Samuel...hitting those terrible two's!

Here is my dear Samuel, who is as usual squeezing out some tears for a dramatic effect. At this moment, his world is crumbling down because one of his socks came off and he cannot find it. And when I offer him other socks to wear, he gets even more upset and throws them and himself around on the ground. After 10 minutes of searching for the stupid sock with Samuel trailing behind me, he is so happy when I produce the sock. Yep, happy for about 5 minutes until the next meltdown begins when he wants to go outside to play while I am trying to get dinner started. And the cycle of mood swings continues...happy one minute and full blown tears the next...over and over it seems. Is anyone else as baffled as I am about the terrible, terrible, terrible 2 stage? Samuel is not even 2 for heaven's sake...I have a long year ahead of me!

Well, despite the tantrums, Samuel is at a pretty funny age where his personality is really coming through. Something Samuel really loves is music. He is always bobbing his head to the beat of the music when we're in the car and he will always start dancing if he hears music, even in public. Here is a video of Samuel dancing at the pumpkin patch we were at in my previous post. I wasn't able to download the video last time, so here's another try.

In this video, Samuel is wearing a pair of little girl glasses that he found at the pool. He loved them so much that he wouldn't take them off for hours, even through dinner. Once he decides he likes something, say a particular SOCK, Samuel becomes committed and there is no changing his mind. So here he is watching Diego, eating, and singing...all while wearing his new glasses.

So the terrible two stage: endearing and enraging...hilarious and frustrating all at the same time. All I can say is that I can't wait for Mason's turn.

Happy Halloween! Wait, that happened a week ago?

Thanks Grandma Suzy for the cute Halloween jammies!

So yet again, it seems that I am still a blogging slug. I almost decided to skip the Halloween festivities on my blog so that I could be "caught up", but there were too many pictures to ignore. Plus, the grandparents would probably have a fit for not being updated on our Halloween adventures. So here goes: We start off with Samuel the Spiderman...1 out of the hundred spidermen on my block alone. Thank goodness Halloween is a 1 night deal b/c Samuel split the back of his pants in mid-spiderman pose. Of course Samuel could care less. In fact, I'm pretty sure he enjoyed the breeze as he literally ran from door to door. We started off trick-or-treating with his little friend Emily, but after the 2nd house, Samuel was off to the races! At first Samuel invited himself right into people's houses, but he soon caught on and it was hard to catch up with him after that. He loved knocking on the doors and picking out candy. Samuel in action. Am I a geek for capturing his first "door"? Samuel literally RAN around our neighborhood for almost 2 hours. The boy never walks btw, he really only runs at full speed. I mean, how many 22 month olds can endure running for that long? Can you get a feel for what my days are like, trying to figure out ways to expend some of Samuel's energy?

Here is Mason in his dinosaur/dragon/lizard costume. We don't quite know what it is, but Joe picked it up at a garage sale for free. Hence, Joe's newest quote: "If it's free, it's for me!" So for those of you who remember Joe's frugal side, you can probably appreciate the humor in this qoute. And yes, we are still scoping out those garage sales come Friday and Saturday! We consider ourselves professionals by this point! Samuel of course got jealous of Mason's costume, so we gave him a turn in it. It put him in the cleaning spirit and he vacuumed in it for almost 15 minutes (vaccuum also a garage sale find). I just wanted to throw in a picture of the Halloween birthday party that we went to. The kids in our playgroup all dressed up in their costumes, made halloween masks, played and threw tantrums, and then ate cookies. My kids of course wanted nothing to do with the sweets. I had to eat both cookies...just so the birthday boy wouldn't feel bad of course! Here is a picture of Joe and his staff for Halloween. It was their idea to dress up in a theme around Joe's costume, so for that day, Joe was the prisoner while the women ran the show. Here are the boys at a haunted house at a pumpkin patch that we went to. I wanted to include this picture to showcase Samuel's 1st crush. Nope, not Mason, but the weird ugly looking witch that he is sitting on. While most of the other kids were too scared to even approach the witch chair, Samuel is holding it's hand and giving her kisses. Mason didn't even want to sit by the witch, but we managed to get a smile with Joe jumping up and down behind the camera. Samuel was too busy looking at his new friend. So now I am officially caught up on Halloween. Until Thanksgiving...haha.