He's a BIG KID now!

Jan. 25th was Austyn's 3rd birthday! That officially makes him a big kid. He still insists that he is 2 years old, but he'll get it eventually. We spent the day hanging out with our friends in San Diego. We had pizza for dinner and strawberry shortcake for dessert. The cake was delicious. Austyn helped us sing Happy Birthday to him, and he blew out his candle. After pizza and cake we headed out to the base theater and watched "Alvin and the Chipmunks." It was a pretty funny movie with a lot of adult humor in it. Austyn loved it and kept dancing around.

My Kids Are Hilarious!

These are just a few things that the kids have said over the years that have me laughing. Some are old and some are new.
I got a kick out of this and just thought I would share. Tonight as we were sitting at the dinner table eating, Taylor asked me if I knew how Aunt Laura spanks her kids. I told him that yes I know how she spanks them, and sometimes she uses a spoon. He then told me that she only uses the spoon on Ryan. I asked him if maybe I should start using the spoon to spank him and if I should take the spoon out right then. His response was exactly this, "Mom, you know you only take the spoon out to cook with!"
One day when Austyn was just a little baby, he was screaming at the top of his lungs and he was just very unhappy. Taylor thought he knew exactly what happened and he said, "Mom, I think you really pissed Austyn off!" Of course, I then had to explain to him that pissed was a bad word and we shouldn't say it. I couldn't help but to laugh.
Mark and I were driving down the road one day and Taylor asked this question, "Mom, are we Chinese?" I told him that we were not and I asked him why he would ask such a thing. His reasoning was this, "Well, we eat Chinese food a lot!"
Taylor has a homework assignment each week where he has to practice a group of words and then use each word in a sentence. One of his words was old. His sentence was, "My grandpa is so old!"
Yesterday Mark disappeared for a little bit and when he resurfaced I asked him where he went. He said he went to load some more Cd's into I-Tunes and then he had to drop the kids off at the pool. (poop) Austyn heard this and came running. He was so excited and he said, "MOM! Daddy take out pool for me!!" He thought he was going to get a chance to go swimming. Mark had to explain to him that wasn't quite what he meant.
Okay, well that's about all I can recall at the moment. I hope some of them made you laugh. If not, maybe you should re-evaluate your sense of humor! lol Just Kidding!!

The Tooth Fairy Makes a Comeback!

So, as most of you know Taylor lost his very first baby tooth on Sunday. He told me that he doesn't believe in the tooth fairy and that it is all "fake-believe." He says fake-believe instead of make-believe. So, I tried my hardest to convince him that the tooth fairy is indeed real, but he wasn't buying what I was selling. I guess I just want the kids to have a sense of imagination and to be able to hold onto their youthfulness for as long as possible.
Bedtime rolled around and we put his tooth (in a Ziploc bag) under both of his pillows. Everything was set, I knew exactly where the tooth was and Mark knew to wake me up when he came home from work.
4AM-Mark gets home from work and wakes me up. We decide that $5 is a good solid amount for one tooth. We sneak into Taylor's room and are lucky to have the fish tank light to help us see. I tell Mark where the tooth is supposed to be and he can't find it. He looks in between the pillows and still can't find it. I was beginning to think we had lost it! I look under the other pillows, in between them, and still nothing! It's a good thing Taylor wasn't actually using his pillows, otherwise we would have woken him up. So, I take each pillow off one at a time and "Hallelujah!" we found it! He had moved it in between the first set of pillows. So, we confiscate the tooth, replace it with a $5 bill and drag our half asleep behinds to bed.
7AM-Taylor wakes me up with this, "MOM! The tooth fairy came in my room and left me $5!! I can't believe that! I guess the tooth fairy really is real!" He was so excited and I was excited for him. I was happy to have his belief back intact. Later while he was eating breakfast he said that he wasn't expecting to get $5. That left me thinking that I had such a great kid, who was so thankful and grateful for the gift he had received, and then I woke up. He finished his story by saying that he was expecting to get $10!! I told him that the tooth fairy decides how much money each kid gets. They think about how well they took care of their teeth and whether or not they are a good kid. Some kids get just $1 and some kids get $10. It just depends on how good they are.
So the tooth fairy made a comeback! HOORAY!

a few pictures

These are Pictures from Christmas Morning...







These are before and after pictures of Taylor's teeth...











Pictures of Austyn and Ryleigh to even things out.








Pictures of Mark, Taylor and myself after we spent a day on the mountain.

It's been a while, and maybe I'll apologize

Okay, so I'll be the first to admit, I have fallen off of the blogging wagon. Shame shame on me. lol. It has been well over a month since I last updated you all, but you know, I really don't feel so bad about it. I have been enjoying my time that I have with Mark and the kids and we have just been enjoying life. Okay, so it's not all fun and games 24/7, we relax and veg a lot, we get frustrated with each other and our kids, but hey, we are human...right?
Mark is leaving all to soon if you ask me. It seems like he just came home yesterday. :( This will be my 4th deployment but it still makes me sad, upset, nervous and unsure of what the time away holds. Its a hard job being a single mom to 3 little kids...2 of which depend on me for just about everything. I'll get through it and we'll find our "Mark isn't home 'groove' " again...I always do. It just sucks that the this time has come again.
Okay, okay, enough sadness. There's plenty of time for that later. Our Christmas was small and quaint. Mark and I chose not to exchange gifts this year due to budget restraints. That and we really wanted to focus on the kids and make sure that they had a great day. We were finished opening up our Christmas gifts in about 20 minutes, if that. The house was cleaned up of all debris in about 5 minutes. That was awesome. And then about 1 hour later, Dave showed up. Dave has become an adopted member of our family. He's a lot like a brother to us, and an adopted uncle to the kids. Taylor loves rough housing with him and Austyn just loves bugging him. Lucky for us, Dave is used to young kids. He has a 6 year old brother, so he does well.
Our New Year's was good. We spent it with some friends of ours. We played a horrible drinking card game called "F*** the Dealer" It actually wasn't a bad game, but I don't recommend you play more than 3 rounds of it. If you do, you will regret it the next morning when you have a horrendous hangover. I don't remember how many rounds we played, and I had a horrendous hangover the next morning. lol.
Just last week we went snowboarding with Dave. Mark, Taylor and I were the only ones to join him. It's about a 2 hour drive to the mountains from where we are. Austyn and Ryleigh stayed home with my friend Heather. The weather was really bad. It was snowing like crazy and the wind was blowing like crazy. It was blowing hard enough to knock me on my behind. There were moments when all you could see was a big blur of white and you couldn't see more than 20 feet ahead of you. Taylor called it quits about 1/3 of the way down the mountain. It was monstrous. Mark carried him down and Dave carried Taylor's board. I think Taylor and I would have had more fun if we had only gone about halfway up the mountain. It took me about 5 hours to make it down. I am a very inexperienced boarder, but I still had a blast. The snow was about 2-4 feet deep in some areas, and since I haven't quite mastered the skill of turning, I kept ending up in it. Let me tell you, it is not fun trying to get yourself out of a 3 foot hole when the wind keeps knocking you down. Mark started to get really worried about me and went down the mountain twice and couldn't find me. He sent Dave up a few times and on Dave's last run, I was found. haha. I was almost to the end of the run, and I was beginning to do really well since the mountains had been groomed by then. Right at the very end I caught a gust of wind and my feet shot behind me, I lost my balance and was basically body slammed into the nice hard packed snow and ice. I swore I had broken some ribs or my collarbone. It took me a good whole day before I could take deep breaths without feeling like I was being speared in the chest. I am okay and I didn't break anything. Thankfully.
So, that pretty much brings us up to date. Here are some "progress reports" on the kids.
Taylor-He has been back at school now for a week. Thank goodness. He and Austyn together all day for 3 weeks straight is a ginormous headache. He is such a smart boy and a very quick learner. He reads everything he sees and is in the top of his class in every subject. He is a math whiz. That he must get from Mark because we all know I stink at it! lol. He is growing up so fast each and every day and I love it and I hate it. He has a great sense of humor and he likes to crack jokes every so often. He still says that when he grows up he wants to be just like his Daddy which is great. He just lost his first tooth TODAY! Well, actually he didn't really lose it. Mark pulled it out. It was pretty much just sitting there wedged in his gums. His adult tooth is already in thanks to the "Hammer Genes". :) He's pretty excited about it. Mark and I will pay him a visit whenever Mark gets home from work tonight. We haven't quite decided on how much the tooth fairy will leave him. I guess it doesn't really matter. My son who still believes in Santa does not believe in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. What is this world coming to? LOL. I am trying to convince him that the Tooth Fairy is real. We'll see what he thinks in the morning.
Austyn-Oh that boy. He isn't a handful, he's two handfuls! He is a smart alec and so opinionated. He's bossy and mean. He's lovable, sweet and generous. He is doing very well with potty training. He has had the whole "potty" thing down for some time now, but the last month or so we have been working on the 'no diaper' thing at night. It's been rough, but he has his good nights and his bad nights. He is on his third night in a row without wetting the bed!!! Every morning he gets up and he says, "Mom, High-Five! Me no pee-pee in mine's bed!" He is doing really great with talking. He says anything and everything now. He still has his moments where he just melts down into total screaming mode, and that's when I remind him that he uses his words. We are working on speaking correctly. He says "Me love you" all the time, which is super adorable, but in a realistic world, he needs to learn to speak properly. Or at least I think so. We just remind him to say "I" instead of "Me". He is also doing a LOT better with his annunciation of letters. He used to say "Pish" instead of "Fish" and all of his F's were P's. He's getting a lot better and sounding out the Ffff sound. He's also a big helper and helps with all kinds of things around the house.
Ryleigh-She is doing so wonderful! She reminds me so much of Taylor these days. She has the great big gap in between her two front teeth just like Taylor did, and they share so many personality traits. She's usually very calm, she's very shy and quiet. She isn't quite talking yet, but that doesn't stop her from talking. She carries on full and very elaborate conversations in babbles. I think she makes jokes sometimes too, because she'll babble something and then she giggles. It's actually super cute. She is walking and running all over the entire house. When she wants to be alone, she can be found in one of two places. She'll either be in her room playing with all of her babies, or she will be sitting in the hallway pulling all of the books off of the shelf and looking at the pictures. She is constantly pointing at things wondering what they are and occasionally mumbles something that resembles the word. She loves to play outside and she definitely loves her doggy. She rests her head on him, gives him hugs, pets him, and my least favorite; she hand feeds him right from her tray. She thinks its funny.
Well, that is about as up to date we can get for now. This will be the longest blog in the history of blogs! J/K I'll post some more up to date pictures in a blog as soon as this is posted.