Hangin' Out With the Boys!

This summer has really been a fun time for our family. We've all had a lot of fun together. Staying home with the boys this past year has been such a great experience for me. I love just being a mom with them. I took this picture of the boys in their BYU shirts that I bought for them when we visited BYU on vacation. One of my former bosses gave them the little cougar you see in the picture. Do I see future BYU cougars here? I hope so! Jacob is our little cuddler. Grant never really snuggled with us unless he was sick or hurt, so this is so fun for us.
Playtime with daddy usually takes the form of wrestling, tickling or chase games. Jacob is finally old enough to get in on the action and he knows he better get moving when Daddy says he's going to get him.
The boys love books! They can sit and do this for.....at least 10 minutes! Grant can go a lot longer actually, unless Jacob tries to take his books away. But Grant is resourceful and has found a refuge from Jacob. He takes his books and climbs up on mom and dad's bed to read them where Jacob can't follow. Smart!
Just last week I finally quit breastfeeding Jacob entirely! Big milestone! So now he takes a bottle of whole milk in the morning and at night before bed and the rest of the day, he just drinks milk and water from a sippy cup. Grant was really excited to feed him his bottle one of the first couple days of morning feedings. It was too cute, since Jacob looks almost as big as Grant! And he's only about 9 pounds lighter than Grant too!

Jacob hung out in the swing a LOT this summer. That was kind of his place to play when we were outside, which we were almost every day. Grant was riding his bike usually and Jacob got to swing.
This is Grant's 'summer' haircut. I buzzed him one day because he just looked so hot with all that hair, especially since he was always wearing his helmet and it made him sweat. He looks pretty darn cute though.
One morning Grant asked for green eggs and ham for breakfast. We'd been reading the book a few times that week, but it caught me off guard a little bit. But it sounded fun, so I luckily had some Canadian bacon in the fridge and whipped up some eggs too. I used a little too much food coloring, so they were REALLY green, but Grant didn't mind. He looked a little dubious about it at first. I don't think he really thought they'd be GREEN!
But he ate them all!! I DO! I like green eggs and ham! Thank you, thank you Sam-I-Am!!
Jacob has just been making lots of progress in such a short time it seems. When we were home on vacation in May, first part of June, Jacob could sit up if we sat him up, but he would just lay there if he fell over. He didn't crawl at all and hardly rolled over. But it seems like as soon as we got home, he took off. He's standing alone now and cruising along the furniture and as of last night, taking a couple of tentative steps on his own (which we have yet to capture on video).

We did finally get some good video of him 'crawling'. Only he bearwalks instead of crawling. And he's SO FAST! Everyone who sees him just laughs and laughs. It looks like he's going to go end over end because his feet move so fast, that it seems his arms couldn't possibly keep up with him. He can go almost as fast as Grant can run!Jacob loves to be in the kitchen, underfoot. He 'helps' me load the dishwasher, or at least plays in it while I load it. He's usually looking for food though. He knows that if I let him down from the table before Grant's finished eating that he can usually find some crumbs under Grant's chair, so that's where he heads. Just like a puppy! He's quick too! If the refrigerator is opened for more than about 2 seconds, he grabs the Hershey's syrup! Thatta boy!

Jacob and Grant love to hang out in the kitchen together and I got this video of them watching the muffins bake one morning. Jacob started waving just about a month ago. Grant's learned a lot about bugs this year. After all, we do live in Kansas, BUG CENTRAL! We have cicadas here. That thing Grant is holding is the shell of a cicada. They're all over. Cicadas lay their eggs in the fall in the ground. Then in the summer, they hatch and crawl up out of the dirt and onto something like a tree or the foundation of our house or a plant or something and they crack open the top of their shell and come out with wings and fly away, leaving their shell. I tried to explain this concept to Grant in simple terms and this is what I came up with: these are the bug's houses. They go out the 'door' in the top of the shell and leave their houses behind. So Grant collects 'bug houses' from all over the yard and lines them up on the railroad ties or on the driveway. He thinks it's great fun to collect them. We even got to show him one coming out of it's shell one night when we found one on each of Jared's truck tires on the driver's side. Grant was really interested in them.This is what the shell looks like up close. You can see the slit in the top where the cicada hatches out of the shell and the rest of it is left in tact. It looks like a real live bug, unless you know what to look for. There's even covers over the eyes that are left which you can clearly see in this picture. Anyway, just thought you'd like to see it. Grant's also very interested in all kinds of big spiders and he got stung by a bumblebee that he tried to pick up. He loves to watch butterflies, ants, ladybugs, beetles, and he knows to be wary of all the mosquitoes because their bites ITCH! He's forever saying what's that? whenever he sees a bug he's not familiar with. His next question is usually 'does it bite?'

Since Jared has been working on his model trains layout this summer, Grant has been loving to watch Jared run his trains and also loves to look at the pictures in the train magazines that Jared has. I took this video one day when Grant was reading the railroading magazine. So funny!