Tommy's Seven Year Old Q&A

Tommy is going to make sure I keep up on this blogging thing because he was adamant that I get this Q&A done right away.  He wanted to do it at 10 pm last night and I refused.  So here we go, Tommy's Survey Questions as a 7 year old.

1. What is your favorite color? Orange

2. What is your favorite toy? Legos

3. What is your favorite fruit? Bananas

4. What is your favorite tv show? Ninjago

5. What is your fave movie? Night at the Museum 2

6. What is your favorite thing to wear?  My new Japan soccer jersey 

7. What is your favorite animal? Snow Leopard

8. What is your favorite song?  Demons by Imagine Dragons 

9. What is your favorite book? The Day the Crayons Quit 

10. Who is your best friend? Dash, Crew, Roman, Connor and Bode 

11. What is your favorite snack? (The one with the box with the chip in the air??) Pringles 

12. What is your favorite drink? Water 

13. What is your favorite breakfast? little bites (Tommy wanted to type that one. :) 

14. What is your favorite lunch? Beanie Weenie 

15. What is your favorite dinner?  chickin nuget (Tommy again)

16. What is your favorite game? Mario Kart 

17. What is your favorite thing to play outside? Soccer

18. What is your favorite holiday?  Christmas because it's in the month of December and my birthday is in the month of December 

19. What do you sleep with at night? Precious (his Snow Leopard)

20. What do you want to be when you grow up? A Fossil Digger 

 Tommy is 47 inches tall and 48 pounds.  He has grown almost 3 inches in the last year.

He has grown in school too.  Today I just got an email from his teacher telling us that she asked him if his head grew because he is getting so smart.  She said she is so happy with his progress academically and socially.  

And this was my heart: 

He still surprises us everyday.  Today he told me that he knew what 250 times 5 was.  He said it's 1250.  I almost didn't believe him.  Andrew had to prove it to me on the calculator.  Ha!
Also, this was definitely a photobomb planned by Tommy T.

He is making lots of friends at his new school. He's having so much fun.  

He had an accident on the treadmill at Grandma and Grandpa's.  It was pretty brutal.  But it didn't really slow him down.

He has at least two super loose teeth right now.  What's funny is that he lost his first tooth exactly a year ago this coming weekend.

My, Tommy, how you've grown.  We are so proud of how much you are growing up and learning and changing.  You are still a hilarious kid and we love you so much.  Happy birthday, Tommy T!

Charlotte's Four Year Old Q&A

Yes yes yes, I know.  I'm only TWO MONTHS LATE on writing about Charlotte's birthday.  But hey, at least it's in the same year!  She had her annual check up.  She is 39.8 inches tall at the 50th percentile.  She's 36 pounds which is the 59th percentile.  I can tell in her class pictures that she's really grown because she's catching up to her classmates who are all older than her.

So I sat Charlotte down for her yearly interview.  Let's see what she has to say.

1. What is your favorite color? PINK! 

2. What is your favorite toy? Fluffy, my unicorn 

3. What is your favorite fruit? Strawberries and berry strawberries (I think she means raspberries)

4. What is your favorite tv show? Mickey Mouse and My Little Pony 

5. What is your fave movie? The My Little Pony Movie 

6. What is your favorite thing to wear? My marshmallow shirt and my new sparkle pants 

7. What is your favorite animal? Horsey 

8. What is your favorite song?  The My Little Pony Theme Song, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star 

9. What is your favorite book? My My Little Pony Book. It's about reading words. In my other My Little Pony book is Tempest and I like her songs.   

10. Who is your best friend? Lakynn and Olivia 

11. What is your favorite snack? Veggie Straws. Goldfish. Yogurt too.  YOGURT IS MY FAVORITE THING THAT I EAT.... for dessert. 

12. What is your favorite drink? Strawberry Milk and Water 

13. What is your favorite breakfast? Yogurt and... yogurt, just yogurt.  

14. What is your favorite lunch? Cheese Sticks for lunch.  (Anything else?) Just cheese sticks. 

15. What is your favorite dinner? TACOS!! 

16. What is your favorite game? Care Bears. (Where do you play that?) On the Applebees thingy! 

17. What is your favorite thing to play outside? Tempest and.... I have to go potty. I don't like tag but I do like scooter Mickey Mouse! 

18. What is your favorite holiday?  Halloween because it gives us candy and I LOVE candy SOOOO much! 

19. What do you sleep with at night? Princess Luna (aka Princess Cinderella, the blue pegasus unicorn she made at Build-a-Bear) I slept with her at night and she comes down the stairs with me a little bit but sometimes she doesn't come down with me. 

20. What do you want to be when you grow up? I wanna make cupcakes! I'm gonna make big cupcakes and little cupcakes. I mean I'm gonna be a food chef.  

She got a bit more talkative by the end of the interview. :) If you'd like to read her answers from her first interview, here is her 3 year Q&A.  
It's also interesting to read Tommy's to compare.  They had a lot in common at age three and four  (Can you believe I was 2 months late for Tommy's 4 year interview?? :) Then you can read five and six for fun!

I cannot believe my youngest child is four years old.  Remember when she was four months old??? 

So tiny! 

0, 1, 2, 3, and now 4. 

This girl is such a joy.  She gets more and more hilarious every day.  She loves unicorns, My Little Pony and all the songs from the movie.  I don't know how she picks up the words to those songs.  She LOVES to sing. She loves to dance.  She enjoys practicing her letters and trying to write her name. She loves to play school.   She loves her best friends but she also wants them to stay out of her face.  She LOVES her big brother and wants to play with and be around him all the time.  She is so overly dramatic with her fits.  She will not like something you say and will throw her body on the ground until she realizes it's not working and then she will get up and act like nothing happened.  Her hair is usually pretty crazy but it's beautiful. I can't believe how long it's getting. How is it possible that you are four? We love you so much, baby girl.  Happy birthday! 

2017: Interesting So Far

 2017 started off with our furnace having trouble keeping up and then totally going poo.  We were without heat and our house got down to 50ish degrees.  We thought we might try to stay and just use space heaters.  But I couldn't take it so we ended up heading to Renssy and staying at my parents' house while they were away.

Even though we were in Renssy, we still came back every day because Tommy had a birthday party on Saturday.  His buddy Cooper was turning 6 and they were going to the trampoline park.  This was going to be Tommy's first big boy birthday party where we leave him and come back to pick him up.  I was excited for him.  He actually said on the way to the party, "I have a feeling like I'm scared to go to this party."  I figured it was just excitement/anxiety.  Well, maybe he knew more than we realized...

 There were just a few of them and they had a great time... until... Tommy ate the cupcakes at the party. I had talked to the birthday boy's mom about how Tommy can eat vegan cupcakes as long as they are nut-free.  She was really excited to order them for him because she knows he never gets to have the cupcakes at the party.   There was some sort of mix-up in communication either between me and the mom or the mom and baker.  I don't know what happened but the cupcake he ate started an allergic reaction.  We weren't there but they said he started sneezing and getting really phlegm-y.  Then he got really quiet.  He wasn't acting normal.  He didn't say anything to anyone.  They opened presents and then they went upstairs to play.  It wasn't long after that when he started vomiting all over their house. They called us and we raced back there.  He was done vomiting by the time we got back but he was still a mess.  The mom was crying and everyone felt so bad.  I felt especially bad for Cooper. :(  Tommy couldn't stop blowing his nose and feeling awful.  He still wasn't quite right but I was hoping he was recovering.  We packed up everything and headed out.  Since we were staying in Renssy, we decided not to leave town and instead we just headed toward hospital because he still wasn't acting normal.  His mouth was open like the last time when his tongue swelled but he kept saying he was totally fine.  By the time we got to the parking lot of the ER, he started vomiting again.   Ah yes, time to go inside.

We checked in very quickly.  You can still see how he does his mouth weird when he's in the middle of a reaction. I don't know if it's his lips or tongue that bothers him but he can't shut his mouth.  I kept asking him questions in the car about how he was feeling and what his mouth was doing to try to figure out if we needed to use the epi-pen or go in the ER.  At one point, he said, "Which one is the right answer?"  Poor kid.
For a Saturday evening, there were not that many people there.  We got room #1! They gave him anti-vomiting medicine, benadryl and a steroid.  No epi this time AND no shots! Whoo hoo!! It was a great ER visit, if you can call it that. Ha! He really recovered very quickly and they sent us home within a couple hours.  Awesome!

 Middle fingers up to food allergies!

Since he vomited all over his clothes and Andrew took Charlotte home to clean up the car and get new ones, he had nothing to wear.  So while we were waiting for them to come back and pick us up, I put him in my coat and hummed the Imperial March while we walked around. He just needed his Vader mask and he would have been complete!

So we learned a major lesson with all of this.  We should never let anyone be responsible for feeding our kid like that.  We can't put that liability on them.  It's just too complicated.  Plus everyone thinks it's gluten because that's the new big popular thing.  So now we know we should just continue to bring our own food for Tommy so we can be sure it's safe.  Lesson learned.

Back to our furnace issues... we came back to Lafayette on Sunday because the kids needed to go to school on Monday and we needed to meet the "furnace fixers" as the kids called them.  So we used Andrew's points and got a room and the Ho-tel, Mo-tel, Holiday Innnnn, say what? Check out our gorgeous view! 

 The kids were totally stoked about using the pool.  Too bad when we went down there, our key wouldn't let us in.  We know the pool is open, folks, so let us in! The manager finally let us in and swim we did!

 Pool time selfies! The pool was so warm.  It was awesome! We called and they said they warmed it up for us.  AWESOME!

Family pool selfie! Sweet goggles, Dada! 

 It was finally time to get out.  The kids were not excited to stop swimming but we had to eat dinner. Do you like our workout room mirror selfie? Ha!

We finally had a working furnace at 6:30 on Monday night.
I couldn't get close enough to the fire.  So cold. I sat in the living room in my winter coat drinking hot tea.  What a wimp! :)
But our furnace is working like a champ now! It actually heats the whole house and not just the downstairs.  I guess they are normally supposed to do that.  Good to know. :)
January 2017 is definitely the time we made lemonade out of the many lemons we were given this month.  Here's to the rest of 2017! It's gonna be great! :)

Tommy's Many 6th Birthday Parties

 Tommy was excited for weeks about ALL his birthday parties.  He knew he would have one at school.  He would also have one with his family and another one with his friends.  He basically thinks his birthday is a week long. :)

For his school party, he didn't want cookies or cupcakes as his treat.  I looked on pinterest and found something he got really excited about: Treat Robots! He thought these were super cool and it involved me purchasing a hot glue gun so now I was excited. ;)

 The kids loved their treat robots at school! Their teacher always talks about how they shouldn't have too much sugar and she really likes to give them slightly healthier snacks.  So these were pretty perfect.

 As a birthday treat, she has the kids make birthday cards for the birthday kid.  The one on the top left is from his best friend Bode.  Can you tell what he drew for him? (Psst... it's Captain America.  I love it!) But what a neat idea.  I love what each kid contributed.

 The morning of his family party, Andrew went to the store for me and got party supplies.  I was NOT prepared for this party at all.  As I was making his cake, I realized I didn't have anything to really decorate it with besides a candle.   So I got creative.  I had some Christmas Oreos that I made into "volcanic rock." Then I mixed up some powdered sugar frosting with food coloring for the river.  We always have dino and shark dummies on hand so they were a perfect addition along with Tommy's mini dino toys.  (Tommy made sure to point out that the stegosauruses would definitely be in herds and to keep them together :).  It all came together PERFECTLY. How fun is this diorama dino-rama?

 I also made a cake with eggs as per usual. Both pretty delish!

Obligatory candle blowing out picture! Happy Birthday, Tommy T!

 Cousin picture!! A picture in a picture!

 After the party, Uncle Adam helped Tommy put together his marble run for the first time.  A little more difficult than I realized it was going to be but now that we have the hang of it, we are rocking it!

 On Sunday, Tommy had his super cool movie party! We planned to see Moana.  We decorated like it was a red carpet event.  Oscars, perhaps? :)  It was awkward in the room because it was so quiet but once the kids ate snacks and cake and starting playing, it was much better.

Here's a pic of all the kiddos.  His two besties, two of his other friends that are boys, and two friends that are girls. And Charlotte of course.  It was too cute.

 The kids were all keyed up on Gatorade.  I was really nervous about how this was going to go because the movie was nearly 2 hours! Yikes! But they did amazing! There was one kiddo that got pretty antsy but he didn't bother anyone too badly.  Maybe just Andrew and I.  Ha!

It turned out to be a super fun birthday party WEEK.  Happy Birthday to my wonderful kiddo.  I hope you enjoyed your birthday parties and felt super loved on your 6th birthday.  :-)

You're My Best Friend!

We have heard throughout the year that Charlotte has a best friend.  She talks about her a little but I had no idea how intense this friendship really was until she was invited to her birthday party. 

Charlotte's best friend, Lakynn, turned 3 and had a party at My Gym.  It was the cutest thing ever! Charlotte was a little shy at first because she didn't know 70% of the people at the party but once she saw her bestie, the party was a GO!

It was a perfect party for 2 or 3 year olds.  Look at that trampoline action! Can you imagine all the giggling that was happening here?

They had this funky swing that they rode on together.

They also had this funky swing that they rode on together too.  They couldn't be separated!

I promise there were other kids at the party! You couldn't really tell with the two of them attached at the hip though.  They loved this ball pit at the end of a slide the most I think.

They had pizza at the party which is Charlotte's favorite.  Andrew looked at this picture and asked if they all had their own personal pizza.  Ha! Not quite but Charlotte did have 3 pieces!! She was hungry after all that play.

At one point during the party, they took Lakynn to another room and dressed her up to bring her back out for a birthday parade.  Before they brought her back out, they asked the kids where Lakynn went.  Charlotte jumped up and starting frantically looking for her and calling out for her.  Then they brought her out dressed like this.  They sang happy birthday and posed for pictures.  It was adorable.

Here's the birthday girl with her cake.  Both girls wanted pink cupcakes.  Lucky for them, there were exactly two!

Charlotte was the last one at the party.  She didn't want to leave.  I had to pull her out of there!

They are just two peas in a pod, aren't they?


Here's a video with all the party action.  Have you ever heard so much giggling in your entire life?? So much fun!! Happy birthday, Lakynn!!

Cooper's Birthday

After Tommy had his birthday at the trampoline park, Cooper decided to have his fifth birthday there too! Yes! We get to go back! Tommy was excited!

 The crew has a blast.  Tommy is in blue, Charlotte is trying to keep up in the back and Cooper is in trampoline green! ;)

Charlotte was having trouble hanging with the big boys.  But she had a GREAT time!

We all jumped in the foam pit again and came out covered in foam pieces, of course. 

 Hey it's the birthday boy!

 Time to slide! WHEEEE!!!

 Then it was birthday party time!

 Everyone had delicious cupcakes.  Tommy had oreos.  He doesn't look happy but I promise you, he was keyed up about the oreos.  I think he had about 17.  HA!

Before we left, we had to pretend to play video games.  Charlotte's still working on her grip.

Here's a quick video to show you the fun that was had. HI-larious!

It is such a heart warming thing to see Tommy develop friendships in his life and he picked an awesome friend in Cooper.  He's a great kid.  Happy birthday, Cooper!