Duke & Birthday: A Good Combo

This week's updating effort brings us to my birthday... so we're at least into 2012!  One of the highlights was that I got to go down to Durham to see a Duke game, after which I continued the gradual indoctrination of our children as Duke basketball fans. 

Stay tuned for a photo recap of Luke's 4th birthday (sure, that was also way back in January, but we're getting there!)

Christmas 2011

What?  Haven't you heard the phrase, "Christmas in July" before? 

In this effort to catch up on over 6 months of inactivity on the blog, instead of trying to remember and recap stories from that long ago, I'll just let the pictures to the talking.  Without further ado, here is a recap of last Christmas told through pictures:

A New Beginning

The Riddles Family blog has come back to life!  I see our last post talked about Halloween 2011.  I suppose one or two things have happened since then.  About a month ago, my sister posted the following on my Facebook wall:

"I still check your family blog every day by the way... *cough cough* :)"

Now that's dedication... especially since it's been almost 7 months since I've posted anything here.  It was also a call to repentance!  I told her that once we got into our new house, I would start back up so that we'd be in the swing of things on here by the time the baby came.

So I just snuck in probably the two biggest pieces of news in our family since the last blog post.  Most who are reading this probably already know through various other channels, but we're expecting our third child - another boy! - in August.  The due date is August 12th to be precise, but as we found with our first two (Luke was almost 4 weeks early and Leo was 8 days early), the due date hasn't meant much. 

The second thing is that we just bought a house!  We moved in last weekend and just love it.  I pulled the picture above from one of the random real estate websites. 

So anyway, I'll now work to get this blog up to speed over the next few Sundays.  Stay tuned! 

Halloween 2011

Figured I should get this one in before Christmas...

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to be home for Halloween this year as I was in Florida for work.  Courtney took the boys to Pennsylvania so that they could go trick-or-treating with some of their cousins.  Luke decided he wanted to be a frog, and Leo took on the Batman costume that Luke used a couple years ago.  They had a great time!

Family Pictures

A couple months ago, we got our family pictures taken.  It had been a long time... in fact, we hadn't done it as a whole family since Leo was born!  Here are some of the results...

The Summer 2011 Update, Continued...

As promised, here are some more pictures from the past couple months.

Here's Leo just hanging out before church one day.

The boys have spent quite a bit of time in our backyard this summer.  The trampoline came with the house we're renting, but when we eventually move, I think we'll have to buy one because the boys can't live without it now!

Luke also painted his very own bird house.  He was very excited about it.

Here's a couple from when I came home from my trial in Florida.

And finally, here are some more of the boys just loving life.

We still need to pull our pictures off Courtney's iPhone, plus get the pictures from Kari's wedding, so more to come! 

Another Overdue Post

2011 has not been a good year for keeping up on the blog, but I'm now determined to get back on track.  The summer has just flown by - I was down in Florida for almost 5 weeks for a trial, my sister, Kari, got married, and Courtney and the boys continued to explore Cleveland.  I'll start with the picture updating here and put up another post tomorrow.  Today's themes will be bath time and Father's Day weekend, a natural combination (right?). 

The boys continue to love bath time, particularly since bubbles have become a regular feature. 

We started out Father's Day weekend with a father-son trip to an Indians game.  It was Luke's first baseball game!  He loved the hanging out with Daddy, hot dogs, and ice cream part of it - but he didn't really like how loud everyone got when they cheered.  All in all, we still had a good time even if Luke didn't get into the game that much. 

We parked at my office, so Luke got to see where Daddy spends a lot of his time during the day.

The next day, we took an old-style train through the Cuyahoga Valley from Cleveland to Akron and back for the boys.  Continuing our theme of "firsts," this was their first time on a train.

Then on Father's Day, Courtney and the boys treated me to a very nice day.  Courtney dressed the boys in "Team Daddy" shirts that were, well, a little big, but it just made them even more cute. 

Stay tuned for more tomorrow!