Autumn beauty

We had 2 playdates yesterday and the children were in heaven! I was also in heaven just staring at the backdrop to the fun!!

 #1 took us to the other side of our village to our pre-school friend Christopher's house. He has a 12 month old little brother so we parents had plenty of stories to share. The weather was a beautiful 60˚ and sunny. We hung out outside while Emma and Christopher had a blast driving around on the Gator, and Benny was racing through every lawn's leaf piles, strewing them everywhere. The best part was the kids were playing in the street and not a single car passed by. That is the kind of street I want to buy a house on. We had only planned on staying for an hour, but we had so much fun it quickly turned into two. On the drive home Emma was whining the whole way, "But we have to go back to Christopher's NOW. He misses me!! And, I want to play with his toys." When I asked her if we could invite Christopher to our place next week, she replied, "NO WAY! I wanna go HIS house and play with HIS toys."

Playdate #2 was about an hours drive away in Huntington. We went to Daddy's college friend's house. She has a little boy Liam who is two and Thomas crazy. He has a whole ginormous train track set up and my kids were in Thomas heaven. Especially Ben!! He was playing the part of Sir Topham Hat jibber jabbering away at all of the trains to do this and do that. He was non-stop and we couldn't even pull him away from the track for dinner - not that that is any surprise... He still doesn't eat. (I am thinking of patenting the BEN-DIET for the new year craze when everyone makes their resolutions. "Eat only what my kid eats and you are guaranteed to lose 5 lbs a week or more!") The best part about BOTH playdates today was Emma had to go potty on the way home from each one and she was able to HOLD IT - yes, you read that right, no accidents in the car until we got home. Could we be reaching a milestone?? (I would say that with a straight face if only I wasn't folding laundry on Tuesday - a mere 4 days since I last washed and folded laundry - and there were SIXTEEN pairs of little girl underwear in the pile. I asked Daddy what the heck went down while I was away and all he could do was shrug his shoulders and say she had a leaky washer. Ugh!)