Back. Birthday. Boys.

My sister is in town for 10 glorious days. We don't get to see nearly enough of each other, and since both of us have stopped blogging, miss the little windows into each other's lives. So, we vowed to begin our blogs anew. I found that I use this blog as our family journal, going back to see what the boys looked like at certain ages or how big they were. I've missed a lot in the past year and probably won't go back to catch up (let's be realistic here), but hope to post a couple times a week going forward. So, without further ado ...

My cheeky monkey turned four this month. We had his party at our local YMCA and it was a huge success. Monkey is obsessed with Jake and the Neverland Pirates at the moment, so we had a pirate-themed party.  Mostly, the kids ran around in the gym, played with the giant parachute and bounced in the bouncy house.

Parachutes: my favorite part of elementary school gym class.

The kids raced around on these .... things.

And there was lots of bouncing.

Here's the spread. It was super fun putting everything together. We had "Pirate's Peg Legs" (pretzels), "Catch O' The Day" (goldfish), "Pirates Brew" (juice and soda) and whatnot.

And here was the cake. This was also fun. The beach was crushed graham crackers.

The Monkey had a blast and it seemed like our guests did too. Party: win!

Tried to get everyone to dress up in pirate gear. It had limited success. At least Monkey dug it.

I also missed out on Halloween here on the blog, so I'll toss in a few pictures from Halloween. 

The boys with our super-cool pumpkins. Jo and Mike came and spent several weeks with us again this year, so the awesomeness you see here is all due to Jo.

It should surprise no on that Cheeky Monkey was a pirate.

And Gummy Bear was a Jedi, a choice inspired by the fact that he got to carry a light saber.

And this isn't really a Halloween picture, but Cheeky Monkey is cute and he is wearing a skeleton shirt, so .... close enough.