Our week

We've had a really fun week, hanging out with special friends...

We spent Tuesday morning with Taylor, Israel and Elijah. We went to a bookstore, a bakery, Costco and to their house for lunch. I didn't do a very good job at documenting our active morning, but I got some cute shots in Costco:

Diego and Izzy run and scream "Diego is Mcqueen and Israel is Sally!" (the characters from Diego's favorite movie, Cars) Costco aisles are great for racing when the place is empty.

I love this shot of the four kids.


We went to Auntie May's house on Wednesday for dinner. Addie and Diego spent over an hour in the garage by themselves, playing in May's car. It was so cute. They were having a blast pretending to drive all over town.

This is Alexia trying to kiss Greydon at playgroup. He was not amused by her affection!

And a sweet sibling cuddle.

A few pictures

Ricardo is working late tonight so I'm gonna go to bed early, but I just wanted to share a couple of pictures from the weekend. We had a wonderful weekend of hanging out with friends and just taking it easy.


Yesterday we climbed to the top of Stone Mountain. We had never done this before, but we absolutely loved it. Diego walked the entire way!! We were so pleased with him! He held hands with Papa and Aaron the whole way and had a blast. I carried Alexia in the baby bjorn and she was quite content, taking it all in and saying "HOLA!" to everyone that passed us.



Here we are at the top with Aaron and Helen. It was a cloudy day so there was no view to enjoy, but it was still worth the hike.

At the rate Alexia is gaining weight, she won't hit the weight limit for the baby bjorn for another year!

Half way there!

We had friends over for a BBQ on Saturday. Josh is very tall so he was able to get this cool shot of the kids in the sandbox.

Alexia playing with her buddies, Elle and Paige (twins).

Alexia's new chair

The weekend that Alexia was born, Ricardo's mom bought Diego a present so that he would feel special. Per our request, she bought him a special chair. He has loved his chair since the day it arrived in the mail and he has had to share it with Alexia for 18-months now. We have our family prayer time every evening in his room and he sits in his chair and Alexia sits in Ricardo's lap. We decided it was finally time for her to get her own chair so we ordered one this week and it arrived yesterday. Oh yes! It was a hit! She RAN to it as soon as she saw it and screamed "down! down! down!" (That's what she calls chairs!) We are going to keep it in Diego's room for now since they love to sit in the chairs together and read books, play, have prayer time, etc. We'll eventually put it in her room, but they are attached at the hip these days so I don't think it's worth separating their chairs.

In other news, Alexia had her 18-month check up on Monday. She is not gaining weight, but has grown a lot in length and head circumference. She only weighed 20 pounds, 4 ounces which is around 4th percentile for girl's her age. Her eyes were a little puffy so the doctor ordered some blood work just to make sure there wasn't any protein deficiency or anything. We saw her results today and Praise the Lord, all of her blood work was within normal range. I wasn't terribly worried because she has an incredibly good appetite, but I was still really wanted to see the results. The doctor was really happy with her growth in height and head circumference so I guess that's where all of her calories are going!

This is our spirited little peanut in time out:

She can sure act up, but she also responds really well to discipline and sits completely still and quiet in time out...we'll see how long that lasts...! :)

While talking to friends in San Francisco, I realized I have never posted pictures of the kids' rooms and they asked me to see them...so, these are for you Auntie Paige and Auntie Asawari. They are still a work in progress, but we're getting there...!


View of Diego's room from his doorway

Still from doorway

View from windows back to doorway

View of Alexia's room from doorway

View of room from closet (to the left of the door)

After dinner tonight, my darling boys went to cut me a magnolia flower from one of our trees.

Dinner at the Office

Ricardo has men's group/bible study every Wednesday. Every other Wednesday, he meets at someones home (sometimes ours) and they all have a meal together. Every other Wednesday the group meets at church for church-wide prayer and then bible study afterwards. The Wednesdays that he goes to church we try to have dinner together as a family before he heads downtown. We decided to do something different today and have a picnic in the gardens of his office complex. We used to do this more often when we lived in the apartment, but since moving we have not met up for a picnic dinner. Diego was so excited when I told him the plan and he was a huge helper in the kitchen, getting the food ready. Before we left the house I told Alexia we were going to see Papa and she said his name the whole way there. We decided to stop at a bakery and pick up some cookies for dessert, but she thought we were going to see Papa inside. So when we left the bakery and there was no sign of Papa, she CRIED and SCREAMED "Papa! Papa!" until we arrived at his office building. Throughout our time with him, she gave him at least 30 kisses, no joke. She would be running around with Diego and then run up to Papa and give a kiss on his leg and continue playing...so sweet!


Enjoying our dinner in the beautiful gardens

After dinner we went down to throw rocks into the stream

Alexia holding the hands of her two favorite people. Diego helped her walk up the whole flight of stairs.

A few highlights...

We are slowly getting back into the swing of things after being away for 10 days. We had a magnificent vacation and I just wanted to check in to share some of the highlights of the trip. We were in Lake Tahoe for 3 nights with Scott, Paige, Danny and Michelle and the rest of the time was spent in San Francisco, where we stayed with Scott and Paige (and Scout, their cocker spaniel, who was thoroughly (and sometimes overly) adored by Diego and Alexia).
After browsing through the 700+ pictures that we took, I realized there are way too many highlights to share in a short post, but I will do my best. In the next few days I will post a link to a Facebook album, where photos are easier to upload.


After a full day of travel and no naps, they both fell asleep in the car, driving back to Scott and Paige's. Alexia slept in her clothes that night and we slipped Diego's jammy pants on him while he slept. Needless to say, they were up at 4:30am the next morning!


Auntie Paige's smoothies were Diego's culinary highlight



This was our first excursion, an afternoon stroll down a huge cliff to a stunning beach.



After running through the waves over and over with Auntie Paige, Diego declared his legs numb.


The house in Tahoe had an indoor pool where Diego begged Uncle Scott to spend (what felt like) hours and hours with him.

A beautiful walk through the woods brought us to patches of snow where we all had fun throwing snowballs.

Renting a speedboat in May in Tahoe is not such a great idea. Diego asked to go back to the dock after getting drenched by waves splashing into the boat. Paige and I took the kids off the boat and let the rest of the crew go out for a spin so we could have the boat for the full hour we paid for!

We rented bikes on our last day in Tahoe and loved it. That was definitely the highlight of Tahoe for me. As you can tell, Alexia was a little sleepy and ended up taking her nap in this little buggie. Diego absolutely loved the bike ride and kept saying we were racing like McQueen :)

The parks of San Fran were amazing. On this particular afternoon we went to three different parks, all of which were a blast.

A family picture at a Sonoma winery

Alexia eating a donut on Pier 39 with two of her favorite guys.

A great Carousel Ride on Pier 39

A major highlight was getting to see Asawari and Ashu and meeting their new son, Mihir. Ricardo and I went out to dinner with them one night and we got to hang out with them three times on Friday which was wonderful.

Be back soon...

I meant to post before we departed for vacation and didn't get a chance. Last Thursday we flew out to California and are here until Saturday. We are in Lake Tahoe right now with four of our friends and are having a fantastic time. The kids are having an absolute blast and we're taking a ton of pictures. We are going to rent a boat today and Diego can hardly believe that he gets to go on a speedboat!
Will check in later in the week with stories of our adventures...!

My sweet birthday song

PHOTOS GALORE!!

The photographs that BobbiJo took of our family are up on her website. If you're up for looking at 150+ photos of the Lopez Family, go to this link:

http://www.bobbijobrooksphotography.com/#/lopez/

Now we have the difficult task of deciding which prints to order - there are so many that we love!

Thank you BobbiJo!!!!