Gabriel's Birthday Party

Gabriel's birthday party was awesome! Gabriel loved every single minute of it. He seriously has been talking about this day for what seems like forever!

Mostly, for the past 2-3 months he has talked about birthdays and cakes. So, pictured in my last post, I made him a dinosaur cake!

After everyone visited for a bit we ate supper!

Then it was time for gifts. Gabriel was so excited he just rolled on the blanket while he was waiting for everyone. He simply could not hold still!

The hat fits him well :)

Then it was time for cake! Gabriel grabbed a chair and went straight to the cake table to eat cake. LOL! He must have thought he got to eat the whole thing :) I honestly think his all time favorite part of the whole party was when everyone sang 'Happy Birthday' to him. He likes to sing the song all the time on a regular basis to Eli or me but whenever I try to sing it to him he always refuses because it wasn't his birthday yet. Sooooo it was finally time to sing 'Happy Birthday' to Gabriel and he LOVED it and he sang the entire song to himself while everyone else sang and he sang louder then anyone else did too!

Then my mom brought out her traditional snowman that she makes every year and sticks in the freezer. The kids all thought it was awesome. 

Gabriel thought it needed some hair after all the kids were done playing with it...

The adults watching the kids

And from the snowman the children quickly saw the dirt pile with all the toys and attacked it

Cute little Eli!!!

And we finished the night off with a campfire and s'mores! 

a boy and his cake...

Gabriel LOVES cake. It's all he talks about when he talks about birthdays. For the past two and a half months since Eli's birthday, he asked me close to every day when his birthday was and if he was going to get cake! Haha! When Friday came along and I started making the cake for his birthday he was one happy boy!

More info about the cake and pictures are here! More pictures to come soon of Gabriel's birthday party!!!

Ways to Melt a Heart

Gabriel can be the sweetest child sometimes! I absolutely adore that boy of mine to bits.

Gabriel has been really into bear hugs lately. Now, he has always loved big bear hugs but now he asks for them all the time and he squeezes and squeezes you as hard as he can to make sure you get the 'bear' end of the deal :) A lot of times I'll go give him a hug and in the middle of the hug he'll say 'no Mama, a bear hug!!!' because I wasn't squeezing hard enough. It's so precious!

He lately also says 'I love you' all the time. Oh my word, my heart just melts every single time he says those three little words. I'll be sitting on the floor and he'll crawl into my lap and say 'I love you!!!' And then a lot of times when I tell him that I love him he will say 'I love you most!' Oh gosh. So. Sweet!!!

Today we were sitting on the floor together filling party bags for his birthday party this weekend (which he is SOOO excited about!) and since his party theme is dinosaurs we got these little dinosaurs to put two of them in each party bag. After the first three bags he would pull out two dinosaurs to put in the bag and play with them for a few seconds before putting them in the bag. He would say that there was a baby dinosaur and a mommy dinosaur and then the baby dinosaur would go up the the mommy and give her a kiss and say 'I love you Mommy' and then they would 'go on an adventure' and walk into the party bags. He would do this repeatedly for all of the following bags.

He is such a cutie pie! I love that boy! Or as Gabriel would say, I love him most!!!

bugs...

Realization: Bugs, mainly mosquitos and horse flies, are attracted to black. They seem to love that color. They seem to love it if you wear that color. And they seem to love to eat you alive if you happen to be wearing the color black. They even seem to eat you alive through the thousands of layers of bug spray you put on yourself. They just really love that particular color!

Note to self: Get an entirely new wardrobe!!!!

Second note to self: Anti-itch bug cream... and A LOT of it!!!!

mud, tractors, and frogs

I love having boys! They are the greatest thing! They are always full of energy and are getting into anything dirty that they can. That is why, almost every time after it rains I let my boys go play in the mud. They absolutely love it! They love getting dirty, they love dirt, and they love mud. True boys all the way. So yesterday I let them outside in the mud...

And they found a small frog... poor thing...

And they played with the poor frog for ages! 

I love a good brother picture!

*Sigh* They are just perfect!

sleep...

As I have told some friends lately, I feel like I don’t have any time and I am extremely busy. But the truth is, I’m not that busy. I just don’t have much alone time.

Lately, for about the past 3-4 weeks, Gabriel needs someone to lay with him during naptime or he will not fall asleep. It’s very frustrating. My boys take a nap at the same time in the afternoon and it used to be a time where I had about two hours to myself. Then I could get the laundry folded, some cleaning done, some blogging done, emails replied too, any reading that I could fit in, phone calls made ect. Now, my ‘me’ time is spent lying next to and fighting with my almost three-year-old son to just fall asleep. So now, the only ‘me’ time I have is the 1-2 hours that I somewhat, but not really, have to myself to get things done after they go to bed.

I do love, however, the moments when Gabriel gives in and goes to sleep. Not because the fight is over (well, I love that bit about it too) but because for a few minutes I get to look at the normally bouncing off the walls toddler lying perfectly still in his sweet slumber. His cheeks get extra chubby as they are so relaxed and they kind of migrate towards his lips so he almost has this kissy lips look while he sleeps, then his legs twitch a little every few minutes, and he’s just so sweet! I love it! So even though sometimes, I really don’t want to go spend two hours laying with my son in the afternoon trying to get him to go to sleep because I have 300 other things to do or I really just need a break, those moments where I get to watch him sleep are just so precious they make it worth it! 

a life less common...

A couple of weeks ago I decided that I should take a break from Facebook (FB). I realized that it was a huge distraction for me and that it just needed to disappear for a time. Now I know some people are probably thinking ‘well if it’s a huge distraction, just don’t use it so much’ but it’s wasn’t really that. It was a habit. If I went on the computer, I went on FB. If I just needed to check my email, I checked FB. If I wanted to check the weather, I went on FB too. I didn’t go on because I necessarily wanted too, it was just a habit, and then once you were on FB you would read all the hundreds of little posts from all of your friends and before you knew it, a ton of time was wasted.

So I figured the best way to break the habit was to just get rid of it. So I deactivated my facebook account and was so glad to be free from this time consumer.

Don’t get me wrong, FB is great. You can interact with people whom you don’t get to see very often, it allows to you connect with a large group of people at one time, it’s great if you want to invite people to an event ect. It’s just kind of one of those cases, for me at least, where too much a good thing is a bad thing… I don’t know. I know it’s not the same for everyone. It’s just that I personally don’t need any more distractions right now, so FB is gone, for now. I’m sure I’ll open it up again in the future, but I don’t know when. 

So, that is where this blog comes in. I used to blog all the time. I had this blog that was originally called ‘Life Abroad,’ and then I wasn’t living abroad anymore so I changed the name to ‘All the Little Moments,’ but then I kept taking breaks from blogging so I just gave up on that blog.

When I quit FB I knew that there were going to be those of you out there that would still want to connect and want to hear stories and see pictures of my kids. About three seconds before I deactivated my FB account I realized that I needed to start a blog again for the sake of those whom, unfortunately, don’t get to see my kids that often that want too, or those whom just want to keep connected. So I hopped on over to blogger and I really didn’t want to spend an hour thinking up a clever blog title, so I wrote down the first thing that came to mind, and that was ‘A Life Less Common.’ I only thought about the name for a minute. I liked the ring of it, and I liked the thought of being uncommon. I thought about that bible verse that says (forgive me, my bible is in my room and Eli is sleeping in there) that if you are of the world then you are not of Him and if you are of Him then you are not of this world and I thought how things of this world are the 'common' things, and since I strive to know God and his ways and will try to do anything He calls me to do, then technically I'm not common. And, neither are anyone whom follows the Lord. 

And that’s how this blog and its title came to be :)

And here is to becoming even less common *cheers* :)

Day Out With Thomas

This past weekend Josh and I took the kids to A Day Out With Thomas at the Depot in Duluth. Our boys love Thomas the Train. It's one of the only shows/movies that Eli will sit down for a long period of time and watch. And Gabriel just loves trains and loves anything that has to do with engines and working so he is always up for watching a Thomas movie (it's actually what we're doing right now!). It's also the one show on PBS on the weekends that we try not to miss, just because they love it so much and we don't own any of the new Thomas movies... you know, the ones where the engines are actually talking, not just figurines with a narrator... 

Because of a little misunderstanding between Josh and I, we ended up with some very early tickets for the train ride. As in I was up at 5:30AM sort of thing getting ready for this thing... BUT, in the end it actually worked out perfect!!! There was so many things to see and do that we were done just in time for lunch! I just made sure that Josh picked up some coffee for me before hand so I wasn't sleeping the whole day :)

This is Josh and the boys when we first got to the Depot. The boys were so excited to see the trains they weren't really interested in taking a picture!

We had a little bit of time before the Thomas ride started so we walked around a bit and Gabriel was in heaven looking at all the trains! 

Then we got to see Thomas! Oh the boys were so excited! Lol, they wouldn't even look at me, they would only look at Thomas! Haha! Oh well!

Thank goodness for the professional guys there! We actually got a family picture and the kids were actually looking! Extremely rare ;)

We got to sit on the second level of the train which Gabriel especially thought was pretty awesome!

And then the ride started!

The boys loved it!!! Especially the part where we got to go really close to Lake Superior! 

After the ride we went inside again...

Gabriel got to look at some trains...

And they had TONS of stuff for the kids to do!

Gabriel LOVED Sir Topham Hatt!

Then outside they had free face painted and one of those big puffy blow up slides!

It was a super fun day and the boys loved every minute of it!

Lake Superior Zooooo... can you hear it? The call of the wild is calling you!

If you are from the Duluth, MN area, you have probably heard the Lake Superior Zoo song, hence the title of this post. It's kind of an annoying song, but catchy non the less. Anyway, on Saturday we went there.

The boys were so excited! They love it whenever we go to the zoo!

Gabriel is unlike most kids. A lot of kids would see a flock of geese and run straight for them or try to pet them. Gabriel on the other hand is very cautious. He always observes things before jumping on in and getting his hands dirty. That's what he's doing with the geese, which is a good thing and I told him not to touch them anyway!

A black swan!

Gabriel has this thing with benches. Whenever he sees a bench, no matter where we are, he always wants to sit on them and play on them. I have no idea why. He also has a thing for not wanting his picture taken :)

The bears!!! We got lucky because they were feeding the two bears when we walked by, so we got an extra close up look of them! 

Looking for underwater animals... which, we didn't see. But the boys still had fun!