First grade awards

Friday morning we gathered in the Northwestern Elementary cafeteria for the first grade honors program. Owen has had an amazing year with a wonderful teacher, and he's worked hard & flourished all year. Over the course of this school year he discovered a love of reading, a strong curiosity for science & math, and that just maybe girls aren't so bad after all.

His awards: Citizenship/Courtesy Award, Athletic Award, Straight A's all year, Perfect Attendance, Reading Award, Champion of Conduct Award.



Cole wanted to be in a shot with his big brother:

At the beginning of the year Owen set a goal for himself to not get any check marks for conduct. Students can get an A in conduct for each day even if they get a few check marks (the number varies as the year progresses), so this was a pretty ambitious goal. He was so proud to accomplish this (despite one substitute's effort to derail him by announcing that the entire class got a check mark one day), and this was his reaction when we told him we'd get him a guinea pig for his reward. He's been asking for one for months, and I LOVE the pure joy on his face here:

And here is Cole again, hamming it up for the camera. Jacob, as usual, had no interest in being photographed.

Baseball

We've been spending lots of time at the ball park lately. Here are a few highlights from last night's games.

Bike-a-thon and baseball

Last week we put the training wheels back on so Jacob & Cole could participate in their school's bike-a-thon. It was such a fun day for them!

All 3 boys are playing baseball this spring, and Owen had his first game Thursday night. Unfortunately Jacob & Cole had t-ball practice at the same time, so the 3 of us raced over to the ball park to catch the very end of the game (which they won 7-6). With 3 boys participating in baseball and Taekwondo, we foresee lots of racing around in our near future!

Big day!

Look what Jacob can do! That's right - no training wheels!!


And I'm happy to announce that, after 4 months of wiggling, Owen has lost his first top tooth! It fell out right before he went to bed last night, and remembering to look under his pillow for cash quickly turned his grumpy mood around this morning!

Here's a photo of me with Jacob & Cole from last week. My friend Michele is taking a photography workshop and she used us for practice. Even though I've already plastered this on Facebook, I'm sharing it here too because it will be fun to look back through our blog archives in a few years and stumble upon this.

Note to self: be in more photos with your children!!!

Tuesday

Here are a few snapshots from our Tuesday afternoon.





I made these for a snack yesterday afternoon. The recipe is from the Super Healthy Kids blog, and they were a hit at our house! Owen asked me to put 100 of them in his lunchbox. :-)

1 cup honey
1 cup peanut butter
3 cups oats
1/2 cup ground flax seed
chocolate chips

mix, spoon into balls (I put them in mini silicone baking cups), chill


And this isn't from yesterday, but I thought you'd enjoy seeing where Diego has started sleeping while I'm working at my desk.

Stitches

Last week Cole fell & had to have stitches. Marshall rushed him to urgent care & Cole was very brave the entire time. He didn't cry at all! He returned home with a stuffed lion (which he's slept with every night since) and a certificate of bravery. He's since had the stitches removed (he was equally as brave) and is doing just fine. Believe it or not that was our first trip to urgent care for any of our boys!

I couldn't resist sharing this iPhone pic of him right after he got the stitches.

When I was importing the stitches photo from my phone it occurred to me that we have quite a few memories stored on my phone which most of you rarely get to see. Of course a few of you get text messages with some of our random happenings & sometimes I think to put some of my iPhone pics on Facebook, but I thought it was about time to pull them off the phone and share them with everyone.

Celebrating

It's Christmas Eve, and as we're gearing up to celebrate Jesus' birthday and open lots of gifts, I thought it would be a good time to update our family blog. On Thanksgiving our elf, Luke, returned to help Santa keep an eye on the kids' behavior. In the first picture he's wearing a party hat - he returned from the North Pole with it just in time for Jacob & Cole's 4th birthday party.

Jacob & Cole each requested very specific birthday cakes, which meant mommy had to bake (and I am NOT a baker or cake decorator!).

These next few are from Jacob & Cole's preschool Christmas program. We were a little nervous they would get stage fright, but they sang their little hearts out the entire time. We're so proud!

This year we tried something new for decorating cookies. We had the kids help paint them with a mixture of egg whites & food coloring. They LOVED it & it was so much less messy (and more sanitary) than having them help with icing.
They did pitch in & help decorate their own "person cookie" with icing last night. Can you guess why we only want them to use icing for their own cookies & not the ones we leave out for Santa?






Here are Cole & Jacob singing one of the songs from their Christmas program.

September already?

Without fail September sneaks up on us every year. The entire summer seemed to pass in the blink of an eye, which is saying a lot considering all the kids were home full time and I was trying to maintain some sort of sanity while being a full time mommy and running a business from home. Thanks to a trip to the beach, lots of time in the pool & several weekend trips to visit my mom we survived & had a great summer. Now that the boys have all been in school for a few weeks we're settling into a routine - it's good for all of us!

Of course the approach of fall means facing the always-stressful task of finding pants that will fit our tall & skinny boys. Jacob & Cole have always been so hard to fit. They need a 12-18 month size for the waist, but a 3t or 4t for the length. Last year we tried on about 20 pairs before finding some that worked, and even those weren't great. This year, our search is already over. Gap now has a "Mini Skinny" jean that fits them perfectly! They're a little long, but the cuffed look is in style right now and this way they'll last through spring. If you have tall, skinny boys I highly recommend them! Here's the link: Gap Mini Skinny Jeans

And here are Jacob & Cole modeling their new jeans (& shirts!) after the package arrived yesterday:

Jacob wanted to spin to show his off:

Aside from the thrill of getting stylish, well-fitting jeans for our little guys, yesterday was also exciting because it was Marshall's birthday!

Signing his card:

Here's a shot of the birthday boy (aka the best daddy & hubby anyone could ever imagine)! We had a fun, low-key celebration complete with cookie cake & burritos. :-)

After dinner the kids were on a mission to save some bugs & return them safely to their mommies, so we all ended up outside. It was a gorgeous, breezy evening...not quite cool enough for jeans & long sleeves, but Cole was not going to take his new clothes off.

Owen's newest obsession is with anything Army. His shirt was a souvenir from PawPaw-Mar & Maw-Gala's recent trip to France, and he wears it almost every single day after school. He'll probably wear it to school tomorrow since it's free dress day (I better go start some laundry!).

This may be my all-time favorite photo of Jacob. Laying on the grass for a picture was completely his idea. Look at those gorgeous eyes!

After a few minutes the kids were bored rescuing bugs & decided they wanted to play photographer. Owen had been watching some photography videos with me earlier in the afternoon, and he was determined to recreate some of the posing suggestions given by "the man in the video". He set up this entire "sniper" shot, complete with the gun prop. Then he proceeded to take a tack-sharp photo of Jacob at f2 with my 85mm on my 5D completely unassisted...impressive!

Then Cole decided to be the photographer and snapped this of Owen. I was nervously hovering beside him ready to dive & catch my camera, but he did great!

Jacob took this shot of me. Excuse the lack of makeup (and that's a pink camisole you see...not my bra). :-)

First Day of School 2010

After what seems like a whirlwind summer, school started this morning. It's hard to believe we have a first-grader and 2 preschoolers. The kids were all very excited and we had a fairly uneventful morning getting everyone to school.

The kids remembered taking these pictures in 2009 & insisted we recreate the moment this year.


Our big first-grader:


Cole, who insisted on tucking his shirt into his "soft shorts" (the only kind he'll wear these days) so he could be like Owen:

Jacob, demonstrating that Owen is starting first grade:

Our handsome preschoolers:

Vacation 2010

Happy Friday!!! It's been a busy week for us with an even busier weekend to come. Nevertheless, this morning I finally got around to putting together a slideshow of our vacation pictures. I was planning to do separate blog posts about some of the activities we did, but there are just too many photos to sort through. Here are a view of my favorites.

Buried on the beach.

Self-portrait by Jacob.


Cole.



Here is the link to our slideshow:

Vacation 2010 Photos

The kids took quite a few of the photos in the slideshow. Every photo of me was taken by one of the kids, and they took a lot of each other and other random things around the condo. Enjoy!

Deeders

This afternoon I found myself slightly bored for the first time in years. Seriously, the house is picked up, the floors have been vacuumed & mopped, I'm caught up on editing & placing orders for clients, and the kids are watching a movie. What an odd feeling for someone who is usually juggling at least 3 tasks at any given time! I took the opportunity to take a few photos of Diego since he hasn't been tortured with my camera in a while. He tried hiding, but I dragged him from his favorite spot and plopped him on our bed.

Reluctantly posing.

Are we done yet?

I'll sit here but I'm not going to look at you.

Don't feel too badly for him - he was on the bed for less than 30 seconds. We have terrible light in our bedroom (& I was too lazy to go find my flash), so there wasn't much point in continuing with the animal torture any longer.

I've titled this post "Deeders" because that's what the kids have started calling Diego when they speak to him. They are so helpful when it comes to caring for him. They all know how to put his special collar on him to go outside, they can each get him food & water and take it upon themselves to make sure his bowls are full each time we eat a meal. It's a great thing to see them going out of their way to make sure he's cared for!