Happy Birthday, Grammer!

Happy birthday to Grammar!!! We had a nice lunch and afternoon celebrating her birthday.

It was a nice afternoon celebrating the big 8-0 with the family!

Disney on Ice & the Fair

Whew-I love a good trip to the fair but I wasn't quite prepared for the marathon fair trip this year!!

Avery and I started the morning at her school walk-a-thon.  I walked a couple miles with the crazy kids and left them to finish their laps and afternoon at school.  I picked Avery up a little early to go to the fair and Disney on Ice!

We met our friends for some rides, fair food, and a little petting zoo fun.

We had scored last minute tickets to Disney on Ice with our neighborhood friends.  $24 worth of sno-cones later...

Afterwards we hung around the fair and the kids rode some more rides.

Avery's little feet hanging off on the right

Watching a video of themselves on a ride

Benny and Gwenny on the bees

We had a great but exhausting time!  I was definitely feeling like Ben by the time we left.

Butterflies

Avery got one of those butterfly gardens for her birthday, and after much pestering I finally ordered the box of caterpillars.  After a few days we had chrysalides, and a few days after that they hatched into butterflies.

Avery was SO excited to come home to butterflies.  She named them Speedy, Buzzer, Lazy, and Crubmly (ahem bent wings).

You have to release them after a couple days.  Avery took poor little Crumbly directly to the garden

where he could live out the remainder of his days among the marigolds.

Haircuts, Soccer, and an Old Friend

While we were at the lake, Ben was getting his first haircut.  His crazy hair was startling to look a bit scraggly:)  He looks so big and handsome.  Apparently he did well enough to earn tow Dum-dums:) Papa did a great job.

I got to spend some one-on-one time with him at the children's museum.  He had so much fun.

Soccer has been going well the last two weeks.  Last week he actually engaged and participated from the start!  Usually it takes about 20 minutes of rolling around, running off, or just lying down on the ground-unresponsive-for him to come around.  The coaches do a great job of trying to engage him.

Avery was reunited with her old friend Brody from Cross Timbers (his brother is in the program as well).  It's been over a year since they've seen one another and they were super shy.  It was adorable.

Our old friend Ducky is back.  If you recall, he was lost forever (or so we thought), allegedly thrown from a moving vehicle.  Well, Mimi found him behind something in her garage.  Ben was so excited to have him back again.  It's like he never left-he's back to being his constant companion.

So proud of our little guy and how he's growing and changing.