Young Party of Four

Kenzie's half birthday is upon us! Today, she celebrates her half birthday and is officially 3.5 years old. How did that happen??? At 3 1/2 years old, Kenzie.... .... Is around 40 inches tall and 33 pounds. Those are our estimates and (if correct), they make her about 86th percentile in height and 55th percentile in weight. That is about in line with what she has been for the last couple of years. She shot up in height at about 18 months and has stayed that way. She also seems to have evened out her weight right around the middle percentile. She is tall and thin though so her clothes are still weird. She needs 4T or 5T in pants and dresses and even wears kids' sizes at times instead of toddler but her waist easily fits into a 3t size. Good thing it should get warm again soon so we can go back to dresses and not have to worry about her waist. A plus to her size? She is officially tall enough to ride on 90% of the rides at Disney. Haha! .... LOVES all things girly. Whether ...

Our lives are all about potty training around here again lately. This time it is sort of two-fold. Will isn't ready to train yet, but he is starting to show some interest. He started pointing to his diaper and then the potty late last week and has started to want to sit on the potty periodically. We figure this is a monkey see, monkey do sort of thing. Kenzie does it and "Dizzy" aka Sissy is the coolest person in the world so he wants to be just like her. Plus? He seems to know something about his diaper is associated with that potty. We started sitting him on it before baths and if he asks any other time. He hasn't actually gone yet, but eventually he might and then we will go from there. We also broke out the old on-the-floor potty and we will start putting him on that since it will be more comfortable for him. We did this same sort of thing with Kenzie starting around 18 months. It was a comfort building thing and I sort of credit some of that with what help...

This week's installment of Smokin' Sunday actually fell on Saturday. Steven and I were both slated to volunteer at church on Sunday which means Steven will get home late so we elected to move our practice round for the ribs we plan to make for our Super Bowl get-together to Saturday so that we would have enough time to actually cook them. We decided a few weeks ago when we started to think about having our annual Super Bowl Get-Together (I hesitate to call it a "party" because it's super low key) that we wanted to smoke something. We had not yet tried ribs so we thought this would be the best opportunity. However, anyone that knows us, knows that we do not just wing things so we wanted to practice the ribs prior to subjecting our friends to them. We elected to use pork ribs. Bonus: They were on sale at Winn Dixie last weekend so we went ahead and bought two. I'm now wondering if I should have picked up one more so we will think about that in the coming wee...

Remember when... When we could just drop everything we "should" be doing and instead sit down and binge watch a TV show? When we could wait until 7pm before deciding what we wanted for dinner, then go out somewhere without thinking twice about whether or not we would make it home in time for bedtime? When we spent weeks upon weeks planning the perfect vacation and then actually took it and did most, if not all, of the things we planned to do? I've been doing a lot of thinking the last few days. I'm not entirely sure what sparked it. Perhaps it was the medical test I had last week (that I will spare everyone the details of) that set off a string of events that I'm not looking forward to but are probably necessary. No worries, it wasn't anything major and to tell everyone about it, would be a lot of TMI. No details necessary, but I'm just fine. Maybe it was having the conversation with a friend the other day about how we used to not have a care in th...

Will turned 15 months old on January 14, 2016. I can't believe he is getting so big! At 15 months, Will.... .... Is FINALLY walking more than he is crawling. It took him a while to get the hang of it. Despite taking his first series of steps just before 14 months old, it took him almost a full month to learn that it was going to be easier and faster to walk. He is walking more and more everyday. We figure the constant running will soon follow and then it is off to the races! He already tries to chase his sister while crawling so she is about to be in for it. In the last week, he has broken into a run on more than one occasion. Pray for me. =) .... weighs somewhere in the range of 23 lbs 10 oz (38th percentile) and is about 31.5 inches (somewhere in the 60th percentile range). His head is only 25th percentile, which is normal but sort of threw the doc off because his cheeks are so round that his head looks bigger than that. All of his measurements have to be taken with a grain...

The time has finally come! The Saturday after Christmas we officially started the transition from formal dining room to playroom. It was a bittersweet day for us. We always loved having a formal dining room and hosting our family for dinners. However, it was time to move on. Besides, formal dining rooms are definitely becoming a thing of the past. We have quickly started to outgrow the room we have in this house and with two small children, we had to change some things around. Enter... the playroom. I detailed some of the inspo for our playroom transition  here  if you want to check it out... but now that all of it (mostly) is done, here is our final product. Tada! Okay, I'm sure this is more exciting to the 4 of us than anyone else. However, since when we mentioned we were making this transition, I had a lot of people ask me about it, I figured we would give an update now that we are so close to being done. The only changes left at this point are to change the light fi...