Bella, Gabe and Josiah

The boys and I have been trying to get out of the house every day this week. Well, lets face it, I’m the one who is trying to get out every day... Monday I decided that we should go for a walk. However, when I made this plan, it wasn’t raining. So, um, that didn’t go as planned. But Gabe was excited to drink hot chocolate when we got home. Tuesday we went to gymnastics and the grocery store and nothing overly interesting happened, except that Josy blew threw a diaper all over my pants at gymnastics so I smelled like baby poop all the way through the grocery store... Wednesday one of Gabe’s buddies (not friends. Buddies...) came over to play. They had so much fun! I don’t know what they were doing, but they were upstairs laughing for an hour before I even saw them. I felt bad telling them to stop playing so we could go play at the park, but, well, it was a beautiful day and I didn’t want to spend the whole day inside. Today I announced that we were going to go to

These boys love each other so much. There may be some smothering involved, but it’s done in love. Also, I just washed all of Josy’s 6 month clothes. How is that even possible???

Somehow we became parents of an 8th grader. I have no idea how that happened...

We made it home, but here are a few more pictures of our last few days. There was lots of pool time, the Arizona Science Center, and snuggles all around.

Gabe and Bryson are best friends. It’s adorable. Actually Gabe woke up from his nap yesterday sobbing because he isn’t going to get to see Bryson anymore, but that’s a different story. That’s how life works when you live in two different states.... Anyway, we decided that the boys are big enough to have a sleepover. So Wednesday night Bryson spent the night over here and then Thursday night, Gabe spent the night at Bryson’s house. We had a great time. We introduced the boys to the ice cream truck, which just happened to come by while we were swimming. (Plus, is there a better way to clean ice cream off your tummy than just jumping in the pool???) We played and swam and ordered pizza and then everyone went to bed at a normal hour, with Gabe in the bed and Bryson on the floor. It was great! And then things got interesting... About an hour after we put all three boys down (and Pat had commented that we hadn’t heard a peep from the boys...) Bryson suddenly started sobb

Tuesday we checked out of the hotel and met Uncle Matt and Auntie Rachael for breakfast. We also met Asta, which was about as exciting for him as getting to meet an LAPD officer, who gave him a sticker. He had a pretty great breakfast... After breakfast we went to the Noah’s Ark exhibit at the Skirball Center. It was incredible! It’s hard to explain, but it was an entire Noah’s ark play area where each of the animals was made out of reused materials and you could play with all of it. There were treehouses to climb, storms to create, puppets, giant animals to manipulate and supposedly a rainbow, but we showed up on the wrong day for that. It was a lot of fun. After Skirball, we went and got a very late lunch and then wandered West Hollywood for awhile, before getting ice cream and saying goodbye to Matt and Rachael. Then we started driving... The traffic is terrible in LA. Everyone knows this. We knew this also, but in order to drive back to Phoeni

Sunday morning, we headed out on another adventure. We started off by meeting Seth, Katilyn and Bryson for lunch, along with Auntie Peach and Allen. Well, really, we had lunch with Katilyn and Seth while Auntie Peach and Allen talked to the little boys... After lunch, we started driving. We made it to LA in six hours, which was pretty good, considering that Josy eats every two hours and we had a three year old with a tiny bladder. But we made it without any accident and Josy didn’t start screaming until the last half hour or so. By then we were stuck on LA traffic and we were all hungry, tired and done. It was a fun end to the drive... We’d found a Paw Patrol sticker book for Gabe and we gave it to him about an hour into the drive. Um, best surprise ever. He seriously looked at that book for the entire drive. It was great! We got up Monday morning and left to meet Uncle Matt and Auntie Rachael for breakfast. Unfortunately the breakfast stop had two locations on

We went to Out of Africa! Gabe loves animals, but Phoenix is way too hot this time of year to go to the zoo. Instead we decided to go to Out of Africa, thinking it would be cooler. Um, it was not. I mean, it may have been a bit cooler, but without a lot of shade anywhere, it didn’t feel cooler... Temperature aside, we had a lot of fun. Seth, Katilyn and Bryson came up to join us. The boys got to feed camels while we were on safari, plus they were excited to see zebra, tigers, bears and lemurs. We saw a tiger show and got to pet a snake. We were supposed to see a giraffe while we were on our safari, but the giraffe had to go to the vet, so we didn’t get to see him. This was even more disappointing because they’d given us all a piece of celery to feed the giraffe and Katilyn had been talking about how you could feed the giraffe by putting the celery in your mouth, like she did the last time she was there. So not being able to feed the giraffe was pretty