Eh, not so good. Louis is really into menus.

Norah decided she would order for him (water and a biscuit).

He pounded the water and the biscuit. Please note the lack of any kind of high chair cover. High chair covers are for first children. Subsequent children love germs.

Norah had a handful of really rough days at school two weeks ago and she was crying a lot during the day. Mostly for Ruby, but I think she was just feeling overwhelmed by everything. She's been so great about adjusting to the move and the change in everything she's known up until this point that I knew there had to be a bit of a backlash at some point.

My approach to when she would be upset would be to empathize with her and tell her how I was really sad as well and how much I missed my friends too and that I totally understood how she felt. Then we would hug and talk about visiting our friends in December. I changed my approach a bit after her week of meltdowns and now we are focusing on how happy both our old and new friends make us and how Ruby would only want us to be happy and not sad. When she starts to feel sad about Ruby at school she goes and finds her friend Renee and thinks happy things about Ruby. When she gets sad about Ruby at home she puts on the Tinkerbell pj's Ruby gave her and thinks happy things about Ruby. So far it's working and last week she had a great, crying free, week at school.

After the first day of no crying she was so proud of herself that I wanted her to know how proud we were of how brave she was being. We went to Target and she got to pick out a movie. She picked Dumbo. Everyone warned me it was a bad choice because Dumbo is so sad. Eh, I know how tough she is. She loved it. She is mildly obsessed with it. She has a stuffed purple elephant that is Dumbo and her comfy Belle doll is now Dumbo's mom. Dumbo's mom gets locked in her closet every night because that's the "jail" and Dumbo gets to sleep in a special basket next to Norah's bed. She told me that if he doesn't sleep there he wakes up in the middle of the night and calls out, "Norah, Norah, where are you? I miss you!"

She tucks him in at night with one of Louie's old sleepers. I expect great things from this kid.

Flip Switch

My iphone camera has something that Norah calls the Flip Switch--basically you touch a place on the screen and the camera flips so that what you see is facing you instead of facing outwards (this is a terrible description and will basically make no sense unless you already know what I am talking about). The pictures have this cool grainy quality. Both kids are obsessed with it. Norah will tell me, "let's cuddle with the flip switch." Done and done.

Continuing a Tradition

I have never been that huge into the bar/club scene (shocking, I know), so even pre-kids BVZ and I were not big Halloween party goers. Instead, we would carefully select one or two delightfully scary movies (as in, read film critic reviews for weeks and stalk Netflix for the perfect ones. Ah, the good old days). Then we would make a traditional dinner of hot dogs and tater tots and eat the majority of the candy purchased for the trick or treaters.

By Norah's first Halloween, two important things had happened: 1) we had a new group of awesome baby friends, and 2) we lived on the "Halloween Street" in Belmont. As a result, the Halloween festivities were incredibly fun and went on for days. Halloween has easily become my all time favorite holiday. I wanted to establish similar traditions here in Texas, so we decided to have a big party.

Norah approved the idea and after waffling between Jessie, Sleeping Beauty, and a Chicken, she finally settled on wanting to be Princess Frostine from the board game Candyland (although she insists it is actually Princess Frosting....good luck trying to convince her otherwise). Lou was going to be Batman. Then Norah asked me to please, please, please be Lolly from Candyland and BVZ to be King Candy. We all couldn't be one theme and leave Louis to be Batman (I mean, the indignity of it all...talk about second child syndrome). So, Louis got assigned Mr. Mint and Norah strong armed Bubby into being Grandma Nutt.

The finished costume, complete with elbow length white gloves.

The dessert table. For the first time we have been able to have both a dining room and a kitchen table and I pretty much love everything about it.

Spider krispy treats:

Owl krispies:

Owl cupcakes (those are mini oreos as the eyes):

Platters of pumpkin, ghost and spider web sugar cookies:

Megan and Trevor brought a platter of eyeball donuts later on (white powdered sugar mini donuts with a m&m in the center and red frosting streaks...they were fantastic), but I somehow managed to not get a picture of them.

We had a run of the mill cheese plate (with crackers):


Fruit skewers:


The "Undead" Pizzas:


Mummy Dogs:


Evil Octopus Hummus and Squid Dip (spinach and artichoke dip....the monsters are bell peppers):


Worm Jello Cups:


Caramel covered snack mix. This was a huge hit. In fact, it almost didn't make it to the party because both BVZ and Bubby couldn't keep their hands out of it.

Then there was a wide variety of chips and crackers and veggies, etc. for the dips and cheeses.

We got a few new decorations this year, including:

The giant Jack-o-Lantern head.

A light up pumpkin.

This was put up so that people could put their heads behind it and take cute pictures. The stupid cat knocked it down before the party, BVZ moved it out of the way, and then I forgot about it. This is the only person who got her picture taken. Boo.

A light up spider web with giant plastic spiders in the center.

My Lolly costume basically consisted of a skirt and shirt I already owned and a giant lollipop scepter that Kiki helped me make the night before from the left over materials we used to make the magic wands at Norah's third birthday party.

This is the best family picture we got. I blame it on the photographer (Bubby), and the fact that BVZ and I are possibly the most un-photogenic people on the planet.


Amy and Mark showed up as Siegfred and Roy. Reid was their tiger. Words can never adequately describe how much I love them for doing this. Mark was wearing Amy's stretch pants. And some of her bronzer.

Grandma Nutt and the tiger.

Kiki flew in from Virginia just for the weekend. She was an enormous help with the party and just generally fun to have around. She was a raccoon. When asked why she picked raccoon she pretty much admitted it was so she could wear sweats to the party.


I had organized a few games for the kids to play, including ghost bowling:


Guess how many candy corns in the jar:

Pin the nose on the jack-o-lantern (not pictured), and shove your hands in a bowl of disgusting worms (spaghetti), eyeballs (grapes), bones (cinnamon sticks), and internal organs (beans) for a prize.

We ended up with a houseful of babies, toddler, pre-schoolers, and big kids, as well as 30+ adults. It was all kinds of fun. The rest of the pictures are in no real order but hopefully show how delightfully chaotic it all was.



















Things were winding down and SLB (my best friend since before kindergarten) and her husband Ben showed up (they were at a baby shower earlier in the day), in these outfits:

They went out and got Snooki and Pauly D wigs specifically for this kid's party. The rest of their costume was found in their own closet. They brought blush wine. They talked in Jersey accents the entire time. I love these two more than words can say.

All in all it was a great time and something I hope we do every year. Kiki was instrumental in helping me with all the food and decoration and costume prep. Amy made both the hummus and the artichoke dip. Bubby cleaned up after us the entire time (no easy feat, I assure you) and entertained babies. Parties are so much more fun to throw with that kind of help around.

We missed our California gang tremendously (I may or may not have cried a little in the Target parking lot the day before about it), and Halloween didn't seem quite the same without them. Maybe I could convince them to all fly out at the same time next year for the party? Any takers??