We spent Easter in Tallulah with family:
Cole: 
Cole at the same party (they refused to take a photo together or with their teacher):
Recently Jacob & Cole have starting playing games on my old laptop. They love the Disney Junior website, and it amazes me that they can already navigate to the website and remember the password to log into the computer. I grew up using computers from the time I was a toddler (thanks, Dad!!), so while we do limit their screen time every day, it thrills me to think of all the information they will be able to discover (supervised, of course!) as they grow.
Here is our big guy on his 7th birthday: 
That's right, I said 7th birthday! How did this happen??? Our adorable, happy, squishy baby boy has turned into a caring, bright, amazing big boy. He's lost almost all of his baby features over the last year or so, but I can always depend on my good friend Michele to remind me how his laugh is still that same chuckle he's had since babyhood. Thank goodness for that!!
Finally, after years of not having any patio furniture (thanks to a hurricane that destroyed our last set), we've started building some. As a family of 5 with who occasionally likes to have company over, we struggled to find anything ready-made that would seat enough people that wouldn't also break the bank. Then one day I was browsing a website and inspiration struck. Poor Marshall. He ends up doing most of the work on these kinds of projects, and he won't admit it but he's really good at it. We've had to build around work, baseball & taekwondo schedules, so we're only halfway done, but it looks great so far!
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.
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!
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.
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. :-)
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.
Jacob & Cole each requested very specific birthday cakes, which meant mommy had to bake (and I am NOT a baker or cake decorator!).
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?
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!
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). :-)
