Around Our House

I've been wanting to be better at recording our lives. I've fallen a little behind on my photo book for the year (which is how I normally record things) and so I'm usually working on the pages from a few months ago and then I can't remember the random, small things we did. I haven't been good at blogging because I feel like I have to have a topic or event to record. I have several friends who do some sort of weekly recount of what they were up to that week and I really like that idea. I'm going to try to do that each Sunday afternoon to keep up with what we are doing.

So this week here are some of my favorite things that happened:

• Last Wednesday through this past Monday (Labor Day) we house and baby sat for a family in our ward while they were in Europe. They have 5 children. So with Bradley, we had 6 kids ages 12 through 2. It was an adventure! It was actually quite fun and they are really great kids....but it was also quite a lot of work. They are paying us and we are going to get a new couch soon! (I've been saving up for a while)

  

  The eight year old did my hair all silly. 

  
  
• My friend Shauna is finally back from her month-long trip to Utah so I got to hang out with her this week.
• We had dinner with a couple who recently moved into our ward and we've become pretty good friends. We played games afterward and it was so much fun. We are so excited to have game-playing friends again!
• Bradley threw a big fit at a store, so I just left and took him straight to the car to leave. He screamed the entire drive home. I was so pleased with my patience level and my ability to remain calm. And as we were almost home, I just kept thinking something was not right with him and that he must not be feeling well or something. So instead of putting him in time-out or getting upset with him, I immediately took him to the rocking chair and rocked him. He fell asleep on my shoulder in about 3 minutes, which hasn't happened since he was a baby. I couldn't believe it. I was so happy with how I responded (the day before had been a very bad mom day with little patience) and it was so sweet to let him take a little nap on me. 
• I hosted a baby shower for a good friend on Saturday. It was a lot of fun.

• Tommy and Bradley went on a date to the children's museum during the baby shower. They had a lot of fun. 
  
• This weekend we had a "working" weekend. We had several house projects that we wanted to get done. We did general cleaning (vacuuming, dusting, mopping), cleaned all our downstairs windows inside and out including the disgustingly dirty window tracks, organized and cleaned the garage, organized our "junk" closet, fixed the shower handle in Joslin's bathroom, washed the cars, and ran errands and did food prep for the baby shower. We had more we were going to do....but by Saturday afternoon we were pretty exhausted and done. So it gives us more projects for the future. 
• Last night after all our work, we went to Half Priced Books to look around and ate dinner at Chipotle. Then Tommy willingly walked around Hobby Lobby with me. :) We redboxed Now You See Me and I thoroughly enjoyed it! It was a super fun evening.
• Bradley has been so funny this week. He has this new thing he has been doing where he randomly starts yelling, "cupcake!" and laughs and then adds other things like, "cars!" "milk!" or whatever comes into his head. One night for about 30 minutes after we put him to bed, he would yell, "cupcake!" over and over and laugh. Pretty funny. 

And here are some cute pictures of Bradley and Tommy last night after we got back and B was eating a cookie and watching something on Tommy's phone.