A New Low...

I have mentioned before the difficulty we have with our last name in public.  Well, here's the latest story we have to share.  We got a pretty good laugh about it...hope you do too!  Chad wrote the following to share with some of our family, and I will share it with you as well.  Brace yourself for this one...

I was at a tire repair shop after church today to drop off the car to fix a tire. The nice man behind the counter asked me my name. I said, "Chad E-I-G-S-T-I" (spelling the name instead of saying it of course). He studiously wrote down each letter as I spelled it out for him. After I finished, he stopped and looked over at me as if expecting me to keep going. I said, "that's it". His look began to harden into total confusion. I peeked over the counter at the piece of paper he was writing on so I could understand where we had gone wrong. As God as my witness, this is what I saw:

E-I-D-S-G-5

Don't adjust your lenses folks, you are looking at the NUMBER 5! It is hard to remember what all went through my mind as I looked over his interpretation of our family name. My first thought was pity for a man who had obviously forgot to listen when his mother told him not to stick the the Q-Tip too far into his ears. If you go in past the second knuckle, you have gone too far!
 
Have a wonderful day.
 Sincerely
Chad Eidsg5 

Use What You Got {A Lesson from Adam}

As a speech therapist, I won't deny that my wee one Adam is a wee bit behind in developing his expressive language skills.  However, the boy understands everything and daily finds ways to use the skills he has to be a part of the action!  Here they are putting on a concert for us:

Christmas Joy

Christmas brings lots of joy...and lots and lots of pictures!  So to reduce my picture anxiety, I decided to focus on just a few things that brought our children the most joy this season.  One would certainly have to be helping decorate the tree!  We cranked up the Christmas music, did some dancing on the living room floor, and made our tree beautiful.

 It was so nice, we did it twice!  This year, we also let the boys have their very own Christmas tree, which they were extremely proud of.  And, because they were allowed to play with and rearrange their ornaments (shatterproof from the dollar bin, thank you Target) as much as they wanted, our tree was left untouched for the most part.  Clever Mommy, thankyouverymuch.

 Luke's Papa works at a retirement home, and each year they have children/grandchildren of staff put on a little show for the residents.  This year, Luke was a shepard and he did a great job!

 While we try very hard not to make gifts the focus of Christmas for our children, there were many gifts that made them excited.  Here I picked the ones that have seemingly been the favorites for the boys.  When people ask Luke what he got for Christmas, he usually mentions the legos he got from the Ayottes, or the remote control truck from his Mimi and Papa.  But for Luke, the unmentioned favorite would have to be Berenstain Bears books.  My brother found him some of the old classics (the ones I grew up with!) from a used book store and he was thrilled.  He has asked to read them every. single. day. since he received them and "reads" them to himself during his quiet time in his room. 

For Adam, it would probably be his John Deere tractor he got from his Grandpa and Grandma.  You can see him waiting in anticipation here as Grandpa helps get the tractor out of the box.

Adam still doesn't have a ton of words, but "tractor" is one most people can understand!  He plays with it daily.  And when he's not playing with them, he likes looking at pictures of tractors in books!

We hope you all had a very joyful Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from our crazy family to yours!

Imagination Station

Imaginations and pretending have been the highlight of play time as of late.  This has been one of my favorite things to watch develop in their little lives so far.  Although Adam is still not much of a talker, he understands everything and "gets" whatever they are pretending to do.  One evening while I was making supper, I heard chattering in Adam's room and went in to see what they were doing.  I was informed, "We're driving our cars!" And of course these "cars" were filled with all of their most precious belongings.  Seriously, who needs real toys!

 Here, they are being kings.  They can both fit inside this cabinet, and that is their castle.  Luke also made up a little catchy song that they sing while they march around the house.  "I am the king, I am the king, I am the king of the jungle!"  Just typing that makes the song get stuck in my head again.

Now here, your guess is as good as mine.  I was cleaning the kitchen while they played in the back yard.  I looked out the window to see them marching side by side across the yard, complete with their hats of choice, and one with a bat and one with a ratty old broom.  This is where they were by the time I got outside to take a picture.  These are definitely some of the best parts of my Mommy days!

Baseball Boys

 A couple of days ago we had a beautiful fall day.  After playing a little bit, the boys decided they needed to be baseball players.  Luke got them their hats and gloves and they were ready! 

 Nevermind Adam's pink glove (we found it for 25 cents at our neighbor's garage sale, so sue us).  He doesn't care, he just wants to be big like his brother.

 He's totally rockin' the pink glove here, don't you think?

 

 Adorable.  I totally get in to playing ball with them.  What would I do if I had girls?!?

Halloween

Truth be told, our Halloween consisted of dressing up, taking pictures, and then heading to church and that's about it.  But Adam did stay in costume and handed out candy to our youth group which he thought was big stuff!

 The second we were done taking pictures, Luke exclaimed, "Come on, Elephant!  Let's go ride our bikes!"

 After church we did suprise Trick or Treat Papa and Mimi which the boys were thrilled with (and so were the grandparents). 

New Kitchen!

We've owned this house for 3 years now.  In those 3 years, we have done too many updates, projects, and do-it-yourselfers to count.  But we saved the biggest project for last...the kitchen!  And I might add, the kitchen/family room area is the main reason I didn't want to buy this house.  I hated it at first sight.  A few of my issues: 1) it was ugly...the orangey-yellow knotty pine cabinets speak for themselves.  They actually don't look as bad in the "before" picture as they looked in person  2) while I was fine with having a wall oven, this one was TINY!  The biggest thing I could fit in it was my smallest cookie sheet.  When we had the boys' birthday party in February, I had to ask our neighbor if I could use their oven so I could cook for our guests!  3) You can't see it in these pictures, but the old (original 1961) porcelain sink was chipped, and therefore had extremely sharp edges that caused some fingers to bleed from time to time.  4) It was not functional.  There was no seating in the kitchen, so for me to feed my children, about a million steps were required per meal to the table in the dining room, which had white carpet, by the way, under the table.  Eating, children, and white carpet should never go together.  These were just a few of my complaints.  So, this spring we decided it was time to do something about it.  At first, we were just going to paint the cabinets, but that didn't solve the oven dilemma.  We got the name of a local guy who does wood working projects as a side job.  We had him over to see if he could help us reconfigure cabinets so we could get a new oven.  After looking at it, he told us it would cost only slightly more to have him just build all new cabinets.  After doing some price comparisons, we found he could build us all new wood cabinets for about 1/3 of the cost of Home Depot or Lowes...and he was doing the countertops for us to boot!  We were thrilled and decided to go for it.  While the process was long and grueling, there are no regrets here!  Of course we saved major $$ because Chad could do so much of it himself (or with the help of his dad).

Here's what the kitchen looked like before we moved in.  The only thing we changed after moving in was taking down wall paper and painting the walls red. 

 This was looking at the kitchen from the dining room.  Please note the white carpet and how little of the kitchen you can actually see.

 Demo day!

 Yeah, it was super fun to try to keep small children out of this mess.

 I'm sure this picture was probably taken some night at about 1:00 in the morning.  Chad worked diligently late into many nights to get everything done before the cabinets were to be installed.  He also did all the plumbing and some of the electrical work.  Sometimes being married to a plumber has its perks, ya know?  Can I just say, my husband totally rocks!  This was all a labor of love, people.

 Looks great, right?!  Please note the cool backsplash and light fixtures that Chad also installed.  But wait!  Still needs new flooring since we had holes where old cabinets had been, and needed to get rid of that (totally stained) white carpet.

 Tada!  New flooring!  Installed by Chad and the best father-in-law ever!

Doesn't it look about 100x bigger?!  I love how open it is between the two rooms now.  So much more family friendly!  I can actually see the boys playing in the family room now while I make supper.

Ooooh, Ahhhhh. 

Check out that beautiful normal-sized oven!  Love it!

We're still finishing some projects in the family room, but I'll be sharing pictures of that too when it's more picture ready.

Family Pictures

So we took family pictures...and I could not be happier with the results!!  Dale (a friend of mine since we were toddlers!) has an incredibly gifted wife, Tonya.  She did a fabulous job and is so creative!  For those of you who live locally, it is 4 Little Fergusons Photography.   I bought a whole set of frames (for super cheap on sale at our new Kohls!) before I even saw the pictures because I knew she would do a great job!  Here are some of my favorites...

Pumpkin Patch

All would not be right in the world if we didn't make it the pumpkin patch in the fall. How is it that the smallest people in the family instinctively know that this is fun?  Adam squealed in delight the whole time, and I remember that at Adam's age, Luke clapped the whole time we were there.  They know it's special! Even though it was a little chilly, it was a great time had by all. They have so many cute activities at this place, too...pumpkin bowling, pumpkin tic tac toe, a big slide, a corn maze, and the list goes on! Why wasn't all this fun stuff around when I was a kid?!

The boys were having so much fun we literally didn't even tell them to smile for this picture.  They are normally not so cooperative with pictures!