Christmas Card Photo Attempt #1

We decorated our tree two weeks ago when Caitlyn was home and we had just enough time before Caitlyn had to leave to get the kids dressed in red, white and green and take pictures. I originally thought that we would use these for our Christmas cards, but the lighting was poor and the resolution on these pictures is not great. Out of about 30 pictures, these two were the best. Whew, I don't ever want to have the job of being a photographer!!!!

Merry Christmas!!!!

I finally got all of the Christmas decorations up, or at least all that I'm going to put up this year, and the house is relatively clean. I figured I should take pictures before it gets messy again! Some of you have been to our house for Christmas and seen it decorated. I only did a few things differently this year. Trying to minimize the number of lights that need to be plugged in and unplugged every night was one change! We still have about 8 different outlets that need attention and two or three candles that need to be blown out.

This is our family room.

Here is another angle of the family room.

One more angle of the livingroom. It's such a large room that it's impossible to get everything in with one picture!

Our Christmas Tree. Ryan really likes the star on top!

Our fireplace. We have gas logs and actually do light the fire a few times during the winter, but most of the time, the weather is too hot for a fire and it is just decorative. The stockings were made by my mother. She made them a couple of years ago and had leftover fabric for a sixth stocking that we'll be using next year!

The china cabinet in our dining room. I also decorate the table but haven't quite finished that job yet, so I did not take a picture of it.

Yes, even the Computer Room/Den gets decorated. A strand of led snowflakes in coordinating colors do the trick.

I have a few Christmas themed stuffed animals and some snowmen/teddybear items that fit better in a kids room than anywhere else in the house, so I did a little decorating in the boys' room. They helped me with their tree.

Another angle of the boys' room showing more snowmen items. My mother-in-law made the door decoration with her fancy embroidery sewing machine.

And last one is of the outside of our house. We didn't go overboard this year as it was kind of late in December when we finally had time to hang these up. But we had to do something because the boys just love Christmas lights and yell "Christmas!" every time we drive by a house with lights. Now they can say "Christmas!" when we drive by our house. :-)

The Playground Project

Here is a long overdue post on our end of summer/fall project. We finally decided that we were in desperate need of playground equipment or something for the boys to spend time on in our new fenced-in back yard. We chose something rather big as we didn't want the boys to grow out of it in a year! This one should do the trick, we hope. The set was a little over our budget but with contributions from both sets of grandparents and the savings that we had put aside for this made it possible. This was actually a present for Charles' birthday on August 29th. I think the playground was actually finished the weekend after Ryan's birthday, the end of October. It was a looong project, half of the work was flatening out the land and filling it with sand. I'm happy to report that all of the hard work was worth it! Both boys absolutely love to go outside and play. They play "pirates" and chase eachother around, going up the ladder, inside the fort, then down the slide and back around, occasionally just running aroudn in circles in the yard. It's sort of a follow the leader type game. The boys also prefer the swings to anything else on the playground. Boy if only we knew that before-hand!!! :-) Ryan can get up on the glider by himself and single-handedly makes it go very very high. That is by far his favorite activity. Sometimes he just takes a 5 minute break in his day to go swing, and then comes back inside. So funny! Here are a few pictures that were taken, thanks to Caitlyn. Neither Seth nor I were very good at stopping to take pictures of our progress. We had more important things to do. Sometimes the boys would bring their toys out and play on the picnic table/area underneath while we were working away on top. Charles helped out with shoveling the sand for the playground in the wheelbarrel and then pushing the empty wheelbarrel back to the sand pile after Seth dumped it. My job was to rake it out flat once it was dumped. Caitlyn helped with putting together some of the hardware and bringing us the required pieces of wood for the next step. Although Seth and I clearly did the most work, it really was a family project!

Trick or Treat

The boys had a blast this year with trick or treating.
We went to Seth's parents' house and walked around with his mom in their neighborhood. One house was really scary for the boys, but they both braved it! Here is where they were standing outside wondering if candy at this house was really worth it!

Seth would point out various houses where his friends used to live and driveways where he played many games of basketball etc. We walked around for an hour and a half and the Ryan barely made it home on his own two feet he was so tired! Both boys had an absolute blast telling everyone who they were. Ryan said "I'm batmaaan!" in the cutest voice and did his best to sound scary, it was so funny.

Charles told everyone that he was not just a jedi and definitely not Luke, but Obi-Wan Kenobi! His lightsaber not only light up but made sounds and really added to his costume. His shirt somehow didn't make it to Seth's parents' house (thanks to Ryan who apparently got into the bag of costume items unbeknownst to me) and so I had to improvise at the very last minute, as his green shirt with a gray hoodie just wasn't doing the trick! In five minutes with an old white t-shirt, some scrap pieces of brown fabric from a left-over sewing project and a folded piece of white linnen type material, I whipped up something that looks almost better than the original tunic that came with his costume. Whew, I saved the day!

I also made Ryan's batman symbol at the last minute with some yellow and black ducktape and looking at a picture from the internet. Not bad! The boys definitely looked like boys this year. We've retired the pumpkin and bumblebee costumes from last year. :-)

Adventure Golf

Towards the end of Charles' first week of school, Cara took a couple of days off from work to go join her parents, her brother, her sister and nephew, and Ryan, at their timeshare condo in Panama City. It was fun to spend some time relaxing, especially after a somewhat hectic beginning of the week. Ryan was still recovering from some sun damage on his face, you can see the multicolored bandaids in the pictures. One evening we decided to go play Adventure Golf, and picked one with lots of animals that would interest Ryan.

Sure enough, he had to go inspect and touch every animal he saw, no matter how far removed the were from the path!
I think he even tried to brush the aligator's teeth with his golf club.

I love this last photo as it was typical of the evening. Ryan was ALWAYS running off ahead of the group, he wanted to be the first to discover the new hole!

Overall, he did very well, and actually scored a hole in one on his own without any help!!!

First Day of School

Okay, so this post is really old, but I haven't been feeling well recently, and now that I am, I don't want to skip some important family history!
Charles started his first day of Kindergarten on August 24th, 2009. Poor guy was sunburnt from our trip out to crab island the day before. But it didn't seem to phase him too much.

He was concerned about finding his classroom once he got to school, we had to tell him several times that there would be people there waiting for little kids with bright colored tags on their shirts (all kidergarteners had to wear them for the first week) so that they could escort them to their room.

The bus comes at 6:20AM, so we had to adjust our daily routine a little. Ryan also likes to get up early and get dressed so that he can come outside with us and watch for Charles' schoolbus and see him get on. Ryan gets so excited everytime he sees the bus coming, and shouts out "I love you Charles" everytime, it's so cute! We've been doing this for two months now and Ryan still gets very upset if he is not able to come out with us. The steps on the bus are so big, Charles still struggles a little to get up them.

Getting Ready for Kindergarten

I took Charles to his kindergarten pre-screening appointment in the media center of his new school last Thursday. He was acting quite shy at first, but I was able to sneak out of the room when the teacher started asking him questions. She recognized Charles' address and apparently there are two other families further down on our street with children close to Charles' age. Maybe they will meet while waiting for or riding on the bus and become playmates.

I found a backpack on ebay that is just perfect for Charles. Total cost was under $10, it is the perfect size for him and even has his name! Charles modeled it for me when the package finally arrived.
Now I just have to got get his supplies! Fun, fun!

Soccer Camp 2009

Charles had his very first week of soccer camp at the end of July. He met with his coach and teammates every day, Monday through Friday, from 5-6PM for a jam packed hour of excercise and fun! Mom, dad, maw-maw, paw-paw, Caitlyn and Ryan, were able to sit on the sidelines and cheer him on.

The coach was wonderful with the kids! And sure knew how to give them a good workout as well as make them laugh. You can see in several of the pictures that the kids are laughing.

Charles absolutely loved soccer. He was a little shy the first day for only the first two or three minutes, but after that it was all he could talk about! I would pick him up from daycare about 30mins before his soccer camp and he would talk about soccer in the car and make sure that I remmebered his soccer ball, his shoes, his soccer shorts etc.

On the field he did pretty well, he never seemed to run out of energy no matter how hot it was out there. He liked to add sound to his kicks, you can see in his videos that when he knocks down a cone he yelled "yaaawww!!!" at the same time. Lol!

The coach had a neat trick to keep the kids from wandering off, in that if they went out of bounds and weren't able to come back in a short amount of time, he would drop a new ball in the center of the field and yell "new game ball!". Charles figured out the trick pretty quickly and if the ball went out of his reach, he opted to turn around and go straight to the coach and wait for the new game ball to be dropped, at which point, he had the ball all to himself! Lol!

I lost track, but I think Charles scored a goal at least once a day. He shows some potential for sure, and definitely appears to be pasionate about the sport. Maybe we'll just have to get him on a team one of these days.

Disney World 2009

I'm not sure I can capture our entire vacation in just one blog entry! We had an absolute blast! Went to all 4 Disney parks and fit in a day at one of the Disney water parks. Our hotel was close enough that we had free bust transportation to/from the parks. We loved it! Never had to worry about trafic, and the schedule worked perfect, we never missed a bus and we went during the busiest season of the year.











Charles was tall enough to ride all but two or three of the rides. He LOVED the river rapids, test track, splash mountain and even went on tower of terror twice!














He was an inch taller than the cut off and loved to go up to the measuring stick just to show everyone that he was big enough. I definitely did not expect him to be such a dare-devil - that's more Ryan.















Ryan enjoyed all of the shows, the kiddie rides and loved the playgrounds and sprinkler parks. He got to spend a lot of time on them because he was too little to ride most of the rides and either Seth or I would watch him while the other went through the fast line with the kids to ride the ride again and again. Talk about making everyone happy!

Charles' Graduation

Yes, our little Charles is growing so fast! We went to his Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten (VPK) graduation ceremony this evening. Charles did so well! He was smiling from ear to ear.

Miss Paula, the Assistant Director, is one of our neighbors and is the one calling out the names. Charles teacher, Miss Stephanie is the one handing out the diplomas. She is going to have a baby in the next month. Charles' other teacher, Ms. April is the one who hugs him right before he sits back down. All of the kids answered the question "What would you like to be when you grow up" and those responses were given along with their diplomas. I think you can hear it in the video, but if you can not, Charles said he wanted to be a "Daddy". Yay for me, as daddy implies a least one grandkid! Seth was beaming with pride and tried to rub it in, but I told him that I couldn't feel all that jealous as I'm quite glad that he didn't say he wanted to be a mommy. :-)

Charles will start kindergarten on August 24th as he'll turn 5yrs old on August 29th, just before the Sept. 1st cut-off.

Ryan Singing ABC Song

I'm sure we've all heard cute versions of the ABC song, but Ryan's version just cracks me up. He sings it with a southern twang, doesn't get all of the letters perfectly, but certainly sings with gusto and also can't stop swaying from side to side! Hilarious!

Dentist Visit

Caitlyn and Charles both went to the dentist today. Caitlyn needed another sealant and Charles was going for his very first cleaning. I was not allowed to go in to take pictures but I captured a few in the waiting room and outside. Overall the visits went very well. Caitlyn has had sealants before, and she was glad that they didn't have to numb her mouth. Charles did very well. He picked bubble gum flavoring but it wasn't for swallowing, just "slurping it out". The Dentist says that Charles' teeth are perfect and he should never have any tooth decay for the rest of his life. ???? What? His adult teeth haven't even come in yet and his jaw is still growing, I think. Oh well...any dentist or dental hygienists out there who would like to enlighten me?
Here are the kids waiting for their appointment.












Here they all with their clean sparkly smiles!















Charles showing off his goodie bag with a new toothbrush, toothpaste, spiderman sticker and small sand timer for making sure he spends enough time brushing his teeth.












Here is Caitlyn pointing to her new sealant.

The Fence Project

The boys have grown and are in desperate need of a safe enclosed area to run around and play. Seth's friend Charlie has built fences before and is helping us do it right. So far all of the fence posts are cemented in and we're working on the support beams now. We hope to have that done by next weekend so that we'll have the three day weekend to do the final step of nailing the boards in and building/installing the gates. One of Seth's coworkers has offered to let us use her nail gun and compressor, so we won't have to buy or rent one. Next project will be to build a playground and then a storage/work shed.
Here you can see the fence posts in one of the back corners.












Here is where we will have one of the 12 foot gates, it needs to be large enough to fit a truck through to an eventual work shed.

Chalres is still dressed in his church clothes but begged to go out and watch dad.














All Ryan wanted to do was to whack a stick, and of course, be outside where all of the action was.

Easter Egg Hunt

I didn't have any girls to dress in cute sundresses for Easter, but I made sure that my boys were spiffy looking! They looked so grown up!

After church on Sunday we went to Seth's parents for a nice dinner and then the boys searched through the house for their Easter baskets that were hidden. Once they found them and checked out all the goodies, they had to empty the baskets in order to use them to collect the eggs that Seth had hidden around the back yard. Unbelievably both of the boys were equally adept at finding the eggs. Their eyes are at different levels and I guess some eggs were just easier for Ryan to find and others were easier for Charles to find.


Towards the end of the hunt Charles did notice that his basket was getting slightly fuller than Ryan's and without any prompting from the adults he decided on his own to put the next few eggs that he found in Ryan's basket. Wow, I was so proud of him! Sharing is something that I really work on with them as it keeps them from getting into fights.

Caitlyn was with her mom, so I don't have any pictures of her. She did get her own Easter basket filled with goodies when she got home. All in all, we had a wonderful day!