Holy Jeez Fall Leaves!

Tree leaves around here are no joke...and emaculate yards even during the falling leaf season seem to be a requirement.  Especially in our case, with a landlord for an immediate neighbor.  Oh, And he's the one who sets the bar that all other neighbors measure themselves by (ugh, sigh, etc...).  It certainly helps that he has lawn maintenance that seems to come every week and vacuum his leaves/grass (yes, that's the what the machine looks like. Or better yet, it looks like a minature zamboni, with a suck-button).  Needless to say, this SAHM and her two toddlers are no match; however, we put up a mean fight on the weekends when Nate's home.  Now that guy is a machine! He doesn't suck like the mini-zamboni, but he's a serious raker!

 

So after the girls rough housed in the leaves for hours on end, including running through our just raked piles!  They came inside tuckered our like I've never seen before.  Hence the crazy, exhausted napping positions they found...

 

Yes, sleeping face-down in the carpet

You can't see it, but Olivia is standing with her head on my lap--sleeping!

 

Gymnastics & Dance...Ready or Not, Here Comes Lauren!!!

So we were able to sign Lauren up for gymnastics and dance classes at the local parks and rec center.  Due to the Lee District Rec Center's great reputation though, all classes are usually full with 10+ person waiting lists, before 10am the day of early registration! It was a shock to me when we got here in August that I wasn't able to get her in any classes until this early registration round opened, and these classes don't even start until January.  So to ensure we got an actual spot in these classes, I woke up at 5am (without a kid waking me up!), and jumped online to enroll Lauren in these classes! We were the first enrollees in one class, and second in the other two.
So now that we were confirmed class enrollees in both dance and gymnastics, I was now allowed to buy leotards and dance shoes for Lauren.  We scored some great deals from Amazon and had the leotard and shoes in our hot little hands within two days of ordering them!  Lauren put the leotard and shoes on at 9am in the morning, and was ripped from them both at 6:30pm, kicking and screaming into the bath.  But she sure was cute spinning around and saying, "me mommy, me mommy". As in "watch me mommy".  I'm sure glad to have active activities for her to do come January, as we need to burn off that energy somehow.  Otherwise it just burns up the house!

Do Ninjas Celebrate Thanksgiving???

The answer would be YES!!! Or at least this little ninja does!



Lauren demonstrating her prowess!

The calm after the sword storm!

Olivia unarming the ninja with a smash-and-grab!

 

Some of you are saying, "What in the world did they do for Thanksgiving?!"  Well the ninja costume makes sense when I tell you that we spent it with our cousins (Nathan's first cousin, Leslie Olsen Torgesen's family), and Uncle Kirk and Aunt Cathy.  The Torgesen's live in Elkton, MD, about 2hrs away from us in Alexandria.  That's 2hrs, non-Thanksgiving Eve traffic; 4hrs Thanksgiving Eve traffic! (*insert decompression sign) 
So the part that makes everything fall into place is that Lauren and Olivia met their second cousins, the Torgesen kids (Mikey, Isabel, and Piper), for the first time on Thanksgiving Eve.  Mikey had a brand new ninja set when we arrived, and somehow Lauren conned him into letting her wear it before he even got the chance! Lauren still has her MacGyver-title worthy skills--I'm telling you!  The video is hilarious in that she does a duck-and-run move at the end--so ninja-like right?!
So Thanksgiving was full of the F trifecta: food, family, and fun! We ended up eating about 1:30pm, so that left a lot of time for dessert, clean-up, toy room play, and card games for the adults.  Nate and I learned a new game called Foot and Mouth, which was awesome!!!  Wish we had more card-playing friends in the immediate vicinity because I looooovvvveeee this game!  It's canasta on steroids...good times.  I was Uncle Kirk's partner and we did pretty awesome, though got inched out right at the end by Aunt Cathy and Stafford (Leslie's husband).  It was a good thing we needed to leave to put the girls to bed; otherwise it would've been a harder defeat to swallow :/ Per Aunt Cathy and Nate, Uncle Kirk and I have very comparable temperaments when it comes to competitions and winning/losing.  But come one, who's really okay with losing?!
Then on Black Friday, instead of joining the crazies at the local stores, we went swimming in the hotel pool!  As you can tell by the photos, I forgot my swimsuit, so Nate was overloaded with holding non-swimmers...and Lauren's diaper was overloaded with water. Wowza!  Not to quote 90's rap song lyrics, but this "baby's got back"!!  Truly!!



Lauren kept jumping in, climbing out, jumping in, climbing out...

Worn out bunch!

Baby Lauren's Got Back right?!

After lunch at Klondike Kate's, we hit the road back to Alexandria to start our Christmas decorating.  God Bless Nate and his checklist-driven self.  Our house was Christmas-ified before our heads hit the pillow that night; but Christmas is my absolute favorite holiday, so I didn't mind in the least...

The Catch22

I've come to realize the Catch22 I put myself in by starting our family blog right when we started having children: I blog for our family to capture the memories, but it's because of said family that I feel I have no time to blog.  Does that about sum it up blogosphere people?
But I've realized I just need to suck it up and post what I consider less than thorough or complete posts/stories.  Maybe even pictures-only posts, if needed.  Because I've obviously developed an unhealthy aversion to posting anything I don't feel I give a good, complete effort on (it's been 8 months since I posted last for Heaven Sake!).  So I'm going to go against my extremely competitive nature, for the moment...or however long it takes me to catch up on our life and happenings of 2012, and stop measuring myself against you timely and thorough mommy bloggers! (Kelly Peper Wilson--can you PLEASE bring down the bar?! I know you're hitting stride on like your 8th year of blogging, and it's second nature to have blog-time built into your day; but at least make it look harder!!) 
(Insert resigned sigh) So now I'm going to make a valid effort not to fret over taking everyday family photos. Why do I fret? Because the first thought that pops into my mind when framing my family through a camera lens is, "When am I going to find the time to post this?!"  This is no way to live people!!!  I shouldn't be deterred from taking everyday pictures because of my blogging-block--completely counter productive!  So I've been letting my photos figuratively stack-up, because not only am I waaaay behind, but because somewhere along my pre-children career it was beat into me that any product output needs to be my best work. Work that it thorough and complete, as it'll reflect upon me. Not to say that this belief is incorrect, it's just not a feasible mantra for the current me: a mother to Irish Twins that's nearly one year behind on posting pictures and putting into words our adventures and the many, many firsts for two sweet girls' lifetimes.
So where to start???....Why how about last November?!  That's right folks, you're about to get caught up on the holiday season from 2011.  Here's to hoping that I can get caught up to this 2012 holiday season by the time New Year's hits! And we're off...
WARNING READERS: I'm going to be back-dating these posts as far back as 11/1/2011, so that when I create books from this blog, they'll be in chronological order.  Seeing as I'm not the most avid blogger (again, working on it), I'm not sure how you'll know which posts are new besides just going back to November 2011 and scrolling through again.  Sorry :(