::today::

Kris is gone on business which stinks. He'll be back very soon, but I don't like it when he's gone at all.
It finally feels like fall here, today was pretty cold. In fact I've been overly warm ever since we moved so I've tried to avoid wearing coats and sweaters because I just have to take them off. Today I wore elbow sleeves and I was freezing picking up Max from school.
I had a dr's appointment today and she said things look great but not like they're happening right away. Kind of a bummer, but we can always hope for next week. We're three weeks out from the official due date and I just don't want to be late!
I'm also getting pretty impatient to find out WHAT kind of baby this is.
Having to come up with a boy & a girl name and buying a few specifically boy & girl outfits has been making me think I'm having one of both.
Obviously that's not happening, but it's starting to get confusing. It would be nice to have it all cleared up.

We're all set up so that we can network to the office from home, now Kris can see his schedule and we can access all the accounts so I can get work done when not in the office. That was one of the most important things for us to get done before baby, and luckily Kris's dad helped him set it up this week. We'd struggled with it several times before and never made it work. So THANKS Ken for helping Kris finally figure it out. It's working great and it's definitely a weight off my mind.

We've been having such busy days lately that I think poor Max is getting worn out. We get him up for school before seven and then rush to school. After school we usually have to rush to karate or guitar lessons. I don't know why the karate teacher did it, but he scheduled his white belt class 30 min after school ends. So we have to rush home and get him to change his clothes and get back to class and it's just tough. Unfortunately it sometimes involves a good amount of yelling. We're working on that. The yelling and the disobedience both.
After that he's got homework and guitar practicing and chores. He basically goes until bedtime.
So anyway I think he's tired of the intensity. I know I am! But so far everything we're doing is valuable, so we'll have to figure out how to ease up a bit without losing out.

And then to the point of this post.
I wanted to do something fun and halloweeny with poor "overworked" Maxwell. Fridays are his short days at school, he gets out right after lunch. Usually we'll go up and work at the office, but it's closed today since Kris is gone. So we went home and as soon as he finished his chores (which took AGES) we started on our little activity.


We really enjoyed ourselves making these adorable Nutter Butter ghosts. Max liked it a lot. (By the way, I didn't think these guys up, I got them from here. Such smart girlies on in the interweb.)

Look how cute they turned out!
Not as cute though, as my little boy, whom I had a very difficult time getting to stop making goofy toothless faces.


Ah, there we go. Isn't he adorable?

I felt like a good mom for actually doing something fun, seasonal and festive with him. And it really didn't take much time or too much standing up. (my back is killing me this week.)

So good for us. And I just put Max to bed at 7:30 and he had nary a complaint. I think he'll sleep well tonight. Now if only I can do the same.....

::fun run::

This is another post filled with content from back when Cammon & Lorri were here--a month ago now!
So anyway, it's fun stuff so I can't just skip over it.
Max's new school is kind of like a neighborhood school. Like a neighborhood school that also services a bunch of other little towns around where we live. It has an interesting small community feel while really being a huge school with tons of kids. I mean, there are four 1st grade classes, and each class has at least 20 kids in it--usually a few more.

So anyway, we think that getting involved with his school is a very good idea for lots of reasons, not least because there are lots of little mouths going there that probably need some sort of dental help (a good amount of them are already coming to our office, so that's fun).

Every year Max's new school hosts an event called the "Fun Run." Everybody gets together, runs/walks a 5K or a 1 mile and then eats breakfast in the gym. I heard about this from one of the moms before the year even started and I thought at that point that if a sponsorship was needed, the office should get in on it!

So we did.

See us down there on the bottom right? Dentistry for Kids!!
It's really fun to be on these shirts because the school allows kids to wear the shirts as part of the regular dress code (otherwise all they can wear are plain polo shirts and stuff with only the school logo on it.) So we see kids in the shirts all the time. Yay!!

The Fun Run was saturday morning, and it was a little tough for us to get everybody out of the house early enough to have a good buffer--we ran into closed roads and as a result were late. Barely late, like one minute, but the rest of the crowd was already on their way when we started.

Pinning on numbers.

There go Max and Kris trying to catch up--until Max pooped out. Wimpy wimpy wimpy. I don't think Max will be joining the cross country team anytime too soon.


But you know who wasn't wimpy? Little Scooter! He ran and ran the whole way. Check out the below picture. He is literally flying.

And his run is so funny--I'm scared the whole time he's going to fall on his face. He runs kind of all tipped over high on his toes. It's nerve racking!

There came the fast guys back around the bend to meet us.
Then went on to the finish line.


Baby Ann just hung out in the stroller and tried to keep her eyes out of the sun--not too easy to do out here.

Our little group came in very very last. We don't care but it was kind of funny.
The breakfast was delicious--yummy breakfast burritos with eggs and sausage and green chiles. Mmmm.



Max even ate some!

It's fun to have community things like this to get involved in--personally and business wise too. I was really excited when the next week we got an excellent new patient in the office directly from our Fun Run advertising. Yay hooray!

::more cousins::

At some point Gram had purchased the same shirt for both Max and Scooter. Scooter loves his and brought it along on his visit (well, really it was Lorri that brought it I'm sure, but anyway) and Max loves his, so was more than happy to wear it.
Since they wanted to wear that one shirt every day, I thought it might be fun to make a Target run and see if we could find them another matching shirt set so we'd have some more options.

It was tough though, considering that Max is so huge and Scooter so small. I can't shop for Max in the little kid section anymore.
So we found quasi-matching shirts. I think they both really liked them though. In fact, Max has worn his several times since, and I heard that Scooter refused to take his off at bedtime one day at home and ended up sleeping in it or something cool like that. Success!!!!
So here you go--please try to ignore the goofy shadows from the super bright sun pouring through the holes in the blinds.

Posing these goofballs is no easy task.

I love the opposing mouth positions on this one.

And then we went outside to try some more.



Finally, a good one! And aren't they cute?
And yes, Max needs a haircut. BAD. But he doesn't want to go. I'll get it done soon hopefully. Maybe this weekend if I don't run out of energy......

::before & after::

Here is Max's cute little face and smile before he went to the daddy dentist.

Mr daddy dentist wasn't pleased with the situation going on with Max's maxillary teeth. He had two loose teeth on top--his remaining front baby tooth, and one of the ones on the side.
Dad doesn't want grown-up teeth coming in crooked because they have to get around loose baby teeth that boys are just too lazy to pull out by themselves.
So he gave Max some time to pull them out himself, and when he didn't, into the office we took him.

He was excited to get "sleepy teeth"--that is, until the needles came out. There was a good amount of screaming from the operatory. The front desk ladies that love Max were cringing and hoping he was ok. When I went in there every dental assistant in the place was patting some part of Max and telling him he was ok. He also already had about three of our reward toys. Is this boy spoiled or what?

He survived the tooth pulling, though he didn't think he would.
And here's the result.

He looks like a ridiculous halloween pumpkin, especially with that great big monster front tooth in there all by itself (he gets those huge serrated front teeth from me for sure.)
He likes having lots of windows for his tongue to peek out of.
I hope his teeth come soon.
He just looks like such a goof. A cute goof, but a goof. But then again, when you're a goof how can you help looking like one?

::nephew::

This is one of my lovely nephews--Christopher. My brother's little guy. But if you call him Christopher, he won't answer or even turn around. He goes by Scooter. He loves things that spin around, he speaks complete sentences in his soft squeaky little voice, he loves his Pup and his Dog, he loves cell phones and he coveted Max's toy microwave insanely. He's not afraid of me which makes me SO happy.
He also doesn't eat.
Or so I hear. His parents say they battle with him to even get him to eat stuff like chicken nuggets & mac and cheese. He only likes juice, cheese sticks and some other stuff I can't remember.
Goofball, right?
I made him a sandwich one day when they were visiting and he actually started eating it. It took like 45 minutes, but long after I had left the table I came by and saw him chomping down the sandwich. It had to be documented.


Dismemberment of the sandwich is not important. It's just the eating that is.
He got a call at some point, but he didn't let it distract him.


Isn't he cute? I'm so glad he got to come visit with his family and we got some fun one on one time. Even if it's taken me almost a month to post some pictures of the visit. Oh well.

::oktoberfest::

This last weekend there was a big Oktoberfest celebration up in Red River. Red River is on of the ski areas up around Taos. Kris has been up there, but Max and I haven't yet. Kris really wanted to head up there and eat sausages and have some fun, but after our crazy quick Utah trip last week I was really looking forward to a quiet weekend (as quiet as they get with Max around anyway) and I didn't think my poor body would be up for another four hours in the car right now.

So, like the awesome understanding husband that he is, Kris thought that we could have an Oktoberfest celebration at home.
So we bought bunches of yummy food and invited some friends over.
Best part? I didn't have to cook anything!

We were missing something important though. We haven't had a BBQ grill since we left Missouri--we left the one we found on the side of the road and fixed up with Kelly & Lechelle. We've missed having one ever since. So finally we just broke down in honor of the Oktoberfest celebration and got ourselves one! Kris was--and still is--very happy about the grill. We've eaten something cooked on it every day since we got it.

So we got the grill and we went to World Market and got ourselves as much German style stuff as we could. The main element of our meal was bratwurst from Whole Foods. Mmmmmm Mmmmmm.

Here are Kris's awesome little appetizers--meats cheeses, pate and nutella on teensy little breads. You can see the saurkraut cooking there too.

Some desert (along with a delicious Sam's cheesecake, of course). These aren't our favorite german candies, but we've got to take what we can get here in the good old US.

Sultan looked on very hopefully, and the lucky dog, at the end of the day he got a bunch of left over wurst. I think he's still thinking about that evening happily.

And here's the master of the feast (with a nice new haircut), toasting you all with his non-alcoholic maltz bier. He was a happy camper.

Happy Oktoberfest everybody!

::amazing::

We went to Max's back to school night a couple of weeks ago, and there we were shown this gem of a chart. Check it out:

Cool, right? But here's the amazing part. At the time of this chart there were only 19 or 20 kids in his class.
It hardly seems possible that they could own 42 dogs between them, that's insane! Especially considering that one of them (poor deprived kid) has no pet at all, and then there are a bunch of cats and "others" in the mix there.
I think it's hilarious.

::a gift::

We left UT early in the morning, heading back home. As we went down I-15 there was this lovely sunrise. I really appreciated it.


It was so lovely it was almost like a Santa Fe sunrise. Almost.....

We had a good drive home. Kris is so sweet, he knows driving isn't my favorite thing, so he drove the whole time. He also set it up so I could sit in the middle bench and put my feet up on the console for some of the time. That helped my feet not to swell up too much.
We made it home by dinner time. It was a whirlwind trip but we're so glad we got to make it.

::proximity::

This weekend we took a quick last minuteish trip to UT to see Kris's dad. He's been really sick and had to be in the hospital for an operation.
It was great that we could be there. We had some really good family time (minus Kelly & Lechelle whom we definitely missed.)
The fact that we were able to just go when we felt like we should was so nice for us.
We took our sweet van. Sultan got the whole back all to himself, the luggage went on top, and I alternated between front seat and middle seat next to Max so that I could put my feet up.


We were only out there for about a day and a half, but we got to spend at least a sliver of time with everybody which was nice.
Max had enough time to step in dog poop with his shoes, then take his shoes off and step in dog poop with his bare feet. Here's my mom lysoling his feet. Lucky guy, right?

Grandpa Ken was in good spirits and we got to spend a lot of time visiting with him at the hospital, which was nice.

Max and his cousins made some fun art for the hospital room wall which I think Grandpa really appreciated.

And Ken also didn't let the hospital get him down.

I hope you appreciate my censoring there.

Max had such a blast, we had a super tough time getting him in the car to go home. He loves it out there and who could blame him.
It's so nice to be so close. We love you all, family.