The Brown Brick Road

Capturing our adventures one photo at a time...

Flashback Friday

I’ve shown you some old baby photos before and how my brother looked like Maxwell.  I’ve also shown you my favorite picture of baby Robert and how much I think it looked like Maxwell, especially his hair.  Finally, here’s just a few more baby pictures of us. Well, got a couple more for you today…

This is a baby Ronnie and Robert… (thanks Jenny!)

ronnie and robert

Ronnie’s on the left and totally looks like Maxwell, I think!  Robert is on the right in all his squeezable, chubby glory just like Spencey!

And here’s another one of my brother, Keath, as a baby…

keath

the blonde hair, the blue eyes, the chub…Spencer all the way.

Whoever my boys do or don’t look like, one thing is for sure….

spencey

maxwell

they are ridiculously cute just the way they are!

Happy weekend!

iphone

Iphone dump!

iphone june

iphone june

There’s some real gems in there!  🙂 I really need to get my big camera back out…  Maybe tomorrow!  See you then!

Saturday

Happy Monday all! We had a fun weekend with plenty of outside play in between the rain storms. Saturday ended up being really nice (and HOT!) in the afternoon which was good because we had some fun plans – a birthday party! Maxwell’s friend, Chiles, turned 4 and had a dress-up party complete with the biggest bounce house I’ve ever seen.  My boys decided to go as pirates, specifically as Jake and Cubby!

jake

cubby

The party was outside and did I mention how HOT it was Saturday afternoon?  Well, it was.  The kids didn’t seem to mind – they just bounced their little hearts out only stopping for some apple juice.  The parents just kept migrating to whatever little area had some shade!  🙂

party

After a while, the boys took off their pirate get-ups.  Then Maxwell got his face painted!

firetruck

He was REALLY proud of that firetruck cheek!

firetruck

Even though it was a “big boy” party, Spencer got to tag along – mainly because Chiles’ parents are good friends of ours and we knew they wouldn’t mind – and he thoroughly enjoyed himself to the tune of a big piece of cake and 2 Dum-Dums out of his goodie bag!

spencey

In that second picture, he’s got a Dum Dum in each hand, but Robert saw it and said it looked like he was putting his dukes up!  ha!

The party was over at 5:00 and since we were all out and dressed, we decided to get dinner at The Club.  Taking Spencer to a nice restaurant at this age is always a bit of a gamble but he did great – sugar high and all!  After we ate we let the boys run around outside and take in the sights.

the club

the club

The best view in town!

the club

the club

the club

One of Maxwell’s 7 wishes…see his penny in the air?!

wish at the club

It was a perfect summer night with my 3 favorite boys!

boys

See you tomorrow!

Weekend

Finally catching up on last weekend as I was out of town Sunday night through Tuesday night.  It was a good one so worth recapping!  On Saturday morning, I got up and went to a cross-fit competition that my gym, Iron Tribe Fitness, puts on every year called Tribal Wars.  This was my first year competing and we just did it to have fun.  We definitely had fun and worked HARD. If you want to see some pics from the event, you can check them out here and here.  There’s a few of me in there including a really lovely one in album two.  🙂  Not the most flattering faces but I was pretty proud of myself for completing it all.  We did three different workouts over the course of several hours.  I was glad to have a good cheering squad for the first workout…

tribal wars

I was there from 7am until about 3pm.  My cheerleaders unfortunately couldn’t stick around because Robert had to take the boys to Towns’ birthday party. There was no way they were going to miss out on cupcakes!

cupcake

After working out all day, I couldn’t wait to get home and do nothing.  But, I pulled into the driveway to see this!

mulch

5.5 yards of mulch delivered from Cahaba Heights Hardware that needed to be spread out into all the beds.  It just looked exhausting.  I then went inside and found skinned knee #1…

skinned knee

and skinned knees #2 and #3!  It had been a rough afternoon apparently!  🙂

skinned knee

Thankfully, after a little snack and some Frozen, these two little guys were happy to be back out playing in the mulch pile.  I’m glad someone enjoyed it!

mulch

We didn’t get it all done on Saturday but got it finished up Sunday morning and it makes the yard look so good!

mulch

mulch

mulch

While we were out there, we also cleaned up and swept the sand table area and got it looking about as good as it’s ever going to look…

sand table

That lasted approximately 3 hours.  🙂

That night, I hopped on a plane to go to Chicago for work.  I had two days full of conferencing and good chit-chatting with some of these great people…

chicago

Back home, Susan and Robert held down the fort.  Robert took Spencer up to Children’s bright and early Monday morning for another speech evaluation (let me tell you, I HATED that I couldn’t be there to go! But, I had called Friday to get something scheduled and they had this one available appointment Monday morning and then the next one wasn’t until JULY!).  While the state funded Early Intervention program that we have been doing is fine, I decided we needed to seek some more intensive/private therapy for Spencey. I just want to give him every advantage. The evaluation went great and it was, once again, confirmed that he has no issues with understanding or comprehension, he’s just delayed in getting the words out – which is great, relatively speaking.  So, we’re going to start doing therapy there and see if we can’t get him saying something besides Nana!  🙂

speech therapy

Overall, it was a great weekend and trip but I couldn’t wait to get home to my little superheroes on Tuesday night.

superheroes

Really looking forward to the long, restful weekend ahead.

Nightime routine

We’ve changed our nighttime routine up ever so slightly and it’s made it oh so much better.  We used to let the boys play until it was time to put Spencer to bed at 7:00 and then, when Spencer went to bed, we would read books to Maxwell and then rock.  It worked fine but Maxwell really wasn’t getting into bed until 7:30 or 8:00 and I think it was starting to wear him down.  So, we flipped things a little and now we read books to both boys around 6:45 and get them tucked into bed by 7:00.  So much better for all…and I think Spencer is LOVING getting to be like big brother and listen to stories…even if he has a little trouble sitting still most nights!  🙂

bedtime stories

They’re reading Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs which is a book I won’t read.  It’s just too long and, frankly, I don’t really like it.  I figure if I’m going to read them, I might as well read the ones I like! These days some of my favorites are The Circus Ship, Randy Riley’s Really Big Hit, Little Blue Truck, Flashing Fire Engines and all the ones in that series, Not Inside This House, and, of course, anything Sandra Boynton – short and sweet!  🙂  I clearly have a strong preference for books that rhyme. I’m always impressed when authors can tell a neat story and make it all rhyme.

Any other favorite books we should know about?