Eli is a Good Boy

My baby turned one this week!
This little guy has been such fun to have in our family.
He loves to laugh and do whatever his big brothers are doing (or at least try to!)
Some of his favorite games are being chased and "cleaning out" the kitchen cabinets.
His favorite food is currently marker tips.

Andrew was out of town most of the week, so we waited until Saturday to have a little birthday celebration. We decided to start with presents since cake tends to be a little messy.
Once he realized he could tear the paper, he was all over it.

After much opening and playing, we moved on to CAKE!

I made these Mini Boston Cream Pies (but with banana pudding... mmm!)


and Eli got a mini star cake with whipped cream all for himself.
He was surprisingly dainty about eating it - at least at first...check it out.

Texas Book Festival

Every year in October, the Texas Book Festival is held on the grounds of the State Capitol Building here in Austin. Every year I say I'm going to go check it out - and this year, thanks to my kids, I actually did!
We actually started the weekend by going to see David Wiesner at the Austin Children's Museum on Friday afternoon. Leah really enjoyed hearing about how a lot of the ideas he uses in his books came from pictures he'd drawn as a child... you could almost see the gears turning as my little artist mulled that one over.

Then on Saturday morning the two older kids and I headed to the Capitol Building. Due to my faulty memory, we got there about an hour before the festival opened, so we walked across the grounds to the visitor's center to kill some time.

We had so much fun there exploring and dressing up that we almost forgot to go back!


But we did make it back in time to make a few crafts and...
see the Cat in the Hat!!!
(the reason for my kids push to attend this year)

We had a great time and will definitely make a trip back next year - maybe we'll even take the little boys too - although they had a great time at the "dinosaur museum" with Dad.

General Conference

Watching General Conference at home when you have kids is always a somewhat risky undertaking. There is always the possibility that you won't actually get to listen to any of it. We have tried many different activities in our attempts to distract the kids and keep them quiet during the last few conference sessions - legos, playdoh, banishment to the backyard, etc.

However, the activity that has turned out to be the most successful and will be elevated to tradition status if we do it again next conference is this:

Cookie Decorating!

In April we made Easter cookies, so I figured this time we should make Halloween cookies.
I think they turned out pretty well!

Picture Day

Today was picture day.

Unfortunately, Leah woke up looking like this...
Actually, the red streaks were darker and her eye was almost swollen shut as well.
Reason #1 why you should never play with poison oak.
I think we'll wait for retakes on the pictures.

Lincoln woke up looking like this...

But we went ahead and took his school pictures anyway. :)

All by Myself

Looks like we need to work on this a little.