Creature Comforts

Ever since Caelum was born, he has been the happiest baby I've ever known. We hardly ever have heard him cry. But lately Caelum has been having some problems with gas bubbles and tummy pain, and so has had a few crying spells. After one such spell (as is proclaimed by his red eyes in this picture), Aile and Brenner wanted to cheer him up and share some of their pets. I walked into the kitchen to see this scene:

Ah, the joys of being the third born! So taken care of by your older siblings! :)

Family Time

Sean and I are trying to institute more family time when we are all home, and Aileana and Brenner wanted to play with play dough with us the other night. So this is our cooperative effort family play dough creation! Ha ha! We liked it...

Family Reunion

I have fond memories from my childhood of spending my Independence Day celebrations in Ohio for family reunions with my mom's side of the family. She has 4 brothers and 4 sisters, so all together we are quite a group! (Especially now that many of the cousins have families of their own!) For one reason or another, those reunions ceased to occur almost 10 years ago, and get-togethers have been few and far between since then for some members of the family. So this year I was excited when my mom and her 4 sisters decided to bring as many people back together as possible!

As most people in our family love Cracker Barrel, that is of course where we spent our first mealtime together when we got there on the 4th of July:


The actual reunion was at a great family park in town, with plenty of room to play and visit and eat lots of good food! We try to take pictures of each individual family represented. Here's one of ours:

After lunch and games and such, there were several groups gathered in various places across the lawn visiting. I thought it was humorous at one point to look over and see Aile hanging out with a bunch of the men from the family! :) (My aunt is in this picture, but she came over to the group with me. Aile had been there with just those men for quite some time!)

My uncle Tim is known for creating these ring toss games, and Brenner thought they were grand fun. Of course, he waited until everyone else had moved on to something else to take them on--as is his usual loner way.



Here's the 5 sisters!
And here's Brenner acting like a redneck at the hotel. He thought he was pretty hilarious with one arm through the neck-hole of his shirt, and he enjoyed hamming it up for everyone to take his picture!

One of the side benefits of this family vacation of ours was that Sean got to pick up his beloved Jed, the Big Ugly Jeep. This is his off-roading toy that he had to leave in California when we moved, so he was glad for the opportunity to get it back. Now it remains to be seen how much off-road adventuring we will be doing around here....
Up until the very moment we walked into the hotel lobby, my mom and aunt Sally thought we were not going to be able to come. We pulled off a great surprise, and they were very glad to see us show up!
Sean wanted a picture with all of his "moms"! My mom and her sisters have taken great care of us over the years, and we love them all so much! :)
Brenner requested that we not forget to include his beloved Whiffer in our memory-making, thus this photo as we were about head out for home:

4th of July Good Times!

There's a little town near where our friends live in Michigan that has a cute Pet, Wagon and Bike Parade for kids. We watched it this year, but I bet the kids would have loved to participate! Here are some photos from our day:

It was quite bright on the 4th, an absolutely beautiful day! The girls were trying to wave and shade their eyes at the same time! :)




Another cool thing was that after we left the parade, we found the fire station, where they had the trucks out for the kids to climb on.

Next, we hit the park for a yummy picnic and then some playtime!

All the kids played at the playground "telephones" for quite a while, and seemed to think they were quite a hoot!

Caelum Sits Up!

While we were visiting our good friends in Michigan, a neighbor let us borrow this Bumbo seat. I just thought it was pretty cute to see little 3-month-old Caelum sitting up in this thing! :)

Annual Mother-Daughter Tea

My husband's mother has two sisters. Every year the three of them, and all of their families, have a large reunion at Thanksgiving. Usually this is when we are able to have our Mother-Daughter Tea (while the men golf). This year all of us daughters were surprised to receive invitations in the mail for a summer-time tea at a local tea house. It was a beautiful day, and we all had a great time eating yummy food, trying on fancy clothes, and spending time together. Here are just a few captured moments from our day:




The sandwiches for the kids were great! They were shaped like little teapots! Too cute!

Things that make you go hmmm...

So much has happened in the last couple of weeks--we really have some catching up to do on here! We'll have to get to that in the next day or two, so stay tuned.... :)

For tonight, I just had to get down in the memory books Brenner's 2-year-old intuition:

He is always saying "thank you" when we answer him, pretty much no matter what we say, and it always cracks us up when we say no to a request, and he still says, "Thanks!" So today when he asked me for permission to do something (can't recall what), for some reason I had to say, "No, Brenner, not right now." He promptly replied, "Thanks!" and began to walk away.

After a few steps he turned and came back. He looked up and me and said, "Mommy?"

"Yes, Brenner?" I replied.

"You just said 'no' to me and I said 'thank you'." He got a quirky grin on his face and walked away again.