November/December

In a continuing effort to catch up on what was on our old camera, I'll post some pictures here from November and December.  I'm way too behind to do much storytelling, but that will return next week when I do a Christmas post (sneak preview: we had a great Christmas!). 

Here are the boys looking pretty sharp before church:

Leo makes one cool firefighter:

One of the things we were most bummed out about when we thought we lost our camera was losing pictures of Luke putting the ornaments up on our first real Christmas tree.  Without further ado:

The boys also got to see Santa IN PERSON! ;)

...as you can see, they were thrilled.  And finally, here's us boys just hanging out:

The Return of the Camera

Yes, we're still here!  And I come bearing good news... we found our old camera!  Believe it or not, it was pretty much right under our noses.  I was cleaning out our car in anticipation of packing up for our New Years' weekend trip to Pennsylvania and found it in the little compartment between the front seats.  So anyway... obviously there is much to catch up on from the holidays, but I'll have to go back quite a ways to catch up now that we have our pictures from the old camera. 

We'll start with Leo's birthday party with the Cross family.  Yes, I know he's 14 months old now, but better late than never!

Our Camera

I have good news and bad news.  The bad news is that we sadly lost our camera this past week.  We hadn't loaded pictures on our computer in about a month, so we lost some good ones, including of Leo's birthday party and putting up our Christmas tree.  Fortunately, Courtney's parents were there at Leo's party and took some pictures, and so we'll be able to get theirs. 

The good news is that we coincidentally had ordered a new camera for our Christmas present to each other.  It arrived the day before we lost our old one!

Life has been busy, but good for us.  Work is in full swing, as is the Cleveland winter!  We got about a foot of snow last week over a few days and another big storm is coming in as we speak.  We bought a snow blower a few weeks ago, and it's definitely come in handy already. 

The last pictures we loaded had some snow pictures from the first little snow storm we got in early November, so enjoy!

Happy Belated Halloween!

Sure, this week might be Thanksgiving, but here in Riddles Family Blog world, we're just getting around to celebrating Halloween.  While Leo was still too young to have a clue, Luke displayed excellent trick-or-treating skills this year.  He needed my help a little bit at the first house we went to, but by the end, I was standing back while he went up to the door by himself, said "trick-or-treat," and left with a "Thanks!"

To those who have spent any time with Luke recently, you will not be surprised to hear that he wanted to be a dinosaur for Halloween. 

Leo also made a brief appearance as a frog:

Here's Luke in action:

Afterwards, the boys enjoyed the spoils:

Fall in Cleveland

We actually got a couple inches of snow on Friday night, so even if it's still technically autumn, that makes it winter time in my book (I am from Texas after all).  We've enjoyed the fall here, though.

I started work on October 25th, but so far it hasn't been intense, just a lot of training and orientation.  Here I am on my first day:

I spent most of last week in Washington, D.C., for a big conference of all the new lawyers in my firm.  I also found out on October 29th that I passed the bar exam!  Tomorrow, I'll be going down to Columbus to be sworn in, and then I'll officially be an attorney. 

Besides going to Arkansas, we enjoyed a lot of family time together before I started working.  As always, I'll let the pictures tell the story. 

We love hanging out in our backyard!

I still have a whole bunch of leaves to take care of, but Luke enjoyed playing in them.  Leo was less crazy about it, but we managed to get at least one decent picture of him.   

The week before Halloween, we went to a local farm that had pumpkins, a corn maze, a hay ride, and other fun things for the kids.

October 26th was, of course, Leo's birthday!  We'll be having his party this coming weekend when Courtney's family comes to visit, but I continued my father-son breakfast tradition by taking Leo to IHOP.  His favorite was the whipped cream on top of his pancake. 

More updating to come!

Arkansas Trip

And we're back... A lot has happened in the past month, it's been an exciting time! 

One of the last big things we did before I started work was to take a road trip to Arkansas to visit family.  I have to admit that we faced the travelling with a bit of trepidation, as this would be by far the longest trip in the car that the boys had taken.  We broke it up over two days and it ended up taking about 16 hours one-way.  To our pleasant surprise, Luke and Leo did great in the car, helped by the box of new toys we got from the dollar store and 17 DVDs from the public library (!). 

We had a great time down there. The boys got to see Grandma, Grandpa, Great-Grandma, Aunt Kari, (soon-to-be) Uncle Mark, Great Aunt Lyn, Great Aunt Nancy, and Great Uncle Bob.  Luke and Leo did a great job of entertaining everyone and providing some excuses to go shopping. I also got in a few rounds of golf.

My parents took a bunch of pictures.  For whatever reason, we got a lot more good ones of Leo, probably because Luke was just constantly on the move, trying to impress people by jumping off the couch into a pile of pillows and doing other fun around the house games he invented there.

We had a Halloween/Birthday Party as well:

Leo had a cookie to celebrate his upcoming first birthday:

He also got a few presents:

But don't worry, Luke wasn't left out.  He got some gifts as well, but the biggest hit of the evening was a Halloween stamp set.  I think most of the ink ended up on his body by the end of the night!

The boys also enjoyed a trip to the beach along the lake:

I'm really glad we were able to make the trip.  It was especially nice for Great-Grandma and the boys to spend that time together, they really took to her well: