Eleventeen is a magic number

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The site’s been down for a while. I finally fixed it last night. So here are some miscellaneous pics from this summer.

Here’s a picture of Chris on his way to Afghanistan. He left last week and will be gone for a year.

He’s the fifth soldier back, the tall one!

We went to Fayetteville for a long weekend to visit Ange’s brother, Chris, and his family. It was lots of fun to see the kids play with their cousins.

Back in the middle of December, Matt & Penelope hosted our second annual West Vine Bungalows Holiday Party. Ange made Mira a beautiful dress to wear to the event. She looked like the pretty little princess that she is.

Melissa is visiting so I took today off work and we went Christmas shopping. Then we picked Riley up from school early and when we got home we decided to give him a haircut like Daddy’s.

Since Ange posted at the end of October about Riley not being interested in books things have changed. Now he’ll go find a book (without being asked to), bring it over to you smiling, then he’ll turn around so he’s facing away from you and back up to you and plop down in your lap. “Riley do you want me to read this book to you?” – “Yeah!!!” And he usually sits still for the whole book.

Well usually. He often eats more than Mira! And he does this really cute thing when you offer him food. He opens his mouth wide and sticks out his tongue. The other day he wasn’t interested in food so he was playing in the kitchen while we finished eating dinner. I thought I’d offer him one more bite so I loaded up a fork and offered it to him. From all the way across the kitchen, he opened his mouth, stuck out his tongue and started toddling towards me.

I know, I’m a bad parent – “read to your child everyday!!!” But I haven’t really read that much with Riley. He wants to eat the books, poke Mira in the eye, play with zoom zooms, go outside, but sit still for a book? Not so much.

This morning, though, I was sitting on the living room floor with Mira, reading a book when Riley sees us and boom! he toddles over and sits down right next to me and PAYS ATTENTION TO THE BOOK. Then, he crawls into my lap to get a better view. After a few pages, he’s up and gone again, but I thought it was so cute how he sat down, just like his sister, and listened for a little bit. Knowing Riley, he may have been trying to push her buttons, or was perturbed that I wasn’t giving him my full attention, or maybe he was just interested in finding out what we were doing; but still, it was great to sit with both my kids and read to them. Now, if I could only find some really cool books on cars, diggers, and such, we’d be in business.