Bradley's 5!

This year Bradley had a dinosaur party, of course since lately all things are dinosaurs. He is SO smart and watches these national geographic shows about dinosaurs and learns so much, and is teaching me so much. Even though at first I was trying to get him to not watch those because I thought all the killing and eating of other dinosaurs might be a little too violent for my little boy - but no, he loves it! He'll even tell me to look away when one is going to get killed because he says I won't like it :) Thanks to the Internet, and Pinterest specifically, I had WAY too many cool dinosaur party ideas filling up my head. I feel like the older they get the more I have to do to keep them entertained and make sure they have a good time for parties - especially when I don't bring them somewhere cool and it's just at my house. So I tried to go all out. I'm pretty sure he had fun seeing that he STILL wants to do the dinosaur dig in the sandbox and STILL wears his tail and dinosaur head around the house all the time :)
Here are the pictures I used for the invitation.

 

 

Dinosaur coloring

Dinosaur cake. I think I'd like to take a cake decorating class because my cakes never look as nice as they look in my head :)

Digging for dinosaurs, we had big ones just buried in the sand, and

little ones in hard dinosaur eggs that you broke open :)

 

I can't believe he's already 5. He's such a grown up little boy now. I am dreading him going to kindergarten next year and him being away from me every day for hours. I'm excited for him but sad for me. I just LOVE spending time with him. I'm one lucky Mommy!

Playing in the back

One of my favorite things to do when it's nice is to all go play in the backyard and take pictures of my beautiful babies :)

Determination

This is what pure determination looks like :)

Thanksgiving

In an effort to catch up as quickly as possible I'm going to try to be brief :) Thanksgiving seems like FOREVER ago. We all went up to Dad and Jan's and had a wonderful time as usual. As long as I'm with all my family - I'm happy! That's all I can ask for :)
Here's our Thanksgiving turkeys we made

 

When we got home we tried to take a family photo and Bradley wanted us all to make this very specific face, I think it's funny how Angel snuck her way into the picture without us knowing :)

Baby Daisley

I offered to take pictures of Tammy and Craig for invitations to their house warming/gender reveal party. I am by FAR no professional photographer but it was sure fun pretending for a little bit :) Baby is definitely growing and she looks BEAUTIFUL!!! (As always!)

Oh, and - IT'S A BOY!!!! :)

Halloween Day

Bradley had a parade at preschool so we went to watch him. He's so funny because he does this thing where he'll look really hard for you, but then as soon as he sees you he pretends like he doesn't know you're there and will purposefully avoid all eye contact. (He does the same thing when I come get him every day :) ) So I got this shot...

Then all other shots were like this :)

Then we went trick or treating in old town like we do every year. We usually get there right when it starts and it's a mad house, so I thought it would be really nice this year to avoid the rush in the beginning. It was really nice and quiet, but unfortunately I think a lot of people had run out of candy because not too many people were still out. That's ok though, we didn't need that much candy anyway :)

It was a beautiful and surprisingly warm day! Bradley even had to take off his shirt underneath and dinosaur head because he was burning up! That's not like the Halloweens I remember growing up - having to go out in the FREEZING cold having to wear huge coats over my BEAUTIFUL princess dresses! :)

Classic Gracie face!

Then at night (evening) we went trick or treating around our neighborhood. We added more houses this year and thought they could handle it, but it was pushing it a little. We had to skip the last couple on the way back because they were DONE.

BEAUTIFUL night!!

Suckers are all they ever want!

Even Sammie agrees!

New Members of the Family

My Mommy got kittens!!! Sadly we lost Keisha back in Feb due to kidney disease. Then Willow passed away at the end of July which left my Mom all by herself. She kept saying how she didn't ever remember a time when she didn't have a dog or cat. She mentioned one day how she would be up for getting sibling kitties so every day I would look on craigslist for some kittens for her. A friend of hers at work just started fostering some kittens so Mom agreed to go look at them. Tammy and I came along to 'help' :) and we found 2 adorable little kitties that we all loved. They were not ready to be adopted just yet so Mom decided she'd go to the cat rescue place that weekend and put a deposit down. Then when she was there she called me and said she thought she'd just 'look around' to see what they had there and she became very attached to two little sibling kitties, a brother and sister, that were there and ready to be taken. I stopped by and of course fell in love with them too and she got them the next day.

This is Patches.

And this is Casper.

They are adorable and keeping Mom very entertained and busy :)