Grandma comes to town!

Luke had the time of his life when Grandma Riddles came to visit us last week.  He wanted to play with Grandma pretty much non-stop the whole time she was here!  We were able to do quite a bit, showing off our new hometown.  Plus we got some free babysitting while Courtney and I took care of all that fun car stuff, like getting our new driver's licenses, title, registration, inspection, etc., etc., etc. 

One day we went to the zoo, and of course they happened to have a dinosaur exhibit (Luke is absolutely obsessed with dinosaurs!). 

We played quite a bit at home, too.  It's so nice having a big yard now, we don't even have to leave our house to get outside and have fun.  Here are a couple pics of Leo inside, and then some of our house:

We also took a stroll downtown and saw some of the sights by the lake and the office where I'll be working.  The first one shows Cleveland Browns stadium in the background.  Go Browns!

Luke was sad to see Grandma go, but we're looking forward to seeing her again in October!  Stay tuned for another post on what we've been up to so far here in Cleveland.   

Cleveland!

Well, we made it!  We're officially Cleveland residents.  Moving and the bar exam pretty much sum up the events of the last few weeks and explain the lack of blog posts.  Both are now behind us and we're happy to finally be here in Ohio! 

The bar exam was from July 27-29 and involved much fun (not really).  I took Luke up to his Grammy and Pappy in Pennsylvania the Sunday before and then took off for Columbus, OH the next day.  The exam itself was 2 1/2 days long (1 1/2 days of essays and a day of multiple choice).  It was difficult, particularly the multiple choice, but I'm optimistic that I passed.  I certainly never want to do that again!  I'll find out at the end of October. 

After picking up Luke and heading back down to C'ville, it was time to get ready for the move.  Courtney had stayed behind and fortunately was able to take care of a lot of our preparations while I was off having "fun."  We had professional movers, so that also cut down a whole lot on what we had to do.  They even packed everything up for us.  The movers came on Aug. 2, and stayed 11 hours to pack and load all of our stuff.  The next day, we headed up to PA.  I stayed long enough to drop off Courtney and the boys and then headed to our house in Cleveland to clean the carpets and get things ready for the movers to deliver our stuff the next day.  Then, on Thursday, I headed back to PA to attend Courtney's grandmother's memorial service.  She passed away two weeks ago.  It wasn't unexpected, though, as she had been struggling for quite some time.  It was a nice opportunity to celebrate her life and spend time with family from out west that we don't get to see as often. 

Finally, we made it back here to Cleveland for good yesterday.  It's so nice to be in an actual house with a yard!  We're loving it so far. 

Oh, and Leo says hi:

The Return of the Blog

It's been busy around here... there's been this little thing called the bar exam that has been preoccupying us.  Fortunately, we're almost there.  The exam starts next Tuesday, the 27th.  Then we'll be moving to Cleveland the first week of August!  Anyway, because of all this, I've yet again gotten behind on updating the blog.  So this will be just another general post, mostly just for the purpose of showing how cute our kids are (that never gets old to us!). 

Leo still gets up way too early, usually around 6am.  He gets so excited, though, when Luke wakes up (usually around 7:30 or 7:45) and it's time to go get his older brother in his room.  Here's a couple pictures of the boys right when Luke woke up:

We're excited to see them start to play more together as Leo gets older.  They already do this thing at the dinner table where they get each other laughing to the point they both can't stop.  It's pretty hilarious to just sit back and watch them egg each other on. 

Luke's been going swimming a lot this summer.  Here he is on his way down to the pool in our apartment complex:

And in case anybody's been wondering what I've been up to all summer, this pretty much explains it all:

Life Lately

June has been a busy month for us.  We spent almost two weeks out of town dogsitting for Courtney's parents and doing some househunting in Cleveland.  We survived taking care of six dogs and we found a house, so I'd consider all the travelling to have been a success! 

Otherwise, I've been studying for the bar exam, which is one month from today.  This next month is going to be pretty intense!  The boys have been spending a lot of time out at the pool.  Here's a couple pictures of Leo getting ready to go outside:

They've played quite a bit inside, too, to get away from the heat:

On Thursday, we had a crazy, but very brief, storm hit Charlottesville that knocked our power out from 5pm Thursday until 1am Saturday morning.  Considering it was in the 90s, we missed the air conditioning!  The internet was down and even our cell phones didn't work for almost 24 hours.  A whole bunch of big trees fell over, it was quite the spectacle.  The boys did just fine, though, we just stuck Luke in this tank top so he'd stay cool:

Leo turned 8 months old yesterday!  After about 20 attempts to get a good pictures of him to mark the day, we ended up with a couple decent ones:

Since we were out of town the past couple weeks, we waited until today to celebrate Father's Day.  Here's one of me and the boys after they gave me a card:

And finally, about an hour ago, Luke handed me the camera and asked me to take pictures of him.  The result:

Catching up with Leo

Leo's been doing great.  All of a sudden, he's almost 8 months old!  He's not too big of a fan of sleeping, with his one hour naps and waking up before 6am every morning, but we tell ourselves it's just because he loves spending time with us so much.  Here are some pictures of Leo from the past couple months that I haven't put up on here yet:

Grandma and Grandpa!

The best part of graduation for Luke was having his grandparents in town.  They got in Thursday night and left Monday.  We played with dinosaurs, watched the Elmo's World segment on dinosaurs several times, and read dinosaur books (any guesses as to what Luke is really into these days???).  But we also got out and did some other fun things. 

On Friday morning, we headed out to the Chiles Peach Orchard in Crozet to pick strawberries!  Luke did his part to find some good ones: 

Leo wasn't quite sure what we were doing, though:

But he still ended up having a good time:

...as did the rest of us.  Luke even got to ride in a wagon:

We finished off the outing with some fresh strawberry milkshakes:

Besides strawberry picking, we also went to the park and did some walks around where we live.  But like I said, Luke was content to just stick around the apartment, play dinosaurs... and read the paper:

Here are some other good pictures from the weekend:

Graduation!

Now that the overdue Final Four post is out of the way, we can move on to more current events.  Last Sunday I graduated from law school!  Finishing school was admittedly a little bit anticlimatic with all the bar exam studying ahead of me this summer, but putting on the cap and gown certainly provided a bit of perspective on how much has gone into getting to where we are today as a family.  It's been great, but we're also looking forward to transitioning to the next stage in our lives. 

My parents came into town on Thursday evening and stayed until Monday.  Luke just loved having them here.  He had the time of his life.  I'll put up a separate post about all the things we did when they were here and stick to the graduation pictures for this one.  

Here's the big moment of receiving my diploma from the dean of the law school:

The graduate with the proud parents:

Kari and Mark came down for the ceremony as well:

We tried to get a good picture with the boys, but the ceremony fell right during naptime, so they had just about had it by the end:

Luke can be pretty cute, though, when he's tired: