Oh brother...

The Easter Bunny-- he's very smart!-- he brought Aidan and Bryce Buzz and Woody dolls!

Happy Easter!

The Back Yard

More House pics

More pictures from our tour of the new house:

The Family Room (with Charlotte, our realtor)














More Family Room














Breakfast 'nook' (but it's a nook in name only)














The Kitchen (with me, impatiently waiting for the picture-taking to end and the contract-writing to begin!)














From the kitchen

Here comes Peter Cottontail!

Bryce and Aidan had a good time dying Easter Eggs this afternoon!

More House Stuff

Still house-obsessed this morning.. so here's a good picture of the exterior:



And here are the floor plans (thanks to the Beazer website)...

The View from the Chopper

In case you're wondering, from looking at this picture, if we just bought an empty lot.. you can rest easy, friends.. obviously this satellite image was taken before the new house was even built. The sellers built the place in April 2004, so it's truly just a couple of years old...
And despite my best intentions, as you can see I am, in fact, buying another house with a drainage ditch running across the back of the property.. but this one is much more scenic than our current one.

House news!

We've got some big news this morning..

We put an offer on a new house yesterday evening and this morning, it was accepted! So, if all goes well, we'll be moving into the new house in mid-July (the seller's are building a new house, hence the lenthy wait before closing-- but that's fine with us.. gives us plenty of time to work on selling our current house.

Pros-- about 700 more square feet, a great floor-plan, and an awesome yard just a short walk away from the neighborhood pool-- and best of all-- neighbors with TONS of kids Aidan's and Bryce's ages!

Cons-- Aidan had his heart set on a house with "two garages" (i.e. two garage doors).. this house has a garage built for two, but alas only one door. This afternoon, when we were showing him pictures of the house, he saw the door and said "But I told you that I wanted two garages!"

8 1/2 minutes of downpour

This just to let everyone out there know that, after about 8 1/2 minutes of torrential downpour today-- with reported tornadoes spotted in various spots around Middle Tennessee-- we've checked in with members of the family here in the area and all are safe and sound.

It was an unfortunate way to end an otherwise sunny and warm (in the mid-70's) afternoon in downtown Nashville.

The Great House Project

Today, it was books, books, books!
As some of you may know, we're preparing to move.
Haven't found a new house yet, but we put our current house on the market yesterday and have been, over the course of the last few weeks, going room to room, clearing and cleaning out closets, bookshelves, the garage, the back-yard.. the works.

Today, with many thanks to Aunt Patty for coming and keeping the boys busy, we made progress on the last major milestone of the project-- the downstairs bookshelves. We're sending out 5 boxes of books to a local used bookstore. Any that they don't take are going straight to Goodwill. And what remains on the shelves will be packed away to move with us to the new house...

Outer Space

The other night, at bedtime:

Aidan: Mama, have you ever been in outer space?
Mama: No.
Aidan: Me neither.
(silence)
Aidan: I don't want to wear a helmet when I go.

Crawlin' Tall Revisited..

A little blast from early last year... hopefully, we'll be able to put together some more of these little videos...
[Note: the video is pretty large (about 20MB), so depending on your network connection where you are, it may take a while to load)...

New Gadgets

Because it's really all about the pictures....

a little evidence of Aidan's handiwork with the 'PhotoBooth' effects on Gramma and Grampa's new computer...


And Mama and Daddy got a new little digital camera, a Canon SD450, and Bryce was very interested to see how he looked in the viewfinder..

See me in the camera!

Gramma and Grampa got a fancy new computer this week-- an iMac with a little camera planted in it (see diagram at left).
Aidan spent a good portion of this afternoon taking pictures of himself on it and laughing endlessly while we were trying to figure out how to start a video chat with Mama who was back at our house...
Photobooth, a seemingly trivial little program that lets you use fun-house effects on the pictures while you're snapping them... well, I think we got Dad's money's worth out of it just in the couple of hours that Aidan spent howling with laughter at images of himself with an elongated head or psychedelic rainbow colors...

"Bice"

Bryce started saying his own name last week...
I ask him "Who am I?" and he gets a big grin and says, with a bounce, "Dadd-ie!"

Then I ask him, "Who are you?" and he thinks for a second... and then he says "Ice!"
That was last week.
In the time since then, he's added the 'B'.. so now he answers, with puffed out chest and a giant smile "Bice!"

Roll-on!

Aunt Patty and Gramma took Aidan roller-skating this afternoon. Aidan really enjoyed it... he got some bright yellow skates and he did really well, even skating by himself on the carpet by the end of the afternoon!

Pancakes!

Well, it's Monday, but Daddy's home from work today, so we made pancakes this morning, and Bryce helped with the stirring...

Sheriff Bryce

Bryce put on the cowboy outfit this afternoon, pretending to be Woody from Toy Story, and galloped around the downstairs on his trusty steed, bulls-eye...

More snowman...

A few more pictures from this afternoon with the snowman.
(Bryce got pretty fussy and decided to go inside after we took the first picture, but Aidan decided to stay out a bit longer and take a few more):

Snowman Saturday!

After a couple of false-alarms regarding snow storms here the last few weeks (the boys have had TWO snowless snow-days from school so far this winter), we finally got about an inch of snow here in middle Tennessee this morning... so the boys got up, ran right out and we made a snowman... then, all wet and cold, we went back inside to have some lunch and hot cocoa!

Pirate Aidan

Oh yeah, Halloween's going to be easy this year..

Chef Bryce

"Come in, Star Command."

After Christmas, you may remember that Aidan was playing Woody from the Toy Story movies all the time, using the cowboy props from the great Dress-up Trunk that Santa brought him. This past week, he's moved on to Buzz Lightyear..
So now, whenever Aidan jumps out of the van, climbs to the top of the stairs, goes from the kitchen to the hallway, or pretty much does anything, we get a little Buzz:
"To Infinity.. and Beyond!"

He's also been walking around the house, prodding the pretend communicator button on his chest, and calling in to Star Command:
"Buzz Lightyear to Star Command. Come in, Star Command. Do you copy?"

Stand back...

A few weeks ago, Mama got Aidan a hooded bath towel that's shaped to look like a dragon..

So now, after bath-time, Aidan runs around the house, roaring like a dragon.
Mama: "Oh no! It's a big scary dragon!"
Aidan: "Oh, it's okay Mama," Aidan says, lifting the hood of his towel, "it's just me."

And occasionally, while he's running and roaring, he'll stop, turn to you and say, "Stand back. I'm going to breath fire!" And then he heaves a big intake of breath and blows a big imaginary fireball into the next room.

Costumes!

The Costume Trunk was a big hit at Christmas... here are a few more pictures:

"Emeril says 'Bam!'"

















"King Aidan"


















"King Grampa" helps Aidan to put together a new puzzle

Yee-Haw!

For Christmas, Santa brought Aidan a really great 'Dress-Up trunk' full of all kinds of great costumes he and his brother can put on and wear around the house.

Aidan's favorite movie lately has been Toy Story 1 & 2, so when he spotted the Cowboy costume in his new trunk, he instantly decided to be Woody... and his horse, just like Woody's, is named Bulls-Eye!

Here Comes Santa Claus!

Aidan and Bryce left out cookies and milk for Santa tonight before heading to bed...
Aidan had done this before, so he got it a little better than Bryce who seemed a bit confused that we were setting food otu on the table when it was NOT dinner time (notice he climbed up into his high chair thinking he'd be next to receive some cookies)...

"Hellooooo Santa!"

Through the wonders of the internet, we've been tracking Santa this morning, thanks to the good people at NORAD. According to their website, Santa is currently flying over Indonesia!

Aidan and Bryce are waving at the screen and Aidan's saying "Helloooo Santa!"

Sylvie, you're not a present!

This morning, Christmas Eve morning, Aidan came out of his room and, as he does every morning in the month of December, goes into the Living Room to check on our tree.
This morning, he found Sylvie, the cat, lying under the tree..
and he exclaimed "Sylvie, what are you doing under the tree? You're not a present!
[this picture is actually from Christmas 2002-- NOT a photo of the actual event-- but does prove that Sylvie has spent some time under a few Christmas Trees in her day]

"All I want for Christmas..."

Aidan and Bryce met Santa Claus at school this week... and Aidan very clearly told Santa what he wants for Christmas:


1) a train that moves by itself
and
2) a whole bunch of Wedgits

(Note to the family, we've got these requests covered-- don't take these as marching orders :) )

Potty Humor

Well, put this one in the "Wow, I wasn't expecting that today" File..

Bryce cried until his mother put him up on the potty and then, like as if he'd been doing it for ages, he went.

I know many, if not all of you, will be happy to know that I don't intend to post any photographic evidence of the event in this space.

And for those of you scoring at home, that's #2 doing a #1 in the top of his 20th month.

Jingle Bell Rock

Yesterday was the Christmas program at the little YMCA Pre-school that Aidan and Bryce go to. Aidan got a little stage fright when he got up there and saw all the collected audience... but then, as you can see from this picture, he got a little more comfortable when he saw his Mama come up to the front row to be near him...



And when I'm talking about the audience, take a look at this... notice the veritable wall of photo- and videographic equipment. Have you seen a more intimidating display? Looking at this, I can understand Aidan getting a little weepy at the sight of it!

Looking a lot like Christmas...

We decorated trees at our house and at Gramma and Grampa's this weekend..










and the boys both really got into the spirit of it!

.Mac site is updated

Go here for some new pictures from our trip to Knoxville and Asheville.
In Asheville, since so many in our group had still cameras, I mostly used the video camera.. so I'll be clipping something together from that in the next couple of weeks, I hope.
But until then, I'm hoping the family will send me all their pictures so I can compile them and post them for all to see... (Hey Brian, I'm talking to you!) :)