Happy Memorial Day!

Thanks to all the men and women who have sacrificed their lives for our freedom.  I also want to thank Granddaddy and Pawpaw and the rest of the members of the Armed Forces for their contributions as well. 

Here's our festive patriot...

I took pictures of Sarah during Nathan's nap, and I was hoping to get some of them together after he got up but he wasn't interested in posing for me.  Oh well!

On a side note, looks like our little girl may share her brother's interest in tags!

Songs By Nathan: Lord's Army

Nathan loves to sing so I'm trying to capture some of his performances on video.  Here's our first offering: "I'm in the Lord's Army, Cowboy Style" (aka "Marching").

Ordinary Days: April

Now that May is more then halfway over, I thought I'd share a few more pictures from April that never made it onto the blog.  Enjoy!

23 Week Pictures...

Byron, Sarah and Baby Wyatt were here for a visit a few weeks ago, and we spent most of the day Saturday at the Branch Ranch.  After we got home I realized that I should have taken pictures with our friends - lame Katie!  But here's the family...

The one time Nathan would stand with Daddy and "help" fish.

This pose will be replicated by the younger Kornrumpf later in the post...

Brian's first catch of the day (I didn't get a picture of the bigger one he landed later).

Nathan was a little unsure about touching the fish.

Here's Nathan with his buddies on the mule.  He didn't want to go for a ride, though, too noisy for him I think.

Hmmmm, that pose looks familiar! (That's a miniature pine cone he's pretending to eat.)

And the three kittens that sometimes call our backyard storm drain home.  So cute right now, but what to do about them...

In Which We Have Further Proof that Nathan is his Father's Son

You may or may not know that Brian has a unique ability to find four leaf clovers. He can glance down at a patch of clover in the yard and usually find one almost immediately. According to Wikipedia, approximately 1 in every 10,000 covers have four leaves, yet they seem to leap out of the patch and into Brian's hands. Within the past few months, Brian has upped the ante by finding (on separate occasions) 2 five leaf clovers! I, however, don't think I've ever found a four leaf clover on my own and it takes me five minutes for me to find one with Brian's help ("In this patch right here... maybe look closer to the edge..."). You obviously know where I'm going with this...

Because Nathan always sees Brian picking (four leaf) clovers and presenting them to me, he likes to pick clovers for me as well. Some days I accumulate quite a collection of special clovers from Nathan. One day last month I was inside putting Sarah to bed and Nathan runs in with a clover for me. And I am AMAZED to realize that it has four leaves! I grab the clover and the camera and ask if I can take a picture of Nathan with the clover. I ask him to count the number of leaves...

His answer was three, which I'll give him credit is almost always the right answer.

And a close up...

Then we played "chase-es" where I chased Nathan around the yard on his four wheeler.

Daddy got home and I told him the incredible news.  He was able to pull a switch-a-roo and brought the four leaf clover inside to press and keep for posterity. That first four leaf clover is definitely going in Nathan's memory box!  (UPDATE: Apparently the clover has been lost out of the daily Bible where Brian pressed it.  Thankfully I still have the pictures as proof!)

An Industrious Cleaner

Two Visits with Nana and Granddad

We've had two wonderful visits with Nana and Granddad in the past month or so, and none of the pictures have yet to make it to the blog - oops! It all started Easter weekend when Nana and Granddad came for a visit to Winston-Salem. On their way, they found this cool golf toy for Nathan. Granddad started by showing Nathan how to hold the golf club...

...then they decided to try the included tee.  Nathan wasn't impressed and the tee quickly went by the wayside because the toy also can use air to levitate the golf ball...

...which Nathan got the hang of hitting with the club pretty quickly.  Look at that excitement, and he even kept his eye on the ball!  Next it will be Pawpaw's turn to give Nathan some pointers!

Then, as mentioned in a previous post, Nana was my great helper in the car on Easter Sunday's road trip to Knoxville.  And first thing Nathan asks to do whenever we get to Granddad and Nana's house is go play on the neighbor's swingset!  It has seen better years, but this little swing is Nathan's favorite!

Sarah was just happy to watch Nathan's fun while being held by her Granddad!  (Is this the greatest picture of these two or what?!)

But that was a month ago, and both kids are still changing quite a lot in a month.  Sarah has grown the most, of course, and while she doesn't look that different (except the dress, which seems to be on her almost every time we take pictures), she has learned to roll over, rock on all fours and is getting much closer to crawling.  Nathan's vocabulary has seemed to take another leap forward in the past month, specifically his grammar has significantly improved.  All the grandparents agree that Nathan's speech is MUCH easier to understand these days, which is good because he seems to be talking almost constantly!  But back to the photo, we were finally (after maybe 3 visits) able to get a pretty good picture of Nana and Granddad with both kiddos.

We love you Granddad and Nana!

Puddles

It rained quite a bit during naptime on Wednesday, but once the skies cleared up Nathan and our neighbor Ellie had fun jumping in the puddles in our other neighbor's patio. The same little boy who freaks out when he spills a little water on himself at dinnertime had a blast getting his feet and pants all wet splashing in the water. And that makes this mama pretty happy!

Sibling Love

This afternoon at naptime, Nathan asked if he could hold Sarah in his lap while I read big and little Hop on Pop books.  I didn't expect it to last long because he doesn't like how she waves her hands and grabs onto him.  But he ended up holding her for most of story time.  Then he sat on my lap for a few songs, but he wanted to hold Sarah again when it was time to pray.  I asked him if he would let me take a picture of him holding Sarah later in the day, and he was excited about the idea.  He remembered this evening after dinner and was surprisingly cooperative for the picture (he hasn't been interested in smiling for pictures lately). 

I love that Nathan loves his little sister!  He is always interested in giving her a kiss on the cheek before her nap times and bedtimes and always makes sure she has toys to play with (though he will take away toys too).  He still loves making her laugh and she still finds him very funny.  I pray that these two will always be friends!

Catching Up: Cousins and Great-Grandparents

The kids and I made it to Knoxville at the beginning of April and had a blast with all our cousins. Here is some of the stuff we did:

Nathan was kind of intimidated with the number of cousins that showed up, but then found a few friends hanging around the pool table. This was his kind of fun!  (With Luke, Tom and Eli)

With lots of cousins, eating lunch at the picnic table.

We don't have these "fancy" chips at our house and he definitely enjoyed them!

Monday afternoon we took all the kids to the Knoxville Zoo.  Nathan did really well for skipping his nap and I think he had lots of fun.  Here are all most of the kids at the waterfall at the beginning of the adventure (Will, Luke and Tom, Eli and Jude, Megan, Nathan)  Nathan alternated riding in the stroller and wanting to walk like all the big kids.  However his pace is much slower (of course) so by the end we were really bringing up the rear of the group.  He did fall asleep in the car driving back from the zoo, in between bites of fruity cheerios!

Sarah was a CHAMP!  She rode in the stroller for a while, then I switched her to the carrier for her to take a nap.  She even made it thought the whole zoo without fussing to be fed!  Jeff mentioned how impressed he was that she hadn't made a peep the whole time.  That's my girl!

Here's Nathan with his birthday twin, Megan. They loved the lollypops that Jeff and Annie brought for all the kids!

The next day, lunch at the kid's table with Anna, Emily, Jenna, Eli and Jude.

More great memories with Granddaddy and Grandmother!  Ten of their twelve great-grandchildren were there for the visit, and I know we were all so thankful to be able to have a great time together!

The breaking of the big brown swing was the most memorable occurrence of our previous visit, and we spent lots of time talking about it this visit as well...

Since the visit, we still talk about "all Nathan's cousins" and "all Mommy's cousins".  Anna and Asher (Nathan's "buddy) are the only ones whose names have stuck with Nathan, but I'm so glad we made the trip over for this experience.  However, I did drive back to Winston-Salem at night and we had a much less eventful car ride, thank goodness!

Catching Up: Easter

The weight of overdue blog posts has me paralyzed.  Hence the fact that I've only posted once in the past two weeks.  So I'm going to throw some pictures up here and call it good until I get a little caught up again!

You've seen this picture before.  We took it right after church, which was an adventure in a of itself because there was no KFC (kid's church) due to Easter.  I think I was up and back from our pew to the nursery about three times, ending up with me and both kiddos hanging out in the nursery until services were over.  Then we rushed home and Nathan did NOT want to take a picture.  But now I feel like I can really call myself a parent now that we have a "crying kid" family photo to hang on the wall!

Fortunately, things took a turn for the better after I took Nathan into the house and explained that the Easter bunny had brought him Easter eggs with candy inside.  They were just hidden in the back yard and would he want to get his basket and come find them?  This all being done as the Easter Bunny/Daddy was hiding the eggs in the back yard.  A whopping eight total eggs, so we were able to capture the whole thing on video:

But I'm sure that Nathan's favorite part was the candy inside.  This kid has barely had any candy in his life up until this point, and the Easter Bunny scored big points with the kisses...

...and Mike and Ike.

Chocolate always seems to leave a tell-tale mark on Nathan's face!  

The rest of the day was a whirl wind: eating lunch, packing the cars to make the trip to Knoxville, the car ride with two tired and angry kids who hardly slept, Nana working her magic in the backseat to keep everyone mostly entertained for most of the trip, ending up locked out of Nana's house when we finally got there - but thankfully we were OUT of the car, so both kids were in much better moods.  I have to say, I will never plan another day similar to Easter 2012!