Happy birthday!

I'm so excited that Mike suggested that I write this blog entry. I almost feel like a guest blogger here, since Mike has been the one who has written most of the recent blog posts (and I always love reading his posts).  So you get to hear about the whole month of February from my perspective.

I've always really liked February because my birthday's in February.  So imagine how excited I was when I married Mike and his birthday is also in February.  It is pretty fantastic.  Side note:  In case you were wondering, I'm nine days older than he is, which I totally love.  I always tell him that being older also makes me wiser.

My boys pulled through, like they do every year, and made my birthday very special.  First, since Mike had to be to work really early, K-Man and Bear decided that we should head to the grocery story first thing in the morning to buy some breakfast donuts.  We got to Safeway and they hopped into their "car" and "drove" me right to the donut aisle.  *I know, it doesn't really look like we're on the donut aisle, but I swear that's the donut case shining behind the cart!  :)

As we were walking out to our car after purchasing our donuts, I got my next birthday present... It was starting to snow!  I LOVE the snow, and since we live on the Oregon Coast, we don't usually get very much snow, which kind of makes me sad.  But, apparently Mother Nature was excited about my birthday, too, and wanted to hook me up.  So it snowed.  And snowed. And just kept snowing!

Our back yard looked like this... I felt like I was back in Idaho or Colorado:

And two days later, our street still looked like this:

Here are some gratuitous fun-in-the-snow pictures for you:

And even though the snow delayed my extra-special birthday dinner that Mike had so carefully planned, we were able to have it the following week, which happened to coincide with Mike's birthday AND Valentine's Day, so it all worked out pretty well.  He took me to dinner at EVOO, which is a cooking school in Cannon Beach and it was so much fun! Here's a picture of the massive desserts we had (after eating three entrees apiece!!--Hey it was our birthdays, right?)

And one last birthday picture for you.  The boys kindly helping me blow out the candles on my cake.

I hope you've all had as wonderful a February as we have!  Coming soon: a post on our Valentine's Day love-fest!

Update

It feels like time is flying by.  Nothing too exciting has happened lately, but life continues to be awesome.  Our kids are the most adorable little guys on the planet.  Yesterday we were at a church activity and K-man impressed everyone by going around and personally saying hi to everyone and giving them a hug.  He's such a friendly guy.  Bear was a lot of fun too... he's picking up on some charming social skills from his older brother.

Last weekend we had a fun movie night and popped some popcorn and watched Despicable Me 2, which was a lot of fun.  Also, the other day Amy found K in our closet wearing a pair of my dress shoes.  He then informed Amy that he needed to go to his work.  Ha ha.  Some other fun pictures that we have are from Bear's recent obsession with taking photos.  He got a hold of Amy's phone and took some selfies, which actually turned out pretty good.

One fun thing that the kids have been up to is running around in circles.  They love listening to the first song from the movie Brave while running in a big circle around in our house.  Sometimes Amy and I get in on the action and run with them too.  It's a blast.  You can check out the video at the end for a glimpse of the fun times.

Amy and I both have our birthdays coming up soon, and K about can't contain his excitement.  He wants to celebrate (and open gifts) every day.  I expect that we'll have some fun Bday photos soon, so stay tuned for those!

Catching Up

Holy Cow, I can't believe that it's already January 19th.  I'm not sure where the time has gone.  It's been a while since the last update so I'll try to fill everyone in on what's been happening in our family.

First, we had a great Christmas.  For the past few years we've been visiting family on Christmas day.  However, this year we decided that we wanted to stay home and spend the day with our own little family.  It was a lot of fun.  We had a nice Christmas Eve and left out cookies and milk for Santa and carrots for his reindeer.  Christmas morning the kids were thrilled to see the gifts.  They each received some books, some toys, a soccer balls, a soccer ball and net, an indoor basketball hoop, and some Nerf guns.  Mom and Dad also received some nice gifts, but we had the most fun watching the boys.  It was a really fun day.  Lately K-Man's favorite gift seems to be the Nerf guns.  He loves to challenge others to play and he likes to sneak up on us with a loaded gun.  Amy did a lot of research to make sure it was an age appropriate gun and it seems to be working great for the kids so far.

 A few days after Christmas we loaded up the car and drove to Idaho to visit family.  We had a wonderful time.  We stayed with Amy's parents and some other siblings were staying there too so we got plenty of time with family.  K and Bear really enjoyed spending time with their cousins and it was great seeing everyone.  We stayed there for a few days, and sometime during our trip Amy and I snuck away to go skiing.  We spent some time with Kable's birthmom too, which was a lot of fun.  Unfortunately, we didn't get a good picture from that visit, but we have one of them playing on the toys at Burger King.



My parents traveled to meet us and we had a great day in Boise with them.  We went to a fun play house, had a great lunch, and finished the day at the aquarium.  The next day we hit the road back to Oregon.  The boys both did awesome traveling in the car and we were able to make good time both ways.

Since we've been back we're getting back into the swing of life on the coast.  The weather has been great and it hasn't been very wet like it usually is.  K-Man and Bear are doing great and enjoying life.  Bear is talking more and more every day, which we love.  K-Man is making more friends and this past weekend he got to go to a fun birthday party with a lot of friends his age.  He continues to love his pajamas and he's constantly encouraging Bear to also wear pajamas all the time.  We love spending time with our boys and we're so glad to have them in our lives.

Christmas is Coming!

Christmas is getting closer and we're all very excited at our house.  It's extra fun this year now that K-man is getting older.  He's getting really excited.  There is a video you can personalize online so that Santa talks to your child.  K-man gets so excited and he is asking to talk to Santa everyday.  He answers all of Santa's questions and everything... it's adorable.  Bear doesn't quite get the whole Christmas thing yet, but he definitely senses K's enthusiasm.

Today we did some last minute Christmas shopping and had the kids buy each other gifts to wrap.  K-man picked a fun bathtub car for Bear and Bear picked a fun Nerf bow and arrow for K-man.  K-man also picked something for me.  Amy says that it's an interesting choice so I'm excited to see what it is come Christmas morning.

Other than getting ready for Christmas things have been fairly routine around here.  Bear is learning more words every day which is really fun.  He is getting much better at communicating.  K-man has been obsessed lately with wearing pajamas.  When he's at home he only wants to wear pajamas, so when we leave the house he has to change.  Then when we get home he runs to his room to change back into pajamas.  We're not really sure why he loves his pjs so much, but it's fun to see.  Lately he has even been wearing multiple pairs of his pajamas at the same time.  We took a picture of him with four pairs on.  You can see that he is pretty proud of himself :)  We had him hold up four fingers to represent how many pajamas he was wearing.

Just the other day Amy went upstairs to see what K-man and Bear had been up to.  It turns out that K was making a bed of books for Bear.  Initially Bear thought it was fun, but after a few minutes he decided that he didn't like his new bed too much.  It's always interesting to watch them play together.  It makes me think of a quote I saw recently - "Because I have a brother, I will always have a friend".

Snow and Santa on the Coast!

Earlier this week it snowed in our town!  Since we live in a coastal climate it hardly ever snows here.  Instead it usually rains during the winter.  It was a lot of fun, and the kids loved it.  Amy and Mike both grew up with snowy winters and we have fond memories of playing in the snow so we tried to make sure the kids got to experience how fun the snow can be.


Amy shoveled some snow into a little path on our lawn so the kids could go sledding.  K-Man absolutely loved sledding and it was the first thing he asked to do when he woke up in the mornings.  Bear hasn't been a huge fan of the sledding, but he likes going outside.

In other exciting news, we got to go see Santa Claus.  He was visiting during the local Festival of Trees event that Mike's work puts on.  K-Man was thrilled and he was totally prepared.  He asked Santa for a blue soccer ball.  Bear was not fond of Santa.  We have a similar picture of K-Man crying on Santa's lap when he was Bear's age, so we weren't surprised.

Anyway, the last few weeks have been a lot of fun and we're getting excited for Christmas.  The boys are getting into the Christmas spirit and have been watching some Christmas classics.  Only two more weeks to go!

The Latest

As we mentioned below, we are very excited to be adopting again and we look forward to hearing from potential birthparents.  We'll try to update this blog on a regular basis so anyone and everyone can see what we've been up to lately.

As far as things that have been going on in our lives recently, we've actually spent a fair amount of time updating our adoption websites with new pictures and information.  It's amazing to see how quickly the boys are growing up, especially as we've been looking at, and posting, some pictures of them when they were younger.  Here's some of the most interesting things we've all been doing lately, starting from youngest to oldest:

Bear: This kid is walking and running faster every day!  The past few weeks he's been in to spinning.  He's also learning fun new words all the time and he's getting better at letting us know what he wants.  He really likes playing with his brother and he is obsessed with trucks.  He also loves to help and when he finishes a task (like putting something in the garbage or in the dishwasher) he always claps for himself, which is adorable.  We've also noticed lately how good he is at doing puzzles.  He's very thoughtful about doing things and he likes to watch us do something and then try to copy us.  He's a smart little guy.

K-man: He continues to charm everyone with his friendly personality.  He is never shy and he likes to say hi to everyone.  Lately he has been taking swimming lessons three times a week which he really enjoys.  It's been good because he's become less anxious about being in water.  He's also recently been obsessed with wearing his pajamas, especially his green dinosaur pajamas.  He wants to wear them all the time and for a while it was a challenge to get him to change into normal clothes to go to the store or to church.  He's now okay with only wearing pajamas at home, so when he gets home he immediately goes upstairs and changes into pajamas.  Crazy kid.  Then again, maybe he's on to something...

Dad: Dad is still getting used to his job (he's had this job for about 7 months now) so sometimes he has some long days at the office.  He really looks forward to his time at home and makes sure to focus on the family when he's not at work.  This last weekend was a lot of fun for him because he got to take the boys out all Saturday morning.  First they went to help clean the church.  Both boys were pretty good helpers for a while, but then they snuck off to play with a friend.  After the church they went to play at the local bounce house with friends, and they finished the morning with some food and ice cream at Dairy Queen.  It was a great day!

Mom: Mom has been a little under the weather lately, but fortunately she's doing much better now.  It seems like we get sick a lot more frequently now that we have these kids.  She's been keeping busy with the boys and has been dedicating time to help teach them new things.  She's also been having fun decorating the house with the boys for Halloween and now Thanksgiving.

We're back!

We are so excited to try to adopt again.  We love our boys, we love their birth families, and we would love to add more love by adding another child and another birth family to ours.  We hope that reading our adoption blog will help you get to know our family a little bit better.  

What have we been up to?

We have actually had a couple of nice weeks here at home, which has been a nice break from all the traveling we did in February!  The only downside is that I got sick, which doesn't happen very often, but I made up for lost time with this one.  Mike was very helpful and took care of the house, and dinners, and K-Man, and me in addition to going to work all day long.  What a guy!  He even took a day off of work on my worst day so that I could rest and he could have some daddy/son time with K-Man.  

These two boys had some major bonding time, to the point where K-Man would have a meltdown when Mike left for work, and I only got a couple of pics of them having fun together.  I think these of them brushing their teeth are so fun!  K-Man is pretty good about getting his teeth brushed, and lets us brush his as long as he gets to brush ours.  

Look at those pearly whites

The dentist would be so proud

What a cutie

"Cheeeeese!"

This big Tupperware bowl was on the floor, where our cat, Chafa found it and thought it would make a nice bed.

Some things we have been up to that we haven't captured on camera are:

• Tons of playing outside
• Finding our bellybuttons
• Throwing lots of rocks, balls, and pretty much anything that will fit in K-Man's hands
• Learning how to put our dirty clothes in the hamper
• Going on walks
• Jumping, pretty much anywhere

Anyway, so this is what's been happening at our house over the last couple of weeks.  I think you're all caught up.

So handsome!

My handsome husband just got new pictures taken for work, and I had to share because he looks so handsome and smart!  K-Man and I are pretty lucky to have such an awesome, hardworking, and good-looking daddy/husband.

February Birthday #2

We love birthdays in our family!!  To start the day off, the birthday person gets to choose their favorite breakfast.  Mike chose homemade raspberry muffins.  Luckily we still had some raspberries from our garden in the freezer, so the muffins were extra delicious.  The perfect start to a fun birthday.

This picture makes it look like Mike baked them himself, but rest assured, the birthday boy did not have to make his own breakfast!

While Daddy was in meetings, K-Man and Mommy went and decorated his office at work

Happy Birthday, Dad!

Gotta love newspaper wrap jobs!

K-Man is a great helper!

My two favorite boys!

Those ribbons were a pretty fun new toy to play with

Daddy's new warm coat!   Happy birthday!!