farm pix

Went to our friend Elsa's 7th birthday party on Saturday. Elsa's family lives out on a farm in Manor. The kids had a BLAST! There were (count 'em) 228 baby chicks running out and about and all the kids (even Sage!) chased them, picked them up, put them on their heads, so on and so forth, eventually leading to many of the kids crawling into the coop :) We had glorious weather that day - for a split second, Darren and I wanted to ditch our suburban digs and move out to a farm ourselves. But then we remembered that we can't even keep our lawn mowed... We stayed a long time, and left with some couldn't-be-fresher cage-free, free-range eggs - yum!

Sage's first words

Ok, now that we have pics up, let me update you a little on what's going on around here, starting with Sage (since he has changed the most since my blogging hiatus). Sage is talking! Ok, just a few unintelligible (to others) "words". He says "DaDa" and "Momma" and one time said "bye bye" while waving - but Darren questions my veracity on that one. He is a prolific pointer, by the way. Points at everything, all the time, and uses the sound "dat?" with a point to pretty much mean that he is demanding said item. He usually puts an extra little quick syllable in front of "dat" so that it sounds like "i-a dat" so we always say he's really saying, "I want that!" Oh, and I forgot - he has a sound/word for doggie and he gets SUPER excited if he gets a glimpse of any canine happenings.

But the cutest thing he does - and I just got to see this for the first time tonight but he's been doing it for Darren for 2 weeks - is that he has started saying the, well, funniest phrase for a newly-speaking 13-month-old........"Foul Ball!" In a sing-song-y Darren-as-an-umpire voice (he's mimicing Darren, as Darren would always say this during this game of toss-the-ball-to-Sage-while-he's-in-the-swing that they play out back, whenever the ball flew far off). Only, of course, it basically just sounds like "owwwww aaawwlll". Super cute.

zoo trip

I took the kids to the zoo over Spring Break. Well, it's sort of a zoo - Austin-style :) Check out the site to see what I mean.

We had a blast there. Weather was gorgeous, the big two loved feeding the animals, Sage is entranced by pretty much *any* animal, so fun was had by all. We'll definitely be going back again with Daddy.

My son is a bottle-feeder!

Just a little lactivist humor....

(The easter egg hunt also had a petting zoo).

more Easter

We also had a hunt at our house....

Easter egg hunt

After church on Easter, we went to an egg hunt at a different church down the street from our house. River and Echo went to the 4-and-up section and Sage tried to duke it out for eggs with the much bigger toddlers in the 3-and-under area. Fortunately, Sage could have cared less about collecting eggs and was happy to suck chocolate *through* the aluminum wrappers and generally make a big fat mess of himself.

update, or "How come you created this blog and then never did anything with it?"

Ok, so as everyone can see, I sort of fell off the blogging wagon. Life got really busy for a while and I just fell out of the habit. We have had requests from you, our loyal audience, to actually, y'know, add stuff to it once in a while. So I'm going to skip over the zillion things that happened since the last posts - River's birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years', Sage's first birthday, Sage changing from an infant to a *toddler*..... so on and so forth. And just pick up where we are now.

Enjoy!