"I love you, Bria."

Before I went to bed last night, I went to check on the girls.  They were sound asleep.  Amusingly, Brynn was asleep with a beauty mask on.  She had three pillows underneath her head and I was sure her neck would hurt in the morning so I tried to adjust her.  She barely roused and muttered, "I love you."  I removed one of the pillows and she said it again.  As I pulled her blanket up, she murmured, "I love you, Bria."  How sweet is that?

Pumpkin Carving with Gramma and Papa

We carved pumpkins last night.  I told the girls we were going to do something GROSS.  This of course got them very excited (why is that with young kids??).  They very much enjoyed reaching their hands into the middle of the pumpkins to feel the gross and gooey insides!  They were actually very good at cleaning the pumpkins out.

Every year I forget just how hard it is to carve pumpkins.  Especially when you try to use the little patterns.  Wow!  I chose a goblin (fun!), Papa chose a spider (for Spider Strategies, natch), and Gramma chose a haunted house.  Gramma regretted all evening choosing such a hard pattern.  She was happier about it after she completed it and saw haw cute the haunted house was!

When we were choosing our patterns, we showed Brynn several but she didn't like any of them because she wanted to carve a smiley face.  We found a smiley face but it had big eyes with eyelashes.  She did not want that one because she insisted that the jack-o-lantern must have triangle eyes.  She decided to draw the face on herself and carve it - all by herself.  I was quite impressed!

Halloween Dancing

On Tuesday, the girls had dance class and were asked to wear Halloween costumes.  They have elaborate angel and frost fairy costumes (to be seen shortly!) but I was concerned that these could be damaged at dance.  So I picked up some amazingly cute witch costumes at Marshall's.  Sheer adorableness ensued.

Gramma and Papa take the girls to dance every week.  This week the teachers left the doors open so we could watch the classes.  Gramma and I kept going back and forth between the girls rooms.  Bria loves dance class and really tries to do what the teacher shows her.  Brynn is better about listening and paying attention in class but I think dance may not be her thing (she takes after her mom!).

Inaugural post and Inaugural baby!

This is my inaugural post.  Inspired entirely by my sister-in-law, Nastassia, and her new blog (fletchergriffin.blogspot.com).  It seems like such a good idea that I had to follow suit.  Entirely appropriate then to have my first post be about our recent trip to go see Nastassia, Ryan (my brother), and Baby Fletcher.  Fletcher was born on October 14, 2010.  My parents (Mike and Pat) and I took the girls down to see him last weekend.  A picture of him, taken by my sister, Ashley, with excellent assistance by me, is below.

Isn't he ADORABLE?  He did pee twice while we took pictures.  Once on his face.  Which Brynn and Bria thought was hysterical.  Speaking of Brynn and Bria ... they were ECSTATIC to be able to hold him "by myself."  I was impressed that Ryan and Nastassia were so easy about letting them hold Baby Fletcher alone.

You may wonder why I say "Baby Fletcher" and not just Fletcher.  Well ... if you ask Brynn and Bria, that is his proper name.  On the drive back from Chicago, we were playing a game where one person thought of a word starting with a letter and the other people had to guess the word.  Brynn said "B."  Then she gave the hint that it was something we saw over the weekend.  Turned out she was thinking of "Baby Fletcher."

While in Chicago we got family pictures of the whole group.  One is shown below.  Yes, Brynn looks a little bit sullen.  But, all in all, not bad for 10 people!!

At the end of the photo shoot, we realized that we hadn't taken any pictures of just me and the girls.  The photographer was gracious and quickly snapped a few.  I didn't like myself in any of them.  I know, I know...  The photographer was then even MORE gracious and took several more.  They turned out pretty cute.



While trying to fill out our entire photo package, we realized it is very important to take pictures of each child individually as well for collages.  Oh well.  Now we know!