L-man birthday weekend

L-man turned FIVE years old this weekend! We made a long celebration of it, and enjoyed every minute of it. 

A little blurry, but having fun at the "giant play place" that the kids LOVE. 

The kids were so darling this day being best friends and running all over the place together. I think they liked that I was running around with them. :)

Didn't quite get the focus I wanted, but it still makes my heart happy. :)

Lady-LE has entered a stage of 'knowing' that she's cute and doing whatever she thinks other people consider funny. Lately it's been running away and playing tease with me while I have the camera out. I pretend I don't see her, she finally faces me and gives me smiles, and without looking in the viewfinder at all I pull out my camera and snap away. She thinks this is the funniest game and I've gotten a few surprisingly good pictures! This was one.

This was another one that I love because of L-man's arms reaching out to grab her. He loves to chase her and love-wrestle her. 

And this was just funny because she was laughing too hard to keep playing our game. Silly girl. :)

And the birthday boy just loved running and sliding ...

... and making funny faces. 

Friday night was spent getting the house ready for the official big day, which included assembling a new bike for the big guy. 

We have a tradition of balloons for L-man's birthday ... some kind of balloon decoration. 

This one was well loved by the kids in the morning!

{editorial note: why do I bother with manual mode when I still have no clue what I'm doing in low-light situations?!}

He was definitely excited!!

Hooray!

Since Daddy had to work on the actual day, we played hooky from preschool and went to explore Lazy 5 Ranch just north of us. It's a ride-through farm-like place where you get buckets of animal feed and the various animals come feed out of our hands.

L-man was in heaven! Granted they weren't African Safari animals or the sea creatures he loves, they were still wild {kind of}, large animals up close and personal. 

The emu's can't be fed from our hands, so we just hold the bucket while they peck at it. Check out the still-frame of the food! Makes me laugh. :)

Lady-LE was a little more intimidated by the whole experience {I was personally scared myself! I think I would have packed up and left if Ry weren't there with me to help corral and keep tabs of the kids with those large animals so close to us!}, but she still gave me a couple smiles.

Please keep your hands and arms inside the wagon! 

Funny smiles, but we were definitely happy!

The giraffes were probably all of our favorites. Holy cow those guys were large and in charge! 

Right after this picture L-man lifted the bucket higher, and the giraffes had a field day of spilling the food all over him and the wagon. A lot of the food (and a lot of slobber) fell down into his shirt, and I had that split second fear of this-could-turn-into-a-melt-down when L-man turned to me and said, "It's okay, sometimes that happens" as if it was no big deal. Made me laugh and showed us just how much he loved this place. 

Our wagon driver was phenomenal with L-man and his non-stop chatter about animals. In fact he was wonderful with all the kids on the wagon. At one point he let L-man drive the horses and was so cute teaching him the ropes. If we ever go back we are definitely waiting for him to be our driver again!

At the end of the wagon ride we still had some feed left over, and found a smaller petting zoo area with goats and sheep that the kids loved feeding. 

Lady-LE especially loved this baby goat. In fact this was her favorite part of the whole day, probably just because the animals were more her size. She kept running back to me and saying "the animals like me! the animals like me!"

It was a beautiful day and such a perfect way to cater to our animal-lover five-year old. And it worked out even better than planned because of Ry's work schedule we had to changed our trip from Saturday to Monday, which meant that we got to avoid the awful congestion of the last day of Spring Break and practically had the whole ranch to ourselves. Glorious I tell you.

We had a really hard time saying goodbye to the goats ...

On the way home we stopped for some soft serve ice cream. It was a monumental day because L-man actually tried it and liked it! First time ever for a positive experience with ice cream! It was definitely a happy day. :)

We love you big guy! Thanks for being in our family and giving us an excuse to celebrate all weekend! 

easter festivities

Easter weekend is always so fun to have time with lots of friends! We met up with lots of great people from our church and had our own Easter egg hunt for the kiddos at a local playground. 

I stayed with L-man in the older group to hunt and barely got a photo in before he was long gone. 

R stayed with Lady-LE inside the gated playground for the younger group, and she loved showing me her loot afterwards.

We even got to go to our neighborhood Easter egg hunt the following morning, which was a major hit for all of us. Seriously our neighborhood is awesome!

Spring is finally starting to show! (I know, we're super spoiled to get early springs here)

Lady-LE was a little more serious in her gathering efforts this morning. 

Hooray!!

Opening to find treats and fun kid toys. 

Funny faces I think ... 

Hooray for family things Daddy gets to come to! 

On actual Sunday we had a wonderful time at church and enjoyed playing together as a family. I sure love these kiddos!! 

march memories

Way back in March we had some special visitors - R's grandparents! Oh these people just radiate goodness. There is an endless supply of love and energy from them, and I literally try to drink it in every time we see them which sadly isn't often enough. They took a small cross-country trip to come out and visit their great-grandchildren, and we are lucky enough to be included in that bunch!

Enjoying a nice Sunday afternoon in the backyard. Chatting, catching up on dozens of family members, showing them our home and neighborhood, and playing all sorts of guessing games with the kids. 

Grandy played on the grass with the kids, and tried to teach them how to do handstands. We might need to wait a little bit before that kind of coordination comes along, but it was sure cute! 

 Like any visitor to our house, they both heard plenty of animals facts from L-man. He will seriously jabber away with random facts for hours if you let him. We had just made a trip to the library and stocked up on a dozen or so animal books, and L-man conned Grandy into reading a rather lengthy one about orangutans. 

The next day we took our guests to see the Discovery Place which is just like a science center. You should have heard L-man's lecture on the giant pacific octopus - it was very informative! :)

There's more of the museum than the aquarium portions, but that's really all I took pictures of. The upstairs exhibits are way more crazy and kids-running-around type that we just played together and had fun. Grandy made this reversible bowtie with different kinds of duct tape at a create-something station which she then used to tell a funny story to the kids about some girl with a hair bow who was taken captive by a bad guy (with one side of the bowtie), who was then rescued by a good guy (with the other side of the bowtie) after lengthy interactions between them all. Oh it was so funny watching her change between characters and move that bowtie around to signal which person she was supposed to be. Lauren kept that bowtie for months and tried to mimic her doing the voices. Definitely a fun memory. :)

{yes, Lady-LE might be picking her nose in this picture, but I just loved seeing all these beautiful faces together!}

We played it simple that afternoon around the home, reading stories and playing games. Grandy is quite the hostess whenever you are her guest, so I really wanted to make good food while they were here. It might seem like such a small thing, but it meant the world to me to hear how much they loved the food I made! Probably because she is the queen of providing good food for her family, and I am still in the throws of learning the basics it seems, but I took her compliments very personally. :)

 The next morning we went to a beautiful park near Ryan's work to show them around. It was a beautiful day and the kids loved seeing the ducks, watching a man fish off the bridge, and running around outside. Then we had to say goodbye and dropped off these dear sweet people off at the airport. 

I begged for one last picture of the kids with Grandy and Charles, and am so glad I did. These two people are amazing! I could write a novel about all the reasons why I want to be more like this kind and loving woman. Oh how we miss them!