How to play pretend

This afternoon a friend was visiting with us, and Benjamin spent quite a bit of time telling him all about Angry Birds Star Wars (the current favorite game on Jacob's phone).

Benjamin: "There's a Chewbacca bird, and a Luke Skywalker bird with a lightsaber, and..."
Bill: "Is there a Darth Vader pig?"
Benjamin: "YEAH!!!!"

The descriptions were accompanied liberally with jumping, slicing actions, et cetera, and every motion imitated by Levi.

Then, Benjamin giggled and retreated upstairs. In a few minutes he emerged fully costumed as the Gold Ranger from the recent Samurai reboot of the Power Rangers. He then regaled Bill with all the details of the Samurai Power Rangers.

Bill: "So I have a question for you, Benjamin. If the Samurai Power Rangers and the Star Wars Angry Birds had a fight, who would win?"

Benjamin paused to think, but Levi was right on it --
Levi: "ME! I would win!"

And that, folks, is how you play pretend. Borrow liberally from real life and your favorite mythologies, and always, always, win.

Levi was a dragon, and Benjamin the Gold Ranger for Halloween 2012

Hooray! Allergy Test Results!

So remember how we went to have Levi's blood drawn and I nearly passed out? And the nurses only collected about 1/30 of the blood requested for the test? "Well, I'll send this in and see if they can do anything with it..." the nurse said rather hopelessly as we left.

Hooray! They did something with it! Our My suffering was not in vain! They did the "childhood allergy panel," plus carrots, because he had seemed to react to them a couple of times.

Milk

Peanut

Egg White

Walnut

Carrot

Fish

Shrimp

Soy

Wheat

Cat

Dog

Mold

Dust

It is so nice to know what we need to stay away from! All of the four that he tested positive for were at the "class 2" level. Personally I'm not certain what that means other than that his allergies are "moderate," but I'm sure I'll bring it up with the doctor soon. I think I would like to have him tested for sensitivity to other nuts -- a friend of ours whose young daughter has nut allergies suggested it, as they found the "nut panel" helpful.

See how the list of things he is NOT allergic to is so much longer? That is what has had me happy this week. For while there I hadn't mentally eliminated anything (except I was pretty sure about fish and wheat), so while the egg was our surprise culprit it was super nice to know we are okay on carrot, soy, dog and cat.

Speaking of allergies, this Halloween I will not be giving out the typical fun size candy bar (all of which I have found are processed on peanut equipment and include milk or egg, soy or nuts). We are giving out Halloween pencils and cute monster stickers! Hope you like them, kids!

We're going to take the boys trick-or-treating, but have some fun prizes for them to buy from us with their poison candy! Happy Halloween!

Introducing...

 The Stewart family as seen on Halloween weekend:

"Scruffy" Stewart (this costume took a lot of work)

"Sassy" Stewart (complete with sassy eyelashes)

"Sticky Stewart (yes, that is a stick stuck to him)

"Stinky" Stewart (borrowing one of his brother's diapers)

 We were all adjectives for the festivities this year.  Ironically, Stinky's extra diaper came in handy.  He spent the whole night bundled in his carseat, but we were glad we dressed him in costume when we got home and discovered he had blown through his own diaper, his onesie and that his carseat had been saved by his costume.  Huzzah!

Halloween Pictures

It appears that our family photo in costume is lost, somehow. At least the file is "unreadable." So, here are the individual shots! We went with a farm animal theme. Papa pig...
Mother duck ...
Baby tom-cat!


The Bairs were the Three Bears! So clever! And cute.
Earlier in the week: Making Halloween cookies with the Jacks! Nate stabs his cat with a candy corn to KayLyn's dismay:

Scary bat!

Jacob and his pumpkin have weird faces!
Jessica (9 mo.) and Benjamin (4 mo.) slept through the cookie stuff. They can't really eat them anyway.