Brady was Uncle Pete's SHADOW while he was here.
We just completed Ramadan 2010 (woohoo! no one died from crazy drivers just before sunset!!!) and a lovely Eid break with my brother coming for 5 days before he made his way on to Israel to see a friend. The boys absolutely LOVED Pete. Brady and Aidan were basically his shadow for 5 days. "Uncle Pete go upstayas. Go upstayas?" and Brady would go upstairs where he would proceed to open and shut Pete's door to his bedroom, lie on the bed next to him as he was listening to arabic/hebrew, jump on him, etc. Aidan also got into the fun until we basically had to ask Pete to come into their bedroom before bed so we could wrangle them all into cribs.
Aidan and Gavin thought he was pretty rad too.
The day Pete was leaving the boys were finishing lunch as i was going to take him to the
airport. Brady says to me "Uncle Pete sit there" and I told him that Uncle pete had to go home and I was taking him to the airport then. Brady stuck out his sweet little bottom lip and his eyes got REALLY big and he says "Uncle Pete go airport? go airport?" i asked if he wanted to go to the airport and he shakes his head yes and immediately begins calling to "get down". so the entire family took Pete to the airport, even though Brady and Gavin fell asleep in their car seats on the way there, so they never got (had?) to say goodbye. it was very cute. Uncle Pete introduced them to cashews (we still get calls for cashews for snacks),peanut m&ms (only once, he didn't have them around later) and dragon fruit (bright purple fruit that doesn't taste like much of anything but MAN does it give good purple mustaches!). Basically they would eat or do anything Uncle Pete did or encouraged them to do. So sweet.
This was the entire family taking Uncle Pete to the airport. Brady and Gavin fell asleep on the way there and Aidan is trying to wake them up by holding hands! :)
Now that he is gone, his guest room is like when hotels put signs up like "Elvis stayed here" - we walk by in the morning to go downstairs and inevitably we hear "Uncle Pete sleep there". Yes, Uncle Pete slept there honey. :) We also have a ladder up to the top of our house which Pete climbed up to help try and find our ant invasion (literally hundreds coming through the ceiling in the bathroom and dying all over the floor. yuk). Since Pete left, Brady pointed out that "Uncle Pete go up there" and all three boys have tried hard enough to climb the ladder that we pushed the bottom rungs up (it's like a sturdy fire escape ladder in this respect) so they can't climb it/fall from it. I'm guessing this just means we will soon have crib escape artists. Right now they try to climb in the crib at night (well, really just Gavin because he wants to go to sleep, but Brady tried to climb in Gavin's crib tonight, and he nearly got his chest over the railing too!)
Aidan has such a purposeful walk when he wants to. Playing on the green spine in EC.
Curt and I had Tess and Arianna come in for a day so we could go to the desert with Pete (yes, it's still over 100 degrees F here during the day), see the local sinkhole and hit up an old fort we hand't seen on the north western side of the country. We had a great time playing tourguides while he was here, hopefully he had fun too. :)
Brady has discovered all the noise mom's heels make. This seems to be his favorite pair. And they make him feel pretty. :)
Gavin REALLY likes homemade popsicles.
Aidan likes to tuck himself into our broken cushion cover while Brady and Gavin look on.
Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum play in the pool (A & B). This an old dog pool given to us from someone whose dog was afraid of it. Lucky us! :)
The boys also got some new trucks from some friends here for their belated birthday. A group of folks (with a nice shipping benefit with their jobs!) pooled resources and got these AWESOME Tonka trucks shipped here for the boys. They could hardly believe their good fortune (neither could we - thank you guys!). :) And yes, they are such good toys that at least one had to be taken from them the first day due to fighting over what the other brother had. THAT'S how you know it was a good one! :)
