Dress Up

 

There is a swashbuckling, dashing young pirate in our midst, thanks to a fantastic hand-me-down costume from our neighbors.  We're all practicing our best pirate grimaces and voices, but it's hard not to smile at this charming lad:

 

The pirate costume is not the only dress up outfit that Luke has donned this week, as he happily put on his construction apron at the Lowes Build and Grow Clinic on Saturday.  This is one of our new favorite weekend activities.  Both Home Depot and Lowes have monthly sessions where children create cute projects from wooden kits (as if Mark and Luke needed another excuse to head to a home improvement store on a Saturday morning!).  These free sessions include child-sized hammers, goggles, badges of completion, and lots of manly building, of course.  Luke's preschool class lovebugs joined us this weekend, as it was our turn to host them for an overnight adventure, and they, too, enjoyed constructing the Valentine's-themed project:

Not to be outdone by her big brother, Leah also dressed up in her own apron and participated in the Kids' Clinic at Lowes.  However, you'll see that she chose a slightly more methodical approach to the project (opening and reading the directions, then carefully applying sticker adornments) vs. Luke's immediate noisy hammering:

 

One of the cutest parts of our daily dress-up routine occurs after bath time each night, when Leah runs around in the dinosaur towel that Luke also loved when he was a toddler:

 

 

She roars quite ferociously, and we all pretend to be terrified, which sends Leah into a fit of giggles.  The whole routine repeats itself over and over again, and it's too cute for words: 

I know that these adorable days of my babies in the bathtub together are going to be a fleeting memory someday, so I had to post a couple of pictures of their sweet innocence while they are dressed up only in their darling birthday suits:

And it wouldn't be the beginning of Valentine's Week without holiday-themed dress up attire.  Leah's shirt says it all:

 

What fun playing dress up in our house can be!!