B on the move

Baby B is on the move with his recently acquired walking skills.  He's able to get into even more stuff faster and is harder to pin down for the old DIY photo shoot. We did make an attempt at the latter and here he is showing off his new skills.

Friday afternoon chaos

 After LT and his friend did their bake sale a few weeks ago, we brought his friend home to play for a bit.  This is a glimpse into what our afternoon/evening looked like (though its not abnormal).

Holiday Performance

Adler is in the 2nd row from the bottom 5 in from the left.


Landon is 3rd row from the bottom 2 in from the left.

Clay Dough!

 Our nephew turned 3 a few weeks ago (while we were on our cruise) and so the boys and I took over a gift of play dough one afternoon.  He was so cute and kept calling it "Clay Dough".

Love

Bath Time!

 Our hot water heater went out last weekend.  I realize this is very much a first world problem, but we realized how lucky we are to have hot water and how much we rely on it!  Luckily we were able to get a new heater Monday and so we've been slowly getting caught up on dishes, laundry and bathing!  These three are too funny together in the bath.

These three

Our big guys are very independent in many ways (as they should be!), but sometimes they just play baby games with their little brother.  I love this picture of them "cooking" baby B style.

Cruse Pics

 

 

Baby B

 The last stop on our cruise was Disney's private island, Castaway Cay.  It was so much fun with lots of activities for every age.  Baby B found this splash pad and spent quite a long time in it.  He fully mastered walking on this trip so it was extra fun to watch him.

Time to Give

One thing that has always been important to me as a parent is that I teach my kids to give to others.  Its something I make a priority in my own life and something I try and model for our kids.  Its also a reason we chose the school we chose for our kids, they align with this value.  LT's class adopted a family for the holidays.  The kids are then raising money (extra chores, bake sales, raking, shoveling etc) and then piling that money together as a class.  Next Monday several other parents and I are driving all the kids to Target to buy things from the family's list.  Last Friday LT and his friend decided (at the last minute, as in 1 hour before they wanted to start) that they were going to bake goods and sell them at City Floral (owned by LTs friends family).  Together they raised $88.00 in one day!  

Adler's class is giving toys and laundry detergent to families that are living at the Ronald McDonald house over the holidays.  They asked the parents to take the kids shopping to choose a few things, but Adler wanted to raise the money himself.  He wrote a nice email and sent it out to close friends and family.  He raised $55.00 and yesterday I took him shopping to buy things.  Unfortunately I had to front the money because of a bad stomach bug we all got which prohibited the baking from happening before the toys were due, but oh well.  

Cousin time

 We went on a cruise over Thanksgiving to celebrate my parents 40th (woah!) anniversary.  We had a great week all together, but one of the best parts was watching our three boys with their big cousin.  They had so much fun together.

 Dinners were long, but they managed to entertain themselves well.

 Sometimes by the afternoon they were wiped and just snuggled.

B was a trooper and napped on the go sometimes.

Halloween Friends

In a post a little while back Kari mentioned the difficulty of getting these four in one picture together and I found this one of them on my phone that isn't too bad.

Dance party when dad was away

 We had a fun dance party one night while Brian was in Korea a few weeks ago.  

Before long we realized B wasn't with us anymore.  I found him heading quickly towards the toilet.