Celebrating the Big 3!!!

We had a lot to celebrate this past weekend and celebrate we did! We rang in Will's 3rd birthday in grand style on Saturday the 7th. With the help of about 30 of Will's friends (and their parents), Grandma Gigi, Aunt Jill and Matt, and Archer (naturally), we held a big birthday carnival in our back yard. The kids played ring toss, pin the tail on the donkey, etc. Aunt Jill painted faces and Keith even tried his hand at making balloon animals. That went surprisingly well...the kids ended up with something other than "eels". (Future career perhaps? Keith the Traveling Clown?) Grandma Gigi was nice enough to make an awesome clown cake for the party. It turned out so well! Everyone had a great time. Will really enjoyed being the center of attention for the day; he just beamed when we sang Happy Birthday and it was time to blow out the candle on his cake. Unfortunately, an overzealous little friend beat him to the actual blowing out of the candle. Luckily Will was too distracted to notice that he didn't actually get the flame out. It was pretty amusing to the parents though! Thanks to everyone for remembering Will on his birthday; this year was an extra special one for us!

On Sunday (Will's actual b-day) we packed it up and headed to the beach. It was a great day. Grandma, Aunt Jill and Matt all joined us and we spent all day playing. I was a bit concerned about taking Archer to the beach at only 4 weeks old but he was a champ. As you can see, he acclimated right away. Future beach bum in the making! Our day frolicking in the surf reminded us how much we love the beach.

Archer's doing really well. He enjoyed meeting Grandma Gigi and Aunt Jill. I think they were both smitten with him right away. :) We weighed Archer on our home scale at the 4 week mark and he was 9 1/4 pounds. Holy cow! I've now taken to calling him Jumbo Baby, but in a loving way of course.

Keith completed his time as a chemo patient and is slowly returning to his old routines. Unfortunately his white blood cell count is still too low to get back to flying but he's hoping it will have corrected itself by this coming Tuesday so his flight doc can get him up and flying. Just a side effect of chemo; it should be back to normal soon. And when Keith is back to normal (ie: in the cockpit) once again, life will be very good. He's getting ready to go to San Diego for a week and a half and I'm bracing for my first extended time alone with two kids. Fingers crossed that is all goes well. How bad could it really be? Just kidding! Here are a few more shots from the weekend.