What goes around, comes around...

My mom gave me all of the awesome clothes that I wore as a baby. So, for her birthday, I put Emerson in one of the dresses and gave my mom a frame with her favorite daughter and favorite grand-daughter wearing the same dress, 30 years apart. Aren't we cute? :)

And she's up...

Hard to believe she's almost 9 months old! Em-monkey is taking her sweet time learning to crawl, which is FINE with me! She's up on all fours, rocks back and forth, and gets really frustrated that she can't go anywhere. I'm sure she'll be taking off any day now. But even though she's not crawling, she manages to wiggle her way around quite a bit to reach toys and get where she wants to be.

Time in the tub

Luke has been creating his own reading nook in our bathtub. It keeps him busy for at least an hour, which make us both happy :)

First Day!

First day of the 3's class! Lukie had a great week at pre-school. And didn't "whack" anyone with a dinosaur on the first day this year. Yea! We're making progress.

TMI?

WOW. Seems like it took Luke forever to get the concept of pooping on the potty. Nothing that I tried to motivate him with worked...until we made the potty chart. For some reason, I made this chart with 91 squares on it. What was I thinking? It's taken months to fill up! Every few spaces, Luke would land on toy or candy and get a small reward. But the final goal was to fill up the whole chart and receive a BIG TOY! Once he figured out that pooping on the potty is no big deal, he started working the system. He would poop out one tiny pebble of poop an hour so he could get as many stickers as possible. I finally had to put a sticker limit on how many he could earn in one day. I thought about cutting off a few rows, but I figured Luke would catch on. He's pretty smart and the potty chart became a goal for the whole family. We had to complete it.

Anyway, this week, he finally completed the monstrosity! Whew, that was a lot of work...



But it was worth it to get this awesome dinosaur fortress (courtesy of Craig's List...sweet!)



However, now he's informed me that he wants a dinosaur castle ("like the one kai has") for his next potty chart. Sorry buddy, you're just pooping for the sake of pooping now!

The Backstreet Boys are still together?

The answer is YES! You mean you didn't know? :)

Amanda and I went to our 4th BSB concert together and it was amazing as usual! We took a trip to Cincy with our boys, ate some deliciousness at the Montgomery Inn, and ditched our boys to go see BSB. Can you believe that JC and Adam chose to go see Scott Pilgrim over coming to the concert with us? Crazy, I know.

We were smooth criminals...

In August, we went to the Symphony at Conner Prairie with our friends. It was an MJ tribute! One of the first things JC and I bonded over was our love for Michael Jackson. I still remember his mom busting out home videos (BEFORE WE WERE EVEN DATING! Cheryl, what were you thinking?) of JC's 5th grade moonwalking skills. It must've worked, since he snagged me.

Anyway, the concert was awesome, thanks to James Delisco who impersonated MJ. And thanks to Kelly, who braved the MJ crazies and danced to thriller with me!

Family Fun!

When was the last time you saw something as cute as this?



We headed to Ben and Ari's (thanks to Groupon) and had a fun afternoon of miniature golfing, pizza, and arcade games!