September - bleh...

Blogging has taken a backseat this past month and for that I apologize.  If I was going to pick a least favorite month, it would have to be September.  September is when the "beginning phase" of going back to school/daycare wears off and things get real.  It's the point where your kids stop being a new class and you begin to realize their annoying habits, recurring problems, weaknesses, or in some cases- their awesomeness.  Either way, by this point you know each other and it gets a bit more involved.  I'm currently staring at a stack of essays over 120 pages high and thinking about how I'm going to get all this done AND spend time with my kids AND have a conversation with my husband AND plan for the next day of classes knowing full well I could have a surprise observation AND clean my house AND have two seconds to myself to watch a good show on tv or read another chapter in my book (at the moment I'm working through The Book Thief which is awesome but I've got it on loan from the library from my new boyfriend, the Kindle Paperwhite, so that is adding to stress/time crunch I feel).  Needless to say, I'm not being the best at chronicling every second of my children's lives for my benefit.  So here are a few pictures I've taken of the past couple weeks that sum up what we have been up to.

Jack's dinosaur obsession is continuing to grow.  We found these awesome dinosaur decals at Target and decided to decorate his wall with them.  He took great joy out of directing my efforts to put them up in some kind of pattern.  At the moment he is still deadset on being a "Jack-o-saurus Rex" for Halloween :)

Lucy is starting to become more mobile. For a while there, Andy and I constructed Jack's old standby - the baby fence.  She's ok in it for about 10 minutes - then she will lose it.  But in that ten minutes I can load the dishwasher, wipe down the counters, start a load of laundry, and fold a current one.  It's 10 minutes put to good use! And it's 10 minutes that I can protect her from the strange infant desire to try and kill yourself every 5 seconds (why on Earth did God design infants to have large mouths in a world littered with tiny small choke-able objects?)

A little flashback here :)

We have been working on the brother-sister bonding.  Which as of late, is the "Jack plays with Lucy's toys and then snatches his away from her if she so much as even looks at his."

Toy in mouth.  It's like an obsession.

Jack was frantically trying to complete the puzzle before Lucy could make it over there.

He has also taken to picking up this poster of trains Mimi got for him and reading it like a newspaper.  Except he calls it "nose paper" and emphatically informs me that I can't bother him - he's busy reading :)

On Sunday we went to Calhouns on the River to celebrate Uncle Adam's birthday!  Lucy, once again, tried to shove everything in her mouth in an attempt to "taste the world around her."  

She even got to try her first biscuit!  The reason you can't make out the biscuit on the plate is because I broke it in such microscopic pieces that there'd be no choking hazard on the plate.

 

I think the highlight of the visit for Jack was at Uncle Adam and Aunt Kate's house.  They live in a neat section of Old North Knoxville and their street has a set of train tracks at the end of it.  The second we heard the horn in the distance Adam immediately began to warn/apologize about how loud the train could get.  This is proof that he doesn't have small male children.  I whipped my head around and asked if we could see it go by.  The next thing you know I'm scooping Jack up and running out the front door so that we could see this surprise celebrity in person.  It was pretty awesome :)  The day Jack stops loving trains will be a very sad day in the Brimer house...

Lastly, September has provided for us some pretty cool milestones.  Lucy is finally starting to crawl!  And not army crawl but good ol' 100% traditional crawling!  She's not a fan, as evidenced by the look of annoyance on her face, but a little tickle at the end solves any developmental frustration woes :)