Happy Mother's Day!

 

This is one of my favorite pictures lately (taken by one of the other daycare mom's a few days ago), and I think its because I'm so often behind the camera that I forget to be in the pictures!  The best part of my day certainly doesn't have anything to do with how my work day went or what I accomplished....its really all about this little guy and how he makes us smile and laugh.  Now that its warm outside, the kids are in the backyard at daycare every afternoon. Its actually becoming challenging to pull Austin away from playing.  I've taken to sticking around for a while and playing with him and the other kids.  Its pretty cute to see him happily playing with his little friends!

 

 

He absolutely loves the slide.  The look on his face below is pretty typical...he has this smile of anticipation before he lets go and slides down.  Its quite adorable, although exhausting.  Since he can't climb up by himself yet, you find yourself lifting him up over and over again to go down the slide. 

 



I was definitely surprised the other day to see that Austin can get on and off this little rocking toy all by himself!

 



I know I've mentioned it several times lately, but playing outside really has been an evening and weekend routine.  The local park has this cute ice cream stand façade next to the play equipment.  Austin looks like he's hoping some new customers will stop by so that he can serve them!

 

The legos that 'Uncle' Jeremy brought have been a go-to toy these days.  If we dump the bin onto the front porch, Austin will sit there and play with them for quite a while.  The other night we babysat little Boston for a few hours and the boys actually somewhat played together on the porch with all of the legos. 

 

Oh, and we have a new toy that we're hoping Austin takes to - its the Pewi Ybike.  My friend Kim told me about it, and after reading the reviews I couldn't resist.  Its part walker part bike - the wheels are on casters so he can scoot around in any direction.  Even though he is walking fine on his own, he likes to push things around and gets really frustrated when trying to turn his walker.  I thought this might be much better, and with the added bonus that he can sit on it and scoot around like he's on a little bike.  We put it together and took it for a spin on the sidewalk and he immediately sat on it and started scooting around with a huge smile on his face.  Its the perfect size because he can also get on and off of it all by himself.  In fact, this weekend he seemed more interested in getting on and off than in actually riding it.  We want to take him to a tennis court where he can be caged in from parking lots and traffic to see if he can scoot around a bit more on it.  Oh, and if you look really close in this picture you can see that Austin has new shoes...we finally got him fitted last weekend.  He seems to really like them - if you show him his shoes and socks in the morning he comes right over and sits down so that you can put them on. 

 

 

For Mother's Day on Sunday we headed out to a delicious brunch at Clydes (chocolate French toast and mimosa's...can't beat that) and then took the bikes up to a park at BWI.  Kid and parent heaven - a playground with a view of the planes landing that also connects to 2 long bike trails!  We biked around with the trailer for probably about an hour and then sat around in the grass watching the planes land.  A pretty awesome day!