tresspassing

The day my mom and I went fabric shopping we passed by some beautiful fall trees and a path. We decided that once we were done loading up on fabric we would take a walk and enjoy the gorgeous scenery. I parked my car and we walked to the start of the path only to discover it was someone's driveway!! One of those loooong driveways that leads deep into the woods. I wanted to turn around and go back to the car but my mother convinced me to walk just a little ways. So, we did, and it was breathtaking. The further we got up the driveway the more freaked out I got that the property owners were going to let their dogs loose to attack us, (I don't even know if they had dogs, but I have a vivid imagination) or come out with rifles and shoot us down. Not like either of those scenarios are very plausible, but I was scared non the less. I convinced my mom that we should turn around and head home. The trees were so pretty, it really was worth stopping to check them out. Who knew my mother would be more adventurous than me when it comes to trespassing! :)

Dog beds

Normally our dogs sleep out in the garage at night which works well because they have their food and water out there.....dog water can not be in the house unless I want my children playing in it, or dumping it out multiple times a day!! But since the weather has gotten colder we bought new dog beds for the house so the boys can sleep inside.....it gets too cold during the winter for them to be outdoors. From the moment I brought the beds home Charlotte has claimed one of them as her own! Poor Tyson wouldn't even get the near the bed for the first week or so because he knows that the girl's stuff is off limits and Charlotte made it very clear that the dog bed was hers! (We have never had a problem with the dogs destroying any of the kids stuff unless we leave balls outside and then Tyson figures it's fair game!) Tyson did eventually figure out that the bed is his, and both dogs sleep on them at night, and the girls pretty much leave the dog beds alone. But for a while it was pretty hilarious!

Henry enjoying his bed!

Tyson in his normal "relaxing" position

Poor Tyson sleeping on the floor
Notice the little monkey enjoying the dog bed in the background?

Comfy

Little stinker!

90 days!

In exactly 90 days from now Dan and I will be leaving North Carolina (in the middle of winter no less!) and flying to tropical La Romana in the Dominican Republic!! Grandma and Papa will be coming from California to stay with the girls for two weeks while we lounge on white sand beaches, swim in turquoise waters, consume unlimited cocktails and eat to our hearts content! I can not tell you how excited I am! The last time I spent over a week on a tropical island alone with my husband was on our honeymoon in Maui......11 months later Maddie was born and Dan and I haven't been alone for more than 24 hours at a time since! I am SO looking forward to this!

Let me just say that it has not been easy trying to book this vacation for the past 2 weeks. I like a good deal, and although we could afford to spend a good chunk of money I wanted to pay as little as possible for as much as possible. All of the vacation websites change their prices daily which never seemed to give me enough time to research the resorts/beaches/food etc. before the price got bumped up which caused me to move on to another resort or destination. I went from Jamaica to the Dominican Republic to Mexico back to Jamaica and finally settled on the DR once the price for my first choice resort dropped pretty dramatically! Just in case you were thinking about planning a trip in the near future, these are the main sites that I used:

Cheap Caribbean
Apple Vacations

Be prepared to check rates daily and be ready to jump when the price is good.....cause the price can get bad quickly! One of the resorts I really liked jumped up $1000 in 24 hours, and still hasn't gone back down! The closer you get to the dates you want to go on vacation the cheaper the prices get....they call it "last minute deals," which doesn't really work for us since we have to arrange flights for our child care but is significantly less expensive if you're a fly by the seat of your pants kinda person! Another great tool that I used was:

Tripadvisor

Just type in the name of the resort you are thinking of going to, and you can read reviews from other travelers who have stayed there. They have their personal vacation pictures posted, it gives you a recommended % based on the reviews. All of the reviews are broken up into categories; Excellent, Very good, Average, Poor and Terrible which you can either choose to read by date of post all mixed together, or broken up by category. But, I must say that everything you read needs to be taken with a grain of salt because people ALWAYS have something to complain about. I think that the success of vacations and traveling in general depends mostly on the state of mind. Dan and I could stay in a dump and we would still have a great time! I tried to mostly read the Very good and Average reviews because I felt it gave the healthiest perspective. Not an over the top fantastic review, and not a nit picky, everything sucked review! Just the good with the bad that helped me to decide where I wanted to stay.

Now all I need is a passport.....gonna look into that tomorrow, and some books about the Dominican Republic and basic Spanish......it's been a loooong time since high school Spanish and it's not nice to go to another country without learning any of their language. So, check out the site and book a getaway, we ALL need one every once in a while! Maybe we'll see you there.

P.S. The pictures below were stolen, ahem.....borrowed from different users on Tripadvisor. None of the photos were harmed in the making of this blog. To those of you who unwittingly loaned these pictures to me, I am thankful! :)

What could be better than a boat full of fruit on a beach?!?

My child the genius

I haven't really wanted to talk about Maddie's potty training because I didn't want to jinx anything, but we've been chuggin' along for quite a while now.....hopefully posting this won't change things! :) Knock on wood. Maddie is doing SO amazingly well with potty training! We're still a good ways away from being 100% trained, but the last couple weeks she has been waking up dry from both night sleep and naps, using the potty independently (still needs some help with wiping and putting clothes back on) telling us when she needs to go, (this is HUGE for her!) pooping on the toilet, using the big toilet about 50% of the time and only having 1 accident in her pull up a day. Don't get me wrong, some days are way bad, but I'd say that 90% of the time she is a super star! The days when we are out and about are harder.....she seems to not like public restrooms, but she's doing great at school, and when I bring the portable potty with us she will use that when we're on the go. I am so incredibly proud of her. Having kids gives you a sense of pride that nothing else can compare to. Her accomplishments feel like my accomplishments, (but not in the weird child beauty pageant way where the moms are trying to make up for their lost youth) I just deeply feel her excitement and pride....her happiness makes me one happy Mama!

Funny story.....

So, tonight I am making dinner and Maddie is wearing big girl underwear.....actual underwear, not pull ups. She is watching one of her most favorite shows on PBS (Word World) and she tells me, "Mama, I gotta go pee pee on the potty!" I give her my normal excited response of, "Hurry up, get to the bathroom so you can go on the potty, make sure to pull your underwear down!" I continue cooking and hear a racket coming from our hall bathroom. I walk around the corner and see this:

She has scooted her potty out of the bathroom, through the hall and into the living room where she is continuing to watch Word World while she POOPS! lol Just so you know, cause I know you are dying for this info.....she calls everything pee, so it's hard to know what she's up to. I can not believe what a big girl she is! That was pure genius.

halloween

Have you ever heard the saying "Want to make God laugh, tell him your plans."? Well, the same can be said in reference to children. Well, at least my stubborn, opinionated children! *Not that either of those characteristics are a bad thing!* They had their own ideas for halloween this year. And their grand plan did not include the pumpkin and clown costumes that I had wanted them to wear! They wanted to be princesses.....and wear the same dresses they wore to the carnival a few days before. Which was fine. Really! I'd have preferred a pumpkin and a clown (I dressed up as a clown when I was 3 too!) but a princess is fine....at least they wanted to dress up! The biggest excitement for me was that Maddie actually let me put pigtails in her hair WITH BOWS!! Granted, I put my hair in pigtails with bows first and there was a lot of negotiating, but she eventually let me, and she kept them in ALL night!! Woo hoo.

Our neighborhood has a lot of churches which equals a lot of halloween carnivals, but this year I wanted to take the girls trick or treating which our neighborhood is not so good for. We have a lot of golden oldies that live here and they don't seem too big on passing out candy. So I piled the girls in the car and headed to our friend's neighborhood which had a TON of kids! There was a lot of anticipation leading up to treating and it's funny because my kids had no idea what this was all about since we have never done it with them before, but they knew it was going to be something fun that involved candy, and that was enough to make them jittery with excitement! We loaded them up into wagons and headed out. Maddie did exceptionally well except for the couple times she tried to go into other people's houses.....it makes sense though, they opened their doors.....normally when people do that you go inside right?!? Charlotte on the other hand did not do so well. She was tired, she is teething, and it was hard to go up the driveway, up the stairs to the front porch, down the stairs, down the driveway, into the wagon and on to the next house. She also didn't really understand what was going on. I helped her the whole way, but it was still tough. Did I mention that it was also 80 degrees and REALLY humid? Yep, the weather never fails to get gross for halloween. The day after halloween the high was 62. Nice. Around 8:00 we had enough of the treating and headed home. The girls were exhausted, overly cranky and flying on a sugar high. They fell asleep as soon as their heads hit the pillow.

All in all a good halloween. Probably would have been easier to leave Charlotte at home, but it wouldn't have felt right. She's part of our gang and we would have missed her. I think we had more than enough halloween fun and I'm glad it's over until next year. Maddie has asked me repeatedly "Can we go treating tomorrow?" I think she liked it! Now if I could only figure out how to get rid of all this candy without anyone in my family consuming it, or freaking out over it being gone!

In leiu of carving

I always enjoyed carving pumpkins as a kid. I would dig right into the goopy innards and clean the pumpkin out with my hands. I think that my kids will enjoy it too, but at this stage they are too little and last year when we carved it ended up being just me and Dan doing it.....which isn't a big deal, but this year I wanted the girls to be able to be hands on without the stress of knives. So, I let them each paint their pumpkins!! They had a really good time, got completely painty, and we have two very colorful pumpkins to enjoy. Another nice part about not carving our pumpkins up is that we get to keep them around longer and enjoy the beauty!

"No Charlotte, Don't eat the paint"

Maddie is VERY serious about her projects

"NO, NO Charlotte.....don't eat paint!!"

"Hey Maddie, can you paint your pumpkin instead of your hand?"

"Charlotte, seriously STOP eating your paint brush!"

Our beauuuutiful pumpkins

"I a mess." (yes, my dear you are a mess!)