Ladies' Man

I saw this out the window as I was finishing up Thanksgiving dinner yesterday. I'm so glad Kim got pictures! :) Thanks Kim, you rock!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hello everyone! Hope you all had as great of a Thanksgiving as we did! We were fortunate enough to have several of our friends and family able to join us this year for a yummy meal and a fun afternoon! The first thing we did this morning was pick up two basic trainees from "boot camp". The base runs a neat program called Operation Homecooking where they get to go off base for Thanksgiving Day with volunteer families. After chowing down on some breakfast and calling home to chat with their families, they settled down for some time playing video games. Colin enjoyed sitting on the couch and watching them.
Somehow in the haste to get dinner on the table, I failed to get a picture of the turkey before asking Michael to start carving it, so you have to settle for my pictures of veggies and cookies while I continued trying out my new camera! :)
Colin spent the time leading up to lunch munching on carrots.
And Laura spent the morning keeping my kitchen clean! You rock!
Here's most of the crew getting ready to dig in.Colin loved everything, but really liked my cranberry sauce and kept asking for more!
Saying goodbye is hard to do and Colin had to give Lily several hugs before they left ~ so darned sweet!
He and Papa played lots of basketball this evening. I think his form is lookin' pretty good - what do you think, chance at the all stars?
What a great Thanksgiving Day ~ thanks to all of you who shared it with us!

Guess What?!?!

We are (still unofficially) headed to Dayton in August!!!

Michael got an email this morning informing him that the job he was interviewing for last week is his. He will be working on his PhD for 3 years and then teaching there for another 4. This puts us for sure in Ohio for 7 years, plus potentially another 4 after that! Wow!

New Camera, New Pictures

Not much exciting going on around here, but I decided to use the relative calm to start getting some practice in on my new camera. We painted with watercolors this afternooon. I got a few shots of Colin singing while I was getting stuff out.
I managed to get a couple shots yesterday afternoon too. I have no idea what he's thinking here, I was mostly trying to use the camera!
Here's the munchkin watching "a shark, a ray, a fish, a dolphin, a seal" on Planet Earth yesterday. He blabbers away about whatever is on the screen...utterly fascinated...

Today he actually asked to watch something other than marine life though. I nearly fell over when he asked for birds and bears. He always wants to watch oceans and Michael and I are sick of them! :)

Our Big Boy

It's hard to believe, but Colin is 20 months old! Here are some pictures we had taken on Thursday. The Harley pics were just for fun...he saw it and had to "ride bike"...if I had known, maybe I'd have dressed him in leather! Actually his whole ensemble was "accidental" as he got banana on the first shirt! Cute anyway...

Week in Review

Here's a quick recap of our week...

Last Saturday crawling through daddy's disassembled computer:
Look at those cute feet! :)Monday playdate at Emma's.Wednesday night, dinner at Adriana's (thanks Lauren for all the pictures this night...I apparently didn't even get my camera out!):Thursday, getting ready for portraits (which I will post soon):
Afterward on Thursday, playdate at base park:
The other mommas.Watching an airplane go by.Friday evening...funny story...
So Colin didn't take a nap Friday afternoon because before art day he snoozed for a bit. Therefore, at dinner time he was literally falling asleep at the table. He kept shoving more food in his mouth and saying "more bread" but his eyes were closed the whole time and his head was nodding. We were cracking up! When he realized we were laughing at him he started singing to keep himself awake, but it didn't work too long and he was back to nodding head and drooping eyes.

Finally he said he was all done so we quickly wiped his face and set him down behind his chair.
Where he promptly collapsed and fell asleep!
We left him there for a half hour snooze while we cleaned up, but then we were off to Best Buy where...
I got a new digital SLR camera! It was a birthday present from both our parents and Jon and Kristen! Sadly, Colin was zonked by the time we got home, so I only took at couple pics before putting the battery in to charge. Here they are though...on auto and lowest resolution I still like the colors better than my other one (which will probably still be my main shove-in-the-backpack-and-take-out camera for quite some time!). I can't wait to learn how to use! I'll try to get some pictures this afternoon, but definitely be expecting more in the upcoming weeks (one of the reasons I got it a bit early was to learn how to use it in time for holiday pics!). For now, here's one of each of our kids:
Wow, look at the colors: