Sibling for a week

For the past week Graham has had the opportunity to have a pseudo sibling live with us. Jeremiah is a 5 year old boy that I babysit sometimes and his mom asked if I would mind having him stay at my house this week while she was working. We kept really busy while he was here by going to the park, two jumpy house playgrounds, a birthday party, having several play dates and lots of naps (oh how I looked forward to those naps everyday!). Here are a few pictures:

Watching Yo Gabba Gabba online. Odd that Elliot seems as into it as they are.

Graham showed Jeremiah how his crib works.

They got ready for bed together every night

and then got up together every morning

Graham was absolutely terrified of both bouncy house places and refused to go on any of them. So in essence, I paid $10 for him to play with this stupid bench for an hour and a half. Awesome.

My friend Tracy (I have like 3 friends, what are the chances one of them would have that name right?) came with us and these are her kids. They both loved the bouncy houses but were nice enough to keep Graham company in between bouncing.

At the second bouncy house we went to (don't ask why we even went to a second one after he had such a terrible time at the first one) Graham tried to mack on this cute girl. Unfortunately, she was already walking and thus a little out of his league.

For the most part, it was really great having another kid in our house. I can definitely see why some people say two kids is easier then one, because the two of them played together all day and kept each other busy while I was able to do other things. The only thing I found exhausting was how much talking a 5 year old does!! Oh my word, I thought I was going to go crazy. It was nonstop from the time he woke up to the time he went to sleep. I am now a bit more appreciative of Graham's 4 words that he chooses to use sporadically. Jeremiah is spending the first week in March with us while his mom goes on a business trip so I am just going to have to enjoy my nice quiet house until then....

My how these boys have changed!

Camera purge

A couple of days ago we braved the cold and headed to the park. Poor Graham is resigned to crawl around in the sawdust most of the time. There is always the option of walking buddy....

Carson and Graham zoning out to cartoons.
We kept telling Carson to give Graham a kiss. So cute.


A cake I made for a baby shower.
Anytime Elliot is in the bathroom, Graham insists on waiting outside the door for him and peeking to see if he can catch a glimpse. This kid won't let his dad out of his sight for a minute.

One laugh and all the naughty times are forgotten

Graham has enough toys for 8 children. Yet, my entire day is spent keeping him away from the DVD player, every trash can in the house and the plants.
Last night we started putting Graham to sleep at 6:30. He screamed his head off until 10:40 when he finally slumped over in Elliot's arms and started snoring. I think he does these things just to show us who's really the boss of this house. And trust me, it certainly isn't Elliot or I.

We can finally eat like civilized people

It has only taken us 5 months, but we finally got a kitchen table!! We have been eating off of a dilapidated (you like that? I even looked it up on dictionary.com to make sure it suited the sentence) card table that Elliot's parents let us use until we got an actual table. Thank goodness we finally found one. I was at the grocery store yesterday and saw this table (I have absolutely no idea why a grocery store was selling a kitchen table? There was no sign of any other furniture anywhere in the store) that was originally $300 and was on sale for $75. That includes all 4 chairs!! It was a new years miracle! I immediately got a manager and said I wanted to buy the table right away. She said it had only been on display for 10 minutes. The only time in my life I have had perfect timing. While I was waiting for the manager to get the UPC code for it, two other people stopped and asked about buying the table. I had to engage in a little grappling (this word choice brought to you by the lovely Chrysta Brower), but eventually I fought everyone off and headed home with my table. I can't wait to start having people over for dinner without being mortified of what we are eating off of!

We've found a new way to clean Graham up

Similarities?

Pretty ghetto that I had to take a picture of a picture, but we don't have a scanner so this is all I had to work with.