Crazy Little Lyla Belle

Lyla wants to help me cook anytime I'm in the kitchen. As a mom, I know I should encourage this and teach her as I go. It's hard though. It's quicker and cleaner for me to just do it myself. I'm trying to have patience and let her help though. One of my problems is that when she wants to help, she just automatically starts climbing on the countertops to get to where I'm working. This just won't work for several reasons. So last week I told her to go get her stool from upstairs so she could stand on it. Instead, she came back with a chair from their art table. That was fine. Good thinking! But, I didn't pay attention when she left the room again. A few minutes later, I went to the fridge to get something and when I turned around I noticed what she was standing on....TWO CHAIRS stacked on top of each other! She was balancing just fine too! That girl has the best balance. Don't worry, I didn't let her stay that way. I put her in a kitchen chair after that.

Habitat House Weekend #3

The house is coming along nicely, thanks to all of the volunteers on site each day. They worked inside a lot this weekend. It was cold but they kept working.

Our Big Girl

Here is our big girl! She's 3 1/2 years old and riding without training wheels. I'm just amazed! She's a little wobbly starting and stopping but she already wants to race Grace. She's so proud of herself too!

Habitat House Weekend #2

This was the 2nd weekend for working on the Habitat House. The workers were great and they got everything done that was on the agenda. The roof is on, almost all of the siding is done, most of the electrical work inside is done, the plumbing is done, the windows are in and exterior doors are on. The Habitat project manager on the job told Eric that our group is full of a bunch of over achievers because they've been ahead of schedule both weekends. And so far, just one injury, Eric's finger. He did go to the doctor on Wednesday and they gave him a tetnus shot and 10 days of antibiotics!

This is a picture of the lunch sacks that the 3rd graders from church made for the volunteer crew on Sunday. Alice's daughter, Leslie, is in the 3rd grade, so it was her age group that provided lunch to the workers. They made sack lunches and drew on all of the lunch sacks.

Funny Faces

The girls were being silly (no surprise there) during bathtime the other night. I caught a few funny faces on camera.

Write it down!

Yesterday afternoon Lyla started riding her bike without training wheels!!! I couldn't get a picture because I was running along side of her the whole time though. I wanted to go ahead and post it though so I don't forget the date. She will be 3 and a half on the 17th of this month!

She rides Grace's old bike that she got on her 2 year old birthday. The training wheels are shot and barely hold her up. When she was riding it she was sitting at a 30 degree angle! If the bike was sitting straight up the training wheels didn't touch the ground. Only one wheel would touch at a time. Does that make sense? Well, on Thursday I noticed that while she was riding, the training wheels weren't touching at all about half of the time! That meant she was balancing!

So, Friday afternoon I took them off and we gave it a try. She got it right away. I still have to help her start and stop and she gets scared every now and then and starts to wobble. But she's doing it! She'll be taking off and stopping by herself in a week I bet.

I'll get some pictures then!

Playing in the Leaves

On Thursday the girls started playing in the leaves when everyone got off of the bus. We have some beautiful trees on our street and most of the leaves have fallen now. That makes me sad. I love the fall season the best. This area is really beautiful at this time of year. The land has enough rolling hills that when your driving down the roads, you can look out and see hills of wonderful colors all around. For the past couple of weeks, when I'm driving around, I keep looking at the trees and wondering why the best season out of the year is so incredibly short. Fall here doesn't last long at all! The weather seems to go from 78 degrees to 58 degrees with nothing in between. This past week was especially warm. In the sun, it was 80 degrees most of the week. In the pictures above, Grace has on a sundress and is barefoot and playing in a pile of fall leaves!! What's wrong with that picture?

Anyway, back to the girls. They had a blast jumping, rolling, falling in leaves and throwing them at each other. When they tired of that they got out the rakes and went to work.

I tried to get some good pictures of them in all of the fall colors but I didn't really get what I was looking for. I really wanted a great candid picture of the two of them together surrounded by leaves. Lyla won't ever look at me when I'm trying to take her picture but it usually ends up proving to be some pretty neat shots anyway. I love candid photography. The last picture is just one of Lyla after we had gone inside and she was being silly.