Christmas morning with a 3 year old is the best!

Christmas morning with a three year old who really gets that he is getting stuff was so much fun. There were presents galore and he was ready to go!



Let's open stockings first. This was strange, we never do this in our family, we usually forget about the stockings and then remember them later. I think it must have been Josh's suggestion since he grew up opening his stocking first :)



Luke: "Dad, stop taking my picture. I have presents to open!"



Luke opened every gift with a "Wow" or "Ooh" he was super excited about everything! A tractor!







Video "Get a tissue daddy"... we have heard this phrase pretty much repeatedly for 4 months now. Yes we are working on getting him to wipe his own nose, currently occurring about 30% of the time.



This next video is too funny...scratch that, was too funny. I can't get it to load so I'll just have to describe what you would have seen.
Luke opened a shirt and he chucked it at me. Up until then he had been so happy with all the stuff he'd been opening and then we got on a small clothes run, so I guess with this last shirt he'd seen enough clothes and threw this one at me. We all died laughing! The rest of the video was just him opening more things, he did open a Gator shirt and wanted to put it on right away, he stripped off his pajama shirt, nearly falling over in the process, to put on his new Gator gear. Yes, we have taught him early and taught him right!

Christmas with small children really is more fun!

Brad, how was your first Christmas?
Thumbs up!

Christmas Eve

Ok, this is getting sad, it is April 4th and I'm just now posting about Christmas Eve. Maybe I'll get caught up to my usual two months behind pace sometime soon. (Let's all say a little prayer that Brad will start to sleep more at night and then mommy may have more energy during the day!...On that note, I am super pleased to say that he did sleep from 8pm to 4:40 am last night!!)

Back to Christmas Eve, we got all dressed up for church and tried to take a family picture. Luke wasn't having it, this is the best we could get.



Then we tried with just us and Brad :)



When we got home from church, we let Luke open one gift.
They turned out to be shoes, but he still loved them.











"Put them on right now!"



Happy with his new kicks! (which, by the way, are already worn out 3 months later, that kid plays hard!)

Pre-Christmas Christmas

Yep, I'm returning to the regularly scheduled catch-up. And we left off at the Thursday before Christmas. We packed up the kids and headed to Lakeland so that I could visit my long-time hair stylist Candi and we had an early Christmas with my aunt and uncle and cousins planned for that evening. I had a nice relaxing couple of hours to myself and got a manicure and pedicure followed by a cut and highlighting of my hair. It was heaven! Since I only ever get my hair done when I'm in Lakeland, it had been a whole year since the last cut/highlighting and it was looking sad. I may have to bite the bullet and find a salon here to go to :(

Anyway, here are some pictures from the evening!
Aunt Kathy holding Brad



Luke and his buddy (my cousin) Grant



me (with my new haircut) and Kathy and Brad



Neil and Ansev :)



Luke ready to open presents!



Uncle Jack opening his gifts (Josh was his secret Santa)



Luke and Grant playing with new toys





New legos!



A Luke smile!



Kathy still holding that baby



Grant gets a turn to hold Brad



Holly holding Brad



And Noah, in his favorite spot during the Holidays!

Luke speak

Well, its been over a week since I last posted, and I was doing so well at the beginning of March catching up! I'm breaking from the Christmas catch-up to do a quick edition of Luke speak. Luke, who many of you know, usually is pretty articulate for his age so it just tickles us that there are a few words he consitently says incorrectly, but soo cutely :)
Here are some that come to mind:
1) "seer-y-up" = syrup
2) "pwillow" = pillow (although he has now corrected this after much coaching!)
3) "lemolade" = lemonade (my personal favorite and now what I say too!)
4) "commote" = remote (controller)

Happy St. Patrick's Day

A rare occurrence, Luke actually smiled for the camera, and big! Couldn't get the little guy to smile no matter how silly I was :)

Dinner with friends

One evening while we were in Florida, we were able to get together with some good friends! We always try to see them while we are in town for the Holidays, but this year was even more joyous as all of us had children born in 2010!

We had a great evening with wonderful food and delicious dessert, and best of all lots of newborn talk.

Here is a picture of all the dads and their new little ones.
Linc and Leah (born 7/2010), Josh and Brad, Jon and Zoey (born 9/2010)



And I took this picture of the recipe for the dessert we has so I can make it again :)

FL trip home for Christmas- Part 2 Busch Gardens

Josh's brother Matt and Matt's wife Jayce invited us to go to Busch Gardens with them while we were in Florida. As it turned out, Josh and me had passes to Busch Gardens from our April trip that were still good until Dec 31st so we were able to go for free :) Matt and Jayce have a friend who runs the Jungala (I think that is the right one) animal section. He invited a group of people including us to a behind the scenes look at the tigers!

Luke and Josh looking at tigers



Sitting on Uncle Matt's shoulders



As it turned out, Luke was too young to go (you had to be 5, Brad was home with Grammy and Papa) so Josh took Luke to see the monkeys while Matt, Jayce and me headed behind the scenes. It was pretty neat to see what they do with the tigers and how close you can get to them. Don't worry, even though we had to sign releases, we never were even close to being in danger. Even behind the scenes the tigers are behind fences and gates.

Gate to go into the Tiger Den





How close we were able to get to the tigers



Video, with a warning to stay away from the spray!



After the tiger den, we moved on to the rest of the park, including stopping for lots of kiddie rides for Luke. He flew planes (well he never lifted off actually, but he went around in a plane)



I finally got to ride Shiekra! Since I was pregnant in April, I didn't get to ride it then. It was AWESOME!

Josh and Luke riding a ride.



We had a great time at Busch Gardens and with our family. Luke still talks about the bird that ate Josh's food! A pigeon flew down and actually tried to grab Josh's slice of pizza from him as he walked to the table! Josh was not to happy about it. Good thing we were eating at the buffet so he could just go grab another piece!