Christmas came a little early for Brooke & Kyle

We finally did it! We broke down and bought the kids a play yard. I always just told Steve we would go to the park that is right around the corner from us. Well, I ate those words. It is going to be soooooo nice to be able to have the kids play in the backyard and mommy can sit on a chair with her coffee in the morning and watch them play. Plus it's going to be much easier on the furniture and should help wear off some of their energy. If I could just bottle some of it up.

We decided where the grass was in the backyard, you know...as big as it is, to rip it up, cap the sprinklers and put down sand. Kyle is going to be in hog heaven. He just loves the sand and dirt. Hopefully he'll want to climb and play on this thing. Brooke is going to have that rock wall down in a week flat! Mark my words. Anyhow, this past Friday, it rained the entire day. No biggie but we decided to cap the 2 drains off as well. Of course I remembered it at work but forgot once I got home with the kids. Wholy crappola. I went out there in the dark, walked straight into "Lake Bierbaum" and tried to pull the caps off so the water would drain. Can I just tell you how cold that water was. Yikes! I'm out there in the mud, sweats pulled up to my knees trying to pull those damn caps off. Well, I can't do it with my bare hands. I go back into the kitchen, grab my jar lid helper, take it back outside and turn the caps off. Glug, Glug, Glug and the water starts to drain next to the patio. Well, not so lucky on the one next to the gate. It plugs up so I just put the cap back on. Nice! Luckily it doesn't rain here much. Guess we'll have to figure something else out for the next time.

So once the play yard is all set up and we're good to go, I'll post pictures but the kids should be able to play on it by tomorrow late afternoon or early Wednesday morning. We are then going to have the sand brought in on the 15th.
Here is a picture of the play yard that went in yesterday. I was so excited yesterday to get home from work and have the kids play on it. There is no sand down...just wet dirt. Oh well. Nothing like being a kid and getting dirty. These are some pictures of the kids on the swings in our enormous backyard(yeah right!)!!!

It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas....

I can't believe it is already December. Where or where does the time go? It seems like just yesterday when everyone was telling me how different this next Christmas was going to be with kids. Well....it's here and I just know it's going to be great. We went shopping at Toys R Us the other day and it was fun shopping for them. It is going to be extremely difficult to not go overboard with them and overwhelm them with "stuff." Brooke is actually in the beginning stages of saying Santa. It's really cute. Everything she looks at whether it's an angel, a snowman or a nutcracker...she calls it Santa. Kyle is just so fascinated with all of the lights and decorations. Whenever he goes by something, he makes an "oohhhh" or an "aawww" sound. It's super cute. He's going to go nuts when we take them to Christmas tree lane later on this month.

Since I missed taking the kids up for their pictures for Halloween, I knew I just had to get their Christmas pictures taken. We already did Santa so...CHECK! The pictures though entailed mommy finding Christmas outfits to wear. Yikes! Well, thank you very much Macy's. CHECK! Got the outfits so we were ready to roll. I decided to book an appointment at Kiddie Kandids since my girlfriend and a guy I work with have had such good luck with them. Good thing I got on top of this early. I booked the appointment online and they had NO appointments after Dec. 4th! Wholy cow! Here is the final result:


The gal there worked hard for her paycheck that night. For whatever reason, Kyle started to cry the second we put him up on the staging area. I mean, it wasn't a little whimper...it was a full on get me the hell outta here cry. You would have thought the boogie man was behind there. She finally did get a smile out of him but we were unable to get a picture of the 2 of them together. What really shocked us was the fact that she got Brooke to have a HUGE smile on her face while Kyle was the one crying. Usually it's Brooke with the stone face and Kyle is our little ham. He still is our little ham but he wasn't having any of that picture place. Who knows!

I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season. I would just love to slow down, enjoy this time with the kids, bake cookies, make a gingerbread house, and sing carols. As cheesy as it sounds, that would be the best Christmas present EVER! It would take me back to when I was young and it was Christmas time at our house. The more and more I get into mommyhood, the more and more I appreciate my mom and how much SHE did. I don't know how she did it but she sure made it look easy. I have some pretty big shoes to follow in and it's tuckering me out! Looking forward to seeing you mom in a few weeks. You are SO helping me with this June Cleaver crap!

Happy Thanksgiving

Well, hopefully everyone had a great turkey day. Ours was pretty uneventful. Steve went to the fire station and the kids and I stayed home(I think we might have stayed in our pajamas all day)and decorated for Christmas. Well, I decorated and they would play with everything that I took out of the box. I was a really quiet day. I ended up eating mac n cheese for dinner. New Thanksgiving staple.

The night before turkey day, I had a brainstorm of an idea and wanted to take the kids up to the mall to get their picture taken with Santa before the mad dash. I thought no one would be there this early. Well, I was right. No one was there and we walked right up. The kids did great with Santa. They both sat their on his lap. At the end, Kyle started to cry for whatever reason. Steve got him down and I told Brooke to give Santa "a love" and she leaned back into his beard and it was too cute. The picture is dark but it's still cute. Here is the picture of the kids with Santa. We had the picture taken at Victoria Gardens and it is so cool up there right now. They have the Christmas tree and Santa in this main quad area. They have machines up on the roof that make it snow. I thought it was real snow but it turns out it was just bubbles. The effect was still cool though. Made me want to take the kids on a "one horse open sleigh."

So basically, I flew right past Thanksgiving and went straight to Christmas. Bad mommy since we have so much to be thankful this year. We have 2 beautiful children that I can not imagine my life without right now.

Parenting 101....PLEASE!

I thought I would share this story that happened last weekend with Brooke. What a proud parenting moment....NOT! So we are in the motorhome last weekend at the beach in Huntington. Steve and I come in around 7:30pm to bathe the kids since it was bath night. I get the little tub out and put it in the shower and fill it up with warm sudsy water. Our little water baby Brooke just jumps right in. I get her all cleaned up, hair shampooed and then pluck her out, wrap her in a towel and hand her off to daddy. He then gets a fresh diaper and some PJ's on her. We're at the beach so it's her warm, footed fleece PJ's. Steve is now in the process of setting up the pack n plays which is what they sleep in at night. In the meantime, I undress Kyle, put him in the tub and get him cleaned up. I get him out and am drying him off on the bed when I hear, "TERESA!" I look up and there is Brooke, back in the bathtub...PJ's and all, sitting there splashing around in the water. I immediately start to laugh. At this point, Steve is not seeing the humor. I tell him it's funny and he needs to go get the camera. We took some pictures and then Steve got Brooke back out of the tub and wrung out the PJ's. Thank god we had an extra set of warm ones. Goes to show you how fast they can get into trouble. Like I said, I will have to post the pictures of her sitting in the bath tub with her PJ's on. What a little stinker!! Gonna have to watch this one like a hawk!

Happy Halloween

Well, this is the year of our "firsts!" We decided way back at the end of August to have the kids be monkeys. Brooke because she scales and climbs on everything...Kyle because, Monkey see...Monkey do. They were so cute in their costumes. Janet came over to help us trick or treat and it was her suggestion for the bananas. Brooke wouldn't let go of hers all night. First chance Kyle got, it was on the ground. We walked around to about 5 houses in our block of the people that we knew. Brooke has understood knocking on the door for awhile so when we walked up to the first house, she knocked on the door. When the door answered, she walked right in. Bypass the candy, forget the concept....I'm coming in! It was too funny. We came back to the house and the kids had just as much fun passing out the candy and putting it in the other kids' bags. It was a fun night.

Pumpkin Patch

Well, fall is here and Halloween is just around the corner. I am so excited to be with the kids this holiday season and watch them experience it all. Tonight we started things off by going to the pumpkin patch right by the house. They had tons of stuff to do there besides buy pumpkins. Which by the way, we didn't even buy a pumpkin. I'll wait a bit and buy one closer to the actual date. They had a petting zoo, jumpers, little teacup rides, etc. I really just wanted to go and have the kids experience it all and so I could take some cute pictures. We had a blast. Brooke is our fearless child and will pretty much do anything. Kyle is a bit more cautious. We bought tickets for the fun stuff and let the kids go into the jumper. Kyle wanted absolutely nothing to do with it and the lady was nice enough to give us our tickets back. Brooke got in there with some other kids around her size and jumped around.There is one picture and she had this goofy look on her face and it's just so her! The ride next to it was a slide. I knew she would love it so I sent Steve up it with her. She had the biggest grin on her face after coming down. At one point, Steve DIVES head first with her and slides down that way. I thought for sure it was going to freak her out. NOPE, she just kept on grinning. This picture is the both of them once they got to the bottom. Take a look at those grins! Steve took Kyle down it and he was OK with it. Not too thrilled but he wasn't crying. He was OK to sit at the bottome on a haystack with me and watch and play with the hay. On the last slide down, Steve let Brooke go by herself and she loved it. Our little dare devil. She cracks me up. Hopefully I will be able to keep up with this blog during the holidays. I will try super hard. I am sure I am going to take a million photos. I am just so excited to see the holidays though their eyes. It's going to be fun to have kids around this season. I'm also going to try and put on my June Cleaver skirt and heels and bake cookies and decorate them with the kids. I wonder how the pumpkin carving is going to go??! Kyle more than likely will want to eat the pumpkin! He has turned into an eating machine again. That boy can eat! Hope everyone is doing well. Things always seem to be crazy around here for me but it's a fun crazy. I am missing sleeping in lately. What I wouldn't do to sleep in until 8am!

It's October Already

Yikes, I can't believe it is already October! We have already been home now for over 6 months. By the end of this month, we will have been home for 7. That is just so hard for me to believe. The kids have almost been with us as long as they were in an orphanage. I can't wait to surpass that number!

The kids are doing just wonderful. Steve took them to the doctor the other day and Brooke has grown 3" and is now in the 90th percentile for height. No wonder the 12month overalls I bought for her were too short. She is in the 25th pecentile for weight but that is still in a average range. Kyle has grown as well and is showing a steady climb. He is still in the 10th percentile but like I said, has shown a steady upward climb and that' all we look at. They both have about 5-6 words that they say. Their new favorite thing though is to throw something on the floor and say, "uh oh". They can also say, Bubba (the dog), mama, dada, up (this is Kyle's thing), hi and baby. They are eating machines and are eating all big people food.

We had a busy September. Work was in full swing for me and my sister got married so Steve drove the motorhome up to Seattle and the kids and I flew up. It wasn't so bad flying with the kids by myself. Everyone around me was very helpful. Restores your faith in mankind. There are still nice people who will help a complete stranger. On the way home from Seattle, Steve stopped at the ACA Rally in Calistoga, CA. It's north of San Fransisco. He was there all week. I flew home with the kids and went back to work. I decided to throw the kids in the car on Friday night around 5pm and drive up to meet him. Everyone thought I was nuts. It wasn't too bad. The kids did great and let me tell you this, we did not have a DVD player in the car and the kids were still fine. They played with some toys and at one point, I did stop and they had their first taste of chicken mcnuggets from McDonald's. Big shocker...they loved them! We stopped around 8ish, changed into PJ's and a new diaper, had some milk and they were asleep the rest of the way up. I took Monday off of work and we had a great time. The kids missed Daddy and wanted in his arms when we got there.

Here are some pictures of the kids with their warm clothes on in Seattle.
They did really well with all of the happenings going on up there. It was a whirlwind of a weekend and it was fun for the entire family to be together. The time sure did fly by and I didn't really want to come home. I hate that my family lives so far away from the kids. They are changing so quickly and they are missing out on that. Oh well. We bought a web cam so hopefully they will get to see the changes that way!

The other day the nanny called in sick so I had to take a sick day too. The kids and I went to the park. I haven't gone to the park with them in a long time. They love it there and of course Brooke is a total monkey and loves to climb on everything. Here are some pictures I took there.



Life seems to always be so busy with 2 kids. It is fun though watching them learn and grow. Halloween is right around the corner and I already have their costumes all picked out. They are both going to be monkeys; Brooke because she climbs/scales everything and Kyle because whatever Brooke does, he does.

So we are just chugging away here at the Bierbaum house. Hope everyone is doing great. I think fall is finally here in SoCal as the weather is cooling down. The holidays are rapidly approaching. This year is going to be extra fun with the kid. I can't wait!