Happy Birthday Boys!

Scott and Tate celebrate their birthdays today - Scott at 32 and Tate now 2 years old! I retold Tate's birth story to him this morning ... the old "at this time of day we were doing this, etc." Tate was born at 11:35am (incidentally the same time as Tyler) after a pretty quick and easy drug-induced and epidural accompanied labor. He's the only of our children who I thought fit their name from the beginning. He was a little man and Tate seemed perfect.
He was a great birthday gift for Scott who joyfully volunteered to share his birthday. This is also the birthday of Scott's grandfather, Robert Fox (Tate Fox's namesake) who died in 2004 and my grandmother, Dorothy Osborne, who died in 2003. So, all said, it's a pretty special day for our family! I took Scott out last night for a little dinner and arcade game-playing and this morning we started the day with birthday candle cinnamon rolls and Tate's first time to be measured on our growth chart.

Cupcakes

In leiu of an actual party, Tate brought cupcakes to our playdate today. As you can tell, there was quite a bit of icing!

Can He Fix It? Yes, He Can!

Here are shots of the five of us at the Bob the Builder show at Lynn Meadows yesterday. The kids got to make their own toolbelts, edible constructions and wooden birdhouses.

Jeh (Yes) and No!

Yesterday, while Scott and Eben were out playing golf, I had a little conversation with Tate who will turn two this weekend. Here are a couple of our conversations(by the way, we're dog-sitting this week) ...



If you'd like to see the entire conversation (it went 11 minutes so probably only the grandparents are THAT interested!), you can link to them on youtube. See Part I and Part II

Helmets

To keep from losing any more teeth we upgraded Eben's helmet ... And, of course, Tate had to try it on too ...

Smile!

Eben did an amazing job with his surgery today. No problems and was really thrilled to be doing the whole thing. He told me he was asleep during it but he still remembered it so I guess the medicine did it's job! I took him before hand and let him pick out some treats which included: jello, Root Beer Float ice cream, superhero popsicles, chicken noodle soup and Mexican soda.

Tonight he'll have his first visit from the tooth fairy who will find a ring box decorated with monster truck stickers and holding three separate pieces that fit together like a puzzle to form a tooth!

Tyler in Nevada

Tyler hit a big milestone this summer, making her first solo trip with Nona (Scott's mom) to Nevada. They went to visit Scott's grandmother, Bammer, and were really busy doing all sorts of fun things in the process. Here's a slideshow I stole from Nona's blog to show lots of the things they did:
(also note the loss of one of Tyler's front teeth - she has a new smile!)

Monster Truck birthday

I just realized I never posted pictures from Eben's little birthday party. He had multiple celebrations - one being with Scott's family while they were in town and then another a week after his birthday with some of his friends. Here's pictures of the festivities ...

Busted

On Wednesday night Eben's front tooth said hello to the sidewalk while riding his bike. As a consequence, he will be saying goodbye to his tooth on Tuesday! For the following pictures on this blog you'll be seeing him missing his left front tooth - it was fractured in three places and will be pulled making a nice, premature spot for his grownup tooth to move down in a couple years. Here's his injured tooth - in a few days I'll post a shot of his new smile!

Bye Bye Summer!

Now that school has started, vacations are over and Labor Day has passed, I guess it's time to say goodbye to the summer! I LOVED this summer even though it was so crazy! As a farewell, here are the kids with their final ice cream cones of the summer!

Gustav

On Labor Day Gustav came to visit! To celebrate our first real hurricane since living here, we boarded up the house and hit the road. We chose Natchez, MS as our destination, visiting friends the Bates who lived here running disaster assistance after Katrina. Turned out we had very little damage here, just some fallen tree limbs and short loss of power. In Natchez we had a great time, ate great food, swam and spent good time with friends. However, it turned out we were without power for half the time we were there! How ironic!

Brothers

Tate and Eben are slowly beginning to have a relationship not completely based on violence. Occasionally they now play with eachother and get in trouble together. Eben is training up Tate in all things "boy" - making great sound effects, jumping in puddles and riding bikes. It's so great to see them becoming occasional friends instead of purely enemies! Here are lots of pictures and videos of them lately ...

I love the hair in this first picture:



Helping (or hurting) their relationship, Eben finally moved in the "boy" room! When we first moved into the house Tyler wanted him in the room with her and then he became a bit of a nomad and moved during the night between our bed, Tyler's room and a sleeping bag on our floor. He was finally eager to move into the room with Tate and we put him back in a toddler bed. Here are the boys together in the bed after we built it together:



After staying inside while Tropical Storm Faye came through, we were ready to get out and jump some puddles. This was a first for Tate and really, probably the first time in Eben's memory ...





Finally, here's a video (yes, I was driving and filming at the same time) of Eben singing his favorite song "Joshua 1:9" from VBS this past summer. He loves to sing it loud and with motions. Here you can also see Tate joining in and then being abused by his brother - all in good fun!

Second Grade

In mid-August, Tyler started the second grade. Here's a picture of her that morning - CAN'T believe she's in second grade and about to be seven!