Riley's First Tooth!!

Lately, Riley has been chewing on her fingers and drooling like crazy! Now we know why...
Oh, how we celebrate life's little achievements!

Warm and Sunny Breezes

Hello from Cancun! This is from our Selvatica jungle canopy zip line tour. It was a blast! Not totally first class but quite a bit of fun and the people were really wonderful.




They had about six different kinds of bridges you could go on across the canopy. It was really a lot easier than it looked.

This is Mom's first time taking a zip line down into a Cenote. She's really getting brave!
We got up to about 45 MPH with these little 4 wheelers. I think we actually caught air a couple of times. What a hoot!

Mom at the mangrove at Xel Ha. This is a great place to go snorkeling all day and just relax and enjoy all the tropical fish and sites to see.
A lion fish at 100 hundred feet swimming around a giant mushroom coral. It was amazing how warm the water was - 82 degrees and how much light there was that far down.
I got to swim with a big school of about 6 Bull Shark. They were humungous! About 7 or 8 feet and kept circling us. What a thrill!
I couldn't help smiling. What an adventure! This was taken at 100 feet. We just drifted with the current along a reef wall. Hardly had to even swim. I want to go do this AGAIN! Wow!!





This is the temple at Chichen Itza. We found out that if you clap your hands right where we are standing the echo comes back as a loud high bird chirp. Doesn't sound anything like your echo at all. We had a guide tell us all about it this time and it was really worth it to hear more about their culture, games, and customs. What an amazing place!

Some photos!

Riley's getting such a fun personality and I caught one of her silly faces!

Definitely a Daddy's girl!

Bray- Bray Talk

Braden: ah huh ackle!!
Translation: I have a motorcycle!!

Bray is now in the sweet rosy-cheek, pot-belly, with skinny legs phase of toddler-hood.  I love kissing that little belly! I almost caught it in zipping up his jammies the other night.:)  So cute.  And... good thing too.  He's also in the raid Mommy's kitchen drawers and pick apart the plants with the utensils found therein. arg... Drives me crazy sometimes.

Kid Picts 2011

I was going to go to Target photo studios to get some pictures of the boys, when my friend Jaime volunteered to take them for me.  I think what we got is far better than anything Target could have conjured!

 

Carving Pumpkins and Happy Halloween!

We've painted pumpkins before, but this was the first year that we've had Jacob and Braden help to carve the pumpkins!  At first they were pretty skittish about the pumpkin goo--my favorite part!  But as we got going it was so much fun. 

Braden seems to ALWAYS have his finger up his nose lately! Gross!

My favorite part is Jacob's drawing of the face he wanted on his jack o' lantern.  Jason cut it out exactly as Jakey drew it-- chin, ears, cheeks, facial hair, and all!


Sunday night at Grandma's house, the boys got to carve pumpkins again with Uncle Davis. He drew some faces for them and they got to pick out what went onto the jack o' lantern.

So Jakey decided that he wanted to be Darth Vader this year.  I don't think he realizes that Darth Vader is a villain.  He's only seen a few Star Wars clips, but he can sing the Darth Vader theme song, do the breathing thing, and knows that Vader has a sword, shoots lightning from his fingers, and can fly with his cape-- pretty cool!  After searching craigslist.com and finding some contenders, we were having dinner at Grandma MacKay's house when... out comes Jakey wearing a Darth Vader costume!  Davis had found their old costume box and with it some gems that I hope to have my kids wear one day (Jason's Karate Kid costume Raggedy-Ann, and an adorable poodle skirt to name a few!) 

Bray wore the dinosaur costume we had Jakey in when he was 2.  Braden was ALL about the candy.  I've never seen that kid with a tighter grip on a bucket-- he was so cute. 

Unfortunately, Jason had a work conflict that night. But, thankfully, the Takos's couldn't make their ward's trunk r' treat and so joined us. Christy and Zach took the boys for me, while I cared for the twins.

Cabin buddies reunited!  What a cute bunch of kids!

Silly Boys!

 So, this started out as an effort to get a close-up picture of the brothers...

Then we got a little silly...

and even more silly!

It was a very silly photo shoot. :)