2. Love Troy’s shirt – and your photo wall looks great!! Sucks he had to go to work for nothing though.

3. The number of family photos you guys take is awesome. I gotta start doing that …

4. I’d be disappointed about missing the daVinci too.

5. Your Christmas photo postcard is on my fridge. :)

http://www.nga.gov/kids/tissot/tissot1.htm

(The light in it in person is AMAZING.)

Things I love in this post:

Dad who does birthday stuff before going to work.

Family portraits on b-days. Must implement that.

Pizza with lots of veggies and cheese.

Annalie being game to try the butterflies again, with a hat.

Annalie’s drawings — yes, just frame them.

That was not an exclusive list.

I also like the blog of randomness. I have done that before. Its shortish and sweet. :) A very nice way to catch up on what you guys have been up to! I am in the process of one of those myself. :)

That is a bummer about the butterflies. I know how Annalie was really looking forward to it!!

Cute drawings by Annalie. I feel that Zach is the same way. He is always drawing or creating something. The other day he was cutting and taping and next thing I know he has made a giraffe that can stand up. Have you thought about getting Annalie the blank paper notebooks? Just a thought.

One last thought- so not cool about Troy going all the way in, waiting, just to come back home!! UGH!! Oh well, at least he got to come back home right? :)

Glad to hear what you guys have been up to!

and I did smile about the butterfly pavilion! We have a butterfly museum that is about 1 1/2 hrs away – we’ve been once. My daughter loved it once she acclimated, but her brother was less than 3 when we went and it FREAKED HIM OUT. It was also super hot so that made it hard. It took him a good 30 mins or so to calm down and be able to sit and enjoy it but I think he was super relieved when we left! A hat is a great idea! My daughter would love to go (its probably been about 5 years since we last went) but she has another younger brother and he is really freaked out by bugs and such so I think I’ll either take just the older 2 or wait another year! I can relate tho – they had one of those bird aviaries that you walk into at the zoo a couple years back, where you hold out a stick for the birds to eat and sit on? That terrified me – all I could think of was that movie Birds or whatever it was! But I swallowed my panic and concentrated on taking pics of the kids and calming my youngest down (luckily we had the stroller so I kept him covered up). things that look like a lot of fun sometimes just aren’t for certain kids and people!

As for the drawing- my son insists on unlined paper now and will go through a stack of printer paper in a week if I let him! I’d frame the lined paper drawings. Back them with some brightly colored paper and they’d be fabulous.