Happy Memorial Day!

Hope everyone had a happy Memorial Day! We had a lot of fun! We started out the day with pancakes for breakfast, then went to watch our little small town memorial day parade - there's not a whole lot to it, mostly tow trucks, high school marching bands, and firetrucks, but we love it! :) Traditionally the parade ends at the cemetery where there is a ceremony at the grave of an unknown soldier. People lay dedicatory wreaths on the grave, and there's a 21 gun salute as well as a WWII bomber flyover. Josh and Claire took their turns standing in front of the statue with their hands over their heart, and saluting. I love Claire's salute :) After, they were handing out free ice cream, and "The-Obama-free-hotdog-man" man gave us all hotdogs on their portable bbq truck/float that drives around the city on holidays campaigning. I love this town. Later on we went and picked up some more flagstone for the path in our front yard, and then we spent the rest of the afternoon working on the house and in the garden. We had a yummy BBQ dinner and roasted smores in our firepit for dessert. It was a fun day!

Fun in the sun!

Josh and Claire spent all afternoon outside today playing outside throwing water balloons (nope, I don't have pictures of the balloons because we were at a friend's house and didn't have the camera!), and running through the sprinkler in our backyard. It was HOT!! Claire was funny trying to pop her water balloon to no avail! She just carried it around and would drop it, throw it, sit on it, and it still wouldn't break. Josh on the other hand probably popped 3 dozen singlehandedly!
Horray! The warm weather is finally here! Here's a short slideshow of some of their afternoon of sprinkler fun :)

Later I took this video of Claire dancing in the kitchen... she does this quite a bit, and I finally caught it on film! :) It's pretty funny, especially with the boots!

THREE !

Here are some spring pics of Josh and Claire!

Hope our baby #3, due september 24th, is just as cute!!! :)

ya. i guess this is my announcement.

Spring flowers

Here are some pictures I took of Claire in our backyard...
I'm glad we didn't trim that flowering shrub! Claire fits in perfectly with the pretty flowers.

... smelling the flowers

Thank you for the bead socks Aunt Lori! Claire won't let us take them off :) she loves them and requests them every day!

Horray for spring!

I'm trying to do better at blog posting.... but I'm really not that great on doing it on a regular basis! These 2 crazy kids keep me busy... as you can see in these pics I took today. The weather is just perfect right now!

Claire riding on the "wiggle racer". No matter what she rides on, she can only go backwards, so she usually ends up stuck on the grass.... then she sits there and says "help me! help me!" haha it's pretty cute. Still, I'm looking forward to her figuring out how to go forwards herself so I don't have to rescue her every 2 minutes! OH ya, and another funny thing..
Claire will NOT take off those rainboots! She loves them so much, and when we put on another pair of shoes she will take them off and go find her boots and put them on herself! She is a funny girl. She also has this funny obsession lately with diaper wipes.... they are comforting to her, like a security blanket or something! But they have to be fresh out of the package.... cold and wet. They can't be lukewarm and wet or dry. It's so funny and strange!
This is a pic from a couple of weeks ago when she scraped up her legs falling. Notice the diaper wipe and 2 fingers.... instant comfort!

Springtime means.. MUD! Josh's 2 favorite things... trains and mud.

A couple of years ago some friends who were moving gave this farm to us, and the kids love it! Claire kept throwing the cow out of the barnyard into the plants though... don't know why that cow was evicted.

... eating lunch outside... Josh still loves pickles! He ate about 4 huge kosher dills today!

Josh playing t-ball... this is the best shot I got of him in action.
He hit it quite far a couple of times.

And last but not least..... HAIR!!! Things are looking up for Claire-bear -no-hair! She has quite a bit in the back now, and it's really blond and curly... wonder where she got that from? :)
But she still has what appears to be male pattern baldness in the front... poor girl. We can only hope it will grow eventually... do they make baby Rogaine?

Dance Recital 2009!

Mother's day weekend was the dance recital again this year... 2 shows on saturday, and 1 on sunday. And it actually turned out quite well, but exhausting - a lot of running around backstage! So I'm glad it's over!

The recital theme this year was "Dance Theatre Studio - On Exhibit" and was supposed to be dances from different museum exhibit themes.

Joshua was once again in the preschool movement class this year, so we filmed his dance... it's pretty darn cute! His dance's museum theme was the Benjamin Franklin Museum and the music is "Let's go fly a kite" ... get it? Our camera was acting weird though and kept trying to focus on different things so it's fuzzy sometimes, and for the 1st half you can't see Josh that well because he's behind a girl, but then he moves to the front line and you can see him better. And OOPS his shoes were untied! Some dance mom I am! geez! At least it was just the dress rehearsal. This is the best video we have of Josh because our seats were pretty far back for the actual show. Josh was really excited because after the last show on sunday he got to take his kite home :) He even tried "flying" it in the parking lot on the way to the car... it wasn't raining TOO hard! :)

Check out his bow at the end... what a little stud!

The next dance is my senior girls' rhythm tap group... they really did well this year! I was very pleased with how the dance turned out. They are supposed to be representing the "American automobile museum" or something, hence the car theme - "dancing machine" song, mechanics coveralls (in hot pink nonetheless!), and car formation at the end.

Ok, so I put up 2 videos of their dance, but for different reasons. The first is the dress rehearsal, and it was taken from the 2nd row so you can really see and hear their taps clearly... so that's nice! However, they were still trying to figure out the lighting so that's kinda messed up, and one of my girls didn't dance the dress rehearsal because she was recovering from pneumonia and she was the front wheel of the "car" at the end. Still, it looks pretty good up close...

The second dance is actually from one of the recital performances... I think the saturday matinee. Everyone was there for this, so it's probably a better representation of the dance as a whole, but you can't see as much detail since it's further away. Half of them are graduating this year... very sad! I'll miss them.

Yay! you go girls! :)

Videos of Claire and Josh

I took these videos of Claire a couple of months ago, but they're so cute I thought I'd put them up... better late than never, right?

Jason is a boy scout leader for the 11 year olds, and is gone every wednesday night for scouts.
I took this first video while he was at scouts one night... it's pretty funny!



She was trying to explain it to me, because I CLEARLY did not understand :)

This next video was also taken about 3 months ago. She knows more animal sounds now, so maybe we'll do a follow up video sometime :)





And finally, Joshua's "Pizza Perfect" commercial.... haha