Strawberry Patch

These pictures are well over a month old, but they are too cute not to share.

Mason LOVES strawberries.  If you ask him what his favorite food is, he will usually tell you strawberries and bacon and chicken wings.

Back during the week of spring break from preschool we met our friends the Parnells for picking strawberries.  Duncan was with us too but he was in the baby Bjorn...kind of hard to get a picture of him while I was carrying him!





Sampling the berries for quality control...




The boys always end up with red goatees by the end of a trip to the strawberry patch!

Excuses, excuses

Actually, I would like to think I have good reasons for being absent from my blog...not just empty excuses. I'm pretty far behind, so here I offer a quick re-cap of what's been going on around here.

I headed down to Charleston a few weeks ago with Tara & Sally for some much-needed girl's time. While there, I picked up an Easter basket for baby D. I thought it was very close to the size of Mason & Roper's baskets, but turns out it is slightly larger. I guess the baby is already getting spoiled. :)



When I was writing out the check to the lady that made the basket, I commented to her that I recognized her name and I was sure she also made the last basket I bought (which would have been Roper's Easter basket). I checked when I got home...puzzling...

Roper's basket...



Duncan's basket...



Moving on...two weekends ago the boys and I headed up to the NC/TN mountains for a long weekend with my mom, aunt, sister-in-law and all the children. That trip deserves a post of its own...pictures to come.

Some of my closest friends were very sweet and generous to host a shower for me & Duncan with a group of my local girlfriends. I felt pretty spoiled to have a shower for my 3rd baby boy...but goodness I got some CUTE things and I'm so thankful to have friends that love my children so much!

In between the trips & partying, I've been doing my best to get the nursery in order. The closet was full of my off-season/non-maternity clothes, which I weeded and re-located. The dresser was full of random stuff which had to be purged, since it is now M&R's dresser. I got distracted inspired by all the cleaning/weeding/purging and tackled our upstairs linen closet, which was an absolute mess. I had seen a suggestion on Pinterest to store sheets in their pillowcases.



Genius! No more searching through the closet for the matching set of sheets and pillowcases! Admittedly, mine don't look as nice and neat as those pictured, since I'm still mastering the art of folding a fitted sheet. So my stacks are a little lumpier, but nonetheless, its a good change and I highly recommend this system!

In the process of cleaning out the nursery closet, dresser, linen closet, my closet (to make room for stuff from the nursery closet), I filled up 9 big trashbags for a LICS donation. That felt good!

This past weekend we made the most progress on baby D's room...but I still have a few finishing touches before it is picture/blog worthy. :)

And here I am at 34+ weeks pregnant, and I keep reminding myself that M&R were both born at 37 weeks, which seems way too soon for Duncan to make his arrival! With all 3 of my pregnancies I have felt like the first half DRAGS and then the second half FLIES by! The clock is ticking...

I Have Proof...

...Roper and Leah used to love each other.





What happened??

Happy New Year!

I'm just getting around to posting pictures of our New Year's beach trip...which at this point seems like it was about a month ago! We spend every New Years with our good friends the Maryanskis...this was our 8th year in a row so I guess you could call it a tradition!

This year we celebrated with a beautiful weekend in Ocean Isle Beach...the weather was amazing and felt more like May than late December. It was very relaxing...except when Roper and Leah were tormenting each other! Those two are like oil and water. We all joked that they will probably end up having crushes on each other one day!

And the reason it seems so long ago is that as soon as we got home from the beach on New Year's Day, Graem packed up and headed to Orlando for a full week. His trip was primarily for work, but when the Gamecocks were selected for the Capital One Bowl, he extended his trip on the front end by a couple of nights so he could make it to the game. I'm so glad he got to go to the game, but I will be honest and say it might have been the longest week of my life!

Graem used to travel all the time for work, so when this trip came up, I thought "no big deal, I'm an old pro at this." HA. It was a little different this time...
I'm 7 months pregnant.
I have a 4 year old and a 2 year old.
It is really exhausting to get two young boys fed, bathed & ready for bed by 8:00 by yourself when you are 7 months pregnant.
We just recently moved the 2 year old to a "big boy" bed and he is still learning that he can't get out of bed 56 times after we put him down...extending bedtime from our normal 8:00 to as late as 9:30.
He is also still learning that 5:30 AM is not an appropriate time to come downstairs or start jumping on his brother's bed, screaming "Wake up, Bubba! Wake up, Bubba!"
It is really hard to get my 7-months pregnant self and two young boys dressed, fed & out the door in the morning without the help of Graem. Thank goodness I did not have to do this every day {at least the "out the door" part...I did manage to make sure we were all fed & dressed each day}.
All three of us were fighting colds {and exhaustion} last week.

So...I spent most of the week in survival mode and I have never been happier to see my husband than when we picked him up from the airport on Friday night! It is funny how a little perspective can make you appreciate someone even more than you already did!

Okay, on to the pictures from the beach...


The progression of these next two pictures cracks me up. Baby Allyson is such a content little chunk, particularly when she is eating...








It is so funny how Mason can be so much like his Daddy. He loves to be on a mission...and his mission during this walk was to collect as many sticks as possible.




I had some fun with these pictures I took with my iPhone...thanks to Heidi for recommending the BeFunky app...after tinkering with my pictures it let me upload them directly to my Flickr account!



Our angels making sand angels...






One of the neatest things about Ocean Isle is that it faces south, unlike most of the beaches on our coast. Which means it gets a beautiful sunset on the western side of the island...

Luminaries

Our neighborhood had our annual Luminary Night on Sunday, and as usual, Santa Claus made an appearance! He flew in via helicopter for the event, while the reindeer caught up on their rest at the North Pole. I look forward to this night every year because we get to visit Santa without having to wait in a line a long line. We also have hayrides throughout the neighborhood, which stop at various "host homes" that serve hot chocolate, cookies, etc. As much as I complain about living in suburbia, surrounded by neighbors, I really enjoy our neighborhood, especially on Luminary Night. I didn't see a single house this year that didn't participate...the streets really look so pretty with all the little glowing bags. And the weather was much more pleasant this year than last year, making the whole event much more enjoyable.

Our buddies Ruth Ann and Tripp joined us...



Please ignore the fact that my child is not wearing his boots...



I forgot to mention that there is also a display of public safety vehicles on Luminary Night...this year we had a fire truck, DNR boat and a robot that I think is used by the bomb recovery team (?). The fire truck was a hit, no surprise there.





As you can see from the following pictures, the Santa visit was not a "climb on Santa's lap & smile for the camera" experience. The boys took the opportunity to have a nice chat with the jolly ol' elf. Mason rattled off his standard requests this year for a razor scooter and a headlamp. Roper, hearing Mason's requests so often, also asked for a headlamp as well as a flashlight. And then he threw in a last-minute plea for some candy.





I enjoyed looking at last year's pictures, when Roper was still scared of Santa.

And here are the pictures from 2009 , when both boys were so much smaller!

Fox's Farm

A few weeks ago we spent the morning at Fox's Farm with a group of friends. The boys just eat up this type of thing...hayride, animals, searching for pumpkins in a haystack, what more could you ask for??

Please excuse the quality of my pictures...sometimes the thought of toting my big camera around while keeping up with both boys is exhausting, so I have become increasingly dependent on my iPhone camera.





Here is Mason, our chicken-loving boy, being introduced to a Chinese Chicken.




This sweet little donkey got lots of love from the Clark boys.

It's November!

November 2nd, to be perfectly accurate...which means my big ultrasound is today! (11/2/11 at 2 -- yall know I like numbers!) I'm so excited!! I'm praying for a good appointment, with news of a healthy baby who has his or her legs spread wide open! :-)

I have some catching up to do with pictures from all of our Halloween festivities. Well, not all of our Halloween festivities. I'm ashamed to admit that I don't have any pictures of our trick-or-treating experience. Roper ended up with pink eye on Halloween so he was quarantined at the house.

Most of you know that I grew up on a farm, so on Halloween we always went to the fall festival at our church and then went trick-or-treating in my grandparents' neighborhood. Most days of the year I do not love having neighbors on all four sides of me...I miss the privacy of living in the country...but Halloween is one exception. I love our neighborhood on Halloween! We get lots of trick-or-treaters...I feel like all the children from Lexington County that don't live in proper trick-or-treating neighborhoods end up in our neighborhood and I love it!

So even though I don't have pictures from the actual night of Halloween, I do have some of our little firemen, aka Sam and Elvis. (You might recall that Mason went through a prolonged phase of referring to himself as Fireman Sam, and he referred to Roper as Elvis...Fireman Sam is still around, but thankfully the obsession has tapered somewhat).

My plan was to dress Mason as a fireman and Roper as a dalmation, but Roper insisted that he be a fireman too. Here the boys are before the Browns pumpkin carving party...



On the way to the party I needed to run in the grocery store to pick up some chips to go with the dip I made...and lo and behold there was a fire truck in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot! The firemen were so nice and let the boys climb all over the truck.



Here are our pumpkins...Graem's emoticon pumpkin came in second place in the contest. I was pretty proud of my bat too, but I heard at least one trick-or-treater refer to it as a moose...



Our next Halloween outing was to Boo at the Zoo with the Smyth family. It was Jr. Gamecock Club night so we got to visit with Cocky and the cheerleaders. Roper loves Cocky...from afar...he refused to get in the picture.



The Smyths...










A hot dog dinner was included with the Jr. Gamecock Club thing, and they also had a d.j. The children were cracking us up with their dance moves!



Ro-ro loves baby Frances...


A sweaty fireman and a goat...


All 5 of the children...