Lots of Playing in January

The weather has been interesting here this winter, we had a few days of record breaking lows in the negatives with highs in the single digits, followed by a week of record breaking highs in the 70's. Along with hurricane force winds topping out in the 90 mph range and now our first snow of the year. We get a little bit of cabin fever when the temps are low and wind is raging, but as soon as it turns nice we try to get outside and take advantage, you never really know when the next time will be! We resumed play dates after the holidays and have actually been able to head to the park for a couple, Rachel has a new love of swinging, she laughs and kicks her little legs as fast as she can. We also had another little person birthday party this month, Makena turned 3, the theme was Dora, and I have never been around so many kids under the age of 3, it was mass chaos, I think we counted 12 kids, 10 of them girls, so Caleb and Quint were severely outnumbered by pink and princesses. The kids had a lot of fun and I think Caleb might have finally met his match in energy levels and aggressiveness with Makena.

Rachel's swinging good time


More big smiles on a beautiful day at the park


Magnetic fishing on the deck

"I got something mommy"

Caleb and Makena having a noise maker war, Makena is wearing her glasses to protect her eyes after Caleb's first blow unrolled right into her eye


Rachel playing in the pool of balls

The pool is the staging area of "Happy Birthday"

Caleb with his cupcake in the pool

New Year-New Car

Happy New Year to everyone, we had a fairly uneventful new years, but again Doug was off for 4 1/2 days, so that made it great around here. We started off by watching the Beavers barely pull off an offenseless Sun Bowl win against Pittsburg, but hey a win is a win right! Actually we watched quite a bit of football over the course of the holiday, On Friday we made the big step and bought ourselves a new-to-us Suburban, that is a decade newer than any of our other vehicles. I know you are thinking, why get a big gas hog like that, well, it has everything we want in a camping/roadtrip/family vehicle and it doesn't get any worse gas mileage than the smaller Honda we have been driving. We are really happy with it so far, although most of the driving we have done is back and forth from the dealership for test driving. Sunday evening Doug had another soccer game against the St. Louis Illusion, it was a low scoring game, but in the last few minutes the Lightning scored a couple goals to go ahead and win 4-2, one of the local papers that wrote an article and published a photo, caught both Rachel and I in the stands right behind the action, check it out at http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20090105/SPORTS/901059997/1010&title=Late%20score%20lifts%20Lightning The team is playing the Denver Dynamite yet again on Friday evening, so hopefully the Lightning will take the lead in the series again.

Our new 2004 Chevy Suburban

Caleb loves the new "big truck"

Bath time with bubbles, our favorite

Fun at Mulberry pool with Grandma Cindy and mommy, both kids loved the water coming out of the play structure, we had fun plugging holes and shooting water up in the air

Rachel loves splashing water

Smiling and laughing at Caleb

Rachel splasing in the tub, and laughing at Caleb dumping water on himself