Easter Sunday in Phoenix

We flew out to Phoenix this year for a joint Easter/Anniversary celebration. Brady kept a journal of most of our vacation days. This one is "Ubout Sunday":

James' parents were celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary on Easter Sunday.

All dressed up and ready for the days' festivities:

Goofy poses...seems to help us get a few good pictures squeezed in!

Checking out their eggs after the egg hunt:

After church, we went to Rawhide, a "western town," complete with cowboys shooting "real" (cap) guns and all. We got to see a Western shootout show, and the kids got to try a few other activities...

Brady riding Bert, the burro:

On the train ride. This took us through a miniature western scene, complete with a ghost town and abandoned wagons. Rudy and Cooper narrated the entire time: Brokened. Brokened. That's brokened. Brokened. LOOK! Not brokened! Brokened...

Cooper went to jail. (Brady and Rudy refused to go in!)

Brady tried the rock wall. He really stuck with it and tried several times. He was very proud of his effort!

Follow the leader with Uncle Dan:

Each of the boys picked out a cowboy hat as well. (Brady and Rudy wore these most of the rest of the week!)

We had an amazing family-style dinner that night at the Rawhide Steakhouse. There was live music and the boys did some dancing after we ate:

We also watched this cute little social interaction. While the boys took a break from dancing, a bunch of girls went out on the floor. Cooper, who is quite the extrovert, settled right in with them. This is him, saying something like, "Those are my cousins!"

Rudy, and his casual approach...Brady never did venture over. Someone pointed out that one of the girls was his age, which made him even more determined to not want to go!

Overall...I hope it turned out to be a good anniversary!

Pre-Easter celebration

We visited my parents over the weekend for a little Easter celebration. We got to spend a lot of time with Brian, Rebecca, and Lila too. We're really getting to know Lila recently, and she is such a sweet little girl :)

The boys even got to do an Easter egg hunt. You just can't have enough practice, right?

Coloring and decorating Easter eggs:

And a little soccer with Uncle Brian...

A cockroach and a bookworm

After we tucked Rudy in tonight, he called me back upstairs. I went into his room to see what he needed. The critically important thing he needed to tell me?!?

"This is a cockroach."

While I was upstairs, I checked in on the other one too. Brady has turned into quite the bookworm. We've even been letting him "stay up late" to read with a book light. We're actually just putting him to bed a bit earlier!

He's very interested in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid book. I think it's a little too hard for him and that he misses a lot of what's going on, but he loves it and hates to put it down. He didn't want to stop reading for dinner last night and had several small meltdowns about having to put his book away!

First day of spring

We took advantage of a beautiful first day of spring on Saturday by heading out to our favorite hike with friends. It was a great day for a hike, and the kids loved having their friends along! The waterfall was the biggest we've seen it.

Amazingly, no one fell in...

Rainy day ensemble

Rudy loves picking out his own outfits these days. His trademark already is the mismatched socks, which you unfortunately can't see behind the rain boots here. I don't even bother pairing his socks anymore, because he unmatches them to combine a white sock with a dark sock.

Look, Mama, they're blooming!

Office drudgery

We've put some old laptops to good use...we set them up for the kids. Rudy loves "typing" on his, which consists of his fingers flying across the keyboard to write a bunch of jibberish.

Brady has actually been writing notes and sentences. His is hooked up to the printer, so he's been able to print them too. We're working on getting his email set up so he can send and receive messages also!

Happy St. Patty's Day

We were running late this morning, so I pulled some clothes out of Brady's dresser without much thought to the date. As soon as he left for school, I sat down at the computer and realized what day it was and had a major mom-guilt moment...What kind of mother was I, to send him to school with no green on St. Patrick's Day? Especially since he talked all day yesterday about how he HAD to wear green today.

I felt so bad that Rudy and I drove the sweatshirt in to school. Crisis averted! We at least covered ourselves by having lunch with Brady, which was a nice treat for everyone.

This afternoon, the boys had art class and then we had a traditional St. Patrick's Day dinner of Chinese food. Odd. Our neighborhood has monthly dinners at the clubhouse, and tonight was a Chinese buffet. Guess we'll have our corned beef tomorrow :)

Yard work...the beginning

We have a long way to go with the yard work, but we got a small start last weekend. We raked all the old, dead grass out of the front yard and spread new seed and fertilizer. We put the kids to work relocating the raked up mess. They look miserable, don't they?!?