Who To Marry?

Today Griffin was sitting in the backseat of the car and started asking me questions like who my father was and who my husband was. I told him and then he wanted to know WHO my husband was when Daddy was not in the car. To which I replied (as a good wife should), Brent is always my husband even if he is not in the car. Griffin wouldn't accept this answer and asked if he could be my pretend husband while Daddy was not in the car. I told him that was okay to pretend that. Then we the conversation took a different route...

G: So who will I marry?
M: Not sure but I am sure you will find someone. Which of your girl friends do you like best?
G: Hmmm, I am not sure. I will have to wait and see.
(time lapse)
G: I know! God will find one for me. That's a good idea.
M: Yes, that is a great idea.
G: So God will hold a girl up in his hands and I will see if I like her or not. That will work.

All I can visualize during this conversation is God as King Kong with a "girl" in his hands.

Sweet Boy

Griffin has been very sweet lately and it just happens to have coincided with his 4th birthday. I am still hoping that turning 4 will be the magic number for happier days ahead. This afternoon he came up to me on the couch and said, "C'mon Mom, let's snuggle. That's where I give you a hug and you give me a big smile". At least this is a form of bossiness I can handle.

Nice porch-swinging kind of night

Last night Brent and I sat on the porch swing outside and drank some wine. The weather is starting to cool down a bit here and the sunset was really pretty. This is what we could see as we were sitting. It makes me ready for Fall.

Book worm

For the past few days Gray has really taken an interest in his Dr Suess books. At different points during the day, you can invariably find him sitting quietly on the top step of our staircase reading Hop on Pop, In a People House, or Mr Brown Can Moo. The Mr Brown book has been helpful in encouraging him to talk a bit more. He learned "moo", "boom boom", and "knock knock" the other day. The first thing he does when he wakes up in the morning is pick up 2 of these books and carry them with him downstairs.

Indy Girls Weekend

This past weekend I met some friends in Indy for a girls weekend. It was kind of random that we ended up there (why Indy you may ask?) but we had a great time. My friend, Amy, lives there and Laura flew in from New York. I am pretty sure that we ate and shopped our way through the city over the course of 3 days. We had so much fun. On Friday night we ate at Eddie Merlot's with Amy's friend, Brittany. I don't think I have ever eaten more food in my life. Laura and I managed to polish off an entire Brie appetizer ourselves. That is going to take some time at the gym. One of our first pics was eating outside at Bruges in Broad Ripple. The weather in Indy was great this weekend- kind of cool and very comfortable.

On Saturday we spent a lot of time walking downtown by the Sailors and Soldiers monument and over to Mass Ave for shopping. Poor Amy was a trooper with walking 2 miles and being almost 7 months pregnant.

Brent did a great job with the boys and they had a fun weekend doing guy stuff. He took them out for breakfast one morning and Griffin ate 7 pancakes by himself. I don't think I have ever seen that child eat that much food. So now we have to plan our next girls weekend in the Spring or Summer of 2009...if anyone has any ideas we are open to hearing them:)

Been away awhile

Just got back from a girls trip to Indy and I will post pics soon.

A few funny Griffinisms that he just blurted out...

A minute ago he looked at me and said, "Honey, you're so sweet. Give me a kiss". Guess he is practicing his pick-up lines a bit early.

Then a sunroom commercial came on tv. He said, "Mom, we need a sunroom on our house". I said, "maybe we will have one when we move someday". Griffin says, "I know what we can do. We can ask God about that. God is a super hero kind of guy". Amen.

Comment

Today Griffin has used the phrase, "You go get it, girl", several times. We did go up to church this morning so I am not sure who he picked this up from but it makes me laugh.

Tom and Jerry

Lately Griffin is really into the cartoon Tom and Jerry. So today on the way up to Moms Group, he was talking about them a lot. Here is how it went.

G: Mom, Does Jerry have hair?
M: No, Jerry has fur.
G: Can I pet him?
M: I guess you can pet him one day.
G: I won't squeeze him. I don't want to hurt him. I want to hurt Tom with my light saber. Tom is the mean one.

Then a few minutes pass...
G: How do we get to Tom and Jerry's house?

After much explanation (about how Tom and Jerry weren't real which he could not accept), I finally told him that maybe his Dad would show him how to get to their house. Poor Brent is my excuse for a lot of things that I can't explain.

You Make My Day

Wow. I got an award from my friend, Carrie, which made my day. Anyway as part of the blogging community (I guess that is what I can call it), it is my turn to bestow the You Make My Day Award to some fellow bloggers. I don't think there are any hard and fast rules to this but you have to pick 5 more bloggers to give the award to. I had issues trying to add the links to everyone's blog so sorry about that. So here goes...





Nautichapmans: My friend, Julie, who always thinks of unique and interesting things to post. She has had some great inspirational posts and they make me think. Which is a good thing.


Ferg Family Update: My friend, Jessica, who was my first blogging friend. The antics of her two adorable kids (who are very close in age to my boys) always crack me up because I can relate. And she has a rescued IG at home too.


3 Girls and a Daddy: Love seeing pictures of her girls and hearing about Caroline's quirky obsessions. The grocery store story and the ball is still making me smile.


Some Kind of Wonderful: For Diana who always adds creative elements to her blog.


Herring Family: for Lori because with 3 kids (and one of them is a newborn), she still manages to blog.

Top 100 Books

I got this idea off of Julie's blog. This is a list of some of the top 100 books and you are supposed to put in bold the ones that you have read and italicize the ones you love. So here goes! I do realize that I have a long way to go to master this list.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible – work in progress
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Phillip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 Joseph Heller
14 The Complete works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune- Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 notes from a small island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine de St. Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town like Alice- Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Shark party

On Saturday we had Griffin's 4th Birthday Party up at our pool. It was the first year where he really could tell us what kind of party he wanted. He had some really specific ideas and the party turned out well. The hardest part of the day was getting the cupcakes into the party without destroying there. Here is Griffin with Brent before the party started.Mason, one of his girlfriends from playgroup, was looking adorable in her bikini. Spencer and Ava.

Jumping in!

Kellan, Griffin, and Annabelle spent most of the time jumping off the side of the pool over and over again. They had a blast and got everyone wet. They also kept the lifeguards very busy.

Getting ready for the cake with my two boys.

The shark cupcakes he requested that I make.

His big cake.

The kids loved the shark cupcakes.

Gray really loved his cupcakes.

It was a great day overall and a pretty relaxing party. Here is a short video clip of him blowing out candles and everyone singing.