The Lost Tooth

Nathan lost his 7th tooth this morning. With the ones pulled by the dentist in May, we now have 3 gaps in his mouth. He has been having a hard time eating with two teeth loose. I'm not sure what he's going to do now. Since he lost one of his two front teeth, he now has an "accent". You know the one where the s's just don't come out right.

We had been placing bets on when it would actually come out. Jason's bet was Monday and Nathan wanted to prove him wrong. I guess he did. Nathan woke me up at 4:50 this morning to tell me his tooth fell out. From his description, it sounds like it literally fell out and there was no pulling involved. I guess it was ready. He's got the tooth beside it loose as well, but it'll probably be another month before it comes out. Anyway, here's the new Nathan, toothless and all.

Busy week!

We've had a very busy week. We went on vacation from Sunday until Thursday. We had 2 days to rest and prepare for Brandon's 5th birthday party. For vacation, we went to San Antonio. Sunday we started our trip by going to Natural Bridge Caverns. Nathan is really into rocks and we enjoyed our tour 150' below the surface. It was about 85 degrees with a humidity of 99%. It was a bit warm.
Monday, we spent our day at Sea World. We watched the shows first, Shamu, the Sea Lions, and saw a penguin exhibit. In the afternoon, we fed some Lorikeets and then went to the water park. Nathan would've had us spend the rest of the day between the wave pool and the lazy river. Brandon would've preferred to spend his time at the kiddie watering hole.
Tuesday, we went to New Braunfels and Schlitterbahn. Our first ride was the Whitewater Tube Chute. We didn't know what we were getting into. Brandon was terrified. There were rapids and drops, and it wasn't for weak swimmers. We didn't start the day out very well. The rest of the day was basically spent in the lazy river, wave pool, and kiddie watering holes. The last ride of the day was the Family Blaster. It's a pretty neat ride, but we stood in line for 45 minutes for all of about 60 seconds of fun. Fun is a relative term as Brandon didn't like this one either. As far as he was concerned, we shouldn't ride any rides. :(
Wednesday, we expected hurricane Dolly to show up. The weather forecasters had us scared off of getting involved in any day-long activities. She didn't show her face until about 6:30pm. We went to the Mexican market in the morning, where Nathan had Steak & Eggs for breakfast. We then stopped by the Alamo for a quick photo shoot. We stayed in the hotel most of the afternoon.
Thursday, we traveled. We went to the Natural Bridge Wildlife Park in the pouring rain. We then made a stop in Lockhart, Texas and Smitty's. They are list in Texas Monthly as a top 5 BBQ restaurant in Texas. It was very good. It wasn't anything fancy, but it was some good eatin'.

Then, we have our Brandon's 5th birthday party. We had quite a crowd. I'm not sure how we got so many people to come to the party. We had 38 people total with 15 kids. They played on the waterslide and in the pool for the first part of the party. Afterward, Jason grilled us up some hamburgers & hot dogs. Brandon then opened TOO many presents and had a giant cookie cake. Lastly, we hit a dinosaur pinata until it gave us our goodies. I think that Brandon had a really good time and I hope all the other kids did too.
That ends our busy week of vacation. I need a vacation now to recuperate. But, it's back to work this week....

What is this???

Having kids can be challenging at times. Having two boys, I think, can be a little more so. There are times that we come upon some invention, experiment, or just plain mess that cannot be described. The photo above was what I found on the coffee table just a few days ago. In case you can't tell, it's a corral of some sort for dinosaurs. The fencing is made of toothpicks and marshmallows. A few minutes after this picture was taken, I walked back by. The marshmallows were gone, but the toothpicks remained. I guess someone got hungry.




The next picture is an example of what I found one day after being on the phone with a business colleague. Yes, that is thousands of pieces of Fruity Pebbles cereal on the floor, sofa, table, and pretty much everywhere else.



Speaking of experiments, one day not long ago, Brandon decided to do an experiment. I will say that he is the one that typically starts them. Usually, they consist of water, some other object (play-doh, candy, soap) and then a cooking or freezing technique. This one was a plastic bowl with water, paper clips and a piece of cork and he was putting it in the toaster oven when I stumbled on him. Thank goodness I caught him in time! He also does this with the microwave oven and the deep freeze out in the garage. One of the experiments was put in the microwave with 20 minutes on the timer. By the time we smelled the burn, only a few minutes had passed. We got lucky on that one too!

Our duck

Our duck showed up in our sandbox on the evening of May 9, 2008. Nathan & Brandon were playing in the sandbox and suddenly, Brandon said, "Nathan, I see a duck!" Nathan didn't believe his little brother. Then, Nathan turned around and saw the duck. Nathan then ran to tell Daddy that there was a duck. Daddy said, yea, a toy duck. Nathan said, "No, Daddy, a REAL baby duck!" It was really cool.

For the first few weeks, Duckie stayed in the house in a dog carrier. Later, we built Duckie, a "duck coop" where she now resides most of the time. Last weekend, we thought that Duckie had left. We were all sad. She left the fence and went over to the neighbors' house and just hung out for a couple of hours. We discovered her and brought her back home.

She likes to take a shower with the sprinklers or someone hosing her off. She likes to eat grass and bugs. She loves to swim in a pool of water. She sits on our back porch and poops a LOT. Her wings are getting bigger and she is practicing her flying. Last night, she got about 6 feet in the air, but didn't go anywhere.

This morning she was eating grass out of Nathan's hand. She kept begging for more. She is not afraid of Nathan & Brandon, but she's not fond of Jason or me. She and Missy get along most of the time. But occasionally Missy gets a little crazy and starts chasing Duckie all over the place. She is usually bad when we leave them alone outside together.

Our blog

I decided to try this since I can't ever seem to update the boys' website and have basically given up. We'll give this a shot and see if we can't update it with an entry at least once a month. Initially, we have several topics that we can post and we'll get those up shortly. Wish me luck at keeping this current!