Wedding

My cousin Kevin got hitched at the end of July, so I packed up the kids and took them on a road trip for the event! The wedding took place just outside of Cincinnati. I know what you're thinking: that sounds far away from New Jersey. Being the smart mommy I am, I checked Mapquest for directions. Turns out that Cincinnati is just over 9 hours away from here. That is a teensy bit over my self-imposed limit of 8 hours in the car by myself with all three kids, but I decided to tough it out anyway so we could see the fam' (Phil couldn't make it because of that job of his. If only we could be independently wealthy...).

Let me just say that Mapquest should have some kind of calculator that lets you enter the number and ages of all children in your traveling party. This is important information to have when calculating how long a trip will take. I'm just sayin'.

Anyway, the wedding was absolutely lovely, my girls did a wonderful job as flower girls, and Colin helped the happy couple decide to enjoy their lives together as a couple for a few years before adding kids to the equation. Just kidding, they didn't actually tell me that, but I'm pretty sure it's true. And we had a wonderful time catching up with family that we don't get to see nearly often enough. Weddings really are a wonderful reason to get together, aren't they?


The photos above were borrowed from my brother (and by "borrowed" I mean "stolen off of Heidi's Facebook page"), due to some dead batteries in my camera!

A whole year

Cake Face!

Our little tiny baby is one whole year old. It's hard for us to believe that he's this big, but he's walking, he thinks he's talking, he has little (or not-so-little) tantrums. Yes, he's turning into a toddler.




We commemorated his birthday by having a couple of our friends over this weekend. He seemed to enjoy himself and he was particularly pleased that there was a cupcake for him to eat. A few snaps from his shindig:

Mingling with the guests

Checking out his candle

Presents!

Present from Aunt Heidi and Uncle Bill

Present from Grandma and Pawpaw

He walks!

Colin was showing interest in cruising around the furniture so I decided to get a movie of him doing his fast crawling before it was too late (Wednesday):



Good thing, too! This was Thursday afternoon:



Soon we'll have a fully mobile and operational toddler!

The Keeler Oak

When we first moved into our house we noticed a big tree near our subdivision's retention pond. It was clearly old. Really, REALLY old. We didn't know it was about 300 years old, though, until I happened to find a little blurb about it on some obscure website that I found while surfin' the web. Upon closer inspection of the nearby tree we found this sign:

Photos really can't do this tree justice, but that didn't keep me from snapping a few anyway.









This area has such a neat history. It was so fun to discover some of it in our (almost) backyard!

Meatballs!

A recent dinner at our house:

Crazy bird

We live in a pretty quiet neighborhood. Quiet, that is, unless it happens to be very early in the morning or fairly late in the evening. Then we are privy to the songs of a somewhat crazy mockingbird. This particular mockingbird has a repertoire like I've never heard before. And he delivers his songs at max volume! Claire even came out of bed one evening, complaining that she couldn't fall asleep because of a loud bird outside her window! After reassuring her that it was just a sweet, overzealous mockingbird I went out to take a little audio clip of the fella. Here he is: