Of Birthdays and Ice Days

We had a great week at the beach!! I haven't uploaded my pictures from the trip yet BUT I do have some other fun ones! Here are Autumn and Tyler at Hudson's birthday party last month. Hudson was a lot luckier than I was with party planning. Whereas my ice cream social got an ice storm warning, he had a crazy pleasant day!

 Birthday boy and his candles.

The ice storm did a whole lot of nothing around our neighborhood but further north people were hit pretty hard. My mom came to visit that Wednesday and said she couldn't believe the difference a few miles made! We made the best of the sprinkling of snow. Autumn and I piled up what we could and threw a few snowballs but that's all the winter fun we managed. We did get out of school for 3 days which was fun.

When school was back, the kids got to do their rescheduled Dr. Seuss dress up day! We all had a lot of fun. Autumn was one of the only blue fishes at the school. I was trying to think of something fun but she was all, "I am going to be a fish." No deals. Ha! Her friend on the left there was a "new fish" and her other friend decided to be a blue fish, too, since he had a blue shirt on.

I also knew that Autumn was the only blue fish in the school because I took photos of every child in costume in the entire school except for 24. There were only two cameras and one stopped working so I got to take ALL THE PICTURES. I didn't mind but I might have planned my day differently with a little warning! They were all super cute. I saw a ton of Cats in Hats, Loraxes and Things! Too fun!

Spring Break!!

It's spring break so no blog post tonight but head over to passing pinwheels and check Autumn out in 3d glasses. Too cute!

Ice Cream, Ice Storms, Evil Kitties, Nice Kitties, and Sinking Ships!

What a day! I planned an ice cream social couples wedding shower annnnnnd there was a winter storm warning. It was about 34 degrees and raining! We had a good time, though, and I'll have some fun photos soon on the Pinwheel blog! Autumn was pretty amazing. Everyone who usually babysits her was out of town this weekend so she just kind of hung out and entertained herself for 2 whole hours. As a reward, she got an ice cream sundae with anything she wanted on it. Autumn has more self control than I do because she got chocolate (coconut milk) ice cream, chocolate sauce, ONE mini oreo, three marshmallows, and five chocolate chips. No one ask what I had...

Anyway, I forgot to upload our photos from Hudson's party and I am, once again, too cold to go get the camera. But I have some fun stuff for you. We've been feeding our friend's cat and she's a great kitty. Autumn loves seeing her because she's an indoor/outdoor cat who may or may not be around when we get there. We've seen Holy(field) more than they've seen Molly.

How many times in, like, a year have our friends seen Molly? ZERO. No matter how much they look or when they come, no Molly. Hopefully one day she'll show up for them. I do think Molly is rather losing her mind. She's been extra weird about lights and shiny things and she follows me everywhere lately. Molly even lets Autumn brush her. I mean, she's still demonspawn but maybe demonspawn lite in her old age!

The above picture? She crawled on my lap when Mike and I were watching a movie. AND THEN SHE LET ME HOLD HER TAIL. Here's the next picture, though:

Ohhhkayyyy. Moving on...let's banish Evil Kitty with Fun Autumn. She dumped all the clothes out of the laundry basket a couple weeks ago and embarked on a boat journey. That cape is the ocean. It must have been a rocky journey (perhaps Frozen-inspired?) because she spilled over in this crash I caught. Later, her boat crashed so hard into the sofa that Autumn had a bruise across the bridge of her nose!

AND I just got word that there's no school tomorrow! On one hand, I'm happy. On the other, I'm hoping it isn't so icy I don't get to teach my class tomorrow night. It's my first day as the new Monday kickboxing teacher at Germantown Athletic Club. The instructor who handed the class over and I are going to alternate this month, I think, in order to ease the transition. :) People get attached to their teachers which I understand. Oh, hey, Mike just emailed me a picture of Autumn from today when they fed Holy. This is what she changed into after church!! And check out how cute and non-demon eyed this kitty is in her heated bed...

Stay warm and dry, all!

Not Preppy Autumn and More Valentine's Day!

I finally uploaded my Valentine's photos. I loved that Mike got to go to Autumn's class party. Look at how cute they are!

They did ice cream sundaes. We have to watch Autumn's dairy intake so I let her pick out some ice cream and I brought it along. She wanted coconut milk ice cream instead of her usual soy or almond milk which surprised me because she despises the coconut milk that comes in a carton. I'm glad she was open minded because it tasted great!

They set up a little "photobooth" and of course Autumn was a princess. I am so relieved that the photos on my camera look pretty good. The ones on the room mom's camera were awful. I thought I looked kind of nice that day but the other photos? I looked ROUGH. I mean, I'm not winning any beauty contests but man. Hahaha.

I'll have some photos from the weekend next week--we went to Birmingham for Hudson's birthday party. We had a good time. After driving from Orlando to Memphis in December, that Birmingham to Memphis drive is a piece of cake! For now, here's something kind of funny. Autumn's been super attached to this blue sweater. She wears it **everywhere.**

Thursday, she walked into aikido with her sweater wrapped around her shoulders like a prep school kid!! She was, of course, adorable but I'd never seen her do that so I asked her if she was feeling preppy today. I don't think she has any idea what preppy means but she adamantly said NO. She's WEARING A CAPE LIKE ELSA. I love it!

Even on Friday, she spent the whole day with her sweater like that! Autumn's teacher told me that she and some of her friends play Frozen at recess so I'm just picturing her and her friends sweeping around building imaginary snow castles and singing Let it Go. I used to think I'd be sad when Autumn wasn't a baby/infant/toddler anymore but the nice thing is that every stage seems to have it's Really Cool Thing and suddenly growing up isn't so hard. :) I'm super thankful we get to experience it with her.

February Fun!

I hope everyone had a super fun Valentine's Day!! We did. Mike got to stay home from work Friday as a surprise. He's been working extremely long hours so it was nice to see him for more than a few minutes before bed time. We went to Autumn's Valentine's Day party and I totally have photos of that but they are on my camera downstairs and I'm too lazy to go get it! But, we did some other things, too. Like the dentist. Autumn has gone from being absolutely terrified of everything about the dentist to looking forward to her visits.

It helps that she and her friends can slide on the chair.

We also made Valentines for Autumn's class. I got the kiwi crate valentine kit for her. We also thought about Doc McStuffins or Lalaloopsy Valentines but decided that she likes crafts so much that it was worth doing. I love what she did. She did the pop ups and then wrote a special note to all of her friends. SO SWEET.

I don't remember if I've mentioned this but Autumn is in a new ballet class. It's great because she's one of the younger kids so it's a challenge for her. It's been going well. Even better? It's during one of the aikido classes I teach. So, She hangs out for a little while, goes to ballet, changes into pajamas, and then I'm done and we go home! Soooo convenient. We didn't do swim team this semester because the timing was just too hard on our schedule as a family. With Mike's work going crazy, it turned out well because he can't take Autumn to swim on Tuesdays anymore. We'll probably do some swim lessons this summer and then see if Autumn wants to try out for the swim team rather than doing the Lil' Gators. I guess it's going to depend on how into ballet she gets. Anyway, this is Autumn waiting on me SO PATIENTLY (not) while I talked to some students, hahaha.

Oh, some of you might have seen this but here's something funny...a failed project. I made these fun yarn balls to put in some vases for a shower I'm giving next month. Well. Only one turned out. It was suuuuper messy so I haven't decided if it's worth doing again!

Here's your monthly Molly report. She's doing fine. She even survived the onslaught of teenagers determined to pet her!

Until next week! I might even have a video of Autumn belting out Let It Go from Frozen!!

Breakfast with Mickey!

It has been a crazy weekend. Our aikido school brought in an instructor from Georgia. We had a great time and he and the students he brought were so good for our students to meet and train with. Did I mention they all stayed here? I haven't updated the pinwheel blog in too long but my next post is going to be on that! In the meantime, here are the last of our disney photos!

First up, sad Autumn. I had the flu over Christmas so when Autumn's sniffles were joined by a fever, we put her on tamiflu. It worked out well and she barely missed a beat. Our second day at Disney was her last day of tamiflu. We didn't get in until 2am and woke up around 8:30 to make a 10:45 character breakfast. I should have given her a snack buuuut I didn't because she didn't really want one. When Autumn started drooping on the way in, I thought it was simply tiredness. We're pretty scheduled so late nights like that never happen.

Because we had some stragglers, we couldn't be seated to eat immediately. Autumn was kind of squatting in what I call her island baby position and mumbled something. Then I heard a panicked, "MAMA, I THREW UP---blarhgk." Yup. She threw up the medicine. POOR AUTUMN I FELT SO BAD. Lainey got her to the bathroom, Brad got someone to clean up the mess, and when I caught up with Autumn, she was more upset than sick. After resting a bit, she seemed pretty back to normal and was almost 100% once she had some easy to digest food in her. And, of course, these guys helped:

The breakfast was good and although it took a really long time to actually get started, the characters were really great. I can't imagine being one of these workers sitting in that costume and having kids paw at them all day. Mickey was extra nice, it seemed.

Autumn thought Minnie was beautiful:

And Ellie was downright fascinated:

Interestingly, Goofy was Autumn's favorite! She said it's because he's so tall and silly. One of the coolest things we discovered is that the characters even have signatures in character. Every time she got a new autograph Autumn would giggle and dance because their writing looked just like she hoped.

We had such a good time. I definitely want to go back someday! We have a list of things we didn't do that we want to do next time--mostly roller coasters but Autumn is dying to see Doc McStuffins who just joined a different character breakfast. :) Until next time, Disney!

Epcot Adventures and Mike's Photos from the Trip

Mike made this cute photo/video montage with one of the apps on his phone. It's so fun! And it reminded me that I have more Disney photos to post! Like this one. All of these are from our last day. We hit it pretty hard since we weren't there as long as the others so we kind of wavered from delirious to exhausted. Delirious might be the face here.

And I think these qualify as Crazy Eyes™. 

Aaaand it devolved into exhaustion! Autumn was determined not to take another step, hahaha. But the promise of food got her moving again. This is actually a retake because the grumpy face lasted a very short time. I asked her to do it again for me because she looked so funny.

After dinner and the holiday fireworks--which were AMAZINGGGGG--we realized it really was our last day! So, picture taking had to commence. Uncle Brad went first. He's in Doha now so his was our last hurrah with him before he headed off to the Middle East!

And then Aunt Lauren, who got to come to Mike's annual fajita dinner last night! I am so mad at myself because we had dinner with Mike's family and then a community group lunch today AND I TOOK NO PHOTOS. Arg!

Last, the reason for that particular season--Lainey and Pd. Check out Autumn's hand tangled in Lainey's hair. I don't know why but that cracked me up. Next week I have stories and pictures from the character breakfast we went to!

For more Disney Adventures, check out Passing Pinwheels!