Eli's Third Birthday Party

Eli's third birthday was January 31st, but since we were traveling on his birthday, we did his party in February. He has been really into trains lately, and he especially loves Thomas and Percy (which were recently introduced to him and Kolby when they got some Thomas toy trains for Christmas from my mom). He wanted a Thomas the Train party, so I made an attempt at decorating a cake with Thomas on it (it didn't turn out professional-looking or anything, but the kids liked it a lot). The main event at the party was getting out the train set and letting all the kids play with it (I think that at this age most of the kids are too young to really get into organized party games, and they are too much work to organize, so playing with trains seems good enough to me). And then he opened presents. You can see in the pictures that the coveted gift by the kids at the party was the ice cream cone that launched the foam "ice cream" ball into the air at the push of a button, from Jordan and Carter Hedgecock -- each kid wanted a turn shooting the ball. Eli loved all of the nice gifts from his friends and had a lot of fun playing with everyone and eating cake and ice cream. I love doing these little birthday parties for the boys, especially while they are so young and it takes so little to please them.

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February Photos

Here are some fun photos and video clips of the Bradshaw boys from last month. The video clips show Isaac laughing, Kolby playing the harmonica, Isaac eating rice cereal for the first time, and a fun game that Kolby, Eli, and Camden play. (I love this little game that they came up with -- it's kind of a mixture of Hide-and-Seek and Chase -- Kolby and Eli run into one room and hide in a corner or behind the furniture and Camden runs in and as soon as he sees them, they run into a different room to hide again and he follows, it's so fun to watch them play together).

The photos are of the boys playing with their train set, Eli on his first day of preschool (and Kolby's first day of school for this winter session), Eli with the trains that he got for his birthday from Grandpa Dick and Grandma Debbie, Isaac in his jumper, Daddy and the boys singing Eli's favorite song, "Wheels on the Bus," Kolby showing off his new favorite possession: his CTR ring from church [CTR stands for Choose The Right], Isaac after he fell asleep on the living room floor, and a few of all four boys together. It's so fun to see these pictures, especially the ones of all of my boys together, and think of what good friends they are (and will hopefully continue to be) as they all grow up together.

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'Christmas' in San Diego

These pictures are of the day we arrived in San Diego (January 5th). Since we were in Boise for Christmas, we waited until we got to San Diego to exchange Christmas gifts with the family there. The boys were very excited about their new toys!

Playing with the Lincoln Logs:

Nana giving them their toy trains:

Camden's Puzzle:

The Train Set:

(Thanks, Jenn, for taking these great pictures of the boys -- I still want to hire you to be my personal photographer!)

Odds and Ends from this Week

So, today is Michael’s ninth day in a row of traveling for interviews. I am very excited for him to come home late tonight. Since last Sunday he has been to Danville Pennsylvania, Milwaukee, Chicago, and he is in LA today. The interview that he missed last week in Spokane, Washington because of all the flight cancellations has been rescheduled for next month too. He has one more interview on Thursday this week in Salt Lake, and then he will be done until the beginning of January, so that will be a nice break for a little while.

I already posted several things this last week about Isaac’s trip to the emergency room and my car troubles, so there wasn’t too much more that happened this week that was very exciting. Isaac, by the way, hasn’t had any more problems since the day before we took him to the hospital – so I guess that he grew out of it like they hoped he would and he won’t be needing surgery. I’m still surprised that he recovered so abruptly, but I am definitely grateful that he did.

This week Kolby did get to go to a children’s primary Christmas activity at the church. He came home with a jar of chocolate chip cookie ingredients that he had put together. I was also able to take Kolby and Eli swimming at the YMCA again, and Debbie was nice enough to watch Camden and Isaac for me to do that. This time we spent a little time in the baby pool so the boys could play on the water slides, but we spent most of our time there in the kid’s pool where the boys practiced jumping in to me, doing ‘bob’s (dunking their heads under the water), floating on their backs, etc. so it was a little closer to what they are used to doing in their swim lessons at home.

I have been able to do a little bit of shopping this week. I got the boys’ Christmas gift the other night at the toy store. And I was also able to find some pants and white shirts for the three older boys so they have something nice to wear for the photos at Jennie’s wedding in a few weeks and they have nice new clothes for church. Before Michael left on his trip we found them all some really cute coordinating sweaters and matching hats. They are so cute that I had to schedule to have the boys’ portraits taken later on this week (they clothes are Christmas gifts, but I really wanted to have their pictures taken in them before they have a chance to wear them around and get them dirty). When we had our family photos taken last month we got a good one of all four boys except Kolby wasn’t smiling, so I am hoping to get one that they all look really good in this time. We’ll see.

Oh, and I think I am going to have to cut Kolby’s hair short. I have been growing the boys’ hair out for the last few months, thinking it might look cute in a little longer style. But it has started to hang in their eyes, so the other day I decided to trim Kolby and Eli’s hair. I trimmed it so it doesn’t hang in their eyes and I tried to even it out in the back so that it didn’t have that “bowl cut” look in the back anymore. It worked pretty well on Eli’s hair, but not so well on Kolby’s. I have been trying to bring myself to fix Kolby’s hair for the last couple of days since I did that, but I know that I will be sad to see him with a shorter haircut – they always look so much older when you cut their hair shorter. But I think I am going to borrow some hair clippers and see what I can do with it. I’m sure he’ll look great with a shorter cut – just maybe not so much like my baby.

This weekend we got to go to the church Christmas party too, which was a Saturday morning breakfast. Santa Claus was there and the boys all sat on his lap while I took pictures. This is the first year that Kolby was old enough to start to grasp the concept of telling Santa what he wanted for Christmas. He told Santa he wanted a train set with a special bridge. And when Santa asked Eli what he wanted, Eli repeated verbatim what Kolby had asked for. (I guess that makes it easy, since my mom found them a train set for Christmas).