Cake!

As we all know, the best part of any 1st Birthday Party is the cake. I made bug cupcakes for Cooper's 1st. Josiah helped with the decorating, which really means he got to eat more gummy worms and jelly beans and frosting than he's ever been allowed to eat before. Needless to say he was very "excited" by party time.

Cooper had never had cake or frosting before, so he wasn't quite sure what to do...

But he quickly got the hang of it!

YAY for fun First Birthdays!

A Bug 1st Birthday

Cooper is 1!! Hard to believe a year has gone by already...but it has. Cooper turned 1 this past Friday and we had his birthday party in Richmond on Saturday. We had a little bit of a bug theme, since his nursery is decorated with bugs.

Gram and Pop with their boys.

Mimi and Papa helped celebrate as well!

Great-Grandmommie was there too, and Cooper was quite enamored with her.

It was a fun, relaxed time. We'll post cake pictures another day...

And He's Off!!!

Look out! Cooper is walking! Our baby boy will be 1 year old in about 10 days. He's been taking a couple steps for a few weeks now, the running/falling kind. Two days ago he started standing up and walking across rooms!

The fun is just beginning...

Josiah is 3!

Yes friends, we now have a 3-year-old in the house!

Josiah turned 3 last week and we had his birthday party this past weekend! It was very fun. I'll let you see if you can guess what the theme was.

That's right, he has been talking for 2 months about wanting to have a "racecar" birthday. So racecars it was. He had 3 of his best buds over and it was a blast!

They decorated wooden racecars
Ate lunch

Ella & Josiah

AnGrace & Noah

And then it was time for the race car birthday cake. Yes, it looks like he's turning 8, but it was really just a "Figure Eight Race Track". I should have realized before icing it that it would look like that...oh well.

Noah's little brother also came. He's so stinkin' cute I just had to put up a picture of him. He and Cooper are just a few months apart and I think will be great friends.

Our first family shot since the beach a year ago. Maybe we'll get one of us all looking at the camera some time...

First Harvest

What a joyful time! We plant, we water and weed daily, we sing and coax our little veggies along. We talk about patience and how things take time to grow & ripen. Last night after I put Cooper to bed, I let Josiah stay up a little bit and help me in the garden. He got to pick the first ripe tomato! That boy was so excited, he wanted to take it to bed with him. He actually cried when I told him it had to stay in the kitchen. And he doesn't even like to eat tomatoes...

Here is our little gardener with his first tomato of the season, his trusty watering can, and a cucumber that he wouldn't hold because it had "pricklies" on it.

I turned my back

This WAS a clean load of laundry...

I pulled a clean load of laundry out of the dryer, left the room for a MINUTE to put in the next load, came back to the family room and found this...

Another Generation of Uncle Jims

Growing up, I (amy) had some "aunts" and "uncles" that weren't blood relatives, just great friends of my parents. I guess that's maybe a Southern thing?!? Anyway...I have an Uncle Jimmy and am very happy to say that our boys have an "Uncle Jim" as well. We're giving him that title...we didn't really ask if he wanted it :)

Jim and Emily are some of our closest friends in town...we love having them around and our boys do to. They recently bought a house near us, so they're close geographically as well as relationally! We had a cookout last weekend and the boys were ALL about Jim. Literally. Josiah especially would not leave him alone.

Here he is reading books with the boys...

Uncle Jim - thanks for being such a good sport and loving our boys so well!

(and no, baseball fans, he is not related to Justin Verlander. although he sure looks like it)