Sarah is 1 year old!

It's hard to believe a year has gone by already, but Sarah turned 1 year old today at 3:58 p.m.! Grandma and Grandpa Gordon came through on their way to Texas and stopped by for 90 minutes for some breakfast and cake. Here's Sarah with mommy and daddy!



Here are the birthday twins! Sarah is 1, and Grandpa is 65 ... er, I mean, 28!



Sarah gets ready to dig into her cake ... we turned her loose and she eventually got frosting all over her face.



Even Grandma Gordon got slimed!


Feeling a little queasy from all the frosting!

Party prep!

Sarah is going to be 1 year old tomorrow! Today she went out with mommy and daddy to pick out the wagon that Grandma and Grandpa Wynne bought for her! Daddy put the wagon together in 10 minutes, and Sarah LOVES it! It has seating for her and her future boyfriend, 4 cupholders, and it even has a canopy for sunny days!



Thank you, Grandma and Grandpa Wynne! XOXOXO!


Daddy was doing laundry, and Sarah kept grabbing folded clothes and messing them up, so Daddy took a break and decided to put underwear on his head and Sarah's! What a couple of wackos!

We are the champions!

The Brooklyn Park Pirates Squirt "C" hockey team went 3-0 at the District 3 Tournament last week in Blaine, winning first place! Noah is standing in the next-to-last row on the left side. Each boy and girl received an individual trophy, and at the year-end bowling party, Noah was voted "Mr. Determination." Way to go, Noah and the Pirates!

A busy household

Noah's good friend Connor really likes talking to Sarah and hanging out with her. We call him "her boyfriend," and he seems to like it! Sarah seems to like Connor quite a bit, too!


Connor's new cell phone drew a lot of interest from the gaggle of kids we had around one day last week. In back are Lucas and Caleb. In front are Lucas' friend Camron, then Connor, Sarah and Noah.

Big snowstorm!

Well, after nearly three years in our house, we were due for a big snowstorm, and we got it! This was our second snowstorm in a week ... the first one dropped nine inches, and this one left perhaps 14 inches in its wake!



Rich is tired of shoveling our driveway! Last night he came home from work and had to shovel away a foot of snow to get the Grand Prix up into the garage before the snowplow came by. Any more snow, and he's threatening to buy a snow-blower!


Snow piles.


Max, of course, acts like a great big puppy in this kind of weather! The snow in some places is up to his chin!

11 months old!

Here's a photo gallery of Sarah, who turned 11 months old on Feb. 18. To celebrate, she decided to do some modeling for her daddy and Grandma Gordon, who's in town to help out while Erin is in Mexico!






"Whatchoo lookin' at, Willis?"



Morning bed-head!


"Mommy, hurry home from Mexico so you can make my hair look pretty again! I love Daddy, but he has no hair, and, well ..."

Newest Boy Scouts

Last Wednesday at Cub Scout Pack 685's Blue and Gold awards dinner and ceremony, Noah and his Webelos den received their Arrow of Light and crossed the bridge from Cub Scouting into Boy Scouting. Noah's now a member of a new Boy Scout troop. Here he is with his pals and some of the members of the Boy Scout troop who inducted them. Thanks, Grandma Gordon, for the photo!

And now, "Deep Thoughts," by Jack Handey

Today, a special treat. I'm feeling wacky, so I thought I would switch gears and combine some favorite landscape photos I've taken in recent years with random "Deep Thoughts" by SNL's Jack Handey ...


"If you ever lose your car keys in a river of molten lava, let 'em go, because man, they're gone!"


(Cascade River State Park, North Shore, MN)


"If you ever catch on fire, try to avoid looking in a mirror, because I bet that will really throw you into a panic."


(Grand Marais, MN)


"Children need encourage-ment. If a kid gets an answer right, tell him it was a lucky guess. That way he develops a good, lucky feeling."


(View from Shovel Point, North Shore, MN)


"Better not take a dog on the space shuttle, because if he sticks his head out when you're coming home, his face might burn up."


(Newport, OR)


"To me, it's a good idea to always carry two sacks of something when you walk around. That way, if anybody says, 'Hey, can you give me a hand?' you can say, 'Sorry, got these sacks.'"


(St. Anthony Falls, Minneapolis ... Rich often walks across the bridge here on his breaks from work!)

Happy birthday ... doubly so!

Saturday was Lucas and Caleb's eighth birthday, and they invited six of their friends over. The original plan was to take all the boys to see the movie "Flushed Away," but after the discount theater refused to accept anything but cash, we ended up at (Up)Chuck E. Cheese. Afterward, we went back to the house for cake and presents.


Looks like the sugar rush from the cake and ice cream just set in!

Pilots meet-and-greet

Erin worked tonight and Noah and his Webelos pack went to visit a possible Boy Scout troop for them to join. So I took the twins and Sarah to Majors Sports Bar and Grill in Bloomington for a meeting of Minneapolis-St. Paul pilots who are involved in Jetcareers.com, a networking website for pilots. My camera doesn't have a working flash, of course, so the pictures are blurry. In the photo above, L to R, are gredenko (James), blee256 (Brian), Dazzler (Richard) and his wife and children, and Clumping Litter (Christine). We found out that I share my birthday with James and Richard, although they are much younger than I! We're all flight instructors, and Brian is a first officer in the CRJ for Pinnacle Airlines.


minnflyer (Rich) with Sarah, Caleb and Lucas.

Pinewood Derby time!

Tonight was Pinewood Derby night for Cub Scout Pack 685, of which Noah, Lucas and Caleb are members. None of our boys won their age group, but they did earn ribbons for participating!

Noah's car is the yellow one, Caleb's is the blue one and Lucas made the red one. The boys had help from Grandpa Gordon and Uncle Aaron (who helped form the shape of the cars), Erin (who got the painting started) and Rich (who applied the weights and put the wheels on. Rich also ran the race computer at the event, which kept the times for each car.

Here's one of the more creative cars that was at the race. Inside each eyeball was an LED that made the eyes glow red!

This car won "best of show" for its design and cool paint job.

Thanks for your comments

Just wanted to thank those of you who have commented on this blog and wondered why your comments did not appear. Well, it turns out that I wasn't aware that I had to moderate those comments in order for them to show up. I've gone back and added all comments I could find.

So keep those comments coming, and I'll do a better job of making sure they are added. Happy New Year!

Rich

Power sleeper

Sarah loves to take a power nap every morning. Today, it happened to be in the papa-san chair behind the computer where I was doing some work. I had put her in there with a couple of toys to play with, and pretty soon I heard some heavy breathing!


Sarah had her 9-month checkup recently and is doing great. She's in the 95th (!!!) percentile for height at 29 inches, and weighs almost 21 pounds. Dr. Manney says we should have five more just like her. OK, if he provides daycare and pays for college!

More Christmas at Bowstring pix

We managed to get everyone to sit still (sort of) for a family photograph!
Sarah with her cousins, Ella (almost 3) and Madeline (almost 6).
Grandma Gordon arranged for all of us to go on a horse-drawn sleigh ride through the forest last Thursday. We had fun singing songs and playing in the hay. Here's Noah and Lucas with one of the horses.

Aaron and Ellaina on the sleigh ride. Awww!
Today, Grandpa Gordon and Uncle Aaron drilled a few holes in the ice (which was almost a foot thick) so the kids could try their hand at ice fishing for the first time. Here's Lucas giving it try. Madeline caught a small perch!

Christmas at Bowstring

We've all been having a great time at Bowstring Lake for the Christmas holidays. Today everyone (except Erin and Sarah) went sledding at the big hill near Mosomo Point. It was the first time sledding for Madeline and Ella, and they loved it!
The sledding hill was pretty big, so Ella made her sled runs starting about halfway down. She's so silly!
Madeline and Caleb "doubled" on one sled several times. They got a little banged up, but that's all part of sledding!

Hockey's a breeze!

Noah was getting ready for his hockey game this evening, and I got to wondering how Sarah would look wearing his breezers. Well, here she is! She's had a lot of gas lately, so she gave new meaning to the word "breezers."

Beautiful weather!

Rich did more geocaching with Caleb on Dec. 13 ... it was 42 degrees, and still no snow! Noah and Lucas chose to stay home on this excursion, so we drove a few miles over to Maple Grove and found three "treasure" caches in Elm Creek Park Preserve, which has 15 miles of trails. We heard owls on the walk back to the van, and Erin had sloppy joes ready for us!

A fuzzy attempt at art ... the park horizon at dusk.

Caleb the geocacher

Caleb and I spent four hours today doing some geocaching. Put simply, this is a hobby done by people who own a GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver and have access to www.geocaching.com. You visit the website, get the coordinates of a "cache" near you, and then use your GPS receiver to go on a "treasure hunt" and visit sites where other people have hidden caches. Inside, they put trinkets for kids to trade and a logbook for the adults to sign, showing they were there. Here, Caleb is holding a "travel bug," which started three years ago in Madison, Wis., and has been moved from cache to cache, including as far away as Hawaii, Alaska and Texas. We're going to drop it off in a cache in Alexandria in a couple of weeks!

Squirrel-head

Sometimes Lucas wakes up and runs around in the morning with bed-head. Erin tells him, "Lucas, it looks like a squirrel fell asleep in your hair last night!"

Thanksgiving memories

We had both sets of grandparents over for a nice Thanksgiving. Here, Erin gives her dad advice on his wonderful Turkey Day meal.

Alas, Moby the cat didn't get to sit at the table with the big people ... or the little people, for that matter!

Sarah gets up close and personal with Grandpa Gordon. She loves to lean in and put her forehead to yours.

Grandpa, Sarah and mommy. Sarah can "low crawl" and is getting lots more mobile.

Cheeeeese!!!

Mr. Webelo

Here's Noah all ready to go to his next Webelos meeting. He's in his second year as a Webelo, and will become an official Boy Scout next spring!

At the last meeting, Noah earned pins for engineering, swimming, and his outdoorsman skills.

In this photo, Noah is wearing Rich's old neckerchief clasp from 28 years ago.

Strung out on cereal

"Oh please, please, PLEASE don't take away my baby cereal."