My girls- Mama.

We were so excited that june's hair is long enough for a pony tail.

Well, almost long enough. With the aid of some hair barrettes, we managed to get it back.

It shouldn't take long to have it properly long enough. June's hair grows fast. I chopped it short in May and it's already longer than mine. And I've been growing mine out for 2 years.

It was sunny, muggy and 75 degrees today when we picked Junie up from school. She came out with her backpack "mailman style."

We hit our favorite pipe installations.

And tried to capture a good 15 month shot of JoJo.

Jo had a check up this morning. She was 30.25 inches tall (50th percentile) and weighed a back-breaking, bone-crushing....

... 20 pounds and 5 ounces. (That's the 12th percentile). And her head was 18 inches, for those of you charting her progress (45th percentile).

This may looked posed, but actually, Georgie is trying to get me to lift her up so she can walk on the brick ledge just like the big kids.

This isn't a great shot of Jo, but isn't South Carolina beautiful? This is the view we get every day just driving to preschool. Not bad.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas- Jo.

Mama says that since she's going to be gone for a week at Thanksgiving, she doesn't want to miss out on a second of Christmas.

Apparently, first the on list is embarrassing costumes. I thought Halloween was over.

No surprise that Henry was almost more excited than mama. He and papa ran to Lowe's to pick up some lights and Henry stressed that we'd decorate the tree before he got back.

I wasn't very interested in hanging ornaments, but I did stay to play with some Christmas toys.

Mama was so happy, she even let papa take a picture. Maybe now she'll take a shower.

June viewed her "ordaments" not as something to hang on a tree but as something to collect and hoard and eventually throw a fit about when mama said she had to hang them up. The compromised and June ended up hanging all of the horses on the "merry-go-round" of greenery around the banister on the stairs.

Since everyone was making a mess, I decided to add Legos to the mix. Remember how I only like toys that my brother and sister like?

We spent a lot of time looking at ornaments with baby pictures in them. Who is that chunky newborn?

June loved her baby puppy.

With 4 people hanging ornaments, the job went pretty fast, even though we've officially outgrown our 7-foot tree. We covered every single branch in ornaments and had to put the leftovers on our second tree.

The branches are overloaded and we also discovered that the stem is pretty bent. We spent a long time trying to get it to stand upright before we just leaned in the corner and started saving our pennies for clearance sales.

Not quite finished, but our crooked tree still looks pretty good.

Rough week- Henry.

It was not a good week at the Turner house.

I was the first to fall to the stomach bug. I had an upset stomach and was sick over the weekend. Luckily, the barfs were done in one evening, though I've been suffering from the residual effects the longest.

Papa was next to fall. He spent Wednesday on the couch. But he recovered in time to find a sick JoJo after nap. What a pathetic little girl.

Keep the trash can close.

Poor little string bean.

Mama thought that she'd do a favor to the two sick ones by taking June and Henry out to supper. That plan backfired about 5 minutes from home when June blessed the car three times. It was a long drive home.

Once we got everyone in bed, mama started to feel lousy too. She hoped she might not get the bug, but by that point, there was no hope. It was a pretty long couple of days.

Thank goodness we're all on the mend and getting back our appetites.

JoJo has also regained her personality. Which includes convincing mama to dress her in Junie's Dora jammies and raincoat. This little girl is quickly becoming obsessed with a certain Explorer. And I'm sure it's not because that's what her big sister loves.

Raking leaves- JoJo.

Normally, the Coopers come to our house for Thanksgiving. And with them comes gas powered leaf-blowers and the guys usually spend a day de-leafing our yard. Well, this year, thanksgiving was moved to Ohio, so we had to take care of our own yard.

Luckily, it was beautiful and 65 degrees.

We blew and raked the leaves down the hill and the kids went crazy jumping in the piles. You can see June picked an appropriate outfit for leaf jumping.

It was so fun!

Then Johnny and Christo showed up for some leaf jumping!

It worked out great for mama and papa because Miss Juliet watched the kids while they worked on the yard. Then she even raked some too! Now that is a guest!

I love this picture of John. Guess why he's so happy? Because mama said he could throw that pile of leaves right in her face.

Then everyone threw leaves at mama.

Hilarity ensued.

Check out those happy kids and that clean yard. But don't get too excited. Only about 1/3 of the leaves are down. And we've still got the backyard to go.

Meanwhile, I was inside sleeping. That is so unfair!

Stampin' Up- Georgie.

The ecstasy of mama allowing the big kids to stamp their faces carried over to Thursday. So on Thursday, mama was in the toy room folding laundry, listening to June and I joyously laugh and giggle in the other room. She stood there, smuggly smiling about how well her girls get along. Minutes later, she walked in to find that June had stamped all over me and all over the walls. That stinker. Luckily, the ink was washable and June got it off the walls.

Here's my damage.

Mama spent some time trying to get a picture of Georgie looking at the camera and smiling nicely. It is not easy. When she's laughing, her face scrunches up and her teeth come out and it's...well... distinct.

For such a smiley kid, she's a tough act. Especially when she gets a hold of the legos. Jo knows what the big toys are in our house. And legos are a big deal. So she carries the bin around the house until someone will sit down and supervise her unloading and loading the bin.

Hooray!

Speaking of legos, Henry is on a lego building league. It's got boys aged 6-9. And these brainiacs bring in some awesome inventions. Mama say this and said "Awesome! A slingshot." To which she got back "Actually it's a trebuchet." Can it, Einstein.

After supper, papa got out his guitar and we had an old fashioned dance party. I'm getting pretty good at my spins.

And June unveiled some interesting moves of her own.

One more time- Mama.

There are so rarely pictures of all of us together and even LESS of us all looking in the same direction. So we just had to post this one again.

Hello Christmas card.

And for humoring us, here's a few videos for you. Not much in this video, but June and JoJo are actually starting to get along. June isn't lovingly (or unlovingly) touching Jo as much. and Jo is spending just a little more time away from trying to climb up my leg.

Henry didn't learn about guns until after the age of 5. June picked it up at 3. And it took Jo just shy of 15 months to master gun noises with a pool noodle.

A few notes about JoJo. She loves to be outside. She could just run around outside all day long. Note two: this kid can EAT! It's so much fun to have a kid who actually eats food. Henry and June categorically refuse all foods. So far, JoJo only doesn't like pickles. But she will eat all kinds of food. Our new goal is to find foods that are too spicy for her. So far, we haven't found any. But she has eaten eggs with tons of pepper, Korean barbecue, rice full of peppers and onions, and tonight, we had steak and mashed cauliflower. And then Jo ate through half our stock of parmesan cheese. And lo and behold, if you feed her for an hour straight, she's pretty happy afterward. And somehow she still only weighs about 20 pounds.

Week in review- JoJo.

We crashed after Halloween and are still recovering. Mama and Papa bought Henry and June's candy. (Don't worry, they let Henry and June keep 10 pieces each. I, on the other hand, got none.) Mama and Papa gorged on the candy all week and ended up feeling substantially more "Wisconsin-like." So now the whole family is on a clean-eating binge. It's been rough on everyone.

Henry has been teaching June how to play on the computer. And he doesn't even answer all of the questions when they play word games. Henry's been having a great time in Kindergarten, but we've been suspecting that most of it is a repeat of what he did last year. We've been talking to the school and when Henry's standardized test scores came back (the whole class took them), we found out that Henry is reading and doing math at a 3rd grade level. So along with the school, we made the decision to move Henry up to the Kindergarten-1st grade mixed class room. He's still with kids his age, but now has the opportunity to work with 1st grade groups. So far Henry loves it.

Not surprisingly, the computer games seem to be doing much more good than mama's efforts to tech June. June has a very strong grasp of the alphabet and the sounds each letter makes. And now she's learning to identify the sounds in words. But of course, there's plenty of arguing when it comes to names. Reece starts with a "W" according to June's pronunciation. And Emily starts with an "A". But the best letter of all is "J" because a surprising number of friends and family have "J" names.

Have we talked about June's dance class? She takes private lessons from a cute co-ed with two of her little friends. We don't have any pictures from class, but we did get one of the girls having a tea party after class.

We complain a lot about how hot it is down here, but fall is completely wonderful. It was cooler this weekend. And by cool, I mean only a high of 65. Oh, the pain and torment of this cold weather. Even the poor lizards were out in droves trying to find a warm spot to sun.

We went hiking to our favorite waterfalls and abandoned train tunnel. This is the only shot we got all day. It's too bad we didn't take more pictures of the beautiful foliage up in the mountains, but this shot is pretty great. All 5 of us looking in the same direction!

Mama's back to training for another half marathon. Our favorite part is when we go running with our friends on Monday mornings after the big kids go to school. I now have a friend of my own. Unfortunately, Ellie and I didn't stay awake very long during the 4 mile run.

Last, but certainly not least, Henry and June got into some stamps tonight and thought it would be SO FUNNY to stamp each other all over our bodies. It was very funny, and the stamps even washed off without too much trouble. But it was worth having stamps on our face for a few weeks for as much fun we had.

Miss Big Stuff- Mama.

JoJo, while a delightful child, has one major drawback- she thinks she's five years old.

She insists on being just like the big kids. She wants to sit on the couch and play Star Wars LEGOs.

When June was practicing her flips, she spent a few minutes rolling around on the floor. Until she decided she also needed to do her flips off the chair- just like June.

Which leads to facial injuries like this. If it's not a bruise on the cheek, it's a bump on the head or a scrape on the nose. Georgie likes to run and try to keep up, but she is not that coordinated yet. And when she falls it's generally on her face.

This is a picture from the beach last month. Check out that bruise on her nose. She fell at the pool and actually had a bloody nose. It swelled so much we were worried it was broken.

As you know, all three kids sleep in one room. Often Georgie gets tired before the big kids. But if you even think of putting her to big before the others, she pitches a terrible fit and there's no way she'll ever go to sleep. In fact, if you even take her upstairs anytime after supper, she assumes you're going to try to put her to bed and immediately starts crying.

George isn't all wiggles and whines. She says words, but you can't ever get her to repeat them on cue. For example, she says "cheese" to the camera, yells "princess" at June's dolls, and demanded "Get up!" yesterday when I went to get her after nap. And she now also gives the sweetest kisses to her babies- or founding fathers.