March - June 2010 Update from the Lynes Clan

One of my 2011 New Year's resolutions is to blog more regularly. So I decided to catch everyone up on the rest of our year in 2010. Here's a brief recap!

One of our favorite things to do is play with our friends. We had a (just about) weekly playdate at a small bounce house in Easley. Alex likes to terrorize the other kids. Mainly the girls and since Peyton wasn't having any of his foolishness, he targeted Avery.

Our neighborhood hosts a lot of fun family activities. In April 2010 they hosted an Easter Egg hunt. The boys had just turned three and were really starting to understand the magic of the Easter Bunny and Santa, etc. So this was a lot of fun. They got lots of candy and found a ton of eggs. Though....it helped that most of them were "hidden" on top of the pine straw and grass in the common area.

So several things happened in April/May. Creighton and I took two trips. One to Cancun to celebrate our 10th anniversary.

And one to Anguilla, BWI. Thank you, ScanSource!

These trips were huge for our little family because they were the longest we had ever been away from the boys and it was good for us all to realize that we can be apart for a while. Both trips were five days each. They were incredibly relaxing and I personally loved being an island girl/beach bum for the whole time we were there. Thank heavens for Skype which allowed us to talk to our babies everyday! The boys stayed with my parents at our house while we were in Cancun and with Creighton's parents at our house while we were in Anguilla. Without grandparents........we wouldn't have been able to have these wonderful vacations!

In May, we decided we were tired of buying diapers and since pre-school was starting in August it was time to potty-train. I was expecting the worst but as per usual with our boys, it only took them about a week to get the hang of this new thing. They did great during our first outing in underwear, which was to our good friends, Payton & Parker Anderson's 5th birthday party.

Alex had one small accident but I was prepared with a change of pants! Along with big boy underwear came a trip to IKEA and the purchase of big boy beds.

These beds are super cool. They don't have the tents on them in this picture because they were actually out of stock when we bought the beds. But they come with a tunnel style tent that clips on the top. These beds are convertible. So we have the parts to convert them into loft beds with a ladder. The tent works with both the loft and the standard style bed. The boys took a while to get used to them but now they love their beds.

We met a wonderful lady named Michelle Giles in April. We had a photo shoot with her for family portraits in April.

Then in June, she did a shoot of just the boys. I fell in love with these pictures as soon as I saw them! We've always known these little guys who went through so much were SUPER, but this just proved it.

These super heroes LOVE....and I mean LOVE tunnels. They are obsessed with tunnels. Even when we go under an overpass on the interstate they yell, "TUNNEL!!!!!!" So we decided to take them to a kind of abandoned tunnel near Clemson called Stumphouse Tunnel. We met our good friends the Larsen's there and had a fun day with our friends.

AND!!! FINALLY!!!! An event that I think Creighton and I were more excited about than the boys....TOY STORY 3 came out mid-June. Creighton took the day off. We had a fun family day going to lunch, then to the movies. It was interesting since we were still iffy on the whole potty training thing, but they did great! I made them go to the bathroom 1/2 through the movie and Alex screamed as I'm pulling him out of the packed theater, "I don't have to go pee-pee! Want to watch BuzzWoodyJesseBullseye!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"