thanksgiving day pop quiz!

this thanksgiving has had one major theme to it... we are thankful that james doesn't have a test for a full week!!! this semester has been pretty grueling (i haven't had to take a single test and i'm worn out so you can imagine how james must feel!) so we have been pining for a holiday! here we are on one of our many winter night adventures...last thanksgiving scott was too young to enjoy the food so we made sure he got his fill this year. we went to james' school for thanksgiving dinner again this year since it is free and requires no work at all on our part. (woo hoo!) so i boycotted all cooking this year but james pulled out his amazing baking skills and made a delicious pumpkin pie. (it really was delicious, i'm not just being nice.) you can probably tell that i was trying some new editing techniques with this picture. its kind of weird.and last but not least, today was so special because not only was it thanksgiving but it was also scott's 18 month birthday!!! he's such a handsome little boy but he's just too cool for the camera these days.and of course the little brodster is 18 months old today too! brody was gone for a whole month and scott would literally cry when we couldn't go over to his house. shopping is just so much more fun when you have a shopping cart buddy.we are so glad the jones's are back in town! and as a little 18 month birthday celebration i'm going to conduct a little pop quiz about our boy scott. let's see if you can get them all right (the answers are in the comments section):
1. what is scott's favorite animal to immitate?
2. which of these words can scott NOT say yet? a)hot b)bye bye c)hi d) ball e)ma ma f) da da
3. what is scott's favorite lullaby?
4. what is scott's mom most proud of about her little boy?
5. what is scott's favorite movie?
6. who does scott prefer out of his mom or his dad?
7. what is scott's favorite thing to give people (even complete strangers)?
8. true or false: scott LOVES putting on his winter coat.
9. what color is scott's favorite blanket?
10. out of the following items what does scott NOT like to eat: a) pretzels b) oatmeal c) cheese d) bananas e) pizza

happy 18 month birthday scotty boy!

hole in the couch treasure hunt

so anybody who's been to our house in the past few months knows that us palmers have sort of an issue with losing our remote controls. so far we have lost two t.v. controls and one dvd control. we've searched high and low over the past little while for them all but always concluded that "scott must have thrown them in the garbage." even though we've never actually witnessed him throwing anything into the garbage we didn't know what other conclusion to come to.
until today.

after realizing that we had officially lost the third control james got a little investigatory. he was so determined and strong as he practically lifted our couch over his head with his bear hands (slight exaggeration) and as he did we could hear multiple objects bouncing around in the under boards of the couch.

we had obviously searched the couch many times before as that would be the most logical place for the controls to be. but what we didn't know until today was that there were super secret crevices for the controls to sneak down into the unknown black hole of the couch.

after a little snipping and much searching we found all sorts of wrappers, toys from the last couch owner and our two favorite treasures....

ta da! two out of the three missing controls. this is the dvd control and the first control that w lost MONTHS ago. as for the third control... scott probably threw it in the garbage.

super scott!!

this halloween scott decided he wanted to be superman (ok, i decided.. but its pretty much the same thing) and even though it was too cold to take him trick-or-treating he had PLENTY of opportunities to wear his costume.

first we went to a halloween party with a bunch of our friends in the club house.

scott especially enjoyed the food.

there were a ton of kids there! and there's a good shot of his cape.
james had three tests the week of halloween so scott and i tried getting out of the house a bit so he could study. here we are at the "night eyes at the zoo". only, we went during the day.


my favorite part about this picture is that it looks like his cape is stuck in his underpants. the original costume came with boring red pants. but i spiced it up a bit with blue pants and red underpants on top. it was the best thing ever to watch him walk around in big boy underpants.

here's our poor awkward kid trying to negotiate the slide.

but i was so proud of him when he acutally climbed up this big latter thing all by himself!

look how high it is? he really might be superman!

right after the zoo we all went out to dinner with our friends to texas roadhouse. scott was the life of the party in his costume.

then there was ANOTHER halloween party at james' school. this is a picture of scott and his dad and his adopted uncles ryan and devin. he seriously loves those guys.

then a very exciting thing happened. the fun really began when my mom came to visit!!!

so we took her to a pumpkin patch. this is all of us on a tractor ride (we wanted her to see the real side of iowa.)

you may have noticed that scott rarely looks at the camera for pictures and even more rarely smiles when the camera is in view. i'm hoping its just a phase but in the mean time i'll have LOTS of memories of this anti-camera phase of his.

here are more goats. scott loves the goats. there are so many goats in iowa. who would have thought?

this place was extra cool though because we could actually go IN to the goat pen.
i love this picture of scott running away from this goat. look how scary it looks!!
and of course... live footage.


halloween night featured a talent show/party at our church. i'm in the young women program now and we put on a skit for the talent show. here we all are (L-R Rebecca, Michelle, Kathy, Becky, Isabel, Megan, Amelia, Kassie, Me) i'm not in costume because i was just in charge of the music... which was a much harder job than you might think!
scott even did a talent (after everyone was gone)

and these next couple things don't have to do with halloween but i really did walk in the kitchen one day to find scott doing this:

(i'm just glad he felt the need to pull everything out of the cupboards before sweeping the floor.)


and this is a fun video of scott and brody. brody is out of town for a whole month and we miss him so much! come home brody! and bring your parents with you!

lovely autumn

things are starting to get a bit frigid here in iowa so scott and i have made sure to get out on some field trips together before everything freezes over. on monday we headed up to saylorville lake to go sight seeing and walking.

scotty loved tromping around in the leaves.


this is one of my favorite little shots of him. sometimes when he wakes up from his nap he is so sad that he just can't let go of his cuddly blanket for at least a couple hours. so here he is in the leaves with his comfort item.

after a good hour or two of driving scott and i finally figured out how to get down to the water. scott was in heaven.looks like all those times of watching me do 'yoga on the beach' tapes really paid off.
i have to take a moment out to say that while its mom that does all the planning and the execution of the planning... none of it could be done if scott wasn't such a stellar little back-seat-driver.

next. on tuesday we went to howell's pumpkin patch! we love this place because not only does it have all sorts of fun stuff for us to do, but the drive out there is beautiful.
here's our little man in front of a whole lot of pumpkins.

this was so funny to me because scott just wanted to play with this little "goat food" machine but all the goats thought he was going to feed them so they were up against the fence paying oodles of attention to scott without him even knowing why.

i really was worried at one point that this big ugly one was going to eat him.

i tried getting scott to feed the goats, but he was a little intimidated. rightfully so.

it took a while for scott and i to get the timing right on the tractor ride out to the pumpkin patch. but we finally made it.

this is the pumpkin we picked. perfect right?

and here's another shot that i loved. its so classic of scott. standing in the middle of a field of pumpkins and all he wants to do is get that darn hat off.

i loved sitting next to scott on the ride back to the farm and seeing him holding tight to his pumpkin. it was a prized possession.

and here we are. the two amigos. while the third amigo is studying his brains out at school.

thanks dad.

finger paints, plumber butts, and WWF (need i say more?)

scotty and i had our first finger painting activity together. it didn't turn out exactly like i fantasized that it would. i wanted to make cute hand prints to send to the grandmas (sorry grandmas that's just not going to happen yet) but scott wouldn't have it.

we did have fun though...and naturally, it got ALL over the place!

even i joined in the fun. (apparently i didn't get my fill of finger paints when i was a kid)

as always, here's the boy in action...

here's the sad part of the past week. scott has had all sorts of the poopy "d" word. we are waiting on lab results of his stools (that i personally had to scoop... not the most glamorous part about being a mom) but in the mean time scott has been having some sad little diaper rashes. so he gets in the bath A LOT. (doesn't he look sad?)

so the other day while i was getting ready in the other room, scott was thoroughly engaged in a project. i walked into his bathroom to find all of this stuff in the bath tub. i think he was trying to make sure he never had to get in the bath tub again!

another "so cute" thing about scott lately is that he's starting to wear all of his new autumn clothes! the unfortunate part about it is that i wanted to buy them all big so they would last a while. which means they currently drown him. i loved this shot of him with his sagging jeans. and yes, if you look closely he does have a bit of a plumber butt going on.

and with today being conference we invited anne and brody over (since anne's husband b.j. is out of town) to watch conference. happily we caught on film scott and brody's version of WWF. (especially the last 15 seconds of the video... it is laugh out loud funny, i swear) these two wrestling is probably my favorite thing to watch, ever. (besides conference, of course.)

catch up!

ok, so there are so many new and fun things happening in the palmer family and i'm so excited to post the new and exciting pictures and videos but i can't NOT post the old and exciting stuff that was unpostable when my camera-to-computer function wasn't working! so here's a quick recap of the past couple weeks before i move on...


i had to post a photo of james' most recent haircut. the lighting is bad making it look uneven... but it really is PERFECTLY even. you may even notice that THE BALD SPOT IS GONE! we're so happy for you james!

i also cut scott's hair. he looks so handsome.

lately scott has decided that he loves steering wheels. luckily we have a lot of neighbors who leave their toys out. this is one of scott's favorites.
the next couple pictures were taken at THE INCREDIBLE PIZZA COMPANY!!! its physically impossible to say the name of this place without shouting it. its an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet with a whole arcade/bumper cars/mini golf area. scott loved and i mean LOVED running around looking at everything. thought it was sort of sad when he would try to push little kids out of the way of the game they were playing so he could play it instead.

i love that as soon as i took this picture scott decided to try climbing up on the skeeball machine.

and here we are at my favorite game... deal or no deal. i kick butt at this game.

and here's a memorable shot of scott just before his first surgery. scott got tubes in his ears a couple weeks ago and he was such a good little boy getting up all early in the morning and waiting around the surgery center in his little p.j.'s. my favorite part was when the doctor came in to meet us before the surgery. scott got up, grabbed hold of the doctor's finger and led him out of the waiting room. the poor kid has had so many ear infections - he was ready for them to be gone!

one fun thing that scott and i look forward to every week are our wednesday friends! my friend shayla and her two boys ethan & isaac come over every wednesday to play and eat lunch. this is another toy car that is always left out for them to play with.

here's a cute video of ethan pushing scott and isaac around.

and here are a couple video's of scott's latest moves.

two little boys in the fall

the reason i haven't posted anything new for so long is a) because my camera-to-computer hook up isn't fuctioning and b) because scott's bff brody was out of town so there wasn't much to post. but even though i still haven't figured out the camera/computer problem, i was able to steal some pictures from anne's blog of our two boys together at today's farmers market in waukee. they are so stinking cute together.
not much beats two 1 year old boys in the fall.