Sweet Abandon: A little bit of life

That's what we've been doing around here. Living, breathing, loving, laughing.....and a little crying (or a lot per Bennett, I think he struck a new record for longest and loudest screaming fit today. And all because I wouldn't let him drink out of a water cup that was his friend's from earlier this morning....and it was most definitely the stupidest of stupid ideas for me to offer him a nice, sparkly clean cup of his own....)

So yes, we are living a lot of life lately. And some of that living came in the form of Cole finishing up his first round of swimming lessons. He did awesome when it came to the swimming part.....and not so awesome in the listening and obeying part. Someone found himself sitting on the edge of the pool in a "timeout" because he wouldn't stop splashing his teacher. In his defense, there were 2 other boys that seemed to feed off of each other, but he probably should have wound up sitting on the edge of the pool more than just the once. Way to make your parents look good kid!

At least he did some flexing to warm up before class....kind of made up for the splashiness....

Or not, but his teacher kept commenting on how relaxed he was while floating on his back, and said that was pretty unusual for first time class takers.

And he passed, and now we are gearing up for round two probably within the next month or so.

Last week we had a day where we actually had no plans so we ventured out to go explore some of our new surroundings. And went to go hike a national wildlife reserve. Who knew there were so many cool places practically in our backyard. Cole loved it and kept talking about his "adventure" and grabbed a pamphlet, read the directions, and told us to be on the look out for Polar bears and Hippos.....not sure what wild, antarctic safari he thought he was on, but we went with it. And we all kept our eyes peeled, just in case.

While we didn't have much luck on hippo sightings we found lots of turtles, birds, a rat looking thing, and two beautiful deer that sat munching away just a few feet from us.

And here is our little adventurer, loving running wild in the great outdoors.

He was quite unhappy when we had to turn around and make the trek back to the car, and kept trying to convince us to go find more turtles, and no, he didn't need a nap, and that sure, daddy was perfectly fine hiking around with Bennett on his back and him on his shoulders (peace of cake).