Funny or concerning?

Some days weird things just unfold as you're watching kids play and imagine and interact that you just don't know how to categorize. Take this video from yesterday for example:

Hannah is dressed as a Native American and a ballerina, she is goose stepping and counting as if leading a regiment into battle and swinging two puppies tied by their necks to the ends of a shoelace. She did this for at least 20 minutes, cracking herself and Noah up the whole time. What an odd conglomeration of potentially offensive things, that just end up being funny and cute when a little kid is the one doing them.


(According to her, she is "marching in an Indian parade." And yes, that is Noah swinging puppies around by their necks, too. "It's a puppy helicopter, mom." Ah, of course. That's what they are doing.)

Noah's manners

Overall the kids are pretty good at using their manners. Of course, sometimes they need to be reminded-- but then again, so do many adults these days. Noah is so good at it though, that he has taken to covering all of his bases for proper polite questioning structure. As you can see in this video, a standard Noah request is, "Please may could I have..." And he reeeeeaaaaallly wanted one of the muffins I had just taken out of the oven.

Cheese.

You can tell quite a bit about the kids from their random candid pictures. Pull out the camera these days and Hannah strikes a pose with a toothy grin and a funny arm gesture. When Noah sees the camera, though, he does something like this (his "scary face") or says "cheese" so intently that his eyes are squinched closed and he looks like he's in some kind of pain.

"In this town we call home, Everyone hail to the pumpkin song. This is Halloween!"

This year marked our first real Trick-or-Treat action. After some play time at Papa and Grandma's house with cousins, we suited up and joined the throngs of revelers in Maywood. (Okay, maybe there weren't exactly "throngs" when we went out at 6:30, but there certainly were when we headed home from my folks' house around 8:00.)

Somehow, I'm guessing it won't take too long before the children will not be satisfied with only visiting 7 houses of neighbors we know. Next year may have to be an epic trek as they realize how many possible doorbells they can ring right in our sweet little neighborhood. I'm pretty sure, though, that Papa and Grandma's will always be their favorite stop-- and not just because they hand out full size candy bars, either!