Monday, September 27, 2010

Outer Banks Vacation

Me and Angie had tons of fun on our sisters vacation. One of our favorite places was Jockey's Ridge State Park where these huge sand dunes are. It had the most silky sand ever.

























































Sunset at Jockey's Ridge was beautiful.


















Back at home--our toes in the grass again.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Smiles, Siliness & Sleeping!

Tanner smiles so much now. He laughs hard too. He's very ticklish. He only has to look at Joey to smile. He adores his big brother already. And Joey is still a great big brother. He likes just hanging out with Tanner and making him smile. It's so adorable.







Joey discovered that tossing Zhu Zhu blankets onto Tanner made him smile, so he kept going.












This is Tanner's first time eating rice cereal. He has a bowl every evening now and I think it's really helping him sleep better! For the past week or so, he's been doing great at night. Going 7 hours or so between feedings. It makes such a big difference in my day the next day.



Joey helped Angie put her new tag on her new car before she left for AZ.




Tanner helped Angie with some computer research.






Joey is very into flags right now. Angie got him a book with all state/country flags in it and a poster too and he loves them. He has many countries' flags memorized. He has his favorites (Republic of Georgie and Greece), and he likes to create his own and tape them on a "ba-dute-da-dute" (what he calls those cardboard rolls).












The boys had so much fun with Angie. Joey really got attached to her and was extremely upset to find out she was moving to AZ. Just out of the blue he'd say, "I'm going to miss Angie." In the car when I picked him up from school one day, he was fighting back tears talking about missing her and not wanting her to go. So sweet. And sad!










Tanner's eyes are still dark gray. Some days at certain angles, it looks like there's small brown specks in there, and other days green specks. My eyes used to be brown brown, but somehow over the years they've changed to a hazel or greenish color. Earl's are green. Joey's are brown. No telling what color Tanner will end up with.






Joey likes putting himself in his big Tonka truck, and Stonewall the Kung Zhu Hamster in the little one and take rides through the house together.




Lars got a great haircut!









Earl had to organize a Evening Parade for work, where the security forces marines show off their drill skills and the band plays and what not.




















Sleepy boys.


Soccer (a.k.a. August Part 3)

Tanner really enjoys watching all the kids at soccer practice. :)




Joey LOVES soccer practice. These are pictures from his first practice, which was a little, well, a lot, chaotic because they had all the same aged teams practicing together to give the parent coaches some idea of how to do the coaching when they are on their on.








This is an example of the chaos.^ All these kids are actually practicing together.


















He still laid down when he was tired or bored, right in the middle of the field where anyone could have stepped on him.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

August Part 2

As summer was winding down, we stayed busy busy busy!


At the zoo here they have the water geysers for the kids to play in at the entrance.





Joey is almost obsessed with maps. He makes them, he loves looking at them, like from Busch Gardens, he just is really into maps for some reason. He just got over a phase of drawing zoo maps. He'd do like 20 a day. They'd all basically look the same. I'll try to find one and scan it to post here if I think about it later. He does a great job. He draws in the roads that go to the different animals. It's cute. He's finally getting over that phase. Before the zoo maps were cards. He was obsessed with folding computer paper and making greeting cards out of them. He made like 20 a day of those (you can see we go through computer paper often--he won't use the lined paper). And as alot of you know, he was most recently obsessed with mailing letters. He loved decorating the envelopes, putting on his pretend stamps (stickers) and putting his letter inside. Then he'd give it to me and have me "decorate" my "side" with the address (he calls I-dress for some reason) and put the real stamp on. Then we'd have to walk it to the mailbox (even if the mail had already ran that day) and put up the flag.









We joined a mommy's group this summer and made some new friends. It was great. It was a wonderful way to get out of the house and do fun stuff with kids Joey's age while preschool was out. I really wish I would have found this group last summer when we moved here. But we're glad to have them now.











The Botanical Gardens here is very kid friendly. There's more water geyser play, plus these cute nifty little furniture carved from trees.



























Tanner is much more into tummy time than Joey ever was.



















Earl uses my boppy for a pillow sometimes.
















This was Tanner's first time on a ride. It's the merry go round at Busch Gardens. We had to sit on a bench and not a horse, but maybe next year :)