blog catch-up : the bees

Cole's best friend is Ethan AND Ethan's dad has bees AND Cole is obsessed with bugs right now, so yeah it was necessary that we check out these bees.  Luckily Ethan's dad John was nice enough to give Cole a little tour of his bee hives.

Cole was so excited to wear a real bee keepers hood!

He really does love bugs and wasn't freaked out at all by the bees.  I, on the other hand, was hiding as far as possible from these little monsters and brought my zoom lens so I wouldn't have to get too close.

After the bees, Cole and Ethan went off to explore the fields and look for more bugs.

Thanks Mary, John and Ethan for really making this kid's day!

blog catch-up : 4th of July

Wow! It's been awhile, huh?  We've had a pretty busy, social summer and I obviously haven't been great at updating the ol' blog.  We've gotten use to the weather here in Medford and we are loving all the sunshine and hot weather!!  I have quite a lot of catching up to do so there will be a good number of posts coming!

First we have our 4th of July.  A few days before the 4th we got together with some friends and painted firework shirts for the kids.  Everyone else's shirts were so nice and neat, mine of course were a hot mess but the boys loved them anyways.  Here they are sporting their new shirts!

During the day we got together with some friends and had a BBQ.  Then we had a mini firework show, and watched some not so mini firework shows that other people in the neighborhood were putting on.

Eating hotdogs with friends.

Ready for some fireworks!

And no 4th of July would be complete without some sparkler action!

yep, Cole is in fact chasing Blake with a sparkler in this picture.  *sigh* These boys...

birthday boy

 

 Yay! Somebody turned 2!

and here he is, the birthday boy:

 

 Every single one of his presents was Sesame Street related.  He got so excited whenever he saw Elmo or Cookie Monster.

His big brother declared it the best birthday party ever! (I think he just liked the cake)

I was able to get in a quick birthday photo shoot the next day

 

And he is starting to get the first of many freckles!  Right now he only has a few under one eye but I love to look at them and imagine his cute little cheeks covered in them!

 

 We really love having this little guy around!

Up next.... Pictures from the coast

wildlife safari park

I was super excited to discover that we did in fact have a zoo down here in Southern Oregon.  We really loved to zoo up in Seattle so I knew that as soon as we had a decent Saturday, we needed to check out the Wildlife Safari Park.

Because the park is a drive through zoo, we got to get really close to a few of these.

He had a blast! 

(yes that is a cheetah in the background.)

Oh, and he loved it too!

 

and I spend most of the time like this.

Speaking of wild animals...  it's not the greatest picture but I couldn't risk taking another and disturbing the subjects.  Every night we put the boys to bed in their separate beds and every night when I check on them I find this.

That boy loves his big brother!

major catch-up

We are officially Oregonians! Nick got a promotion and we moved down to southern Oregon. Here's a quick catch-up on what's been going on.

We lived in a hotel for 1 month which means there was a lot of this going on!



The nice thing about living in a hotel is that it forced us to get out and explore our new city. We check out a bunch of the local parks, as well as the children's museum and science museum.






Finally we found a place to live and moved in just in time for Easter.





In other new, Cole got his first real pet (not counting the slugs, lol). He picked out three little crabs. Since buying the crabs, we've also added 3 guppies and 9 ghost shrimp. The crabs were suppose to eat some of the shrimp which is why I bought so many, but so far they haven't bothered them.





Last weekend we checked out the Wildlife Safari Park in Winston. It was really cool, the boys loved it! I'll post photos soon.

holiday/winter catch up

Okay, time for a catch up. Here's what's been going on these past few months:


It seems like forever ago but in October we took the boys to a local pumpkin patch. They loved the kiddie hay maze, jumping in the huge hay pit and playing in the dried corn box. Cole had fun picking out our pumpkins. We ended up leaving with four good sized pumpkins for carving and two littler ones for painting.

Running around in the patch

our masterpieces

Then came Halloween. Cole went back and forth on his costume. First it was a bat, then a ghost and finally a...

zoo keeper

with Blake as his little tiger

and Nick was his not so little gorilla.


Christmas came and the boys got way too many presents and gave me way too few good pictures, typical.

And after a uneventful January, we got a bunch of snow and the boys had fun romping around.

Hard at work building a fort.

The End!