Cutest 2-year-old boy.

I love my Orrin.  He cracks us up all the time.  Just the other day he started saying names.  It’s quite difficult to try to spell it the way he says it, but Ethne is something like Affeee.  He will say Talmage and Hazel and Jethro, but not Wyatt.

He makes the greatest faces of any kid.

 

And those eyelashes are legit!

 

Cutest smiley eyes ever!!

And a quick picture of Ethne and Wyatt.

 

And boys are weird.  So this lady randomly came to my door with a small pile of shirts and asked if I wanted them.  I had no idea who she was, she didn’t speak English nor did she introduce herself, but she showed me the size on the tag, and I said, “For Jethro maybe,” or something like that, and she nodded her head, so evidently she knew Jethro.  It was strange.  ANYWAY, I was having Jethro try on the shirts, and he had his head inside it and was fooling around a bit, and then Talmage came inside and saw him like that, and immediately –with no invitation, just at first glance—pulled his own head inside his shirt and went up to Jethro and started fighting him.  Funny boys.

Gosh I love pictures of my honey and my baby (in case you hadn’t noticed).

Rub-a-dub-dub, three boys in a tub!

And this was taken just this afternoon.  We called Ethne’s kindergarten teacher and asked if Talmage could come to school with her this afternoon (she only has afternoon on Mondays) and she said he could, so here he is going off to school with the girls.

The end.

Wyatt’s Name.

So here I am, all by myself.  The kids are all in bed sleeping- even Wyatt- and Brett is sleeping in a snow cave at a work retreat.  I hope he doesn’t freeze to death.

Sometimes it still seems a bit weird that I have a son named Wyatt.  With all my other kids’ names I had known far far ahead of time that that was a name I wanted, but Wyatt’s just came up not too long before he was born.  I tried out so many names for him when I was pregnant.  When I first found out it was a boy, I thought Skandar (introduced to me by this actor) was it.  I told my family that’s the name I wanted.  I still like the name, and I had Hazel saying it for a while, which was super adorable, but Brett said no and I thought it was just a titch too far out there.  I also tried out Foster for a while, in fact, when my sister happened to run into a salesperson at a store with a name badge that said Foster, she talked to him for a while about how her sister (me) was going to name her baby Foster.  Brett also brought up Enoch and for about one day I thought for sure that was going to be it, and then after that day I thought –what in the world was I thinking?  I also considered Colter/Kolten for a day or so, because Brett also liked that—and he liked so few.  I liked Chet a bit, and I loved the sound of the name Tolkien (brought up by my sister-in-law Jessica), but just couldn’t go with it because of it’s huge JRR association.  Not that it’s a bad connection either, just that it’s so very strong, and I’m not a die-hard fan or anything.  I also thought about Forrest/Forrester, Hawkins/Hawke (shortened for Hawthorne), and Thatcher.   And right at the very very end, after I had decided on Wyatt but thought that Brett wouldn’t let me have it, I thought that I would name him Oaks, but Brett liked that even less, and so I got Wyatt.  At this present moment, I think if I hadn’t been able to have Wyatt, I think I would want to have named him Fielder.  I think Fielder Tate is the name I’d use if I had any more boys (don’t get any ideas, Brett is ADAMANT that we are done.  (And if we WERE to have one more, it would definitely be a girl.)  ;) ) 

I had mentioned to my sister Andrea in one of our many, MANY conversations about names over the course of our pregnancies that I have always loved the name Wyatt—the name of our little brother.  She agreed that it is a wonderful name.  Later she was with Wyatt at a family get-together and mentioned to him that we had said we admired his good name, and he said something to the effect of –don’t think about taking my name.  At that point, I wasn’t sure just how much I wanted it, but as I felt myself leaning more and more towards it, I told Andrea not to tell anyone I was considering it, especially Wyatt himself as it would be pointless if I didn’t end up naming my baby Wyatt anyway.  Then, the strangest thing ever, Andrea’s husband Tim said that HE liked the name Wyatt—and Andrea hadn’t brought it up to him at all!  So crazy. 

Also, I remember one night when I was browsing a children’s clothing store online, it had lots of personalized things—like shirts and shoes and whatnot that you could have your child’s name put on, and one of the little baby pajamas had the name Wyatt on it, and I almost started crying because I thought Brett wouldn’t let me have Wyatt.

Anyway, when I had Wyatt and Brett finally gave me the go-ahead for the name Wyatt, I called up my brother Wyatt and said, “Hey, I just had a baby and named him Wyatt.  You’re cool with that, right?”  And he said he didn’t mind.  And at the end of the conversation he said, “Treat Wyatt right!  Give him a good life!”  and in an email he recently sent me, he said, “How’s Wyatt?  He’s my main man.”  So I think Wyatt is all good with having a cute little namesake. 

We did basically the same thing with Wyatt’s middle name, Blake.  Blake is Brett’s younger brother, and we didn’t ask him if we could use the name either.  I’ve loved the name Blake forever, and figured it wouldn’t be an issue for us to use it as a middle name.  Blake is a very chill guy anyway, so I had no worries. 

So that is the story of Wyatt’s name.  He has two very special guys to share his names with.

Oh, and by the way, had I had a girl instead of Wyatt, I would have had two names already picked out—one for a redhead and one for a brunette.  But that would have been too easy.  :)

(The pictures are from the beginning of Feb.)

Pinwheels, yogurt, braids, easter nest.

The kids saw pinwheels at the store so we came home and made some.  They lasted about 42 seconds before Orrin destroyed them.  :)  I love Orrin’s little blowing lips and cheeks.

 

Ha ha- such funny fake cheese faces.  :)

 

The only yogurt I’ve ever eaten and thought that was delicious!  Truffle raspberry.  YUM.

 

 

Talmage made an Easter nest at Waldspielgruppe, then the Easter bunny filled it with some goodies and hid it in the woods.  I helped him find it by saying warm/cold.

 

He pounded the nails in the wood and tied the burlap around the nails and filled it with moss and pinecones and snail shells.  Love it!!!

Finally.

You know, I had almost NO pictures of Hazel and Wyatt together—just one right after he was born at the hospital, and that one yesterday, and that was about it!  That’s pretty nigh-on travesty in my book.  So we had to take some the other day.  I know, there are lots and they’re all very close to identical, but I love looking at Wyatt’s different faces and Hazel’s different smiles, and okay, you’re right, I’ve never been able to narrow pictures down.  It is what it is.  Enjoy.  :)

(She was looking to the side because she could see their reflection in the window.)

Middle of March Stuff.

The other day Orrin pushed all the chairs into a line and made a train, and then he pushed them into a line (side-by-side instead of front-to-back) and made a bridge.  He was very proud.  The kids had a great time walking back and forth on it.  Can you spot Jethro on the couch reading?  He’s always reading.

 

At the breakfast table one bright morning.

I found a matching shirt in Wyatt’s size at the second-hand store, so obviously I had to buy it.  Pictures with a baby and a two-year-old in them are… awesome.  :)

Wyatt turned two months old!!  And he is such a handsome man!

I love these cute little pants.

The kids had out some of our tourist maps and were looking at them, and then one of the kids- I forget which, maybe Ethne?- said, “Look, Grandma and Jethro are on this map.”  Of course that was pretty impossible, so we all took a look, and man, it really DOES look like it could be Grandma and Jethro!  It’s a pretty small picture in real life, and when you look really close, you can tell that it’s not them, but it’s a pretty good resemblance.  (Mom, you didn’t come here last summer on the sly and take Jethro on the rodelbahn, did you?)

Oh Talmage.  That kid is fun and funny.  Today a few times when I told him to do something, like pick up his mittens, he said, “At your service.” (Of course, when he says it, it sounds more like ‘at yo dovis’) ha ha.

 

This a picture of 1) what the weather was doing this morning and 2) what our “house” looks like.  When my mom came to visit, and we were walking up to our apartment she said, “Oh, I didn’t know that this is what your apartment looks like—you never took a picture of the front of it, just the farm view.”  And then just recently someone else said that she forgot that I lived in an apartment.  So, this is the view from the window above my kitchen sink, and our own apartment looks just like it.  (Though this is the back of the apartment, not the front.  The front is even less interesting.)

More pictures of Wyatt.  Because he’s my baby and he’s cute.

 

And also, he makes very funny faces.  :)

Talmage the photobomber!

Do you guys realize I have three little boys at home with me?

Hey bro, hold still while I drive my car on your head.

Hazel’s going to be such a good mom some day.  She’s already got the multi-tasking thing down. 

The end.