May crept up on me and surprised me, and now it's practically gone. Never ceases to amaze me at how fast time literally flies by. The boys and I have been keeping very busy, but mostly with fun stuff. Brian has been busy at work. He completed his second trial in 3 months. It's very rare he takes a case all the way to trial, but this seems to be the year for it. It's not like Law and Order when a case goes to trial and the witness still has bruises from her attacker :) It's years and years of filings and such and generally a summary judgement or settlement is achieved. We aren't used to having him gone for several days at a time, but as long as I keep the kids busy - time flies and he's home before we know it.
Our neighborhood pool isn't open but we seem to always find a cool place to get wet. Here the boys are at the YMCA. Leave it to boys to figure out how to turn a splash park into what looks like a giant stream of pee. So proud...
Here they are naked in the backyard. I think this is sweet. Carter has his hand around Cole's shoulder. He's showing him the flowers and trying to tell him which one is what color.
We still go to swim class weekly (Cole goes twice a week). Carter is doing beautifully. He has the freestyle down (it's not as pretty as an olympic swimmer or anything, but pretty darn good for a 4 year old). And now he's working on learning the backstroke. He was promoted to Swordfish at the beginning of May and has already acheived 60% of the goals the have listed. Cole is making great strides as well. Poor kid has huge fins to fill, as I say. He has been struggling, or shall I say fighting lately. He's so strong willed. Fortunately he's paired up with the director who is his instructor and is as strong willed as he is. We had a breakthrough a couple weeks ago and he will now finally float without kicking and splashing and screaming. He's even turning from back to front and vice versa to traverse the pool like he's supposed to. His favorite thing is to dive for rings on the bottom of the pool. Here's a video of him from May 11. This was just a few days after he stopped fighting his teacher. We've made a lot of progress since then as well. Though, he likes to hold the hair on his head with his left hand. He refuses to let go while he's floating. Hey, right now - I'm just glad he's floating and learning to swim. As opposed to sinking to the bottom of the pool! Pardon the fuzziness, it's through a two-sided mirror.
Carter's last day of preschool was on the 14th. They had a Super Summer Send Off Party. I was in charge of collecting money and getting the teacher gifts this year. I made a gift card bouquet with some potted Gerber Daisies. They turned out cute.
We normally drive when we go up there. It is roughly 1000 miles and takes us 18+ hours which we do in one day. One very long day. We had plans to drive again, but a good airfare fell my lap and we couldn' t resist. The last time either of us had flown was when Carter was 8 months old. And Cole has never flown. Leading up to the flight was rather anxiety producing for me. We aren't regular fliers and were flying on an airline we weren't frequent flier members of. So we were going to have to pay to have our bags checked. $50 per bag round trip. And since you can't have any liquids on the plane, I had to check all our toiletries which take up space. We ended up checking two car seats (for free thankfully), two big bags, and we carried on Brian's work computer and 3 smaller bags - plus we lugged around the kiddos throughout the airport! To say we had our hands full is an understatement. I got this shot of Carter laying on his carry on bag that Brian was pulling. But it wasn't the shot I wanted. Carter had been pulling it through the airport with Cole laying on it. It was hilarious. But by the time I got the camera out, the scene had changed and the shot was blurry anyway. But it gives you an idea of what was happening.
As it turns out, I didn't need much bribery. I bought a few new sticker books, brought the DVD player and our iPhones made for great entertainment as well. They were WONDERFUL on the first flight (2ish hours). 
The only mishap was on the second, short flight. Cole fell asleep with only 20 minutes left on the flight and his seat was leaned back. The flight attendant made me move it up for landing and it woke him up. He was madder than a hornet. He wanted so badly to fall back asleep, but just couldn't get comfortable. So he cried. The rest of the 10 minutes until we got off the plane. Coulda been alot worse.
We arrived in Indy to a cool 57 degree day and I worried we had under dressed for the week. It warmed up to the mid-80s and turned out to be beautiful in my book. Here is a picture of Carter with PeePa on his new riding mower. He loved it. I think they only thing that could make mowing the lawn better in Carter's book (his favorite weekend activity with Brian) is to do it on a tractor like apparatus. Lucky kid. It reminds me of when I was young and got to ride in Grandpa's lap on the land in his John Deere tractor.
On Sunday we drove up to South Bend to celebrate Ian and Parker graduating. I didn't get a picture of them walking down the isle, nor walking across the stage. As you can see, Brian and I had our hands full. Poor guys were so tired from a week with Nan and Pee Pa that they fell asleep. And they slept through the whole ceremony, screams and all!
I wanted a picture of the graduates together, but for some reason I got this one instead. Future ND graduates possibly ...
My camera went on the fritz for the rest of the evening. Bummer. I'll have to get some photos from Sissy and Ruppert. They had a nice celebration at a local Italian place after commencement. Nana and Papa came from Abilene as well. Mom and Dad drove from Houston. Erica and Jake came from St. Louis - and congrats to Erica by the way. Or should I say Dr. Erica - she walked on Thursday and received her PhD. We couldn't go to that, but everyone else did. It was nice to see everyone, but the boys kept us busy. So we barely got to catch up. Hey, I'll take what I can get.
We had some good food in Indy. Size seems to be a good descriptor. We cooked the biggest steaks I've ever seen - ribeyes almost 2 inches thick. And Nan found these ginormous marshmallows to make smores with. This is a half eaten marshmallow of Cole's - no joke.
We barely made our connecting flight in Detroit. We flew into gate C-34 - the end of terminal C. And had to fly out of gate A-75 the very end of a different terminal. Lugging 4 carry ons, two pillows, two kids and a full bladder - oh, yeah, being almost 7 months pregnant doesn't help either - across the Detroit airport in under 25 minutes is rather frustrating. But we got on just in time and made it home safely.
We are going to take it easy for a week and play catch up around the house. The long Memorial Day weekend is going to be nice. We wanted to go up to Austin and check out Mom and Dad's retirement house, their making great progress. But I think we'll stick close to home for a while.
While uploading some pictures, I came across a video and picture of our mini-vacation in March to San Antonio. Here are the boys laying the in the pack-n-play during quiet time.
Lastly, I end with an update on the baby. All is well. Chugging along. I'm a few days shy of 28 weeks and can't believe August will be here so soon. I haven't been sleeping all that well, but I'm getting used to it. We'll probably move the boys into one room this weekend. The bunk beds arrived and they're a big hit. Carter calls it their "bunker bed" and tells me that he likes sleeping on the "top shelf". Once we get Cole moved over I can reset the nursery and organize some closets.
Carter is excited about having a baby in the family. He prays for him most nights at bedtime, as well as some random other things like ceiling fans, monster trucks, and Cole's pacifiers that we don't use anymore. But the baby does get thought of often.. The other day we were talking about what a great family we have. I said we have a nice big family "with Daddy, Cole, Carter" He interupted with "Mommy and the baby". I added "Shiner" (our cat) and he promptly said "And God, you can't forget God. He's in our family too." Yes, sweetie - he is. I love my family.
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