Hard at Work

Here’s Noah’s class hard at work.  They traced their bodies and then they had to color them in.  Noah’s looks great.  By the way, Noah is on the far side of the room in front of the piano.

Family Time

My cousin Stephanie and her family came for a visit to Austin this week.  We really enjoyed spending time with them.  She has a daughter, Nichele, who is 5 months younger than Noah.  They had fun playing together (for a while).    We went to Wonder World in San Marcos and had lots of fun in the cave.

2nd cousins… aren’t they too cute?

You would never know how close in age they are just looking at their size.  But they both definitely have 4 year old attitudes. 

The Big ONE

Gabriel turned one last week, and we had a little party for him.  Cowboy, Ma, GiGi, Grandpa, and Uncle Dent came to his party.

Aren’t grandmothers the best babysitters?

Chris took the opportunity to relax while Dent and Cowboy worked on assembling Gabriel’s new kitchen.

Everyone enjoyed hanging out in our new back yard.  The bugs especially love when Gabriel comes outside because he tastes so sweet.

Noah helped Gabriel blow out his candle, but Gabriel got his cake all to himself.  He didn’t have any hesitation about it.  He just dug right in and tried to lick his fingers clean.

As per tradition, Gabriel got a bath in the kitchen sink after he finished his cake.  Then we got to open presents.

Gabriel liked all his new toys, but I think Noah liked them best.

Our Beach Vacation

Sorry about the number of pictures, but I just couldn’t pick a couple.

We had lots of fun on our trip.  Both of the boys loved the beach.  Noah just wanted to play in the water the whole time.  He enjoyed jumping the waves.  If he got knocked down he just got up as quick as he could to jump again.  Anytime you let Gabriel go, he headed straight to the water.  You couldn’t take your eyes off of him for a single second.  We buried the boys in the sand.  We buried Daddy in the sand, too.  Fortunately, Mama didn’t get caught.  We made a sand castle, complete with flags and a drawbridge.

We took one day to go to the Corpus Christi Texas State Aquarium and the USS Lexington.  We saw dolphins, sharks, jellyfish, and birds at the aquarium.  We petted the stingrays.  Noah was a “brave volunteer” in the Birds of Prey show.  He immediately raised his hand when the girl asked for a brave volunteer.  She put him in goggles and big leather gloves all the while telling him how brave he needed to be.  Then she says, “Just kidding!”  and out came a cute little anteater for Noah to bottle feed.  Of course, by this point you couldn’t pay him to get close to the thing.  But he got a coupon for a free hamburger from Whataburger for his performance.  Now he wants to know why Whataburger doesn’t have food without meat.  Cowboy is going to take him for fries and a milkshake sometime soon.  After we finished at the aquarium, we headed next door to the Lexington.  We enjoyed checking out all the jets on the ship.

All in all, we had a great time.  The one downer on our trip was the night before we left our car got broken into.  Fortunately, all they took was our GPS.  We got the busted window fixed in Corpus Christi on our way out of town, and everything has worked out.

Hook ‘Em Horns!

We took the whole family to the Longhorn football game last night.  We had a great time.  By 7 Noah was asking if it was bedtime yet.  But we had a good time anyway.  Gabriel was a trooper and only slept for about 3 minutes after filling up on a bottle.  It rained (lightly) for a very short time, and Noah had fun trying to catch the raindrops on his tongue.  Gabriel preferred to catch them with his hands.

Our World is Changing

Gabriel actually crawled today to get to something he wanted and I caught it on tape.  So here it is… Our world is changing.

Happy 4th of July!!!

We stayed home for our 4th celebration.  We had burgers and hot dogs at our neighbor’s house.  Kermit and Sandy came out and made homemade ice cream for everyone, and Uncle Stephen was able to make it out for our fireworks.  For the first time since Noah was an infant, he didn’t have a panic attack about the fireworks.  I count that as a success.