Beginning of May

Anthony and James found a bunch of grasshoppers in our backyard, so of course they decided to catch as many as they could and put them in a spare aquarium! Can I just say, these things seriously gross me out. They look and move a little too much like cockroaches to me. I am counting down the days until these things die and we can clean out the cage, but James loves them. They like to gather at the top of the aquarium and hang upside down with their little insect feet (gross!), and James' favorite thing to do is to run up to it and bang on the lid until they all fall to the bottom.

For some reason, James has been talking a lot about roasting marshmallows and even pointed them out to me at the grocery store. It doesn't really get dark until after bedtime, so we decided to just go ahead and do it in the middle of the afternoon. We figured, why not? Roasted marshmallows taste good at any time of the day! James decided that he didn't like his with "fire on it", so he would take one, put it on a skewer and eat it off of that like a Popsicle. 

Our stake put on a Father/Son campout for all ages last Friday and I convinced Anthony to take James. They only went for the evening and didn't sleepover since Anthony works Saturday, but they had a blast together! James was so excited, I told him that he could run around and collect sticks and play in the dirt. He thought it sounded amazing! He was very concerned that there might not be marshmallows there (which was very important to him), so I put a bag of them in their stuff just in case. Here they are, ready to go have some fun!

Rett was upset about being left inside the house while I took the picture and I think he didn't like them leaving without him because he had a few minutes of this after I came back inside.

He perked up after he realized he could play with all the toys without James taking any away from him. We played for a long time and ate a quiet dinner and had a quiet bath. It was amazing just how quiet it was without James in the house. I had almost forgotten what it used to be like before he learned how to talk.

Anthony texted me this picture while they were gone. Apparently James zonked out in the car almost immediately after they started driving. The campout was about an hour away, so he had a nice nap in the car before they got there.

They got home around 10:30pm and James could not stop talking, he was so excited to tell me about all the things that they did. He informed me that they helped set up tents, jumped over horse poo-poo, saw lots of ant piles, and he got lost at one point (!). When I asked Anthony to clarify, he said that after it was full dark, James ran away from him with a friend from church and then he lost track of where his friend was and ended up alone in the dark. It didn't take too long for Anthony to find him, thankfully. Of course, James wasn't worried at all. He said that he was having fun looking for ant piles.

Saturday afternoon we got to drive down to Cocoa to celebrate Dallas and Nevada's birthday! It was such a fun party, everyone had a great time. James spent a lot of time on the big inflatable water slide, although he insisted on sliding down cautiously so that he didn't splash in the water at the bottom. Kid is determined to never have water on his face. Ever.

Rett loved their homemade ring toss game. I definitely need to recreate this at home, it entertained him for at least 30 minutes! He would put the rings on, then take them off, then move the bottles, then put the rings on, then move a bottle, then get more rings, etc...

I completely spaced and forgot to put them in water clothes, so when Rett decided he wanted to play with the water, I just went ahead and took his clothes off. I love that cute belly!

After a break for a diaper change, Rett decided it was a good time to eat some popcorn. I had a bag for him to eat from, but he had other ideas. He ignored my bag, picked up a discarded bag on the ground and started filling it up with popcorn from the floor and then eating it. Sigh. I pretty much have given up on stopping my kids from eating things off the floor. It's not worth the hassle. They almost never get sick, so I figure if it was going to make them sick it would have done it by now.

When it was time for the party games, James half played and half observed. He wanted to play, but I think he was also a little intimated by how much older and bigger the other kids were. They were all really sweet and patient with him though, I was really impressed! They did a water-in-the-sponge relay race and a water balloon relay race. The water balloon was too heavy for James and he dropped it, but luckily Aunt Robin clapped for him and told him he won so he ended up excited about it :)

Then it was time for presents and cupcakes! The cupcakes were on the table, waiting for everyone to sing happy birthday after the presents, but this little stinker got past me and grabbed one before I could stop him. You can't come between Rett and his food!

Robin packed a special goody bag for James right before we left and he had so much fun going through it on the drive home. It was such a good time playing and visiting with family, we love celebrating with them!

We have been watching and waiting for the blueberry farm near us to open up for blueberry picking. I saw on their Facebook page that it looked like they would be ready soon, so we had to get serious with figuring out what to do with Rett. If we let him walk, we don't trust him to stay next to us and it is pretty easy to get lost in the tall bushes. We decided to try out this backpack carrier we bought for hiking with James and never used. I tested it out and it looked like it was going to work! (As a side note, when I was looking for shade to take this picture, Anthony insisted I get the boat in the background. Because priorities.)

Since Anthony has Monday mornings off, we drove down to do the first blueberry picking of the year. We used up the last of the ones from last year just a month or so ago, so we were ready to restock! When we walked up to get our buckets, the woman who works there said, "I remember you all from last year, those boys are getting big!". 

 I "let" Anthony be the one to carry Rett. That boy is heavy! I would also like to point out that Rett is picking his nose and James is making his pirate face in this picture.

There were so many blueberries, that it didn't take us long to fill our buckets. We didn't have to move around that much if we didn't want to, you could just stand in one spot and keep getting more and more from the bushes around you. Anthony decided he wanted to walk around and test out the different varieties of blueberries to see if he could tell a difference between them. There is a color coded pvc pipe at the beginning of each row that indicates what variety that row is. Since two of the three varieties they have are ones we have in our garden, Anthony wanted to see if the best tasting ones were the kind we have. They were!

While Anthony was exploring and taste testing, I was having fun just filling my bucket. 

James and I had fun comparing our hands afterwards to see how purple they were from the blueberry juice.

Rett loved the blueberries! At first we were handing them to him and after he would eat one, he would start yelling, "Mommmmmeeeee! Mommmmeeeee!" (which means more, but is just a weird sounding mommy) until someone gave him one. Then he realized that if he is close enough, he can just pick his own. So he did!

Now I need some great shrimp and blueberry recipes because we are going to be eating a lot of both for a long time!