Today is Halloween.  I'm so excited.  Britt has been counting down the days, but not me.  I've just been asking every day "Now Halloween?  Wear Wonder Woman Dress?"  Momma finally told us last night that today was the day.  So, we got up when Daddy got up at 6:15 this morning, and were very unhappy to discover that he was not going to take us trick or treating till tonight.  Momma was unhappy too, because we wouldn't go back to bed.
Monday was the Callithumpian Parade.  It was exciting.  I danced every time the police cars with their sirens went by, and the fire trucks with their sirens, and the bands who played music, and the drummers with their drums, and even the cars with loud radios.  There were floats with dogs on them, and floats with Ghost, and floats with dancers.  I danced with them too.  There were people giving away candy, and beads, and candy, and pens, and the boys and girls club even gave away  a book.  I don't know why they gave us a Christmas book at a Halloween parade, but Momma seemed to think it was a very nice book.
It lasted for an hour and a half.  By the end, we were all very cold.  So we came home and had a hot bath and some hot chocolate milk.  We had a good time.  Now I'm ready for tonight for Halloween.  Momma is going to fix us some supper, and then when Daddy gets home we are going to go!  Momma is going to stay home and hand out candy, and Daddy is going to take us around the neighborhood, and maybe other places too.  He said we can use the wagon and go until we get too cold!

I've been collecting some Brittisms for a little while now, and I thought I would share them.

Britt was picking the sesame seeds off the hamburger bun the other day.
Momma:  Don't pick those off.  They are part of what makes the bread good.
Britt:  It's a bun not bread Momma.  What are they?
Momma:  Buns are a kind of bread.  They are sesame seeds.
Britt:  Oh like Sesame Street.
Daddy: Yes, like Sesame Street.  Do you taste Big Bird?
Britt:  Yep, it's good!
Daddy:  What about Oscar?
Britt:  No, silly Daddy!  He lives in a garbage can, we don't eat garbage.
After a run to the grocery store last week.  I was adding the bananas to our bowl of fruit on the table.
Britt:  Bananas can't go in that bowl.  It's for fruit.
Momma:  Bananas are a fruit.
Britt:  Oh they are?
Momma:  Yes.
Britt:  Oh so they are with their family, now.
We were eating Mexican for supper one night.
Momma:  Son, you really need to eat some vegetables too, not just the rice.
Britt:  I am.  I'm eating salsa!  It has tomatoes and onions and good stuff in it.
Britt was complaining because Gary got out of the car to get a redbox movie one night.  So I attempted to distract him with a conversation.
Momma:  Hey Britt, did you say you wanted some ice cream for dessert when we get home?
Britt:  Yep, but I want out now.
Momma:  Where do you think Daddy went?
Britt:  In that store?
Momma:  Which one?
Britt:  That one!
Momma:  What do you think he's going to get?
Britt.  Momma, (sigh) I don't have ALL the answers!
Tucking Britt and Ruth into bed one night.
Momma:  Here's Moo Cow.
Britt:  His whole name is Moo-y Cow.
Momma:  Mooy Cow?
Britt:  Yes, like Daddy's whole name is Daddy Gary B. Cunningham.  Moo Cow's whole name is Moo E. Cow.

Yesterday after Britt ate a lunch of ham, Cheetos, a left over cinnamon roll, a cup of juice, and a banana.  After all of this I found him sitting behind my chair eatting out of my bag of chips for my lunch.
Momma:  What are you doing with my chips?
Britt:  I need to eat some more to fill up my big body.
Momma:  What?!?
Britt:  I'm still hungry.  I need to eat to fill up my big body.

I have no idea where the boy gets these things from.

It dawned on me today that I don't think I've "documented" some of the fun peculiarities of this baby yet.  So here goes...

I like Fall.  It's my favorite time of the year.  Now that we have a house of our own, I finally feel like I can start investing in some decorations.  I have all these idea (and all these pinterest boards) so I just jumped right in this month.

I have to admit the kids are the perfect age to start enjoying this kinda thing.  Which makes it even more fun. I wasn't sure how much they would care.  The first thing I bought were two garlands to go over the door outside.  I found them for 70% of at Michael's.  (If I still had an employee discount there, I could have bought so much more.)  You would believe just how excited Ruth was with the bright red and orange leaves and glitter on them around the door and how excited Britt was with the pine cones on the door.

While I was there I looked at wreaths, but I had already decided that I'd probably just make my own.  It's so much cheaper that way.  Finding nothing that jumped out at me, just confirmed that.  So, a few days later I went down to the dollar store right next to us, and picked up a couple of bags of leaves that looked alot like the leaves on my garland and a spool of wired bronze glitter ribbon.  Gary grabbed me a grapevine wreath from Walmart that night, and so with the help of a hot glue gun, and a reminder video online about how to make a bow, I put together a wreath for the door.  I thought it turned out well, since I really can't tie bows well.  I was one of the few at Michael who wouldn't tie them at Christmas time for customers.  I had planned to put a C on the wreath, but didn't find anything I really thought was in the right font or a cheap enough price, so maybe another time.  It was a $6 project, and might have been even cheaper if I had tried out the pinterest link on saving real leaves by coating them with clear wax.  Britt went on and on about the wreath the next morning when he saw it.

I had so many leaves left over that I used them to decorate the dining room table as well.  Gary picked up some fruit when he went grocery shopping, so I just piled it all up in a pretty glass bowl in the middle and scattered leaves on both sides, and it makes the room look so much warmer and happier.  I have some more ideas for the leaves, if I get time.
And of course no porch is complete this time of year without some carved Pumpkins.  Britt picked out a spider in a spider web for his.  His pumpkin was so big I went back and added two bats next to it.  Then Ruth picked out a cat in a boot for hers.  I went ahead and carved mine, because almost half of the neighbors on our street had, and I figured they knew when was ok to do them.  I wish I had waited a little longer now, because I'm not sure if they will last until Halloween.  I still have plans to try something called pumpkin etching with mine, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

The final yard decoration, I added this past weekend.  They are some neat lighted ghost.  The original idea seems to have started over on Lowe's website, but I've seen several versions adapted on Pinterest.  I went with a pattern that I can just take the sheets off and then use them for Christmas yard decorations.  Just take some tomato cages and wrap them in Christmas lights.  Throw an old sheet over the top and color faces and waa-laa!  Ruth was very interested in watching me make them, but she still hasn't seen them lit up at night.  Britt just loved standing with them.  I ended up using our tent stakes to hold them down, and using straight pins to secure the sheets to themselves and in a few places to the tomato cages so that they wouldn't blow away.  So far so good.  One thing I would say is to be sure that you have steady glow lights.  Ours our currently blinking.  They take a few minutes to warm up and start blinking, so when I checked them, I thought I had the steady glow, but I didn't.  Mother says it looks fine that they look like they are flickering, but I think it would have looked better with a steady glow.

We enjoyed raking leaves as kids.  I can remember all of us getting in the backyard around this time of year with a rake.  We would first rake out some major roads (where we rode our bikes, and then we would each pick a spot for a house.  We would rake out walls.  Have kitchens and bedrooms, and leave an opening for doorways.  They looked like little floorplans made out of leaves, but when you added some lawn chairs and other assorted toys and items from the garage they morphed into amazing houses.  Each afternoon that we played outside, we would first have to reform the walls and move any leaves that had been scattered by the wind.  Eventually as it was getting too cold to play in our leaf villages, we would help Daddy rake all the leaves on a big tarp, and with several trips transport most of them to the dog pens to help insulate them as winter arrived.  The dogs always loved jumping and bouncing in the leaves as much as we did.
Apparently there is a big parade here the end of the month, on Monday infact, and they line everything up in our neighborhood to then go downtown.  They call it the Callithumpian parade, and from what I can gather it's primarily a Northeastern-Midwestern thing (which explains why I've never heard of it).  In the tradition of the early settlers who would treat any local odd ball, or anyone who had earned the town's redicule to a sernading of pots and pans and horns, and general racket.  It is usually accompanied by costume contest which is why they are popular at Halloween.  They are also popular for the Fourth of July, as a time to celebrate independence and ridicule the British.  I'm curous to see what all goes on here.
So, what does that have to do with raking leaves?  I'm glad you asked.  Yesterday, I decided to go ahead and rake the front yard, because Monday morning the city will come around and pick up everything that you rake into the road (weird I know, it not in your yard or bagged, everyone is just raking leaves in the road, and they are going EVERYWHERE).  Well the kids seemed to love the leaves as much as we did as kids.  They are too young to get the idea of a leaf village, and besides with the amount of wind we have here, it would be gone tomorrow.  However, they did love the idea of making a huge pile and then jumping in it.
Britt helped rake until he had a little pile going.  I kept raking and when he realized how much fun a bigger pile was he was grabbing handfulls and carrying them to the pile.  Ruth, bless her pea pickin little heart, tried but was losing almost all the leaves by the time she go to the pile.  Ruth would sit in the pile and rake them over her lap and be almost neck deep.  Nice to know that we don't have to worry about chiggers in the leaves here.  Britt would run and jump in them.  I tried to get a picture of him airbound with no luck.  Ruth would run, stop, and "jump" aka for her that means get one foot up to her knee, leave the other one firmly planted on the ground, and fall over into the pile.  Our neighbor Lilly who is about 6 months younger than Ruth came over to play a little too.

Momma says that I need to work on sharing.  She says I'm not doing a very good job of sharing.  I have no idea what she's talking about.  I let Britt play with my things anytime I don't want them.  She says I need to work on sharing people too, not just toys.  I don't think I should have to share people like Grumps and Ahna or Momma's lap if I don't want to.

Grumps and Ahna came to see us.  I took them to the zoo.  It was cold, windy, and rainy the day we went, but I didn't need my coat, I wasn't cold.  Ahna kept saying, "Put on your coat, your making me cold."
There were lots of fun things at the zoo.  There were lots of pumpkins, some were carved with lights and some were painted.  There were animal pumpkins too.  We saw bats and sea lions.  They are my favorite.
I liked the maze too.  Ruth kept trying to catch up and find me, but she couldn't.  Then she did, but then I hurried off, and she climbed over some hay to catch back up.  There was a witch but we didn't like her.  We liked making witch soup though.
They also fixed my hair.  I picked pink and it really made me Captain America.  Ruth wouldn't wear her Wonder Woman dress, and she didn't like her hair after they fixed it.

We are up to 23 weeks now, and I am almost as big as I was with the last two.  I'm a little concerned how much of a belly I will have by the time this one gets here.  I've already had the belly button "pop out" and I can't see much around it.  I've been measuring a little bit ahead.  Mother keeps throwing the word twins around, and Gary can't even stand the thought. haha.  Despite my belly size, I'm only up 4 lbs from pre-pregnancy weight.  I'll confess, I'm thrilled even though I should have gained more.  I had gotten off all the weight from Ruth, but I still haven't gotten off the last 15 lbs from Britt.

This one isn't as busy as the other two were, but it's still early.  I feel her more in the evening, and she goes crazy after I drink juice (but not Dr. Pepper I'll add).  Sometimes I do think she's doing jumping jacks in there, since out of nowhere I will feel baby EVERYWHERE.  The other night Gary made some Spiced Apple Cider (which is almost all straight fruit juice.  This child went CRAZY.  For the most part this one likes to hang out really low.  I have almost always have pressure with this one that I didn't have till much, much later with the others.  I told Gary the other night, that sometimes standing and walking feel like I'm squeezing a bowling ball between my thighs and trying not to drop it on my feet.  It's a workout sometimes just to stand.  :)

We are still working on a girl name.  If we ever get one, I'll let Gary look at the paper, if he still wants too.  I think we have narrowed it down to Katherine or Rebecca.  I prefer Rebecca because Gary and I can't agree on what we would call a Katherine.  We are no closer on a middle name though.  I like Rebecca Raleigh, he prefers Rebecca Joy (though we still have a gazillion other maybes that he likes).  I like Hannah Katherine or Katherine Faith, and he like Katherine Hope or Abigail Katherine.  See the trend of undecisiveness here?  Furthermore, he is debating whether we should just keep going with the pattern of using a middle name, and last night he mentioned that have a girl with a three syllable name will be odd after having two with one.  He is no help at all.  :)  As much as I want another boy, I'm feeling like this one is another girl.  All the more reason to come up with a name.

Some superhero Britt is.  He has yet to figure out that he only has a shield for defense.  Unlike the real Captain America he doesn't have a gun or a motorcycle.  I on the other hand am the Queen of the Amazon Women.  I can fly and my "bracelets" deflect everything from lasers to bullets. I don't need defense because I have super strength, plus I'm pretty.  What I'm still looking for is my lasso of truth, for some reason I can't find it.  I need to tie Britt up, you see I've been getting blamed for some things that I'm sure are his fault...

For Halloween I'm going to be Captain America.  He fights with Hulk, and Iron Man, and Thor, and beats up the bad snakes.  He carries a shield but he doesn't have wings like Batman.  He wears a flag and a star.

I posted this to facebook earlier, but I know I have a few Mom friends that aren't on facebook. I need some suggestions, Britt has never been completely potty trained. We were making better progress he would tell us that he needed to go when we were out, and if he wasn't too focused on playing at home. Now, unless I tell him to go, drag him in there, and spank him when he tries to run out of the room, he won't use the bathroom. He is going through several pairs of underwear a day, I don't want to go back to pull-ups but I'm SICK of washing all of his underwear and pants every other day.

We had some success with a sticker chart. We were up to giving him one a day for every day he stayed dry, but now he acts like he doesn't care. I've tried taking stuff (toys, privileges) away for wetting his pants. I've tried rewarding him for using the bathroom with cookies/marshmallows/M&M's.  He always has to clean himself and the floor up, but he just doesn't seem to care.

I'm frustrated and out of ideas.  He be 4 in January and we've been working on this over a year.  I think it's utterly ridiculous that he's still not potty trained.

We just made it back from the doctors office for our check up for the baby.  There has been lots of movement over the last few weeks, and we heard a strong, fast heart beat today.  We didn't actually get a number because the kids were rattling on at a mile a minute asking the doctor questions about what does this do, and what does that do, and what is that called, and what are you going to do to my momma.  You get the picture.

Last go round my thyroid numbers came back much better than they've ever been, even not pregnant.  They were shocked because it should be even lower than usual.  They want me to run another set of lab work now that it's been another month, and they are going to run a second test to see if all the medicine is actually out of my system.  Then they'll decide what to do.

We talked a little about my general birth plan.  She said that she thinks everything sounds good, but she would like to plan to induce at 42 weeks if the baby hasn't come by then.  It was nice to hear that I can have the full time, and not start hearing about inducing 2 weeks early due to a massive baby.  That would mean depending on which set of due dates we use that we would induce on the Feb 22 or March 1st.

I'm still hoping for a boy, I think we've settled on the name William David again for a boy.  We plan to call him Will.  But, I think we are having a girl.  Which is a problem since we still don't have the name list narrowed down at all.  Infact counting middle names we have a grand total of 21 name combinations.  Gary still wants to cheat and look at the paper, but I told him if he did he wouldn't be able to tell anyone, because I want a surprise.  No co-workers, no family members, no church members.  He doesn't think that would be a problem.  I know what the problem would be though.  He'll start referring to the baby as a he all the time, and quit helping me pick out girl names, and then it would be obvious what we are having.  So for the time being it's still sealed up in an envelope and skillfully hidden. haha

Fall is my favorite season of the year.  I missed it while in Florida.  Those nippy mornings and crispy days.  The September and October footballs games, where it's not too cold yet, but you have on your letterman jacket and a cup of hot chocolate.  It's the weather for sweaters, bluejeans, and good boots.  It's all those great deep colors - hunter green, maroon, navy blue.  Best of all it's the trees that go from their every day green to explosions of color.  All over town, trees that looked perfectly ordinary are changing their leaves.  Some almost overnight have exploded in color.  Others are gradually easing into fall.  Then still a few (like our trees) are waiting to make their grand autumn appearance after all the others begin dropping their brown leaves to the ground.  Here are a few pictures I've collected mostly from around town in the last week.

This is called a "Burning Bush".  It's green and gradually turns a flame red during the fall.  We have one but it hasn't begun to turn yet.

We do go swimming in September... but only in the bathtub.  We like to pretend to be sharks, and eat Momma and Daddy when they come into the room.  Other days we play with ducks.  Today, Momma got out our bathbooks.

Nothing much right now.  Gary doesn't want to help me pick out a name until he sees what the sex is, and I don't want him to open it up (at all) but at least not till he helps me pick out names (and then only if he can keep a secret, which I doubt).  Mother has graciously agreed to take one for the team.  She says if we will just mail her the sealed envelope she can remove temptation from us and start her baby shopping. hahaha.

In addition, to all the usual request for have the baby on my birthday.  (We have 9 different days now, plus Daddy has told me to just hold it in, till his birthday... April 2nd.)  We are also getting naming suggestions this time around.  I like Anne as a middle name, but Mom informed me that her middle name doesn't have the e, so we can't spell it like that.  Bro. David has requested David for a boy or Davina for a girl.  Sis. Sharon has promised me a great big cake if I name a girl Sharon or Sharizibel (my choice).

I enjoy picking names, I don't enjoy the lack of name picking help I get from Gary, but he thinks part of his job description is to make life difficult, and veto all the good names (like Zoey and Felicity for girls, and Brennan and Landon for boys).  I always have more trouble with boy names, I like so many of them.  I have narrowed a list of 20 names down to William, Michael, Nathanael, Samuel, Ethan, Shaun and Ryan.  Some of those I've even narrowed middle names down.  The girls list has only been gutted of 4 names (all by Gary I might add) leaving Rebecca, Katherine, Bethany, Miriam, Caitlin, Laura Grace, and Raleigh.  I'm a little funny about names, I want a biblical name, and a name with meaning, in addition to it just sounding good.  I guess we'll be at this part awhile longer.