Daddy's fort

One Sunday afternoon in October when we trying to find something for Avie to do inside, Jarad thought it would be fun to build a fort for Avalon. She did go inside and color with Mommy for a short time, but all in all she wasn't too interested in the fort yet. But Daddy did have fun building it!

Avie's new toddler bed

We recently moved Avalon from her crib into a toddler bed. We set up the bed on Saturday, October 2nd thinking that we would get her used to it and then decide when to make the transition. But as soon as the bed was set up, Avalon wanted to sleep in it immediately. I guess we should have expected that. She loves her new bed!

The transition went really smoothly. For the first couple of weeks, she stayed in her bed until she fell asleep. Since then, she has started to get out to play sometimes, but she always make it back to the bed to sleep.

Avie helped Daddy set up the bed.

She loves to play on it and help Mommy make the bed.


And sleeps well too.

Archie's first swing ride

The other day Jarad asked me if I'd ever tried putting Avie and Archer in the swing together, and to tell you the truth I hadn't even thought about it yet. Avie's first swing ride at the park wasn't until she was 8 months old. Jarad had tried it out and it worked, so the next time we were at the park on November 15th, I gave it a try. It worked great! Although with Archer in the swing, I couldn't push the swing very high, so Avie didn't like it as much. And so far, Archer was still pretty indifferent. But it was nice not to have to hold Archer for a bit.


When Avie was done swinging, I put Archer in there by himself. And then Avie came back and wanted to give him an underdog push. When I give Avie underdogs, I always count "1-2-3," so that is what we did. It was pretty cute! Luckily Avie couldn't push him too high yet. I'm not sure how much Archer really liked it. Check out this video and see what you think...


A few more pics too.

Feeding the fish at the Zoo!

Avalon's favorite activity at the zoo is feeding the fish. We just discovered this activity about a month ago through a friend whose son likes to feed the fish too. Now every time we go to the zoo, she asks to feed the fish and its the first place she wants to go. Unfortunately, the last two trips to the zoo they were out of fish food. Bummer!

When I took the kids to the zoo on October 29th, there was plenty of food. I bought two handfuls of fish food for Avalon. When it was gone, I told her we were done and so she went to the fish food dispenser and found a piece in there and then took it to the pond and threw it in. I thought this was pretty clever for her to figure this out. Then she continued to go back and forth telling me that she found more food. At first, I thought she was finding more food each time, but then I realized she was just pretending to find the food and pretending to throw it in. However, she had kept one last piece in her hand the whole time. Pretty clever little girl! :)

Here is a video of Avalon feeding the fish.


And a few pics from our day at the zoo.

Archer's 6 months old

Archer turned 6 months old last Friday. We had his doctor's appt today where he came in at 15 lbs 6 ounces (15%), 26.5 inches (50%), and his head was 46 cm (95%). Archer started to make razzing noises about a month ago, but he just started to do them all the time this last week. So I was able to catch a pretty good video. This is how Archer spent most of his 6 month birthday...

Daisy's Dance

Avalon loves to watch TV shows now and one of her favorites is Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. When we first returned to California in early September, her favorite episode was Daisy's Dance. She would watch it almost every day and then throughout the day she would perform Daisy's dance over and over again. And she still does it occasionally now too. It is pretty fun, you should try it! :)



On a side note, Avalon loves playing with this water table. It's been pretty warm this fall, so we've used it several times a week including today. Ahhh...California.

Trick or Treating

Avalon went trick or treating for the first time this year. We took her out last year, but she mostly just ran around. When we started out, I was holding Avalon, knocking on the door and saying trick or treat for her, but Avalon was saying thank you when we asked her to. Then as she started to get candy in her pumpkin, she got really excited. So she started to knock on the doors by herself, and then back away from the door and wait. She still wasn't saying trick or treat, so we decided to ask her to "roar" instead since she was a white tiger and she was happy to do that. By the end of the night, Avalon was knocking on the door, saying trick or treat and thank you, and sometimes even happy halloween. And at a few houses she even told them to close the door afterwards. And she kept her hat on the whole time (all the other times she wore the costume, the hat was off after the first 5 minutes). The video above is one of the first times she went up and knocked on the door herself. Too cute!

After we'd been out for about 45 minutes, Jarad took Archer home, but by now Avalon kept saying, "let's find another door to knock on mommy" so I couldn't take her home. She was so cute and she was having so much fun! We ended up being out until 8:00pm, a total of one and a half hours and past her bedtime too. What a treat!

This video is from our very last house. Her pumpkin is really full now, but she is still carrying it herself. For the most part, I carried her from door to door, but she held her pumpkin the entire time.


I thought that dressing up as a family and taking pictures would be the most fun part of halloween, as I had little expectations for trick or treating. But in the end, trick or treating with Avalon was by far the most fun!

Avalon just as we were leaving our house.

This was taken before we got to the first door.

These pictures taken right after she received the candy.
Avalon knocking on a door all by herself.

She was so excited about her pumpkin full of candy when we got home, she didn't even make it past the steps.
She took the candy out piece by piece and then started to sort it by candy type and count it too (not too surprising since she is the daughter of a statistician and an accountant.) Luckily she still doesn't know how to open them herself yet, but we did give her one piece of candy when we got home.

Final poll results -peanut butter

In contrast to Camille's video and picture filled posts, mine is going to be a short post with only text. I know, how boring.

So the peanut butter poll is closed and the final results are that one family uses a container of peanut butter every week, 5 families use a container in a month and 2 families use a container every year. I put this poll up after we returned back home after spending most of the summer in MN. In our first trip back to the grocery store we bought a 16 oz container of peanut butter. By our next trip back to the grocery store, a week later, we had finished off the peanut butter and had to get a new one. I couldn't believe we had gone through a whole container so quickly.

We now buy the 2x24oz peanut butter containers at Costco. The main downside is that they only sell the creamy version of the brand we like.

Halloween

We again attended the Halloween festivities at Family Student Housing on Saturday, October 30th. This year they had a photo booth too and captured a great shot of our family costumes (above). Does anyone have any guessing as to who we are?

Here's jarad pulling a pretty cute rabbit out of his hat:

As part of the festivities there were lots of fun crafts that Avalon enjoyed! Most of the time she spent coloring trick or treat bags. She had colored three bags before we realized it and stopped her from taking any more bags.

Next she spent some time with dad decorating a pumpkin with stickers.

Here's the pumpkin when it was finished and before she decided to pull off all the stickers again.
She wasn't too excited about posing with her pumpkin after she was done.

She did much better posing with dad while wearing his hat and he was wearing her hat. As you'll notice during most of the festivities she did not want to wear her hat.
She also made a candy corn necklace with a little help from mom.

While Avalon was busy with her crafts, Archer was just hanging out with mom or dad. After the crafts were done, we participated in the costume parade around the complex and Archer fell asleep in dad's arms.

After Avalon's nap, we met up with some friends from Camille's PEP group at the pumpkin patch.

We tried to get a cute picture of Archer with the pumpkins, but the sun was in his eyes.
Jarad's favorite part of our costumes (the adult costumes anyway) was Camille's cape.

Avalon loved the hay ride, which she went on twice. Once with mom and once with dad.

Here's a self photo taken by Camille while on the hayride with Avalon.

She also loved playing with the water pump and was pretty wet when she was finished!

Archer again spent most of his time hanging out with mom or dad.

Stay tuned for Avalon's first real trick or treating adventure in our next post...