A wonderful Spring

We've had a warmer than normal spring and haven't wasted a single moment of it.  Here are a couple of highlights from the last couple of months.

We went antique shopping in Hopkins one weekend and finished off the night with some yummy ice cream.  

Ladd practicing his usual chokehold love on his favorite brother.  Ollie's not super fond of it, but he's getting use to "tough love".

We have a new favorite loop we love to walk on Sundays by our house.  Recently we've seen frogs, turtles nesting, tons of wild flowers, deer, and we even brought home some ticks one night- and we haven't been back since.

One of the rare occasions that Doug let Ladd's stick be bigger than his.

Ever wondered what the symptoms of Hand Foot Mouth disease and a double-ear infection look like? This was a couple of days before I took him to the doctor and he was still dishing out the love.  And then Ladd picked up HFM  and from the looks of the pictures below his daddy is pretty lucky he didn't get it. We would have had a pretty miserable 2 weeks if my mom hadn't come to visit for a long weekend.

Shama Lene's visit.  

We didn't break out the camera much because the boys weren't feeling too good, but we still enjoyed playing outside and being together. The boys LOVED having their grandma come and can't wait to see here again.

At the end of my mom's visit we drove her down to Omaha.  It was my first car trip with the boys and it was exhausting.  Thankfully I had my mom to entertain them for the 6 hour trip to Omaha, but the way back was a little more stressful. 

 I planned a little outing to the Omaha Zoo before we made the trip back.  It was an awesome zoo and the boys loved it.  I loved that they slept for 3 hours of the trip home!

We loved the orangoutangs.  They were super interactive. 

More fun times outside- Really we can't get enough of it.

Fun-times inside too.  I hope Jocey's and Austin's mommy's don't think I'm too crazy for wrapping our kids up like burritos. I promise they begged me to.

Oh yes and this is from a couple of months ago, but we did a Family Home Evening focused on taking care of the world Heavenly Father created for us. We ended with a service project where we cleaned up the wetlands in our neighborhood.  I could hardly believe that we picked up 5 garbage bags full of litter in the area just behind us in the picture.   The kids were awesome and really did most of the work- especially little Lydia- look at that bag (on the right)!!