Happy Halloween!

In honor of Halloween, I will post a photo of Anna's prize pumpkin, which she named Herbert.  We picked him out on our recent pumpkin wagon ride for "Me and You Day."

I hope all of you readers have a fabulous and spooky Halloween and enjoy trick-or-treating with your kiddos tonight!  Be safe and have fun.  And if some evil person out there decides to be the "candy police" for your kid (see yesterday's post)....tell them exactly what you think!

The Candy Police?

I am now interrupting the regularly scheduled post I planned to write to bring you some Halloween-themed ridiculousness that I just encountered online.

Picture it: Halloween night.  Adorable children are in their costumes, gleefully skipping from house to house saying, "Trick or Treat!" and filling their baskets with yummy candy. Except, when they say "Trick or Treat," they don't actually expect a trick.  Particularly not as nasty a "trick" as this one employed by a heartless woman in North Dakota.

Photo from www.today.com

That's right, folks, some wonderful lady decided to help kids celebrate Halloween by telling them they're fat.

A nasty trick, indeed.

Photo of the Week: Science Humor

This week's Photo of the Week is dedicated to all you science geeks out there. :)

LOL. If you have any funny kid-related cartoons that you'd like to share, email them to us at mylifewithpie@gmail.com and we will post them!

Friday Fun: We've All Been There

Happy Friday!  Today I will share with you an image that has been popular on my Facebook page.  I am sure all of you parents can relate!

I don't know where this came from, but I know this is SO my life. :)

Have a great weekend, all you multitasking parents!

Firsts.

Sometimes I miss those little baby days of firsts.  First real food, first words, first crawling, first steps, first running....so many things. The growth is constantly visible and occurs so quickly it can be mind-boggling.

At one month old, everything is new and exciting!

Then, after a couple of years, the pace seems a little slower for some reason.  To be sure, there are still milestones - words turn into sentence fragments that turn into sentences, scribbles turn into letters that turn into written words, doodles turn into amorphous shapes that turn into stick figures.  The evolution is more reasonably paced - so much so that you might not even realize it's happening until it does.

Which is probably why, in these last few months, the several "firsts" we've experienced with Anna seem so striking.

This may be Anna's first real character drawing - "It's a minion giving another minion a haircut, mom!"

Thank You for Being a Friend, Part 2: The Wedding

Yesterday, I shared with you all the story of the chaos that our family experienced mere days before Heidi and I were to be married.  I had started to think all sorts of self-pitying thoughts:  why me?  Why now? What if we have to cancel our wedding?  I realize these are not, in the universal scheme of things, terrible problems.  Many people have it much, much worse than we did.

But in my little world, at the time, things felt like they were falling apart.  We didn't want to cancel the ceremony because we wouldn't be able to afford to arrange it all again. We had rented tables, chairs, fancy port-a-potties with sinks, all sorts of things we needed to make this farm wedding perfect.  More importantly to me, some of my closest friends were coming from hundreds of miles away. They would have to cancel their travel plans at the last minute. Or maybe they would get here only to learn of the cancellation. 

Photo by Kaitlin Jarry Photography

Thank You for Being a Friend, Part 1: The Hospital

Thank you for being a friend

Traveled down the road and back again

Your heart is true, you're a pal and a confidant

--Andrew Gold, "Thank You for Being a Friend" 

Well, I can certainly say the past few months have brought with them their share of challenges - but also much joy.  I meant to write this sooner while events were fresher in my mind....but given that I was recovering from surgery and still shrugging off the haze of anesthesia and pain medication, I can't really say they were all that fresh anyway!

I wanted to share this with you, though, because what I went through around the time of my surgery really drove home for me how blessed we are to have such amazing friends in our lives.  People who, when it comes down to it, are more like family than friends.