oh Christmas tree....

 The girls running around looking for the perfect tree.

 I let the girls decorate the tree and I didn't even "fix" it when they were finished. So I am learning to let go and my husband when say that it is about time too. haha

What a pretty tree and they got it all done while Brooke was taking her nap so there was no one ripping anything off.

Oh the things we learn at school. Trust me I didn't teach them this...weirdos!

Working for retirement

So Paul and I have been talking about our retirement the last few years and what it is we want to do when we retire. As you can gather from the picture we would like to buy a sailboat and learn to sail so we can travel by boat around the world. The reason for posting about this now is that we have to take some steps to make this dream a reality. So this Christmas we have toned it down a lot from the past years when it comes to the presents. I had a goal to only buy the girls 4 gifts a piece and I came really close. Also Paul and I have decided to not buy presents for each other. But with this being our first year of doing this we cheated and bought 1 small gift for each other (I am talking under $30). The amazing thing about this is that Christmas really doesn't feel any different. We are still making the treats, seeing the Christmas lights and all the other fun activities that we have done in years past. I am glad to know that our Christmas spirit hasn't changed with limited amount of money that we are willing to spend this year.
Well cutting back on Christmas is only one small step. We have cut back on our living expenses, limiting all the extras. We will not be buying a new car anytime soon, we shop with a grocery list (it is amazing the difference in the price when you shop with a list rather then just going through and buying whatever looks good!) and we are looking into some investments that will help secure our future. There are times when this is hard and I want to buy things that aren't on sale or name brand things but I need to force myself to keep thinking about our future. Don't get me wrong this is something that we have been talking about for years but haven't really started doing until this last year. Also I love being able to stay home with Brooke but I have decided that the sooner I get back to work the better for our retirement and the sooner we can retire. So I will be looking for something that I can do and still have Brooke with me. Once Brooke starts school then I will get back into the work force full time. I know there will be sacrifices that will be hard for me but it will be well worth it to have years of Paul and I just enjoying our time together. I will also love the freedom of going to see my kids and their families and not worry about taking time off work. This is our current plan for our future and I am hoping with the steps that we have taken so far and the steps we are going to take that our dreams do indeed be come our realities.

The little nugget....

 My Brooke is such a happy, busy and full of fun baby. We had her 9 month dr. appointment and she was 95% in height and 90% in weight...so she is healthy!

 She loves blankets and pillows. For fun I cover the living room floor with blankets and pillows and put Brooke in the middle of it. Every time I do this she gets the biggest smile on her face and just rolls around wrapping and unwrapping herself in the blankets.

 We have started eating as a family now. Depending on the meal of course Brooke is now eating real food. She loves it and it is helping her sleep through the night.
 I know this isn't probably very good for her but this is how Brooke watches TV when she really likes what is on. She loves Super Why on PBS and will stand like this for the full half hour. I have tried to sit with her on the floor but she won't have anything to do with that. Oh well.

Right now Brooke is crawling all over and is getting ready to start walking. The last couple of days she has started to stand up from a sitting position all by herself. We only understand a couple of her words but she loves to talk and she jibber jabbers all the time. She loves to follow her sisters around and gets really mad when they close their doors so she can't get in their rooms. At the same time Natalie tends to treat Brooke like her baby and that she knows what is best for. I do love that Natalie is so involved with Brooke that it is very helpful to me at times. Katelyn just loves to play with her and get her going. Brooke will scream and then Kate will scream and Brooke sees this as a game and keeps screaming and Kate would not be Kate if she didn't keep yelling back. This could happen at any time in the day. We love this little nugget and are so glad that she is a member of our family.

School pictures

 These are the girl's school pictures and for some reason I can't get Kate's picture to rotate the right way. Its not in this position on my camera but it turns it this way when I upload it....oh well. I think they turned out OK. I told Natalie that she doesn't have her glasses on and she told me that's OK mom I will have lots of pictures with glasses on. haha Yes you will....at least until you can get contacts. Kate's hair is a little bit of a disaster but I didn't expect anything less. She is such a ball of energy that I am sure when she gets around her friends they just run all over. We have our parent teacher conferences next week and I am excited to see how the girls are doing.

Ready for earrings

 Natalie was so excited to get her ears pierced that she jumped in the chair and never once looked at me with a look of being nervous. She wanted to get Hello Kitty earrings but I wasn't set on having those for six weeks so she got blue balls instead. I told her after the six weeks is up and she can change out her earrings then we will come back and get a pair of Hello Kitty ones.

We went will Natalie's cousin Taylor but she got scared and didn't get hers done. We tried to have Natalie go first and I told Natalie that she needed to be brave to make it easier for Taylor but it didn't work....Taylor just wasn't ready. I went up to Natalie after it was done and I asked her if she was OK and her reply was funny. She said "Mom I wanted to cry a little bit but I didn't, I just sucked it up." Then later she told me that it was that bad and didn't hardly hurt at all. No drama with this kid...yet!

The witch, the cat and the pumpkin....

 We had a great Halloween this year. Natalie wanted to be a scary witch and wanted the makeup for it. I gave it my best try and she seemed to be pleased with it (even though it looks nothing like witch makeup). Katelyn wanted to be Natalie's black cat so naturally Brooke was a pumpkin.

 The girls were so excited to get going that they took off and I couldn't keep up and take pictures at the same time. haha

 This is the girls entering a haunted house that was just up the street from us. The house that put it on went all out on decorating their yard and trying to make this fun for our neighborhood. As the kids go through they are suppose to say chicken out loud so the people inside the haunted house won't jump out and scare the kids. Well when Paul took our kids in there was a mix up and a bunch of people got clumped together. Some were older kids that wanted to be scared and some were younger that didn't. So they ended up scaring the whole group. When ever someone would jump out and scare Natalie she would yell in their face "STOP SCARING ME!". Katelyn of course did pretty good but lost it at the end and came out crying.

Brooke and I only went to a couple houses and then headed home to hand out candy. It was pretty chilly out so I was happy to go home. Brooke loved crawling to the front door every time the bell rang. She would just sit at the door at look at the people in their costumes.

My front porch

Well this is my front porch this year. Think the bats need to be closer together but I am to lazy to do it over so this will have to do this year. The cat is for Kate She wanted to have a cat so bad but I think it doesn't look to bad.

 This is what you see when you walk up to our door. We were thinking of going alittle scarier this year but there are a lot of little kids in our neighborhood so no skeletons. There is a haunted house just up the street so if we need scary we can just go there.

This is an amazing wreath you say...I agree. I made the wreath. The girls helped me pick out the fabric and the letters. I did everything else and I have to say that after I used spray glitter on the letters I want to use spray glitter on everything!!! I love spray glitter!!!

Natalie turned 7

 I still can't believe that I have a 7 year old daughter. My kids are consistently changing and growing up. Natalie got a bigger bike for her b-day but the most amazing thing is that her favorite color isn't pink anymore. She likes the color blue now......what a sad day that my princess doesn't like pink anymore!

 The party was really small just some neighborhood kids came over for McDonalds and a movie. I told Natalie if she did a small party this year next year we will do a school party. The rules at this school is that if you have a party and give out invitations at school then you have to invite everyone. So next year we will be inviting about 25 kids to a halloween themed party. So I am grateful this year was small.

 Natalie didn't want cake this year she wanted to have doughnuts which is awesome. I love doughnuts but with trying to get healthier they aren't welcome in our house very often.

After the party was over I saw this idea on the Internet. It is a glow stick bath. So I turned off all the lights in my bathroom and let the girls hang out in their glow stick bath for awhile. They thought that was amazing!

growing up

Brooke is growing up so fast! She can now sit up all on her own. We had a week of her sitting up and thinking everything was OK and then she would lose her balance and fall straight back. I think after a few times of it hurting herself she got the hang of it and now is a pro.

 After the girl's shower and it is time to get pjs on all I ever hear is I don't have any can I wear one of your shirts. Most of the time I have to admit there is a good chance I haven't done laundry and they don't have any pjs but this time I just finished all the laundry in the house (and folded it too). So now I know they just prefer to look like slobs. I need to stop wasting money on pjs. haha

 Brooke now can sit up in her crib so this weekend we will be moving the bed lower. She is not a baby anymore! As you can notice her hair is still out of control. It almost looks like wig....it does look better when I pull it up into a ponytail.

 The cutie loves her baths now that she can roll over and sit up in there she has all kinds of fun. I just love the little naked bum. OK maybe not so little but that just makes it more adorable.

Portland to Coast

The Hood to Coast was this weekend and I was really missing it. Since I was 19 or 20 I have tried to do the Portland to Coast every year. The difference is H2C is a run and P2C is a walk but not just a stroll a motivated walk. So while I haven't been able to do it every year I have done it 11 times. As of yesterday I have signed up for next year. I am really looking forward to sleeping in random fields on the sides of the roads, cramming myself into a van with 7 other people and all of our stuff, no sleep and no shower for the better part of two days and when we finally get to the coast wait in line for an hour and a half just so we can eat breakfast at the Pig n' Pancake. I know this sounds like a list of negatives but its not....after it is all said and done I am always excited to do it again. Next year will be a blast for me because a lot of my friends that I do this with I will not have seen for almost two years! The only downside  now is I will have to make the trip all the way back home to West Richland after we are done...but I think it is still totally worth it. So with both the older girls in school this year Brooke and I can start training. I will finally get a lot of use out of my stroller.

Random

 Katelyn got cold but was to lazy to get up and get a blanket so she grabbed a pair of Paul's pj pants out of the laundry basket. I know that everyone who knows Katelyn is surprised that she was to lazy to move more then 2 feet....haha doesn't sounds like Kate at all!

 The girls wanted to have a tea party with Brooke and spend some girl time together....so cute. I love that my girls are so different but they are great sisters. Funny thing (or at least I thinks its funny) all of my girls have different colored eyes. Natalie - ice blue, Katelyn - brown, Brooke - grey (with a hint of blue). I do bet (and I am putting it in writing so I can look back) that when they grow up that they look more alike then they do now.

Natalie got her new glasses and she loves them. Now Kate is walking around the house saying "mom I can't see small words, or my eyes hurt I think I need glasses". Oh my sweet Kate can't be left out of anything. She couldn't even bare to be left out of this picture. haha I feel a little bad for Natalie because she got the bad eye sight from me but she looks really cute in them. Actually she looks really grown up to me and I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand I am very excited to see the woman she turns out to be.....but that is my baby! Anyways we got the glasses just in time for school.

6 months

 Brooke is 6 months old!!! She is a very happy baby and already learning how to play the DS. She is 19 pounds and surprisingly she is in the 75% for her height. I guess that would be why she is getting all kinds of chub-rub. This is a little unfamiliar territory just because my kids thus far have never been below 85%-90% on any of their stats.

She loves her baths!!! Notice the red rash on her chest....awesome! We have had to change her soap and lotion to all fragrance free and our laundry soap as well. Also the dogs are visiting friends for the week to see if crawling around on the floor in the pet dander is getting to her. If so the dogs are outside dogs until she is walking. I love it when she is in the bath because her head looks so round. When the out-of-control hair is all wet I think she looks a lot more like Kate.

We have moved on to baby food and the first couple of days she wasn't so sure about it. Now she is a champion eater and inhales the food. She still sleeps through the night and is up on all four rocking back and forth. It should be anytime now and she will be crawling all over the place.

The big debate....

I was having this big debate with myself trying to decided if I was done blogging or should I continue. Well as you can see I have decided to keep going. I really enjoy looking back on the past years and the older post to see the kids when they were little and some of the things that we have gone through and done over the years. Plus I didn't think it would be fair to Brooke if I quit. I don't want her to see this and noticed how it stopped after she came. So I will be knuckling down and trying to post on a weekly basis. (I hope)

So this post has the pictures that we had taken at the beginning of the summer. I love the lady I found and she did a great job. I got over 400 pictures on CD's to have....which is what I wanted but it is a blessing and a curse. I have always wanted to be able to get all the pictures taken during our photo shoots because there could be pictures that I like but the photographer didn't so I never get to see them. Well now that I got them all it takes a lot of time to go through them and sort the ones I do like. We are really pleased with what we got and now I just have to get them up in my house.....a project for another day. Enjoy!!!