Bailey Family

We decided last minute to go to my mom and dad's for Halloween The kids had a lot of fun trick-or-treating with Grammy

I decided (with Rob's encouragement) to upload a photo to an online photo contest. I'm not even amateur, but I like to take photos, and so I did it. (It's worth a shot just for the fun of it!) So, click the link to the right and go vote for mine. (only a small portion is popular votes - the rest is by a judging panel, so ignore the photos with 72 votes!) :) (It's from a beach trip last September.) OK, apparently you have to sign in to vote, so if you don't feel like making yet another account with another password, don't worry about it! :) 

I finally got all the costumes finished in time (our ward party was Saturday night and we went to Rob's parents' Thursday night through Saturday for a "birthday project" for his mom's birthday - so they had to be done early...check Rob's blog later for the birthday project). So here, they are (not really in order): Natalie, my little penguin. (Anytime she heard someone talking about her costume, she started, "penga, pinga".) That's her favorite animal right now. Her costume was my favorite to make. Carolyn the cat. (Whiskers would have been cute, but I don't do face paint...) Hers was mostly bought, except for the ears...she had some, but the headband broke. I said, bring them to me so I can fix them. "But I threw them in the trash." But I pulled them out twice - what did you do with them? "I put them in the trash." GRRRR - (so, that was a last minute before-we-walked-out-the-door-Thursday kind of project.) and it's no...

I'm working on enrichment plans (which of course line up the same time as halloween plans and birthday plans), and I got side tracked (which I always do on the computer anyways) and saw a cute idea for turning photos into coloring pages. I've done something similar before playing with mom's photo software as a teenager, but hadn't done it with my current photo software b/c I wasn't sure if it would do it. It doesn't (I don't think?), but while I was playing around for a few minutes, I changed Carolyn's picture to look like this...kind of cool and artistic looking. (She's gently holding a caterpillar, which she wanted to keep as a pet. I said no.) (I just did a filter called "photocopy" in photoshop and then adjusted the options to make it more pink than red....not really too high tech, but I said fun "moment" not fun "hour"!)

Seth comes home singing songs - in fact, he's learned several normal 'kindergarten' things through song, so here are his most common: Counting by 5's to 100. (We also have him singing by 10s.) This is the months of the year - can you say "Hey...MACARENA!"? And my personal favorite... Days of the week: (I think the only word that remains from the 'original tune' is "Wednesday"...watch and see!) His teacher told me at the open house whose cd's they listen to where these songs come from, but I can't remember the name now? It's cute to here him singing all the time. And to hear him spouting off information all the time. (And it's funny to hear Carolyn argue with him and him be right...all the time!) :)

I wondered at the end of last week why my house was a mess, nothing got done on my projects, no blogs were read, and I did virtually nothing with my calling, and what on earth I did with my time?! Then I realized: I had spent the week guarding things/siblings from other siblings and refereeing fights! This happened in the 2 minutes I rotated the laundry: This happened while I was working on dinner (Rob came home to find her...I had no idea why she was so quiet - I was just grateful the fighting and hanging from my legs had stopped!) I don't remember what this fight was about?? But then, they make me smile.... Carolyn as prissy as she is loves nature and animals (and getting dirty with those doesn't bother her). She went out (with my permission) and cut the flowers (overgrowing). Then she brought them inside in a bucket and "arranged" them in some of her plastic drinking cups with water, and put them in high spots throughout the house! (A little relief society sister i...

This is the first time trying out cloth diapers. I actually think I like them. I just can't decide which of the two kinds I want to invest in...? She refused to turn around and look because she was mad at me for something.  (She was puttin' her 'raider' on, Jacob.) Aren't they cute? :) (Kaitlyn's is an "all in one" so once she pees, that's it til I wash it. Natalie's is just a cover, so I can wipe it out and use it a few times a day. Usually, she doesn't even pee enough for the cover to get wet at all. After she peed in it today, she undid the velcro herself. Shame she didn't just go ahead and change herself while she was at it!) I say, please don't go in the puddles. Then they do. And they're so cute, I have to go get the camera. (No wonder they ignore me and get into the puddles - what am I teaching them by taking pictures?!) At least Seth and Carolyn ask permission first. Gotta have the purse and the water! (right Grammy?) We...

Rob has this fascination with food shows, which I think are kind of boring. But even boring shows, if they're on, I can't help but watch (other than sports, which feel like background noise thanks to Dad, Daddy Tom, and Granddaddy having them on all the time)! :) So, he found a new cooking show (on fit TV channel), called Just Cook This! by Sam the Cooking Guy - and decided he wanted to try chimichitos (a healthy version of a crossover between a chimichanga and a burrito).  WOW! Spicy!  I could only eat one, and even after two glasses of milk, my mouth was still breathing fire (but I've gotten to be a real wuss for spicy since my bad beartburn during all three pregnancies), so I just can't take it like I used to! And tonight, he cooked it - isn't it pretty??

I don't have pictures to put with these quotes (although I could have if I had thought about it and had the camera in hand...nuts!) so I'll put pictures of the kids' new shoes...can you tell Carolyn picked hers out without parental guidance? :) Kate's Quotes: 1. She looked down at something on the garage floor, "A fwog!" (the "frog" was a cricket) 2. She was playing with a balloon in the den and it got a little hole in it so it was slowly leaking air. She put it against the ground and pushed on it; the air leaked out faster with a little noise effect. "It poot!" Here are the shoes:

So I bought toddler beds Friday (which was an adventure, b/c of course I loaded the big ol' boxes into the cart by myself, pushed the side-by-side stroller and pulled the now unstable cart through the store to grab the few other things we needed, and got the three girls out to the car, and had to drive back to the door to load the beds by myself - in the rain)... Anyways...here they are the first night: Natalie 'christened' hers Friday night, so I had a load of doodoo laundry to do Saturday morning before heading out to visit Rob's parents. But they slept through the night, and at normal wakeup time (a little after 6), they were up and ready for everyone else to be up! So, I took down one of the cribs in the room Saturday morning (mostly so Carolyn could get into her dresser). Saturday night, 4 am, crying awoke us. We went in, checked on them, put them back to bed and thought all was well. 4:50 am, crying again awoke us (oh, no! I thought...maybe they weren't ready)...

Here are Seth and Carolyn reciting their parts for the primary program. The sunbeams said theirs as a group after singing Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam, then returned to sit with their families (which was good b/c we barely got her up there...no, she's not shy - just a pain in the butt!) But that's Carolyn's personality :) and yea, I got to upload Seth's twice b/c somehow I must have hit delete rather than the arrow keys (I hate when it does that to my pictures and videos and I have reupload them! How do I reference something I uploaded already but accidently deleted from the post window...anyone know?) I don't even totally remember what this video was of - but I uploaded it thinking it was Carolyn's b/c I didn't feel like watching the three to find hers, so you get the extra video - probably Natalie since that's the image it shows!

We have had "fall" weather for the past few days. Rob just informed me today that fall officially began (I think) at 11:44 am? today.  Fall is my FAVORITE season! This picture is one I took while we were driving up the interstate to Ohio at the end of October last year. Aren't the colors beautiful? Some reasons I love fall, in no particular order: (some of these are childhood memories) Carolina football games with Dad and my friend Haley (sp?) SC State Fair School Starting (yes, I have always like starting...it's the projects 2 weeks later I didn't like) the cool weather after the oppressive summer My first 2 children were born in the fall (and the most "fun" part of my twin pregnancy was during the fall - that would be the part when everyone knew I was pregnant but I wasn't too fat to get off the bed without ROLLING off the bed!) Thanksgiving at MaMa's It's my most productive "project season" Halloween Apple...

I finished the quilts for the twins' toddler beds (my goal was to finish the quilts before we bought them beds). So, Rob said, "Let's go get some beds this weekend!" (I'm not so sure I'm ready to have Natalie 'loose', but if it were just Kaitlyn, I would SO do it. I am a little tired of the tight squeeze it is between the dresser and cribs to get in the door - a shorter 'bed' would help that. Anyways - here they are: They like them...so I put them up in the closet so they don't ruin them before I actually buy the beds to go with them! Reminder: here are the curtains that are in the room- (no, the walls aren't green in their room...this is when they were in their 'old' room, now Seth's) See the fabrics repeated? :) (I had to get the entire remnant when I bought the fabric for the curtains...glad I did, b/c now it's in all three quilts of the girls.) how nice...it looks so "designed" Caroly...

Let me preface this by saying, I have not really liked reading since I was in jr. high and reading became "not fun" anymore (that was when teachers started decided what I read during the school year and summertime and usually picked reading material that was depressing, inappropriate, or boring). However, I still have a love for libraries and books...just not long novels (literature teachers ruined that - I hope they're happy!) lol Regardless... I have always loved taking the kids to the library. I started taking Seth when he was about 15 months old. I would walk UPhill BOTH ways (just kidding - we lived a mile away - up a mile to it, then down home).  Now we drive. After the twins were born, it was the first place I started taking the kids regularly again. We went almost weekly. So, I guess it should come as no surprise that my kids LOVE books.  The twins just haven't been able to sit still like Seth could  (or even Carolyn, whose attention span is only slightly long...