Merry Christmas, so here is Christopher's birthday

Better late than never, right? Right?!
Anyway, here are some pictures from Christopher's birthday party back in November. It was just him and Ever, his friend from school. She's very cute and her mom and dad are very nice. We know that because they were impressed with our large collection of light sabers, and encouraged Ever to wield them along with our two JIT (Jedi in Training).

The big hit at the party was John's hanging bar. Ever impressed all of us by hanging on for a long time.

I think this was her very first time!



Look at that smile!




She could hang a long time, she was very strong! I think her mom and dad were surprised at how well she did and how much she liked it!







John showed off his tricks.





Christopher tried too, but he hasn't quite got the holding on part yet.



The next activity was decorating re-purposed Halloween Happy Meal buckets with stickers in preparation for a scavenger hunt. Miss Kerri reintroduced me to the joys of scavenger hunts for kids and we had one for Christopher. I took pictures of locations around the house. Christopher would go to the location and then Ever would pick up the toys. They were a great team.

After that we had fruit, chicken nuggets, and cupcakes!







Then the kids just played a little bit. It was a really good party.

John and Christopher later watched TV.



I actually had a 5K that morning before the party. I received the prestigious "first in age group because I'm the only one still there" award! It was really cold, and so only newbies stayed for the awards. Basically the race director read down the list of names to find people who were still there! Our friend Mark got best overall!




And I can't even remember how this evolved...





Happy Birthday Christopher! I can't believe how many smiles you've given us in two years!

A walk through the woods

On Thanksgiving day we went for a hike at the ironically named Mountain View Park. The boys took walkie talkies so they could stay in touch. We stopped by the lake to crawl through the mud and throw rocks in the water. We saw a train go by (daddy likes his new lens)...And got lots of exercise...

Denver Downs

Black Friday

John and Christopher saw Santa at Lowe's. He gave them "candy cans" (which is what John calls candy canes).

This and That

Here are a couple of random photographs from last month...

This is the only shot I got from "Hollywild" an animal park somewhere north of Greenville. We used a Living Social deal or groupon or something... It was ok, the drive was more than an hour, and it was kind of depressing. Not the worst animal park I have seen, but I felt like maybe they kept the animals on shortish rations so that they would eat for the patrons. Because that was the big gimmick. You get to feed a lot of the petting zoo type animals. Also, you drive to a big pasture in a school bus with the windows cut out, and animals come up to the bus and you feed them bagels, crackers, and english muffins you purchase there. It was definitely fun for the kids. There are buffalo, cows, zebras, steers, and other grazing animals. I was surprised to find out that they let the animals breed and there are interspecies crosses. I'm not any sort of animal activist, but I was a little ambivalent on this one...


These pictures are from a stretch when Tony was in tech for two weeks in a row, and I was just trying to get through until bedtime. I consider watching TV and eating the ultimate cave-in at our house. We now have one DVD player for each kid. It boiled down to that or else we would spend forever swapping the DVD player and Tony's iPhone...