Happy New Year!

Happy 1/1/11!

We rang in the new year with our friends, Joel & Michelle, and their family as we helped celebrate Joels' mom's birthday. What a great start to 2011! 

Alex & Danielle were BFFs

Sporks forever

Happy birthday, Mary!

This is at the end of the night. The kids were beat, especially Alex.

Of course, Alex had just spent the previous hour doing this:

  Here's to health, happiness and celebrating milestones in 2011!

Merry Christmas!!

Many blessings to you and yours in the coming year!

Hermit Park

We spent some time up at a Hermit Park cabin in Estes Park around Thanksgiving. The weather was fantastic - warm at first, and then breaking out into huge, fat snowflakes the morning we left. We brought Jack, and he behaved like the dream dog we wish he was.

We even got our favorite cabin:


Misc. End of Summer Pictures

Family Photos

Our last professionally-taken family photos date from Christmas 200...7. Yeah, Alex was about 6 months old. He's changed a little in three years, so we figured it was probably time to get some new photos taken.

A friend and neighbor of ours is starting her own photography business, and we volunteered to help her build her portfolio. She did amazing work - captured the boys' personalities, and got some fantastic photos in less than an hour!

The top of our blog has several of these photos, so I'll just share a couple more:

 

Go, Rockies!

Continuing our new summer tradition of taking the boys to a Rockies game, we invited our parents to join us. We got to the stadium early enough to catch the end of batting practice. Our seats were in the lower deck along the third baseline, and the announcer invited kids in our section onto the field. Alex wasn’t interested, but Zach got to play a rousing game of kickball with a bunch of kids and Dinger the Dinosaur. He had a great time!

We ate hot dogs and a bunch of other tasty junk food, and got our photo taken with Dinger. Dinger autographed a photo, which the boys refused to put down for the rest of the day. Great memories!

Happy Father's Day!

We took the kids to Hermit Park in Estes to camp during Father’s Day weekend. This was our first tent-camping experience of the summer with the boys and Jack, and our new tent [which actually fit all of us]. They loved it. They got dirty, built stuff, went hiking, saw deer, made s’mores, sat by the campfire, and slept in sleeping bags. We invited Seth’s brother, Shane, and he brought his daughter, Shayna, and dog, Bailey.

Now, Jack, alone, is a pretty rowdy/naughty/stinker of a dog. But for some reason, this dog is a completely different dog in the mountains. He behaves, doesn’t bark, stays near us. It’s…well, it’s weird. Probably, by herself, Bailey is the same way. Needless to say, Jack and Bailey together behaved exactly like two kids – one kid [Bailey] was somewhat prone to naughtiness in the form of incessant barking, and the other kid [Jack] was a big copycat. We got warned by the park ranger…yeah….

 

Still, we had an excellent time. I got a ton of reading in, since it was Father’s Day, and Father needed to spend time with his sons. [Like how I worked that? ;)]

We Love the Museum!

The Denver Museum of Nature and Science has become the boys' favorite place. As I write this, it is the beginning of April; we've already been to the museum twice, most recently last week, and they've begun asking when we're going back.

In February, the museum had a "free day", when admission is free for Colorado residents. Of course, we had to take advantage of that, if only for a few short hours. The boys especially loved the dinosaur exhibit...surprise, surprise. They enjoy the space exhibit as well.

Last week, we spent the day at the museum with my friend, Bree. We had to look at everything, sometimes twice; the boys especially liked pushing all of the buttons in the diorama sections. Alex also enjoyed sitting on the angled edges of the diorama cases, and sliding down to the floor. Since the Body Worlds exhibit is currently on display, there were a few volunteers scattered around the walkways, ready to share information about parts of the body. Zach listened intently to a kind, older man who carefully explained how the spine, discs and nerves in the back work, and demonstrated (with a little plastic model) the proper way to lift, so as to avoid rupturing said discs. I thought he was just being polite, which was fine by me, but a few days later, Zach reprimanded me for lifting Alex, because he's too heavy and I could break one of those things in my back like the man at the museum said...remember?