Maybe I'll keep it up this time...?

I was thinking about how much I enjoyed looking back on what I wrote about Nathan his first three years of life and that I'm sad I haven't chronicled the past year in the same way. So I'd like to keep up the blog better. I think what holds me back is the uploading of pictures. So there may not be tons, but I will at least try to put up some and keep on updating about our lives. I don't have long periods of free time these days to upload lots of pictures and make them all cute with nice captions, so it may be a little slap-happy for a while :) Anyway, here are some updates on our little boys.

Nathan will be four in just over two weeks. He is currently obsessed with dinosaurs. We're having a dinosaur birthday party for him! He also loves Toy Story and I plan to take him to see Toy Story 3 in the theater sometime this summer. Nathan finished his first year of preschool this past year. I was his teacher! He (and I) went three mornings a week. Nathan really loved it. Though we're still wondering what our long-term plan is for schooling the boys, we know that at least for next year he'll be going five mornings a week at our church's school, The Freedom School (where he went this past year). Oh, and Nathan is obsessed with the color orange. We have orange bunk beds in the boys' room. They look like a gigantic, bunk-bed-shaped traffic cone.

Isaac turned two at the end of April. Here's a conversation Isaac and I have several times a day. He does this out of the blue:
Isaac: "Mommy, Mommy."
Me: "Yes, Isaac?"
Isaac: "I not hot."
Me: "Oh, good!"
Isaac: "I not cold, too."
Me: "Oh, I'm glad."
Isaac: "I just right!"
Me: "You're just right for me!"

Isaac likes everything Nathan does. They have A TON of fun together, and it's always loud. Sometimes that gets on my nerves, but I do love the fact. Isaac loves trains and cars and trucks and animals. When we go to the zoo he wants to see the "tangs" (orangutans), bears and "unts" (elephants). His favorite colors are green and purple. He really likes to talk a lot. When we're driving along we get lots of commentary about the stoplight colors. He likes to tell me when to stop and that we have to stop at red lights and that we need to go at green lights. Sometimes he gets angry because he thinks we should have turned; that we're going the wrong way. He is a very opinionated child, who has incredibly large, beautifully blue eyes.

Toby was born on May 17. He is a wonderful baby! He really likes to eat and he sleeps pretty well at night (and during the day), thankfully. He likes baths, and he gets loved on by his big brothers. He has dimples and I'm so excited when he starts socially smiling so we can see them all the time :)

As for our family in general, we're still in St. Louis and Jimmy has two years left at Covenant Seminary before he completes his M.Div. I will be staying home full-time this coming school year, and I'm stoked about that. I'm glad that the school hired a full-time teacher for my job, and I'm glad it means I can stay home next year! Jimmy got a job teaching the GMAT (business school entrance exam) so he'll be doing that a few hours a week. This summer we will spend most of our time in St. Louis, but we'll go to California for almost two weeks in July to visit Jimmy's family and spend a weekend in Long Beach, and we'll go to Virginia for about two weeks in August to visit my family. We haven't traveled out of St. Louis as a family since August of last year except to go about two hours away on a church retreat back in October. We're hoping that the older boys travel as well as they used to, and that Toby is also an easy traveler :)

Well, I'm really hoping that this is the beginning of a blog resurrection. It really seemed to die just after I started teaching preschool nearly three semesters ago, so maybe now I can bring it back to life. Keep checking and we'll see :) For now, here are some random pictures.