Congratulations Julie & Paul

We celebrated Julie and Paul's wedding.  It was a beautiful wedding and reception.

2 year stats

Josh had his 2 year dr. appointment on Tuesday, a little belated because of holidays and travelling, but here are the stats.
35 inches tall 50-75th %  he got to stand next to the wall, no more weird lay him down and stretch him out on the table.
31 pounds 75-90th% again he got stand on the regular scale, no more bucket!
Head 19 inches 50th% I think this is the largest his head has been, I'll have to look back.  Must be those thousands of words he's been saying.  Like the other day, he said he wanted to put on his pants "all by myself".  yup, no prompting.  he's amazing!
He also got to have his temperature taken under his tongue instead of the rectally which was much more comfortable for everyone.  He was kind of shy when the doctor or nurse were in the room, as he normally is with new faces, but the second they left, he was crawling all over, wanting to make phone calls and wash his hands and sit on the rolling chair.

Vegas day 4

Saturday, we knew we needed something just for Josh, so we took a cab through a SKETCHY part of Vegas to the Lied Children's museum

waiting outside before the museum opened

We spent about 2 hours at the museum and probably about 40% was in this plane!

working as a car mechanic.* 

yes, there is a board that you can slid UNDER the car.  I thought that was awesome!

changing a tire

adding antifreeze maybe to the car.

swimming again.  Josh spent each day in the pool, he even got my father into shorts and in to the water.  Josh can be very persuasive, if not bossy.

Aunt Sara fixing Josh's hair for dinner out.

I think we were happy with the results, though by the time we left for dinner, his hair had fallen and wasn't spikey any more.

We went to Le Burger Brasserie in the Paris for dinner.  Great food, and caught this picture by the miniature Eiffel Tower while waiting for our table.  

Carl, Natassha, Brett and Sara enjoying their 100 ounces of beer.

*though the kohl's children's museum has a car exhibit too, you can't actually work on the car.  I found it interesting that the children's museum in the white collar suburb of Chicago focuses on washing and driving cars, and the one in Las Vegas on repairing cars...

Vegas day 3

Friday was determined to be the day that we wouldn't split up and would just spend the day all 9 of us together. Natassha made us delicious pancakes and then we spent the morning at the pool.  Josh did really well with his water wings...much better than the life-preserver thing we also tried.

We caught this pic of the family before we left for dinner

Firestone Family Vacation in Las Vegas

We flew to Las Vegas last week to spend some family time together.  Wednesday was pretty much just a day of travelling and getting used to a new time zone.  (Though we did order food from Metro Pizza.  And when they tell you the baked ravioli is gigantic, believe them.  it easily lasted about 6 or 7 servings!)  Anyway, on Thursday we got some bus tickets and rode down the strip from our hotel to Mandalay Bay.  Easily this took an hour.  Since Josh has really been into trains, I knew there was a free monorail from the Luxor to the Mandalay Bay.  However, you have to get on at the Excalibur.  So we got off the bus at Luxor and had to walk through the Luxor and Mandalay Bay to get to the Shark Reef. It was more than we would probably spend normally on a museum or whatever, but we were finally somewhere and we had to do something interesting for Josh.  And though it only lasted about 45 minutes, he really seemed to enjoy it.  

Cars

We were at toys r us a few weeks ago, and josh had to check out the motorized cars...

Gymnastics

It only took me a few weeks to bring the camera to Gymnastics.  Luckily, I did today because it was the last class.  They had an award ceremony!

Josh loves to hang, and this was the only picture I got!