Trick or Treat

Although Justin and I aren’t big fans of Halloween, we were excited to get Tristan dressed up in his Michigan State football costume (aka…recycled birthday outfit) and let him have some fun in the front yard handing out candy.

We were bummed when only THREE trick-or-treaters came to our doorstep! I couldn’t believe it! We usually have tons of kids and teenagers stop by….and this year only three?! Which of course means we have a huge bowl full of candy leftover! Scary!

Here are some pics of our cutie playing in the front yard this Halloween night…

Only three trick-or-treaters?

Oh well, more candy for ME!!!

Shower for the Little Buckaroo!

Our lifegroup girls had the privilage of hosting a baby shower for our sweet friend Alicen and her little baby boy to be! Since she’s using a cowboy theme for his nursery, we had the best time going country for our newest little cowboy! Yeee-haw, I love a reason to celebrate!

Come on in and take a look around….

And the proud mama to be! I LOVE throwing baby showers, I think mostly because of the sheer joy on the new momma’s face as she opens all the precious, tiny things for her little one!

We love you Alicen! I’m so excited to add BOY #7 to our group of little buddies! And if you’re reading this now, please pray for Alicen and sweet Baby Aaron. She’s in the hospital right now with a bit of high blood pressure. We’re praying God will keep and protect both her and Aaron until he’s perfectly ready to come meet us all! And hopefully keep him a-cookin’ a few more weeks! Love you guys!

Pumpkin Patch with our Boys

So Tristan got to share his birthday with all his favorite boys (well, not quite all, we miss you Jack!!!) in our first venture to the pumpkin patch! We couldn’t have asked for a better way to spend the day! You should have seen us, a real sight to see. Six moms, seven boys and two on the way, five cameras, and two strollers going in every direction! I know we’re just going to laugh in the years to come when we look back and see how crazy life was with little ones. Sweet memories.

We started off our adventure by feeding the animals. We each got a cup of feed and got to show the boys the longhorn and goats.

The boys were pretty amazed by all the animals and probably would have been perfectly content here all day. But oh, no. What do mommies want? Cute pictures of course! And so began the madness in the hay and pumpkins!

First attempt at the all-boy pic! Makes me laugh now just thinking about it. You got Ryan saying “I’m outta here”, Parker’s crying because he’s bonked by Brayden, Brayden’s crying because he doesn’t want to sit, poor Caleb’s not even fitting in the picture and Tristan is crying probably because he wants his mommy! And Jacob, the oldest, is looking at all these babies like “yall are crazy!”

We quickly decided it would be much easier if the mom’s joined in on the picture! Great thinking Lindsay! Watch the progression of the pumpkin in Jacob’s lap!

Oh, and did you notice sweet, happy, smiley little Colby!? The youngest and most content, not phased by any of the other boys shananigans! Just as smiley and happy as ever! I cropped Tristan out of this pic with his frowny face because Colby’s smile was just too darn cute!

So after we got the boys all fussied up with our picture attempt, it was time to give them a treat with the fun hay ride through the farm! It was an absolutely beautiful day too, we couldn’t have asked for better weather!

And then the reason we came, we got to go out into the fields and pick our very own pumpkin to bring home! Of course we couldn’t let the moment pass without one more try at the all-boy pic too! Better than the first, the wagon helped contain a few of them at least! I love this picture of Megan taking pictures of Parker! Captures what all us moms were doing most of the time there!

Thanks boys for a fun day at the farm! I look forward to many more years worth of pumpkin patch trips with our boys!

Tristan’s Real Birthday

Tuesday, October 20th our little Tristan Dean had his actual first birthday. After all the celebration the weekend before I’m sure he was part wondering, why are you still saying Happy Birthday and making such a fuss, and part just happy to still get to celebrate and do special things!

We couldn’t wait until Tuesday to let Tristan open his “big gift” from us, so we let him open it the night before. I think Justin and I were more excited about it than anyone. Tristan got a new basketball goal for his playroom. Justin had fun showing him how to slam dunk!

Then, Tuesday morning we woke Tristan up early for a special birthday breakfast before daddy headed off to work. You can tell he wasn’t too thrilled about being woken up at 7am, dressed and people singing at him so early! I think he was in a bit of shell shock. But he did love his birthday waffles! Yum.

Blowing out the birthday candle!

We also let him open up a couple more presents. He loved his V-tech laptop! He always wants to play with our computers, especially when we’re using them, so we figured we’d see if he liked his own “toddler friendly” version. I think it was a hit.

Then, quickly after, Tristan and I and our other six lifegroup boys and moms headed up to the pumpkin patch in Celina. I’ll do a whole separate post on our time there, but what a perfect way to spend Tristan’s birthday, with all his closest buddies! We had a great time! After a full couple of hours at the pumpkin patch, Tristan and I enjoyed a birthday lunch from Dickey’s with his favorite mac-n-cheese. And a little leftover birthday cake to top it off! Still just as good!

After a good, long nap, Tristan and I took a trip to play up at Celebration Park. We were sad our Rowe girl friends couldn’t join us because of stinkin’ fever! But we had a fun time anyway swinging, sliding and playing with the woodchips.

Justin and I had planned on taking him to Chik-fil-A for dinner, but at 5:30 Tristan was letting me know he didn’t care WHERE he ate, but that he was READY to eat. So we scrapped that plan and made T happy with an early dinner and some playtime at home with some of his new toys. Daddy’s pretty good with the new mega-blocks…our favorite was this mega block Vegas!

We love you sweet boy! It was so fun being able to celebrate your FIRST BIRTHDAY in so many fun ways!

U2 Concert!!!

So before all this birthday madness began, Justin and I got to sneak away for the night to go to the U2 concert a couple of weeks ago!  Marc McCartney, who Justin works with at Bluefish, bought tickets for their leadership team at Bluefish and the wives too!  Thank you again Marc for such a fun treat!!! And even better, the concert was in the new Cowboys stadium which was fun to be able to see for the first time.  We had a blast!  The only down side to the whole night was the lady in front of us.  You’ll see her below, we just had to take a picture of her intoxicated self standing up, yelling and dancing completely off-beat to every song, the entire concert!  Made for some good stories anyway! 

    

Thank you again Marc and Robin for such a fun night!

After Party Pics

We were so blessed to be able to have both Tristan’s set of Grandparents come in to celebrate with us! From Abilene, to Austin, to Michigan, they all made the trek down here to love on our little guy.  Thank you Gigi and Pop, and Grandma Jill and Grandad for coming to make T’s day even more special! We love you!!!

       

PARTY-TIME!!!

So we really had a blast with Tristan’s first birthday party, and the best part is he did too! He handled all the craziness like a champ and loved playing with all his best friends. Our idea was to have a laid-back cookout with our lifegroup and family at our house, watch some college football, eat some cake, and just hangout. The funniest part was trying to corral all our seven lifegroup boys for a group “football player” picture in all their milk jug football helmets. Hilarious. I have a complete and total respect for people who can take good pictures of babies, especially more than one at a time! Everyone who was huddled around watching was laughing at all of us crazies trying to get some cute pics. It didn’t take long for the boys to tell us enough of this, let’s go play!

Time to Eat!!! Justin fired up the grill and we all enjoyed the gorgeous weather outside and watched the Texas/OU football game. Of course all the moms ended up with all the babies in the playroom in pure toddler mahem! I didn’t get near enough pictures of everyone else hanging out, I guess I was having too much fun just enjoying everyone!

Eating his birthday CAKE – Yum!

After lunch we gathered everyone around T’s special birthday chair and sang him a little Happy Birthday. I thought he’d be overwhelmed by this, but he proved me wrong! Must be like his momma and love the attention! Although he was a little shy with it at first, it didn’t take too long for Tristan to realize this was GOOD stuff!

Sic’ Em Bears?! Okay!

Here we go…

Mmmmm, can mommy have some too?!?

The party ended with a little more hang-out time outside, especially with our family. Wesleigh made Tristan look like a real football player with his tough-guy black lines under the eyes!

No wonder where he gets his loud mouth smile from! We couldn’t stop laughing because Tristan was getting such a kick out of Wes, she did a GREAT job!

Thank you to everyone who came and made Tristan’s First Birthday so special! What a great day Justin, I and Tristan will always treasure!