two cute

can be cute:

can be crazy:

thats pretty much the twins in a nutshell.

haircuts cubed

we finally cut the boys hair, it seriously needed taming and i think the twins were growing mini mullets. here's the before and afters:

crew before, yes he looks confused, it's been a while since they've got hair cut!

crew after, dressed and ready for church:

kade before:

kade after, love those cheeks!

brody before (well, a couple weeks ago)

and after:

all in all we think it's an improvement, at least they look maintained now! it's possible that someone might think kade and crew recently enlisted in the military, but i'm hoping their age will prove otherwise.

you lose some, you lose some

so i'd prefer the phrase "you win some, you lose some" so i'd at least get to win some of the time, but not in this situation. this is the dresser we bought when brody was a baby, as you can see that ikea craftsmanship has held up impeccably!

i hated that dresser! it only had one drawer that properly worked which we tried to keep all the twins clothes in (thankfully it was the biggest drawer.) but more often than not we had to put clothes in the broken drawers, which lead to things like this happening during nap time:

so now instead of just hating the dresser, i then started hating all the clothes i would have to clean up during the course of a day. i finally decided on a dresser to buy the boys, and here she is:

we haven't put the hardware on yet, and we tied hemp cord around the drawers to keep them closed. but wait, didn't i say this was a lose/lose post? oh right, thats cause of this:

worse than before. and they can climb on top of the dresser for a nice place to sit and look out over their room. big. fat. fail. twins- 2, mom-0.

showing some skin

so i've posted about the twins wake-up apparel before, but here's crew's latest morning fad:

what? you think this is weird? well maybe he's wearing the sleeper correctly and your kids are actually wearing theirs incorrectly, good luck with that.

men at work

this is one of the reasons that i love having boys, because if something heavy gets delivered i don't have to worry about moving it, i've got four tough guys that will move it for me.

ok, so three guys are moving it and kade's just posing but i still love it.

high maintenance to what maintenance?

you know how it goes with your first kid, you're on top of every runny nose, hand sanitizer for after park play, washing the pacifier off whenever it falls, never forgetting to wipe the highchair tray so baby food won't set hard on. yeah totally, me too. in a phrase i was a total high maintenance mom. people say it changes the more you have, holy cow! poor kade and crew! i get tired of wiping every run of snot, i was super relieved they never took pacifiers cause it would be one less thing for me to disinfect, and certainly can't control every little piece of food that drips, drops, or is grinded into their clothes. the thing is people still think i'm pretty uptight when it comes to my boys, but sometimes i wonder if i've totally fallen off the maintenance boat! sure, you'll be nice and say i'm doing fine, but seriously, my kids look like this:

good luck first time moms, but i strongly believe your maintenance goes out the window with subsequent children, well so does your sanity for that matter.

at a loss

i straighten my hair every single day. i don't care if i plan on wearing it in a ponytail all day long, i'll straighten it before hand. naturally it's kind of wavy on top and kind of curly under neath, sounds like that would be so fun and versatile, but really, not so much (or at all.) it's a nightmare. it never occurred to me that i would pass this on to one of my kids, one of my boys. but you've all seen brody's hair. it's beyond something else. i don't really have words for it. it's so unruly (kind of fits the kid eh?) we've decided to let it grow because it's really hard to style. alyssa did a great job styling it over christmas, but i believed she used gel, hairspray, a hair dryer and a whole "technique", more than my day allots. all i know is it needs to be quick and the pomade we use doesn't hold, i don't know how to tame it from this point. but i love it, it's kind of his trademark, and i'd never cut it off. let's just agree now that if you see brody and his fro seems a little unkempt, just roll with it because this hair has me at a loss!

table for five

well the time has finally arrived, and naturally, it was months before it should have occurred. the twins are finally at the table to eat. as i'm sure you'd assume, the restraints on their little highchairs weren't really restraining them anymore (if you catch my drift.) so now we're working on both how to sit in a chair and eat, and how to eat with a utensil. although it's requiring more patience than i actually have, it's so fun to have our whole family at the table for a meal. and the twins LOVE being able to sit in the big chairs!

i also figure that this is a good time to try to reinforce the lesson to brody that we need to stay in our seat during a meal, so far that's yielding terrible results. since when does "brody come back to the table and finish your dinner" translate to "hey buddy, why don't you run off to play in the toy room, play with some noisy toy and ignore your mom?" apparently it does.

normally i try to space them out in their own seats, but when we're all home for dinner the little guys get the bench. and for some meals they all like to sit on brody's chair.

bon appetite!

any requests?

justin got a guitar for christmas, so of course his biggest fan, brody, had to ask for one too. luckily grandpa clarke bought brody his very first guitar and over the christmas visit he gave brody his very first lesson. it was so cute, and definitely merited a photo session.

learning to strum with a pick.

singing for the crowd.

brody loves his guitar and loves that he has another hobby to do with his dad. i love when he'll randomly yell out "i just need to go play my guitar!" who knows clarke, maybe E Ticket the next, next generation will live on.

2010 wrap up

whew, what a year! ok, so doesn't everyone say that near the end of december? but seriously, i look back at this year and think that at this point in 2009 justin and i really didn't have a clear plan for the whole "life after dental school" thing. i would have rolled my eyes (a kim classic) had someone even suggested that we'd be living in dallas six months later. anywho, we are and we LOVE it! so here's some of our highlights of 2010:

in the beginning of 2010 kade and crew starting crawling! it was great to have them start moving, and coming close to entertaining themselves!

brody, justin, clarke and ryan went to the monster truck show, thus beginning brody's love of monster trucks. (have you seen mater's tall tales on dvd, brody's in heaven on the monster truck story.)

we took a trip to texas for interviews, justin got the job we were hoping for and later came out again to find a place to live. talk about some whirlwind trips!

we unfortunately learned that the twins can climb really well.

this guy's finally legal -to practice dentistry that is.

we celebrated by going to a concert, 30 seconds to mars. it rocked.

we finally got the twins to graduate from the wic food, finally no more formula!! oh, that's all the free stuff for the twins that we got each month. too bad it only would last us three weeks.

crew and kade turned one!! we survived the first year!

we packed up and moved to tx!

we now have a yard to play in!! the boys love it!

shortly after we got here the twins learned to walk! also, apparently some time after we moved here they grew hair. i thought they always had hair, but looking back they're as bald as a couple of RM's at byu!

this big little guy turned 3!

these "trash trucks" are practically a daily staple in our home.

justin and i got to take an overnight trip to ok city to see muse. they also rock. like super hard.

after a last minute idea, the boys had a star wars halloween r2d2, jedi luke and c3po.

the twins are finally in nursery!! i could shout it from the roof tops! brody also had his last year of nursery, as of now he's officially a primary stud, i mean kid.

the closest thing we can get to a christmas pic.

the end of the year, so much has happened in such a short time, this was a huge year for our family and it's brought us all a lot closer. i love my guys!

oops

i did brody's hair for school with an emphasis on how high i could get his mohawk up. no biggie right? oh, except for that tiny little school wide christmas singing program i forgot about at his preschool. so when i dropped him off some boys were in little suit coats (no joke) and little girls in their sunday christmas dresses, one little girl was even dressed like santa. and here's how i sent my kid:

oh well. sweet hair though.