I've been a bad blogger lately. Wade has moved to South Carolina; so I've been a single mom most of the time. Thankfully, Wade's been able to come home a couple weekends a month to give me a small, but appreciated break. A lot has happened that I want to document on my online baby book/diary of life events, aka my blog. ;)

We finished our first season of football as coach and team mom. We survived and learned a lot. Mostly, that no matter how hard you try, you can't please everyone. It's a sad truth that always upsets me.

We've put our house on the market. This is our first home. We closed on it February 21, 2001. We've had 4 kids here and learned a lot about life here. It's kinda bittersweet when I think of selling it to someone else. But I'm excited about the new adventure, whatever it may be.

Tucker is so attached to his big brother. It drives Taylor crazy at times.. like here, when he's trying to play his game. But Tuck loves hanging out with him and laughs so hard he loses his breath when they play. Taylor is such a good, and patient big brother.

I love making the boys things. One of my projects this Christmas was "Quiet Books" for all the boys. Sadly, I didn't finish in time for Christmas, but will have them done soon. Here are some of the "pages."

The 'blast off' page: the rocket moves up and down the ribbon.

Carter isn't my favorite or anything, just the first one I did. ;)

Each book will have 12 pages front and back - so 24 scenes total. I'm making them all different and fun. I can't wait to finish them all. The pages will be sewn together and have a clean finished look, unlike their current state.

My 2nd big project for them was 100 hand.painted.blocks.

Here are a couple older pictures I'm just getting to. They are from Thanksgiving weekend, which we spend at our friends, Clay and Amy's house in Lexington, SC. The boys were checking out their cat with great intensity.

We had Thanksgiving dinner at Clay and Amy's Church, then played on the playground afterwords.

As I mentioned earlier, Wade's been gone a lot. Here's the boys reaction after 2 weeks of missing Daddy.

We had a mystery gift left at our door one morning. A truck for Taylor and 3 books for the boys. Here's Tuck reading the book he just tore out of the bag.

My 5 favorite boys. ho.ho.ho!

They were over the Santa hats by the time I got on the other side of the camera.

Twas the night before Christmas...

Christmas morning:

Christmas Day at Mamaw and Papaws:

Taylor with his new Crayon Maker, it melts small crayons and drops them into a mold to make them big again:

The boys room goes from this:

in the blink of an eye.

The boys love their new chairs Mamaw gave them for Christmas.


Lego's anyone?

in other news, we're becoming more civilized and eating from plates now without throwing them. They are even telling me when they are hungry by saying "eeeeeee" (eat) and "all duh" (all done) when they are finished. Much better than screaming until I figure out that they're hungry and throwing their food when they're full. We've come a long way. They're talking more and more, repeating lots of what I say.

That brings us to New Years. Here's Taylor while he was watching the fireworks show our neighbors brought over to our house and shot off for us.

Happy New Year!!! (fireworks show over.)

Cheerios?

One more shot of our civilized diners:

The answer to that varies depending on which of my kids you ask.

Tucker: Definitely no friend of his.
Brayden: He's a very comfy, cool guy.
Carter: Although you can't tell by this picture, he was okay.
Taylor: Definitely leaning towards foe. I mean, what kind of guy threatens to take Christmas from you if you don't behave?!

School Santa Picture: We still have to go see the real Santa at the mall...
Can you tell by Taylor's eyes that he's not buying into this Santa at all? He was quite upset at this "disguised Santa."

Wade is back in town for the weekend so we decided to hurry today and have our family picture taken for Christmas, since we probably won't be together again until Christmas. Our intentions were to take those pictures, head to the mall and get Santa pictures, then head to the NICU tree lighting, where we would take yet more pictures, the we would come home just in time for the boys to go to the All Star game. As it turns out, it took us 3 hours to get our family pictures done and then it was time for the game, so Santa pictures have been delayed to another day and we missed the tree lighting this year. = ( BUT, we got some great family pictures AND our Christmas cards WITH NO TEARS or melt downs, or any destruction what so ever. The babies were Angels. Perfect. Sweet. Angels. I'm not bragging; actually I think I'm in shock. We went to a little chain photography place called Portrait Innovations. It's neat and pretty cheap; it's kinda like Sears, but bigger and they seemed to really care about making us happy. But the best part is that you get your pictures in hand in about 15 minutes!

Taylor's 1st grade picture: