Kids.

These Two.

They drive each other bonkers and thus Matt and I bonkers. They fight. They scream. They tease. They squeal. Then they miss each other when the other isn't around. Wait, you guys actually like each other?? I'm so confused! The other day when Sawyer was at school Scout kept asking "Where's MY Sawyer? I want MY Sawyer!". And likewise, one time when Scout was at daycare later than usual Sawyer was saying "Come on Mom, let's go get Scout! I miss her."

I'm relieved and happy they like each other, but man oh man do they know how to push each others buttons!

Whenever I work on a Friday or Saturday night Matt has the kids the following day while I am sleeping. I sleep with ear plugs and am so tired by the time I get home that I'm out as soon as my head hits the pillow and don't hear a thing, but Matt still tries to get them out of the house for a little bit. This day he took them to a Home Depot kind of store and found these wooden animals/bugs/dinosaurs for $2 that they could build. Scout picked out a T rex and Sawyer got a flying beetle. They were pretty proud of their wooden creations and SO excited to show me when I woke up. As soon as I open my door after napping Scout always yells "It's mommy!". The fanfare every time I wake up in the afternoon on the weekend never gets old.

Scout's love of her pink baby blanket, that she named her "Mimi" long ago,  is still going strong. She takes that thing everywhere, just like Sawyer did with his "Bluey". He still sleeps with his blue baby blanket, but it mostly resides on his bed now and doesn't travel with us. Scout, on the other hand, brings her Mimi everywhere and believes that everyone must be as fond of her pink blanket as she is. She holds her blanket up to show strangers and says "See my Mimi" whenever we are out. Today in the car Sawyer was sad, so I heard Scout telling him in the backseat "Here Sawyer. I share my Mimi. You pet my Mimi? She's so nice" and was showing him how to pet her pink blanket as if it has magical powers that will make him feel better. That's some blanket!

She is also quite fond of hair accessories and sometimes decided she needs all of them in at once. 

Remember how I said they sometimes like each other? Scout doesn't ever like to sleep in her own bed so we let her fall asleep in our bed or Sawyer's bed and then move her into her own later on. She wanted to sleep with Sawyer this particular night and when we went in to move her found the two of them cuddling. I HAD to take a photo. Especially, since earlier that same evening they were fighting NON stop! 

Scout's pink dog costume she likes to sport once in a while. 

And sandals, a beanie and sunglasses sound like an excellent outfit for summer when you are two years old. 

She is like her dad in that she has to wear sunglasses in the car because the sun apparently hurts her eyeballs. She and Sawyer both sound like the wicked witch of the West melting whenever the sun so much shines a tiny bit in their eyes. She is like me though in the fact that she loses all of her sunglasses. I think she and I have both gone through three pairs of glasses this summer. 

Both of our kids have this fascination with stuffed animals. Have I mentioned before that I loathe clutter? Like literally loathe it and stuffed animals fit that category perfectly. They seem to have no purpose in life besides being left behind in every room for me to trip over as they stare up at me with their blank, beady eyes. Every time I turn around it's like the stuffed animals we do have are procreating because they seem to be multiplying! What started with some Build a Bears from Matt's mom a couple years ago has turned into this mass collection of all sizes and shapes of every stuffed animal imaginable.  Matt likes to tease me though about my disdain for them because he has seen a photo of me with all the stuffed animals I owned as a kid! I found the photo he was referring to and decided to recreate a photo of the kids with all of theirs. The same cabbage patch doll to the right of me in the photo is also to the right of Scout in the photo of our kids. I got her for my 1st birthday so that doll is 31 years old! And for the record, I have since embraced the stuffed zoo our house is quickly becoming since I realize our kids will not be little forever and I may one day miss having these hundreds of stuffed Minnie's, Mickey's, R2D2's, elephants, emoji's, bears, dolls, turtles, Norwhals, aardvarks, monkeys, sheep, raccoons, and bunnies milling around. 

Roaring Springs

This summer we utilized our Roaring Springs water park passes quite a bit. Sawyer and I went a few times together just the two of us and then on some evenings we went as a whole family. Most of the time we spent floating around in the lazy river. Scout wasn't huge fan of the kiddie area this year, mainly because they didn't like the big bucket that would tip out tons of water unexpectedly. She did however, like the wave pool even though the waves would sometimes smack her in the face! Go figure. I think swimming here, in our friends pool this summer, and in our neighborhood pools has helped Sawyer tremendously with swimming! He has blossomed into a great swimmer and can swim confidently in the deep end by himself now. We will definitely be getting passes again for next summer. 

St Chappelle Sunday

A few Sundays ago we decided on a whim to go to St.  Chappelle Winery for the afternoon. The weather was perfect, there was lots of shade to sit under, live music, and it was a family friendly event so when our rugrats wanted to use our picnic blanket as a slide down the slope we were sitting on no one even batted any eye.  You could bring your own picnic so we packed food for the picky palate kids and then Matt and I enjoyed what the food trucks had to offer. The kids did pretty well considering it was Scout's nap time and they literally had to sit and listen to music without electonrics to play on (oh the horror!). Once they got too restless we did bust out my phone and snap a ton of pics and then when the novelty of that wore we off we packed it in and headed home, noting to ourselves that next time we will go sans children :)