I finished the canvas I have been working on forever, well not forever but at least a month. It's finally done and hanging on the wall. The No Whining rule has been the hardest for TJ and Ava is too young to really get it, but she has sharing issues. :) Ava upgraded to her toddler bed. She loves getting in and out of her bed by herself. We had problems with TJ staying in his bed when he switched to a toddler bed but Ava usually stays put. The only problem we have is that we put a baby gate in her doorway so if she gets up in the morning she can't get out of her room. Only, she can. She digs her toes into the little holes in the gate and scales the gate and gets out. We NEVER had that problem with TJ. He never really tried to get out of the gate. he would just lay in front of it waiting to get out. i'm not sure what we are going to do about her yet, maybe buy another baby gate and stack them so she can't climb over. I don't know. I'm not really up for discipling her about it when she gets out at 6 in the morning. ava has started playing with her dolls recently. She's really cute playing with them and I gave her one of her old baby bottles to use with her baby and she pretends to feed her baby. And I know this baby doll is really ugly, but it's the only one she plays with and she has about 6 dolls. This doll actually used to be mine that my mom gave me when i was younger. somehow Ava has become attatched to it. I don't know why, it really is ugly, but then again, why do all dolls have to be cute?? But no worries, I did get her a nice big 20" Cute baby doll for christmas, hopefully she will like it more than this one.

Showing off her new church outfit from Grandma Schimp. "I'm so pretty, oh so pretty..." I always feel like singing that song when she poses like that.

We had Thanksgiving at our house this year for the first time ever. THis is Trenton's Thankful Tree. He told me what he's thankful for and I wrote them down for him and we hung them on the "tree".

Not sure if I posted this picture before or not...I really don't feel like going through the archives to find out so i'll do it again. He said he was being a musketeer. you can't see it but he has a feather in the back of his hat, he has a sword, a belt, Not sure what the blue thing is on his hand though. i'm just glad he has an imagination. :) Lately he has pretended to be captain america. he is truely obsessed with captain america. I went on YouTube and let him watch some of the old 1960's Captain America cartoons and he loves it. He has a whole nother made up out fit for Cap. America too. For Christmas I am going to make him a superhero cape to go along with the captain america shield and helmet we got him. i know he will love it.

We are setting up our christmas tree today. it's tradition her to set it up on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. I tihnk i'm going to do the thing we did last year with TJ that he loved. I found 24 kids books about Christmas, like The Night Before Christmas, The Christmas Story, THe Grinch and all kinds of other christmas books and wrapped them up individually and let him open one book each night in December and we read it before bed. He got a kick out of opening the book each night to see what story we would read. Now Ava is old enough to do it too so they will have to take turns. Christmas is fun when the kids are small :) I'm excited this year that we might be going to NY for Christmas. The kids have never been to NY for Christmas to their grandparents house so this will be new for them. I think the last time Barak and I went to NY for Christmas was when we were first married 6 or 7 years ago...Ithink it was 7 years ago because our neice Amber was just a month old and she's 7 now.