Berry Special Birthday Girl!

It is so fun to have nieces! Since I only have boys, I get to live out all my visions of pink and pretty through my nieces! Birthdays are so much more fun to do for girls because you can go as pink and girly as you want. With boys-not so much! :) So I love being able to help my sister plan the girls' birthday parties and help with the decorations! She did a Strawberry Shortcake birthday for Ava, but not with everything in Strawberry Shortcake printed things. We mostly used strawberries, pink, red, a little green and a little Strawberry Shortcake here and there. It turned out so cute! These tissue balls seem pretty popular all over now and pretty simple to make!

Here is a cute little garland/table runner I made using a tutorial I found here. I have been hitting the craft blogs hard recently and finding some really cute things!!! She did it with shamrocks but you can really do it with any shapes so I used the strawberry and flowers from the invitations and decorations to trace. I also had a lot of pink and red things I had made for Valentine's Day that I brought along that went with the theme perfectly!

Here's the cute birthday girl Ava with her cake! 4 years old and getting prettier every day! She must take after her Aunt Jessie- wink wink! ;)

Brady playing the strawberry beanbag toss game. I used a simple strawberry pattern I found online and made some beanbags with the leftover felt I had from the garland.

My mom, me, Ava and Melissa

I love this picture of us girls!! :)

Here's our 4 kiddos-this one is probably better than any we have taken all together recently! :)

Disney On Ice

My sister had the awesome idea to take Brady to Disney on Ice for his birthday. It just so happened that it came to St Louis the same weekend that we were coming for Ava's birthday so it worked out perfectly!

Grandma Gray watched Collin and Melissa and Ava came to St Louis for the day, we had lunch and saw the show. They had the best time! Here's some pics from the day: Grandma Gray made a cute little scavenger hunt for the kids to do before going. (Ava even calls her Grandma Gray since we've all been getting together when we come visit!) It was so cute and they got some cute little Mickey and Disney treats!

Looks like Lilly (the dog) is trying get her treat too-not a surprise if you know anything about that little scavenger dog!

Lunch at Red Robin before heading off!

The kids were totally captivated by the entire show. It had Mickey and the gang and also abbreviated stories of The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Peter Pan, and Lilo and Stitch. The kids knew most of the songs and were singing along. The lighting in these types of things is never good so these pictures didn't turn out as clear as I had hoped. Oh well, Brady will recognize what it is and remember how fun it was.

Melissa and Ava

Me and Brady

Brady's favorite part-Captain Hook being eaten by the GIANT crocodile!

My favorite segment-The Little Mermaid. I wish I would have gotten a good picture of Ursula because her costume was really cool. And then she came out as a huge giant Ursula at the end before they poke her with the giant fork!

Anyway, the perfect birthday gift and a very fun time for me and my sis with our 2 cute little 4 year old cousins!

A new villain...

Move over Darth Vader there is a new villain in town!

I am a little behind in posting this, but better late than never! A couple weeks ago we were playing on the floor with Brady's little Star Wars guys and Aaron was doing the dishes. Yes, my husband does the dishes every night-I have him trained well! ;) Collin was playing a couple feet away and when he saw the Star Wars guys, he starts pulling himself over to us as fast as he could with that look of determination in his eyes!

Brady was making the characters talk to each other and one tells the other "Don't let that big baby get you!" So Aaron and I were laughing that he was calling him "Big Baby" like from Toy Story 3.

But "Big Baby" just kept coming and Brady kept pretending he was part of the little story he was playing out with his action figures. But then instead of calling him Big Baby he called him "Dark Poopie" (he says Dark Vader instead of Darth Vader)! So I guess we better call George Lucas and tell him about this new character!

Here's our little destructo bad guy Darth Poopie - photo taken by Brady!

What we've been up to lately....

It seems like time is flying by and I have no idea where it is going. Life has just gotten in the way of blogging so I have some catching up to do! :)
I've been busy working on some crafts and decorating projects and that's how I've been spending my days these long winter months.....
But I'm not sure how these 2 boys are growing so fast and just getting more and more fun to play with. Unfortunately, Collin prefers the night life (like his mother) and wants to get up and play in the middle of the night! We had about a month straight of him getting up anywhere between 2 and 5 times a night and then another month of him getting up 2 times a night. This is after he had been sleeping all night until 5 in the morning, eating, going back to sleep until 8. I think it must have been some kind of phase that he just wanted to be social because he didn't really want to eat and even if I did feed him, he wouldn't go back to sleep. Anyhoo......I think we're getting out of that phase since he has slept all night (9pm-8ish am) 2 times in the past week. Yay!! He is almost 7 months old and is getting around a lot!! He is eating all kinds of baby foods and I'm trying to fatten him up a bit. At his 6 month appt. he was only in the 11% for height and 7% for weight. We go back this week for another weight check. But really, do we expect to have a sumo wrestler baby? Not really, considering the size of Aaron and me!

Gets himself trapped in all kinds of fun places!

Brady is loving school still. He came home as the Cat and the Hat for Dr. Seuss's birthday.

And our new-found interest is the foxes that live in a big hole/drop off ditch behind our house. We've seen them several times back in the open field behind the house. At the end of our yard it drops down into some trees and such and then goes back up on the other side. We see them around dinner time usually before it is getting dark. And in the spring and summer I'm sure it will be more difficult to see them once all the trees and bushes start filling in again.

You can kind of see the little path that they have made running back and forth.

They are such pretty animals-all reddish with black legs and feet. It's fun to stand on the back deck and watch them. We've seen 2 different ones and one of them had a limp on one foot so he wasn't going as fast.

One night Aaron took Brady down into the woods to see what was down there while I finished dinner. That's our fence down there and then you can see where it drops off at. These pictures aren't that great but maybe one of these days I can get a nice camera with a really good zoom.

But it has been fun for Brady to see them and learn about them. I'm just glad our yard is fenced in completely or otherwise they might just want to make Bo their dinner!

Omaha Children's Museum

A couple weeks ago, we went to the Omaha Children's Museum with some friends and Brady really enjoyed himself. He even fell asleep and took a great nap on the way home because they just played so hard all day!
I have found it very hard to keep us busy with things to do when it has been so cold outside this winter. On those days, I get cabin fever and so it's nice when we can find a fun place to play inside for a change and a chance to get out of the house!

Shooting the water guns with Silas

Fire truck!

They had a huge campsite set up with tents, boats, a pretend fire and all kinds of outdoor type things. They boys absolutely loved it and played forever in this area. At one point, they both had on khaki vests, fishing hats and were carrying around fake leaf blowers. I somehow didn't think to take a picture of that part!

The ball room was Ca-raazy! There were all these different systems sucking and shooting balls in and out of everywhere! It was like a giant system of the bank sucker tubes! What are those things called anyway?

Some of them would drop out of the ceiling when it built up enough, others shot up out of this hole all over the place. It was a really unique thing. We could have spent many more hours there playing with everything. We'll definitely have to go back again. Maybe next time cousins come to visit us here we'll take them.