The trip home

The extended arm shot before take off.

Landry passed out before we made it down the runway.


It was terribly windy on Tuesday, which scared the bejesus out of me. Camden LOVED it!

Landry also slept through the first landing.

Camden was easily bribed with suckers to behave during the second leg of the flight. What a great discovery!

Vacation photos of my boys

Happy birthday, Elliott!

Erin and Andy welcomed Elliott Anderson Smith into the world this afternoon. He weighs 8 pounds, 1 ounce and is 21 inches long. Congratulations, guys! We can't wait to see more pictures of the little fella.

Sarasota Jungle Gardens

On the way to the zoo.

Camden found a "shower". How do you like the harness? It worked like a charm!

This is Roxanne, and my butt.

Silly stuff.

Cool rider.

Camden got pooped out and decided to ride toward the end of the day.

Good girl.

Landry is 9 months old!

Our sweet baby girl turned 9 months old this morning. She has been a dream this week, which is greatly appreciated since Camden has been so difficult. (He's been sick and more irritable than we've ever seen before. Stupid roseola virus!)

Landry cut her second top tooth this week. We're up to four teeth now. She's still got the sweetest little personality, but isn't afraid to scream holy terror if you don't feed her as quickly as she wants to be fed. She's showing great interest in people food, so we've been slowly giving her tiny pieces of new things. She had some Spaghettios today! It looks like she might not be the picky eater her brother has turned out to be. We'll see how that shapes up.

A little note about Camden: tonight he took his new best friend, Sunny (a clown fish puppet), into his room and put him in bed. He told him "night night", closed the door and said "shhhh" as he walked back into the living room. It was pretty stinking cute!

Beach babies

We finally made it out to the beach this afternoon. Turtle Beach is nice and quiet, but the sand isn't all that great. It's really course, and VERY hot. The good new is that what it lacks in sand quality it more than makes up for in sea shells. I have never before seen so many shells on one beach. It's pretty cool!

Camden wasn't too sure about the water at first, but he eventually decided it was okay, until he got it in his mouth.

Here are a few photos from our day.

Safe and sound on the ground

We landed in Sarasota safe and sound this afternoon. The kids did pretty well - there were only a few crying fits due to extreme exhaustion. Camden sat by Pop Steve and I sat in the back with Landry. Neither of the kids would leave their ear plugs in, but the really loud noise didn't seem to bother them at all. It was actually a great way to drown out the crying fits! Landry made it about 45 minutes before she passed out. Camden held out a good bit longer, but finally gave into the noise and vibration. We decided to bypass the stop, so we made it to our destination in 4 hours. It was really nice to have the option to avoid commercial travel. We would've pissed a lot of other passengers off with our volume!

We're now in our condo on Turtle Beach settling in for the evening. Camden and Landry have both woken up crying already. They passed out quick, but then they woke up in unfamiliar surroundings and lost it. Hopefully we'll get that worked out pronto.

We'll check in later on.

p.s. It occurred to me today that calling the plane "the miniature plane" might offend the two men who bought it, so from here on out it'll be lovingly referred to as the subcompact plane. Now if we can just get Camden to stop calling it a tractor . . .

All packed and ready to go!

The kids and I will leave at 10 a.m. tomorrow to meet Blake in Sarasota. I've been all by myself since Thursday morning! The kids have both been waking up super early, but other than that they've been really good for me. We're going on the miniature plane, which makes me a little nervous, but we'll have two pilots on board and Steve, one of my fathers-in-law, will be with me to help out with the kids. That will make a huge difference in the way this flight goes. We intend to touch down in Ft. Walton for a break, but if everyone's happy (keeping my fingers crossed, but I'm not overly optimistic) we'll fly straight through, which I hear is about a four hour flight. Otherwise we'll take a little break and stretch it out a little longer. Wish us luck!

I'll take lots of beach pictures and try to post some while we're away. We'll be back on the 28th.

I hope everyone enjoys the remainder of the weekend and next week.

Note to self

Yesterday Landry cut her top left tooth. She also started covering her face by herself during peek-a-boo, or "Where is she?", as it's called in our house.

Pumpkin Patch '08

We went to the Pumpkin Patch at Asbury Methodist today. It was a beautiful day for it. Of course the kids wouldn't look at the camera at the same time, and rarely smiled (which is odd for these two), but we got a few cute pictures nonetheless. The booger pickin' picture is my favorite. That's some random granny in the upper-left.

Sorry for the blogger's block

When all else fails, post more pictures!

Blake left for Florida this morning. This was our farewell picture. We'll join him there on Sunday.

"Where'd he go?"

Camden has started showing interest in getting dressed lately. Today he was working on his shoes, but he kept trying to tie a lace from each shoe together.

Landry's trying to cut her two top teeth.

But we'd prefer her not to cut them on this.

She's still way interested in the sippy cups, but once we give them to her she just chews.

The simplest things become toys around here.

And sometimes kid toys become dog toys.

Sweet babies

From yesterday:

Landry's always smiling!

See?

Camden sometimes thinks she's a riding toy.

Precious blue eyes.

The most handsome dark chocolate brown eyes in the world.

From today:

"Throw me something, Mister!"

(Notice the new haircut - they got it a little too short up top.)

All my babies.

Landry didn't even make it to 6:30 tonight. She was beat.

I had a hard time resisting the bellybutton tickle, but I didn't dare wake a sleeping baby!