Riley-isms!

Oh...my precious first born! He is such a light in our lives! I can't believe that he is almost 3 years old. I am seriously having some "time must slow down" issues these days. I'm not real sure there is much I can do about it. Although we are creeping into the typical 3 year-old "fit-throwing" stage, he still says some of the cutest/funniest things and I just want to record them in my blog so that I can read this one day and remember our life during this time!

His favorite song to sing (by far) is "Jesus Loves Me". The cutest part is that...when does he most often sing it? When Aubrey is screaming her head off! Seriously...he does it to try to calm her down. And it really does work most of the time. He is just so precious.

Along that same line, when he sings "Jesus Loves Me", he sings "...they are weak, but He BE strong". And even the Speech Therapist part of me LOVES it. He sang it the correct way the other day and it almost made me cry because that means he is growing up!! But the next time he went back to "be" instead of "is" so maybe we still have a little while. He also will keep going with the "Yes, Jesus loves me" at the end because he doesn't quite get that he should sing it 3 times and then go on to "..the Bible tells me so." So precious to hear him sing this!

He definitely talks ALOT these days so we have lots of fun conversations around our house. One that we have repeatedly is about his "dress". I guess because he hears us say, "let's get dressed", he started to think that anything we wear is called a "dress". At first I just thought it was cute when he'd say, "put on my dress mama", but after a little while I figured that I needed to explain it to him. Well...even with an explanation, he continues to call his clothing a "dress"! As you can imagine, this frustrates daddy a little!!

We have also been working hard on teaching him how to be nice and kind and he is now quick to point out when we are not acting that way. The funny part is, this is almost always when we are correcting him about something. He constantly says, "you are not being very nice." when we tell him to stop doing something. Whew....we have our work cut out for us.

He is really getting into sports and most importantly...the LSU tigers! I honestly have not been TRYING to brainwash him, but we sing alot around our house and the LSU fight song just might be one that I sing often. Well...out of nowhere, he started singing almost every word of the song with me. It is so very cute! His favorite part is "make Mike the tiger stand right up and roar...ROAR" and he screams ROAR at the top of his lungs!!! He is ALL BOY!!

There is more, but I keep holding off on publishing this post and never seem to find time to add to it. So, I'll just add to it later!!

Homecoming Pictures

Here are a few more pictures from Edmond's homecoming. I know all of my Facebook friends have already seen the video, but I wanted to have these pictures in the blog so that if I have it printed one day (which I really want to do)....these very special pictures will be included!

Needless to say...we are SO GLAD to have him home!

Riley had a blast dancing to the music played by the band!

In this picture, the bus had arrived and we were trying to wait patiently.

And...we see daddy getting off the bus!!

I think they hugged for about 5 minutes before either one of them looked up. It was seriously one of the sweetest moments of my life.

Riley is showing daddy the sign he made. He was so proud!

Then we showed daddy our family sign. And then Riley needed hug #50 for the day!!!

This was our first official post-deployment family picture!

This is now one of my all-time favorite pictures. So sweet!

And now we are headed home!!!

I think Riley's face says it all in this picture!! Pure joy!

Birthday Celebration!

So today we celebrated Aubrey's first birthday! We are a little late, but wanted Edmond to be a part of it....of course! Here are some pics from her big day.

Sorry that this was super long with all of the pictures! I have the worst time deciding which to post!!!

I have to say that today was a very special day. I just had this overwhelming feeling of thankfulness all day long. I love our family so much and we truly had a blast spending the day together! Thank you Jesus for blessing me.