Brothers and Sisters

Evan has a love/hate relationship with Hailey. Actually hate is probably a little strong. More of a love/completely irritated and frustrated by my sister most of the time kind of relationship. Hailey is fascinated by her brothers and wants to be by them and do what they are doing. If she is bothering Spencer, he will just pick her up and carry her away from him and that works for about 10 seconds - which is the time it will take her to get back to him. That scenario will replay a couple times until he brings her to me to contain her. Evan just gets mad at her and screams "NO HAYBAY!" when she is getting into his art things or crawling over the puzzle he is working on. He looks at her and looks at me in disgust and I know he wants to pound on her but knows he will get in big trouble if he does.

Sometimes he will make the best of her destructiveness by building towers of blocks for her to knock down. She loves that for about 3 towers worth then is ready to move on - which will then make him mad that she doesn't want to cooperate with his game. So it is rare when he wants to interact with her a lot. Yesterday was one of those rare days. When I was about to feed her cereal he asked if he could do it. He did and he did a great job. She was loving it and he was proud of himself. He told me "Mom, I am good at this!" He even wiped her lips off with the spoon. He was a little appalled that he got some on her hand, but I told him that was just fine. Then later, before afternoon naps, he asked if he could give her a bottle. As you can see from the pictures - he did a great job with that as well. I guess you could say yesterday was a LOVE day.

I am curious to see how things will play out with the kids in the years to come. Our little family is a weird dynamic for Trent and I. Trent with all brothers and me with one sister - we don't know how families with boys and girls interact. Spencer and Evan like to play together now, but a lot of what they play consists of Evan watching what Spence is doing (like computer games and Wii games). Evan and Hailey are a little closer in age but opposite sex so I wonder how they will interact in later years? Evan has little to do with her now, but I predict in the years to come they will be good friends and he will be very protective of her.

I love his hand on her head. How cute is that?

Laughing at spilled milk.

On a photographic note - these pictures were taken with natural light and a ramped up ISO - IN MY FAMILY ROOM! Where did all that light come from? They look a little blurry here but viewed big on the computer they are full of noise. So that is a little disappointing. The top photo was a little washed out so I went to darken it in my Elements program. In dinking around with it I wound up with the picture here - which I love. It reminds me of a color touched photo yet kind of black and white.