Happy Easter

Happy Easter everyone. We had a nice Easter weekend here with not a lot going on. Sunday morning, Braedyn got a little Easter basket and a new outfit (pictured here) and then we headed off to the Easter service at Reality which was held outdoors at the local high school. They had lots of fun bouncy castles and good food afterwards so it was a hit with Braedyn. We were able to snap this family picture before everyone got dirty!

 

Naptime

Braedyn wasn't wanting to go to bed for his nap eventhough he was exhausted. Then Dori decided that a nap looked like a good idea.

 

Dune Jumping

Another day at Carp beach jumping off of the sand dunes.

Happy New Year

Well we made it through another year again. We made it back home from our Christmas trip to Iowa, although we got rerouted to LAX because Santa Barbara was too foggy to land. Here we were all worried about snow in Iowa and Denver and then it's Santa Barbara weather that throws us for a loop. Oh well. We ended up grabbing a rental car from LAX and driving home. We we're going to rent a car in Santa Barbara anyhow as our Prius decided to not start the night before we left on our trip, we made it to the airport after a frantiv call to a local taxi service. The drive up was certainly foggy, but we made in good time since it was late on New Years eve. We gave a ride to another guy who was on our plane, it turned out he lived in Afghanistan working for an NGO, so he had some interesting stories to entertain us on the ride. We made it home safe and Braedyn was a little trooper the whole time.

We're looking forward to the coming year. We have lots of friends and family coming to visit and some trips planned to go see others. Come visit us if you don't have plans to yet! Braedyn will be starting pre-school in March after he turns 3. Dori will be turning 6 this year and is starting to like the beach more each time we take her. Not too much else planned for the year and no big resolutions here besides working on our tans and getting Talisha surfing. Happy new year to all, we hope to see you all this year.

Here's a picture from our New Years day outing to Rincon beach in Carpinteria (it's still foggy).

 

Sleeping

On our Thanksgiving trip we stayed the night at a hotel. After a long day of travelling and playing hard our two kids tuckered out pretty quickly.

 
 

Turbo Beach Sledding

Since we had the sled at the beach to ride down the big burm of sand we decided to take a walk and Braedyn wanted to ride. He has some sort of addiction to speed lately and is always yelling "TURBO!" to daddy whenever we are on the bike, in the stroller, riding on shoulders, or in a sled on the beach. I'll tell you what, sprinting through deep, soft sand pulling a sled with a 30 pound toddler is a good workout.

 
 

Dori

Yes, Dori is still part of the family. She mostly hangs out at home, but does go out for quite a few walks to the neighborhood park and other places. We decided to start taking her to the beach despite the bath that it requires afterwards.

 

Cleaning up

He already likes working in the garden, but Braedyn has been helping out around the yard a bit lately as well. Since our pine tree dropped all of its cones this week we put him to work collecting them. He started out getting them all into the container I put out for him, but then soon discovered that they were pretty fun to throw and so he proceeded to empty the container...

Dori

Dori is still around even though she doesn't get a lot of press coverage on the blog these days. On this nice day she was enjoying the sun enough to pose for some pictures.

 
 

Another beautiful weekend day found us off to another nearby parks, this time in Kirkland on the East side of Lake Washington. We took quite a few pictures so here is a short slideshow. Click here to see the large format slideshow. Click here to browse the pictures on your own.

Dori & Braedyn Video

Dori has always loved to play with her food. We always said she must be half cat. She chases after pieces and pounces on them as if they needed to be killed before eating. She especially loves it when we throw her food for her to chase, I guess it is like the thrill of the chase or something. Well, since Braedyn's been around, Dori hasn't gotten a lot of food throwing or other playing, so it was to her extreme delight to find out that this new addition to the family (Braedyn) was capable of playing with her.