Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

This past Sunday, it was peak high tide during our AM beach hours and with the erosion, there isn't much left to play with when the tide is high, so we had to make alternate plans. Enter Tregembo Animal Park. I had avoided this place based on what I'd heard about the poor living conditions of the animals, but decided it was time I experience it myself. While definitely not great, it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. Just hate to think of any animal spending their entire life in any form of confinement. Anyways, the kids loved it and we made memories.

Open your eyes, Crew!

Along for the ride

Photo cred: Danny

Like father like son

Goat photo bomb

Special pic for Ali, Dieter and Colin

Eight is Great

Last week Jimmy and I celebrated our eighth wedding anniversary at Freddie's Restaurante in Kure Beach (thank you Martha and Ron for the gift card!). I dropped all three boys at Island Time drop-in and then we scooted down to Kure in the golf cart. Food, lack of chaos and conversation were all amazing!

As crazy as everyday life is these days, it's still pretty sweet.

Always so excited to see mama at pick-up

Shoe shopping for daddy's birthday

Playing dress-up while I take a conference call

How is Crew - not even 3 - almost as tall as Danny at 5 1/2?

Love when I catch him still sleeping. So sweet and peaceful

As of late...

Gotta love the boxes Costco gives you to package your things. Speaking of Costco, I never thought I'd need to buy in bulk. Now I share my home with 3 boys and 1 man and to say I plow through food is an understatement. We're talking 4 boxes of cereal a week, a dozen eggs in one sitting, you get the point. And they're still little. Heaven help me when they're all teenagers...and have teenage friends.

A little Crew and Kingston time before naps and Danny gets home from school...

I believe this was a post a midday poop mess

At the Children's Museum for Ava's 3rd and Eliza's 1st birthdays. Love their mommy, Danielle, and it's so nice that Crew and Ava have been in preschool together and Eliza and Kingston are both about to start as soon as they start walking!

Ava was having none of my photo taking

Crew and his buddy, Nelson

Lastly, a little grocery shopping with my main man, Kingston. Love when it's just me and him out and I can pretend for a few minutes that life is that simple.

We Jammin

One of the most special moments of our weekends these days are our post dinner dance parties. It starts in the golf cart listening to music coming home, carries into the house and then usually continues in the outdoor shower as Jimmy gets the boys cleaned up and ready for bed. The photo series below was a jam session/dance party to a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert DVD. The video was epic, but stupid iPhone said it wasn't a supported file. Danny definitely has a flair for the dramatic.

In full costume

Cool Guys

These three boys are just growing up before our eyes and too cool for school most days. They're at each other's throats half the time and the other half just loving each other to pieces.

Blowing off his temporary tattoo. Such a tough guy.

Getting dressed for dinner. The usual suspects.

Loving his "wings" and crazy hair these days...

ISR for the Win

Starting in mid-July, I enrolled both Danny and Crew in what's called ISR swim lessons. If you look it up, you'll see that the program can train babies as young as 6 months old to self-rescue if they were to fall into water, essentially get to their back and float. For kids Danny and Crew's ages, it's about a swim-float-swim sequence, so essentially they swim with eyes open and "in",  or underwater vs. their head picked up, and then when they need a breath, they flip to their back and enter "starfish" where they can relax and catch their breath and then flip over to swim again. Instead of traditional swim lessons, it's really about survival, so their ultimate goal is to swim-float-swim to get to the wall, stairs, river bank or whatever. No goggles and just eyes open, because kids don't fall into pools with googles on! At the end, kids have to swim in the pool with clothes and shoes on because, again, accidents don't typically happen when you're nicely dressed for a day at the pool!

Danny mastered everything in 2 weeks and is now swimming the vertical lengths of pools like a little fish! He's really using the skills for more water play at this point, e.g. jumping off the wall, entering starfish for a second and then flipping over and swimming back to the wall to repeat all over again. He's also really into diving to the bottom for rings, etc.

Eyes in!

Textbook starfish

Crew being 2.5 years younger than Danny and quite a bit more spastic (sorry, but it's true!), took a bit longer to "graduate" with 5 weeks of daily lessons. What's crazy is the lessons are only 10 mins long, but it's so intensive that it wears them out. This was Crew after his first lesson. He refused to move off the towel for 20 mins. Wouldn't even pick up his head.

In the end, his technique is still not as "clean" as Danny's and he's not swimming per say, but he's safe. At my mom's pool the other day, he stepped off the steps and went under and got to starfish. From starfish, he flips over and swims to you. I'm going to continue working with him to strengthen his skills, but overall I'm happy with where he's at!

Crew with instructor, Amanda

Land starfishing

Proud of himself

At the end of each week, we incentivized with special treats. Here was the first Friday - tattoos from their instructor, Amanda, and Duck Donuts!