Happy Birthday Papa!

Today we celebrated Papa Bryant's 70th birthday. We hope for many more great birthdays with you. We love you and love being with you.

So Long Metrodome

The boys enjoyed their last baseball game at the metrodome. The new Twins stadium opens six months from today. Today we take on the Tigers in a single game tie breaker. The winner advances to the playoffs. Go TWINKIES!

Danny is 4!

Where does time go? While we await baby #4 in just 2 weeks, our 2nd child is 4 today (Monday).

Oh it seems like yesterday that Danny had no hair (see below, and really he didn't have much for a LONG time!)...but Danny has always been a gaggle of giggles, his boyish smile, energy and laughter have been blessings to our family for 4 years.

He is becoming a greater big brother to lil' sis Allie, especially due to Tyler being in kindergarten all morning every day of the week now...he is "the man of the house" on Mon, Wed and Fri mornings!

Danny is in year 2 of preschool and has Ms Nancy, who Tyler had in year 1 of preschool. He likes her already because "She doesn't talk to me much.". Ah, kids.

Danny's biggest desires still seem to be anything physical ("Transformer fights" with dad and tyler), generally tackling, is a big swinger on the swing set these days, and this past summer has been making chalk drawings every day (yes, that is a lot of chalk).

Thanks to many family that were here Saturday for a party of sorts for Danny, he had a "great time, yeah" and Sunday went to Chuck E Cheese with Ava and Rowan, a school friend and the other a neighbor, for his "friends" celebration. What a weekend of birthday mania!

We love you Danny, happy 4th birthday!

Too big

Allie will not be left in anyone's dust. This week she climbed up on this two wheeler and took off. She loves to pedal down the slope to the corner yelling faster! faster! while I run/waddle to keep up. (Don't worry, she wears her princess helmet!) She hasn't figured out braking so she makes corners at top speed. And she sometimes gets distracted and starts to look around then veers off the sidewalk. She has no fear!

Zucchini

After having our fill of zucchini we decided to let the remaining zuccs grow to see how big they would get. We checked out prize winners at the state fair and think we may have come close. Especially since we ate all those from earlier in the season. Had we let those grow they would be larger than our van! We enjoyed using our muscles yesterday to heft them. Especially Allie who pronounced each one, "heby!"

Dirty, dirty, clean

Sometimes Allie just has to stop, take a moment and roll around on the ground. Today her choice of rolling location was the dirty, dusty depression just under one of the swings on the swing set. She could not have found a dirtier place for her roll-a-round. And as fate would have it I spent the morning scrubbing out the tub. It was clean, for a few hours, I promise!

3rd of July Parade

This third of July we put on our own parade. We invited some friends, decorated our bikes and our faces then rode down the block throwing candy at neighbors. It was very fun to decorate our bikes and make balloon hats (they didn't work so well with the helmets, though). We finished off with a hot dog grill out and backyard revelry. We might just make it a yearly occurrence!