Happy Thanksgiving, and some mummy talk

I'm thankful for:

• Travis's love of reading
• Noah's charming smile
• Sophie's never-ending curiosity
• my fabulous husband who can be an insensitive brute sometimes but still supports me in the ways he can and puts up with me more than he should
• my job
• christmas lights
• the new iTouch
• my gym membership
• comfy pjs
• cheese and crackers
• the public library
• Colts football
• my mom, who watches my kids every day
• ski trips
• pinot grigio
• not driving a mini-van
• new washer and dryer
• babysitters
• date nights
• euchre
• snickerdoodles
• DVR
• suspense novels
• the muppets Christmas album (and muppets in general)

Not an exhaustive list, but that pretty much covers the important stuff.

Today, on the way home, Travis says to me "At school we learned that people wrap dead people in toilet paper". I was not quite sure how to respond. Further inquiry appeared to reveal a conversation with a classmate regarding mummies, presumably in reference to Halloween. I'm assuming this wasn't part of the standard pre-K curriculum.

Time to start planning birthday parties for Sophie (her first!!) and Travis (his fifth!!) in December. Gee, isn't there something else in December we have to buy presents for?

Obstacle Course Sunday

- The balance beam

- Shoot a basket

- Crawl across the loveseat

- Leap over the mat

- Jump onto the bean bag / pillow pile

And, on an unrelated note, Travis's happy face:

Back in the saddle

Its been a while since I've posted. Strangely, I feel like I have a million things to blog about, but somehow, its not seeming to find its way from my brain to my fingers. Plus I've been feeling just a little overwhelmed lately, and not really interested in laying that all out in a blog, so its a little difficult to get my mind in a place to write about interesting things.

But here goes.

Let's see, when we last met, I was talking about Travis's food sensitivity, and his ability to distinguish between granola bars. So, for a food update: 2 weeks ago, his speech/food therapist got him to eat bananas with peanut butter; last week, apples and peanut butter. He's since been eating apples on a somewhat regular basis...although we've taken a slide backward in the last couple days since he's been sick. This whole food thing is a terribly slow process. Wow. Who would have thought I'd be so excited about getting the kid to eat a gummy bear, for pete's sake.

I've started getting Travis working on his Christmas list. The first thing we did was sit down and talk about what Christmas is all about, and why we celebrate. Then we talked about being able to make other people happy, from buying gifts for people we love to helping out others less fortunate. Travis is a pretty thoughtful kid, so this stuff resonates with him. So then we get to making out his own list, and its like pulling teeth. He can't think of anything he really wants. We looked through an entire kids toy magazine and there was barely anything he truly cared about. Its kind of heartwarming, actually, to see him developing into a primarily unmaterialistic kid. That's something that is pretty important to me.

Highlights (and lowlights) of the last week: many of us battling illness -- slight fever for Sophie and me, stronger one for Travis, runny noses and sore throats all the way around. Ben in Indy for a technology conference this week. Had a gorgeous weekend last weekend and did some tailgating, Ben went to ND game. Pics below:

Noah posing for the camera

Travis playing kick the can

The family (minus Sophie)

Ahh, there she is.

A tale of two granola bars

This morning Travis asked for a granola bar. I told him that I only had the kind in the blue wrapper (Aldi's brand), and he quietly and sadly said, "no thank you". He's turned these down before, he much prefers the Wal-mart brand. So Ben and I decided to put him to the test.

We showed him two granola bars.... blue wrapper and brown wrapper. Ben took the two of them to a secret location, unwrapped them, put them on a plate, and brought them both to Travis and asked him to pick which one he wanted. Incidentally, both granola bars were of the chewy chocolate chip variety, but the Aldi's brand one was much chocolate-ier and in general looked better. But at this point Travis didn't know which was which. He looked them both over, then decided to go for the better looking one and said "that's the brown wrapper one". He took one bite and said "nope, its the blue wrapper," put it back, and grabbed and ate the other one. I'll be honest, I was a little surprised he could tell so quickly -- I thought it might be more psychological than anything else -- but his little sensitive mouth can seriously tell the difference, and fast. So, he won that battle.