Playhouse Disney Show

We decided to take Josiah on a very special outing all by himself to see the Playhouse Disney show at the Paramount in Seattle. Here is the marquee showing the show title.

Before the show, we went to lunch and we needed to kill some time before the restaurant opened and so we introduced Josiah to the escalators in the Pacific Place Mall. He was having a blast with this as you can see and was an expert at getting on and off the escalators by the time we were finished. It was also cute that when we rode in the elevators he would hold his hat. We think he did that because he felt himself falling and thought his hat would fall off or something.

We went to Johnny Rocket's before the show to have a bite to eat. It is an old 50's type place, which we found it to be rather overpriced lacking in the quality of food department as well. We did enjoy sword fighting with the straws however!

Here is a shot of Daddy with the happy Josiah boy and his new Handy Manny light up spinner toy.

Here is a good shot of me and Josiah at the show. The Handy Manny spinner posed for the shot too apparently!

Here is a shot of all of us at the show. Josiah was SO excited for this outing and has been talking about it for weeks! The funny thing was though that while he was there he was very subdued and shy. I guess that shouldn't suprise us as he is not the greatest with new environments and change, but overall he did great. He absolutely loved the Handy Manny skits and at one point, Handy Manny was over by us (we were in the 2nd row from the stage) and I told Josiah to wave at him and instead he crouched down behind the seat and hid. Obviously, he does NOT take after outgoing me. By the end of the show, he was pretty tired and ready to go home. He fell asleep on the way home and we transferred him to his bed for a nice long nap. The show itself was cute. I had to laugh though at the theme that basically indicated that music the universal language can unite the world in peace and harmony. Ummmm....yeah, not so much. But hey, it's Disney, so it's got to be a little over the top, right?

Lego Fun

We found this Police Headquarters Lego set on clearance and decided to get it when the price was right. This is the first picture I took of Josiah with his new set, as he was making the motorcycle fly through the air with a boyish "Khshhhhhhhh" sound. He was having a blast playing with these things! I built the second part with the garages and he kept saying, "Is it ready yet Momma?" and was trying to play with it while I was still building. Needless to say he was excited.

Here is the finished product of the Police Headquarters. It is pretty neat to play with actually. The garage doors open and close, it has security barriers that go up and down, and the prisnors can "escape" by pulling a lever in the back. We tried to do a prison break a few times and Josiah quickly responded with "Weee--oooo weee--oooo, you're too late!" There is zero crime in Josiah's Lego town!! He wanted to take the entire set with him to bed, but as you can see, that would have been a bad idea. We let him take back only the 3 vehicles ( plus a fire engine that I made) from the set to sit on the table next to his bed.

Fun New Pictures

Here are Caleb and Katie (Melissa's daughter) posing for the camera. When Caleb saw Katie, he couldn't wipe the smile off his face. It was really cute because usually it takes a lot to make Caleb smile, so he must have really been happy to see her. He is flirting with the girls already!!

Here is my dear friend Melissa holding happy Daniel boy!

I am currently making an afghan for my parents (late Christmas gift) and Caleb is always interested to pull and eat my yarn, so I got some old yarn for him to play with and he enjoyed that quite a bit!

We finally broke down and decided to replace the decripit, mismatched entertainment center that we have had for many moons. David found a good deal on that and a new TV and had been saving up for a while for the purchase. He got Josiah all hyped up that they were going to build it together and he was just thrilled to "help." He said, "I can help with my tools!" He has his Handy Manny shirt on here and "Philipe" the screwdriver to be of assistance.

Josiah was attempting to balance the hammer with one hand here and shortly after I took this we advised that this was a bad idea! I love his very intense face here though! A cute story about him from today also was when David asked him to put some coins in the piggy bank and I asked him, "What are you doing Josiah?" and his answer was "I'm doing penny work."

I decided to try bathing the twins together today, since they are both really good at balancing now and it worked pretty well. I first got everything ready and then undressed them both and then put Daniel in and cleaned him up. Then I put Caleb in and cleaned him up and then sat there and watched them play. It was hard to get a shot of them both looking up and equally as hard to not get the camera soaked as you can see here. Daniel was saying, "AH AH AH AH" and splashing very aggressively most of the time. Caleb appears to be choking on the fishing pole, but I promise you he wasn't. He is always looking for something to put in his mouth to chew on! They had a blast in the tub together though. They mostly sat back to back and splashed incessantly. I had my towel shield so I didn't get a bath also!

One-Year Check Up, The Cage, & Salads...

We took our boys to there one-year check finally (though they are officially 13 months now). Caleb weighed in at 21 pounds (2 less than brother this time) and 29.75 inches long. He is in the 25th percentile for his weight and height (for actual age, not adjusted for prematurity). The doctor wants us to keep in an eye on his left eye as it seems it may have a blocked tear duct (his eye gets all gummed up when he is sick and/or cries a lot). This usually corrects itself in children as they grow older, so we will wait since it isn't bothering him much and it only happens once in a while. The doctor noted that our Caleb was "very observant" which is something we have noticed here as well. He really wanted to check our her stethoscope and she tried to distract him with a tongue depressor, but he wasn't deterred at all and held onto the tongue depressor in one hand and proceeded to investigate the stethoscope with the other hand. Later she had a blue glove on and was looking in his mouth and he was just fixated on the glove. The picture above captures a rather rare spawn, a Caleb smile. It is a challenge to capture his smiles on film, but he has a very sweet little smile!

Daniel weighed in at 23 pounds and was 30 inches long. He is almost in the 50 percentile for his weight and height (for his actual age, not adjusted for prematurity). The doctor was still very pleased with the boy's progress and doesn't have any concerns about them. I had to add this shot of the boys playing. Daniel has the funniest expression here as he is chomping down on the duckie.

Here is Captain Smiles A Lot, Daniel, in the forefront and Caleb munching on a block in the background. This is also a good shot also of what I call my stress reliever, which is sometimes called "the cage," but is more appropriately called "the play yard." Once these little guys started crawling more and getting into everything, it was all I could do to find even a moment to go to the bathroom! I didn't want to gate off our whole house, as I hate tripping over gates at every turn, so my mom bought us this free-standing play yard for them (thanks mom!) They don't like to stay in it for too long, but will remain in there longer if I turn on a Baby Einstein for them to watch, so that I can clean the kitchen or what have you for a little bit of time. I usually rotate them between playing in Josiah's room and playing in the play yard. David has called it "the cage" off and on and one day when the babies were playing in Josiah's room and were messing up his railroad tracks that he laid down, he said, "Put them in the cage, Momma!" I had to laugh. So we need to stop calling it that, so that won't accidentally come out in public someday to the wrong person. Hee hee!

Here is sweet Caleb boy. This is a nice close-up of his eyes. They are so different from our other boys, sort of a grayish brown with hints of green as well. They change color depending on what he is wearing. This face he is giving is his "Ma ma ma ma" face. Sometimes he sticks his tongue out and says "mama" with the tongue wagging as well, it is so funny!

Here is Mr. "take a picture of me too!" It was all I could do to get a still shot though while he was bouncing on the ball! Here are a couple new little things to add to his latest sayings. One is that he and David were playing with the Legos today, and as Josiah was helping Daddy put the little fireman together he said, "I have good thinking." Then another one was when I was taking him home from the store (later at night one evening) and he was talking about Toy Story (the first movie) and kept saying that Woody said, "Salads" (or at least that is what I heard him saying). As I tried to dig for what he was talking about, he described the scene in the movie where Buzz gets into the space ship at Pizza Planet and starts talking to the alien toys inside it. When Woody gets in and hears them talking about "the claw" and such, he calls them "zealots." So not salads, but zealots....aha! Then Josiah wanted to know what the word "zealot" meant and I said that it means to be really excited about something. I said that when we love Jesus a lot we could be called zealots for Jesus. He replied with, "I'm zealot for Christmas." And well...he did get it as you can see!!

Funny Josiah Stories

This is a picture of Josiah I took a while back when we first got the new camera, but I wanted to post a picture of him, as I am about to write down some new Josiah-isms. To give a little back story, Josiah is an early bird and loves to wake up around 5:30am and in some cases earlier than that. He had been coming into my room to wake me up (before the babies were stirring), which WAS NOT very popular for me, the night owl. So one day this grumpy Momma gave Josiah a talking to about waking me up too early. I said something like, "Mommy doesn't want you to wake her up unless it is an emergency, because Mommy needs her sleep, so she isn't so grumpy in the morning." I then told him if he got up early that he should go potty and then he could go and play quietly in his room until I woke up. He has actually been doing this! One morning David was leaving for work early and he was out in the hallway playing and David asked what he was doing and he said, "I'm playing quietly like Mommy said and I didn't wake her up!" He likes to tell me that each morning now, Momma, I didn't wake you up! And the crowd cheers....right? But wait...I think Josiah has figured out the "secret" of how to get Mommy up without waking me himself. The other morning, the babies started to stir, which was waking me up and I heard this talking in their room. I listened further and heard Josiah singing, "Lullaby and goodnight, may good dreams ever find you..." This is what I sing to him each night before he goes to bed. He was trying to help the babies go back to sleep by singing to them. It was very sweet! Though I do think that his playing in the hallway routine is a method of getting the babies to wake up, so that I will soon get up also. Hrrrm...this boy is too smart for his own good!

Here is another fun one that we got the other day. I was helping him make a boat from his Lego magazine and one part of the boat has this little thing that looked like the boat was transporting a car (a very basic something with 4 wheels), but David informed me that likely the wheels were to represent how big ships have the life preservers hanging off the side and that perhaps it wasn't a car. In reponse to this, the conversation went something like this:

Me: Alrighty then, well Momma didn't know that.
Josiah: Why didn't you know that?
Me: Mommy doesn't know everything.
Josiah: Why don't you know everything?
David: Only God knows everything!
Josiah: I know everything.
David: NO...only God knows everything.
Josiah: Me and God know everything... (little does he know!!)

Another lovely was today when we were in the car, and we asked Josiah about what he learned today at church. He began telling the story of Joseph and what happened to him. When he got to the part in the story about how Joseph's brothers lied to Jacob about how he had disappeared, David asked Josiah, "Does Jesus like it when we lie?" He said, "No!" And then David asked him, When you tell the truth, does it make Jesus smile?" And again he said, "No!" But he obviously didn't know what David meant, so he explained and then David asked, "What does make Jesus smile?" And his response was, "Jesus likes us to share....and not to say pee-pee, or poo-poo, or dang it or darn...those are bad words!" I would like to add that the latter list was unprompted and David and I were trying so hard not to laugh outloud in the front seat! He had been using the potty words for a while there thinking they were super funny to say just randomly, we we have told him not to use them unless he is in the bathroom of course, and then the last two aren't "technically" bad words, but I have been trying to strike them from my vocabulary anyway and we didn't like to hear him say them either, so hence the "they are bad words" comment.

Another cute story from today occurred when I decided to dress him in his very dressy clothes for church (ie: dress pants, dress shirt and a vest). Daddy came in and told Josiah that I had some very special dress-up clothes for him today and he got excited and said, "Yeah!" Then when I brought them out, he saw them and said, "I don't like this dress!" (Since we say, "It is time to get dressed," he equates putting on clothes with the word "dress" regardless of the type of clothes he is wearing). I said, "You will be fine, this is what you are wearing today." He then responded with, "I am shy about this dress." Ha ha ha! He did wear it, and then later we asked him if his teacher's noticed his special clothes at church and he said, "Yes, they said I was a grown up!" He did look very grown up and unfortunately I did not get a picture, but I will next time he wears that "dress." I didn't want to make a big deal about him wearing them this time due to his response.

He is our sweet little Josiah boy! We love the things he comes up with now, and I am glad to write them here for him to enjoy someday too and to show his little ones the funny things he used to say. As a quick aside, his behavior has taken a marked turn and he really has been doing great and obeying more these days the first time. David and I are so proud of how he has been doing and can only thank the Lord and the faithful prayers of you all for this little success in his life.

Raiding the Pantry

I have a feeling this is a scene to be repeated many times at later dates as the twins grow older and start eating more and more! Here they are in their Sunday best though, rearranging things in the pantry for me. Aren't they handsome? :)

Bath Time and Fort Time!

Here is Daniel splashing in the bath shouting, "AHHHH!" He really likes the water now! He didn't used to though! It used to be quite a scary thing for our little Daniel boy to take a bath, but he is getting more comfortable with it now that he is a one year old!

Here is Caleb splashing in the bath. He gets the award for the most water displaced! He really goes to town with the splashing! So much so that I am hard pressed to get a shot without getting waves of water heading towards the camera. He didn't want to look at me while he was in the bath either, and so it was hard to get a shot of his face!

Here is Daniel looking at the water coming out of the cup that Josiah is holding. I thought this was neat to see the droplets coming down in the still photograph. He was just infatuated with looking at the water coming down!

Here is Caleb's extreme close up in the bath. It was hard to get a face shot, but this is the closest I was able to get. You can see here how gray his eyes are. Daniel's are a very blue, blue, but his are gray and sometimes green. They seem to change color depending on what he is wearing (just like his Daddy I might add). A funny note about the twins. The new thing is that when one of them has a poopy diaper, they both come crawling to find me wherever I am. They can be playing and playing in Josiah's room and then all of a sudden come crawling as fast as lightning down the hall, and it can usually be guaranteed that someone needs a diaper change. It is really cute!

Here is Josiah in his fort in the living room. Sharel took this shot of him playing in the fort they made. This is a rare close up of our oldest boy. He is getting harder and harder to photograph these days! He is starting to learn the "I hate photos" motto from his Dad I guess. :)

Cute Little Daniel Boy!

To those of you who actually read this post earlier and tried to vote I apologize now as I have decided not to do it because when I entered this picture in the contest, I thought it was just a simple click and vote thing and apparently it is a multi-marketing nightmare instead. So, instead of voting for our cute little Daniel boy in the "cutest baby" contest, you can just see how cute he is right here on the blog. By the way, this picture was from a while back, but it is one of my absolute faves of him!

Josiah Sayings and Snow Fun

It snowed again today, and before the snow melted Josiah wanted to go outside and try out the sled that Grandma brought over. I tried not to ruin his fun in telling him that the hill in our backyard wouldn't work for sledding, but let him figure that out on his own. You can see the "disappointed sledder" look here and also when he is sitting on the sled below. He had some alternative fun though by romping around in the snow with Echo (our dog).

One of Josiah's funny sayings of late went something like this:

Josiah: When I...when I'm big, when I grow up...I want to fix things.

Mommy: What do you want to fix?

Josiah: Cars. (big smile)

Mommy: Oh, well when you fix cars that is called being a mechanic.

Josiah: (even bigger smile) I going to be a 'chanic!

And later that day when we were watching Toy Story and Buzz was wanting to find a space ship...

Josiah: I wish to go to the moon.

Mommy: Oh then you might want to be an astronaut someday and go to the moon in a rocket ship.

Josiah: Yes, I wish to be an astronaut.

Mommy: I thought you wanted to be a mechanic?

Josiah: I want to be a 'chanic AND an astronaut.

Mommy: Maybe you could fix space ships and rockets instead.

Josiah: YEAH!!

I discovered something interesting about Josiah here recently also. He seems to learn things better and is more cooperative to learn things when he is busy doing something else. Perhaps he has inherited the skill of multi-tasking from his Mommy and Daddy? Anyway, I think it has more to do with the fact that he doesn't like to be singled out and likes to do things "shoulder to shoulder" and feels more comfortable that way. So I was able to work with him on 3 different Awana verses last night while he was playing with his Legos and he very easily and quickly memorized them without much effort on either of our parts. I even used the Legos to help him remember one of them. The verse was "Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight paths for Him" (they paraphrase a bit for the little ones) and I took the Legos and made a straight path for his Lego trucks and cars to go through and we repeated the verse. Then today he was playing with his Legos and he started shouting something which I couldn't understand about 4 or 5 times. I finally discovered that he was shouting, "Prepare the way!" and was moving his cars and trucks through the path we made. It was very cute!