weekend adventures and family additions

First of all...CARDINALS ARE WORLD CHAMPIONS!!!!  Few things in life are as sweet as watching your team win.  And win and win and win, after so many said it wasn't possible.

I am about to dive right into peppermint-flavored things because...'tis the season.  Mere days from November, it's okay to celebrate the coming of Christmas effective immediately.  It will distract me from my biggest little girl turning three and all the rest of things that must be accomplished this week.

Football season is winding down, slowly and sadly.  I can't say I'm entirely sad about it because at least I'll have another set of helping hands (as opposed to destroying hands) around here.  Just in time for the holiday crazy and the wrap up of 2011.

Halloween came twirling in with more than a foot of snow preceding its arrival.  We celebrated with a Halloween carnival and a costume contest dressed like this:

They took first place in the costume contest which gave us tickets to spend on a dozen suckers, trips to the fish pond, orange-flavored cotton candy, and caramel apples.  And to the cake walk where Ruby, defeated, told Jimmy, "They didn't call my number!"  It's best we didn't come home with a cake.  Cruise, remember?

I'm quite aware this looks like child labor.  Actually, it's...my nearly three year old doing dishes to keep me sane.  One of my favorite games that Ruby begs for is doing dishes, no joke.  I fill the sink with warm water and soap and she plays until she resembles a raisin.

Apparently, dish-doing in your skivvies is way more fun.

Oh, for inquiring minds: Up to 20 sets of stairs before my lungs yell WE QUIT!


And! We welcomed this precious face into our family on Friday:

At Ruby's insistence, her name is Pippi.

How about a phone photo dump?

Rubyism:

We have always called candy that comes in little pieces (jelly beans, M&Ms, etc) beans.  When we went to Missouri earlier this month, Ruby picked up a new name for M&Ms.  They are known in our house as dumb&dumbs.