Have you met my niece, Avery Grace? She is 4 months old and so wonderfully adorable and fun. I love to kiss those chubby cheeks and I really work ever so hard to get these smiles. I love her so much and am so thankful that she lives just down the street from me. Right where she belongs.

5:33pm

Right now, I am sitting on my driveway in the dark. My kids are riding their Razor scooters up and down the sidewalk in front of our house in the dark. We are waiting for Daddy to come home so we can eat dinner and we are STARVING! It is a little nippy, but refreshing since most of the day was spent in the 80's. Just a glimpse into the fabulously exciting life of the Fretz family.

Oh, wait! This is funny...
Yesterday I put Brennen down for a nap and told him to go right to sleep.
I said, "Blankie is really tired, don't keep him awake. Go to sleep!"
He said, "What if Blankie talks to me?"
I said, (Sigh) "If he talks to you, then don't talk back."
I left the room and waited right outside to see if he would start to play or not. I waited for a minute. Then I heard:
"Blankie.... no talking!"
Pause."No talking, Blankie! I SAID no talking!"

Should I be concerned?

Sigh...

Nate and I decided that this particular picture will represent our daughter for this period of time in her life. It is real, not staged, not provoked. We did not doctor this photo in any way, and we did not pay her to be outrageous. This is just her. Pretty often. Yep.

Halloween Time!

This year, we had our family and friends over to celebrate the annual ritual of buying expensive bags of candy to give away to strangers, only to get back 1/8 of what we bought. Okay, that sounds too cynical. It was really fun and the kids had a blast. Olivia had a doozie of a time this year deciding what she wanted to dress up as. She wanted to be a pumpkin originally because Daddy calls her his "pumpkinhead," but we couldn't find a costume big enough. It seems that pumpkin costumes are only for babies. We racked our brains and scoured the stores to find something age appropriate and not too girly for Liv. We finally found a doctor costume at Target and she was sold. She started to call herself Dr. Oz, but it changed to Dr. Fretz eventually.

Brennen had a Buzz Lightyear costume that we purchased last year after Halloween and it still fit him. He really liked that the wings lit up.

We had little Avery and McKenna over for their first Halloween ever and the Nolan boy was a ferocious lion!

We had almost all of Liv and Brennen's friends there, except for Bryce, Ella, and Halle, of course. We played two games, a ring toss around the pumpkins on the lawn, and "make a mummy out of your daddy" with toilet paper. Noah-boy won that one! We then proceeded to trick-or-treat and the kids loved every minute of it. Brennen and Gavin giggled to one another after each house and Olivia flew as fast as she could to the next house. Overall, it was a happy Halloween experience and we have been eating one piece of candy a day ever since. (Well, maybe one of us is eating more than that, but who's counting?)