Sitting in the swing, as only Emery can do it. She thinks she needs to be able to grab her feet and chew on them at all times.

I'm getting a little sentimental about leaving Thomasville. I really believe the move is going to be great for our family, but this is where both of our children were born so we've made a lot of memories here. When we go to the playground up the street, this is the view we have while we're pushing Kenton on the swings. There are lots of great parks in and around Xenia , but I'm going to miss this gorgeous old school building and the live oaks draped with Spanish moss.

Kenton had a playdate with his buddy Parker this morning. We talked beforehand about the fact that this is probably the last time he'll see Parker because we're moving. He didn't seem to be too upset by it, although he did act a little strange when we first got to the park, not wanting to go over to Parker and play where he was. He got over that and they had a great time, playing for a couple of hours. I think emotionally it was harder on Edward and me than on Kenton, because we were so concerned about how he might respond. He's definitely a little stressed by the upcoming move, but I think he's going to deal with it pretty well.

The temperatures were up in the 90s again today, so we decided to let Kenton experience the joy of playing in the sprinkler.

We should know by now to never, ever leave a toddler alone with anything that can be dumped out. Apparently mixed nuts are almost as much fun to play with as rocks. Given a few more minutes, he probably would have gone to get his dump trucks.

Kenton would probably have a hard time picking his favorite thing about going to Nana & Papaw's house. I think it would be a tie between playing in the basement and going to the creek. He got to do plenty of both on this visit.

We got to be in town for Uncle Ken's 30th birthday. As you can see from the picture, he celebrated the occasion by partying like a rock star. Or maybe he just stood out on the carport in the rain and blew bubbles with his nephew.

We had a good, but exhausting, trip to see Nana & Papaw and to find a place to live in Xenia. The kids really enjoyed the time with their grandparents. Edward and I really enjoy knowing that we will have a place to live to once we leave here. Here's Emy being spoiled by Papaw.

Don't they look like they're plotting something?

It's pretty hard to catch bubbles, but Kenton gave it his best shot.

I think this picture captures Kenton's personality as well as any one I've ever taken.

I took a ton of pictures of the kids while we were outside blowing bubbles tonight, and they're all great. This is one of my favorites of the two of them together. They sat in Kenton's bed for 20 minutes or so this afternoon and played together with some of his toys. I just love to see them interact. Emy is finally feeling better this evening and smiled and played and acted more like herself.

Emery playing with one of her favorite toys--a french fry box. Like most everything she grabs, she's holding it with both her hands and her feet. When she lays on her back and holds her bottle with her feet and hands, I can't help but think of the pictures you see from zoos of baby panda bears holding their bottles. She's been fussier than usual the last couple of days, and definitely seems under the weather this evening. I think she may need to make a trip to the doctor tomorrow.

Things are more than a little crazy around here right now with trying to get the house ready to sell and move, but Edward and Kenton took a little time this evening to go to the playground at the elementary school up the street. Kenton had a great time on the swings.

Granny Cardin, Aunt Brenda, and Aunt Betty are visiting us, and Kenton and Emery are enjoying it a great deal. They're both getting all the attention they can handle. They all had fun at the park yesterday afternoon.

Two of the three of us are looking at the camera. That's about as good as it ever gets!

After supper tonight, Kenton wanted to break out the Play-Doh. I agreed that Play-Doh sounded like fun, so the two of us played while Edward cleaned up the kitchen and vacuumed the living room. It takes a while to get ready to usethe Play-Doh because we have to put the plastic table cloth down, then we have to get out the big box of cookie cutters and all the other accessories, and only then can we actually get the bag of Play-Doh out.

Those are our freshly painted kitchen cabinet doors you see propped up behind the table. They look really great with the new coat of paint, and I'm guessing they'll look even better once we get them back on the cabinets.

Another picture of Em from her bath last night. Isn't she a cutie? She was really showing off for the camera in this one.

After a two-week hiatus, I'm finally putting up some new pictures! We've just been busy lately and I haven't gotten the camera out to take any pictures. Here's one of Kenton helping give Emery her bath tonight. Notice the fabulous new countertops and sink in our kitchen. We're quite happy with them!

We took some time away from yard work this afternoon to check out a big sale at the Carter's outlet that one of my coworkers let me know about yesterday. It was worth the trip. We got about 25 outfits for the kids for around $80! There was a lot better selection in the smaller sizes, so most of it was for Emery. We won't need to shop for her again for a year. She had a great time helping me take everything off the hangers.

It was the weekend of much yard work. Edward shopped, dug, planted, mulched, and watered a lot. The kids and I gave him moral support by standing around in the yard and watching. Kenton even dug in the dirt some.

The neighbors also worked on their yard this weekend and Kenton was really fascinated by their sprinkler. He stood and watched it for a good ten minutes. We may have to buy one just for the entertainment value.

Kenton got a Diego table and chairs this weekend. He didn't need it, but it had been marked down to $9 and he loves Diego and his mother is a sucker for a bargain, even if it's for something we don't need and have no space for. This is why Edward usually does the shopping.

It was pizza night at our house. That's homemade crust and homemade sauce--aren't you impressed? We love the bread machine and the slow-cooker! Kenton loves to help in the kitchen. I let him help a little with spreading the sauce, but I did most of the work since I didn't want stains on his clothes or mine. Adding the cheese and other toppings is his specialty, and his takes his work very seriously. He does quite a bit of taste-testing, too. Usually he eats more as we're cooking than he does at the table.

Look! It's the Em-ster Bunny!

Happy Easter! The Easter Bunny came to our house last night and left goodies for our kiddos. In the picture, Kenton is opening an egg and checking out the treats inside. He got granola! And some of the eggs had yogurt-covered raisins, too! We figures we'd take advantage of the fact that he doesn't know the Easter bunny is supposed to bring chocolate and jellybeans and marshmallow bunnies. And he really does love granola and yogurt-covered raisins. They're treats to him, because we don't eat them very often. He also got a Play-Doh set that has already been a huge hit, and a Candy Land gave that we haven't tried out yet but will before the day's over, I'm sure.

Em got a new rattle, some socks, and a couple of sleepers from the big bunny. She was mostly interested in chewing on the basket, though.

My camera has the capability to shoot short videos, so I finally decided to give it a try this evening. Here you have 21 seconds of poor quality video (and even worse shooting) of Emery showing off for the camera. Her new trick is blowing spit bubbles, so I was trying to get her doing that but she wasn't being terribly cooperative. We'll have to try this video thing out a little more and see if we can get any better at it.

It was hat day here at our house. Nana & Papaw brought Emery a cute little dress with a matching hat and she wore it for the first time today. Since she was getting fussed over for wearing a hat, Kenton decided he needed one too. So he got out the engineer's hat uncle Ken gave him and slapped it on his head. He thought he looked pretty cool in it, and I'm inclined to agree.

Since eating in the house required safety goggles (see the post below), Kenton and I decided to have a picnic lunch on the front porch yesterday.

Since the house has been a construction zone for the last few days, Kenton took the necessary safety precautions while eating breakfast on Sunday.

Nana and Papaw are visiting this weekend and helping us get some much-needed work done on our kitchen. Kenton, of course, wants to be in the middle of the action helping Papaw out. He got out his box of toy tools this evening and trotted into the kitchen and announced he was ready to help. Edward gave him a clean paintbrush and set him to work "painting" the cabinets, but that didn't last too long.

Emery spending some quality time on Nana's lap

They look just a little bit alike, don't they? And they both look an awful lot like their daddy, too. Although I'm still holding out some hope that Emery might resemble me...at least a little. The boo-boo on Kenton's chin came from going down the slide headfirst at the playground a couple of days ago. After he flew off the end of the slide and scooted his chin across the gravel, he decided to go with the traditional sitting-on-your-bottom approach to sliding for the rest of the day.

Isn't she cute?

Despite our sniffles, we decided to take advantage of the glorious springy weather today and go to a park in Tallahassee and then have supper out. Kenton was fussier than usual, but did enjoy the trip. He loves throwing things in the water and would have stood there and thrown gravel all day if we'd let him. Unfortunately for him, we don't share his fascination with throwing things so we insisted that he move on and check out the rest of the walking trail.

Kenton would walk for a couple of minutes, then start whining that he wanted to be carried. So we'd put him in the stroller and he'd be okay with that for about 20 seconds before he started whining to get out and walk again. He's obviously whining in this shot.

Em just cruised around the park in the stroller, taking in the sights and enjoying the day. Her brother could take a few lessons from her.

Kenton had a play date with his buddy Parker earlier in the week. They're usually a couple of wild monkeys when they get together, and this was no exception. They played with "gunk", played trains, and just ran wild and had a great time. When I came home for lunch, Kenton was worn out from his big morning.

Em can sit up for a few seconds by herself, but topples over pretty quickly. She's really liking the bumbo seat these days, though. She also got her first tooth this week. It broke through on Thursday morning, and she's working on several more. Between the teething and her cold, she's been doing some serious drooling lately.

Emery loves to chew on her toes, so tonight Kenton thought he'd offer his to her. She was amused. They've both have colds, so they have snotty noses in this picture but I think they're awfully cute anyway. The last two weeks have been a little rough--we've all been sick this week and last week Lucy had to have emergency surgery and spent four days at the doggie hospital. She's still recuperating but it starting to act much more like herself. We weren't sure she was going to make it for a while. Hopefully we'll all kick these colds in a couple of days and get back to normal around here!

Our boy sure does love to go to the park. Maybe one day we'll live somewhere with a yard big enough to have our own swingset and slide.

Em has recently discovered her feet and she's very fond of them. When she gets cranky, taking her socks off is usually a good way to improve her mood in a hurry. She spends a lot of time trying to get her feet in her mouth but isn't usually too successful. She spent about half an hour tonight rolling around on her play mat grabbing her feet and slapping at her toys and was so very cute.

He was running through the house wearing nothing but a diaper and some pink sequined bunny ears and yelling, "I'm a nudie bunny! I'm a nudie bunny!" He'll be so embarrassed by this picture one day.

For the last week or two, Kenton has been pretending to have birthday parties and Christmas parties, and all of his pretend parties have cake. He's been talking about cake a lot. So we decided to make the boy some real cupcakes this morning. We usually do a lot of cooking on the weekends anyway, so we're used to the kitchen being wrecked. However, letting Kenton help added a whole new layer of mess to our usual kitchen chaos. He was so impatient while they baked, but managed to survive the nearly 20 minutes until they were done, and then ate one as soon as they were cool enough to touch. He didn't even want to wait for frosting.

Chillin' in the beanbag chair, watching tv. Obviously Kenton was a little more into the show than Em. She seems to be learning than when the camera comes out, it's time to turn up the cute.

My husband would like me to point out that those are my shoes in the corner of the picture, sitting in the living room where they do not belong. The 2 1/2 year old in the house puts his shoes where they belong as soon as he takes them off, but the 35 year old is proving to be a little more difficult to train to clean up after herself. ;-)

Kenton's puppy bath towel is not only incredibly cute, it also matches our bathroom decor really well. He's been really into letters for the last couple of weeks and can consistently identify all upper case letters and most of the lower case ones. He's also been working very hard to learn the sounds they make and has most of them down pat. The vowels are still a little confusing sometimes, but he's picked up so much so fast. It's so amazing and so exciting to watch him learn. Tonight we went out to eat at Zaxby's and they have lots of decorative items hanging on the walls, including lots of signs. Kenton was checking them out and said to me, "The letters are just everywhere!"

Temps here are in the 70's today, but it has been a little chilly over the last week. Em didn't mind the cooler weather, since it gave her a reason to wear her super-cute winter hat when she was heading out on the town.

As I've mentioned before, Kenton sleeps with a lot of junk in his bed. A couple of nights ago, he wanted to take a pile of train cars with him, too. So I said yes and off he went. I had to laugh a few hours later when I opened the door to check on him and saw this. The first thing I thought was, "...while visions of train cars danced in his head..."

Kenton took his bucket along the other day when he was out for a walk. He was quite choosy about what treasures he chose to pick up and put in his bucket. Only the finest rocks, sticks, leaves, and pinecones would do. And then, just a half-block from home, he unceremoniously dumped it all on the sidewalk without a word, and carried the empty bucket home. We don't try to understand toddler logic.