My Only Request

This Mother's Day I had one thing on my mind.  Breakfast in bed?  Not a big deal.  Chores?  Would be nice if someone else did them, but no.  Relaxation?  Hmm, maybe. 

Snowcones.  Yep, that's right.  All I wanted to was to hunt down an ice cold, sugary snowcone.

Here I'm enjoying a coconut snowcone.  I can thank my smart mother for my love of the coconut flavored cone.  As a child who grew up in the hot hot South, snowcones (or snowballs, as they are also called) were a familiar summer treat.  The coconut flavor (as well as pina colada) is clear and thus is not capable of staining clothes.  

Clearly I didn't inherit my mother's sensible side.  Luckily no one spilled on themselves (with the exception of my child-like hubby).   But even if we did, nothing could have ruined our day.  We were headed to the beach!  

I know that by now you must think that we are beach bums.  And I'd have to say that you might be right.  We just can't help but head down there when we have free time.  Somehow, the waves and the wind seem to make you forget all about everything.  Just what a mom with an overworked brain needs every once and a while.  And here's the special treat that magically appeared on the beach.  

Well, to some passerby it might seem like magic.  To me it was more like a simple combination of gratitude and kindness.  Love built that sandcastle.  And I loved it!  

It was a great Mother's Day.   I'll leave you with more pictures of our snowcone/beach adventure.

I hope all you mothers had a happy Mother's Day.  May you all be celebrated every day of the year.  

60 Fun Things Update

It's been 10 days since I posted about the 60 fun things we are trying to do.  I'm crossing off the things we have done as we go along.  You can see it by revisiting the original post.  Here I'm just sharing some of the photos and details from our latest adventures.  In no particular order...

Beach fun--She finally learned to love the sand!

More museum fun, this time in Sugarland

Played with our cousins!

Found a new park with sweet hiking trails

Our trip to the zoo

Waiting for the bats to come out at Bat Fest

This is the rehearsal for the wedding, we forgot our camera for the actual event...

We still have a ways to go to complete this list.  It's exhausting to even think about it.  But it's a good kind of exhausting.  The kind of exhausting that makes you happy to be alive and happy to have a comfortable bed to fall into at the end of the day.

*Sidenote:  The best and most heartfelt wishes to my sister and new brother-in-law!  It was a beautiful wedding.  Thank you for allowing us to all have a special part in it.  And congrats to two of my sister-in-laws on the recent additions to their families!  We are so blessed!

Once For All

Funny story.  Orry and Isaac were sitting next to each other in the back of the van.  Orry turns to Isaac and says, "Put your arms out like you're on the cross.  I'm going to hammer you to the cross."  I turn to look and sure enough, Isaac is sitting there with arms wide open and his head hanging down.  Crucified.  Orry had his turn at it.  I'm sure that he could give Jim Caviezel a run for his money.

I hope that everyone had a wonderful Easter weekend.  Here's a bit of what ours looked like:

Sandcastle #2

About to sing in the Easter Eve service

Way too early to dig into baskets in their underwear...

Hunting eggs in rain boots

2 out of 3 ain't bad

"For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.  He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit."

Waves of Optimism

We finished off this week with more rounds of Brainwave Optimization.  I will update you now and tell you that Isaac has been doing really well, physically and mentally.  He's growing leaps and bounds as far as learned knowledge goes.  He loves to do his "work" as he calls it.  It's a preschool workbook full of concepts that children should learn, like the difference between big and small, first and last, red and blue.  As far as his health is concerned, he seems to be fine.  And by fine, I mean that it's the first time in a long time that I forget about the diagnosis and really consider him to be just another normal kid.

We scheduled the treatments now (as in this weekend) for a couple of reasons.  First being that Grandma Tammy has so generously offered to pay for them.  We are so blessed.  The second is that doing the next round of treatments within a relatively short time of the first round will give us the maximum results.  It also helps us avoid the cost of another assessment.  And finally, Troy was able to help out on Saturday, when we scheduled two of the four sessions.  Remember, we have to wait for him in our car, so the extra hands do help.

I'm very optimistic about the results from this mini session.  Isaac is pretty sure that this work on his brain is going to make him a genius (his words).  I wouldn't mind the genius factor, but I'm just shooting for good bowels.

Since we were all together, and out and about, we decided to make an adventure of our Saturday.  Our adventure, going to beach.  I know, I know.  We've been plenty since moving to Houston, but what differed this time was the time of day when we went.  Usually we wake up before the sun does and head out there and enjoy the beach with few others.  It's nice to beat the crowds and the heat.  So we were really shaking it up this time.

It was pretty sunny and a little windy.

We kept with our tradition of building a sand castle.

We rescued a tiny fish from the moat around our castle.

The boys did a great job making it look really ruinous.  

Here we are taking credit for Daddy's work.

Daddy found a small hermit crab.

Then he found some more.

Annie had to rescue them all.

Going to the beach in the late afternoon was surely a different experience.  It was pretty warm outside when we got there and pretty sunny.  We managed not to get burned, but it did cool off pretty quickly as the sun set.  We felt less rushed in the evening.  Troy even mentioned staying around for longer than we did, but the kids were getting pretty cold and tired.  Another difference was the amount of people.  We were not the only ones on the beach.  It's okay, a crowded beach and all, but I prefer the quiet time away from the people.  *Sidenote- What is this new mullet of a bathing suit style that women are wearing now a days?!  It's almost a one piece in the front and definitely a bikini in the back.  Huh.  Back on track.   The sea gulls were out in flocks in the evening.  I'm sure it has to do with dinner time/people out there feeding them.  But we managed to avoid any droppings, so that's good.  We will probably do the evening beach excursion again.  We will definitely do the early morning excursion this summer as well. 

In summary, I'm enjoying the wave that we are riding on now, so to speak.  Good health and great fun.  In my opinion it's a great way to start off the sunny season.

*Sidenote- Happy April Fools!

A Labor of Love

I hope you all thanked your mothers today for laboring on your behalf.  Your lives would be considerably less exciting if they hadn't done that...

Seriously.

I hope you all had a great Labor Day weekend.  We had a delightful time this weekend despite it having flown by so fast.  I guess that's what happens when you are really busy having fun.

Saturday we spent the morning at the beach.  It was a really windy day thanks to T.S. Lee.  The waves were pretty rough and sand was blown all over, but we still managed to build a small sandcastle and do other fun beachy things...

Another masterpiece

On Sunday we went to church.  After church we had a shopping errand to run and as we drove to the store we passed the dollar theater.  We saw that Kung Fu Panda 2 was playing and we made plans to go back in a couple of hours and watch it.  We have never taken our kids to the movies.  So this was really testing the waters.  I'm glad I had Troy with me.  He sure came in handy, putting Annie to sleep while the boys and I wiggled all around the row of seats, laughing at that fat panda.  Later that day we played outside since the weather has gotten down below the 100's recently.  

Oh, the joy of bubbles

And what did we do with our Labor Day?  We spent the morning at the zoo!  Again, since the weather was so "cool" we hit the road early to avoid the inevitable crowds and spent the morning watching elephants getting a bath and bats getting some brunch.  We went home for lunch and to get ready for our busy week coming up.  

Tomorrow, Isaac will start going to pre-preschool.  I'll have to pack his lunch and a few sets of clean clothes to change into.  He will also start following a routine.  This means a scheduled "rest" time and that means that he needed a nap mat.  So I made him one.

So I guess you can say that I labored on Labor Day.  But it was a small labor of love.  I'm sending my baby boy out into the world (kind of) and he needs something to remember me by.  Hopefully he'll look at the nap mat and remember me saying that the dots are "dinosaur green".  And if he doesn't remember me then, maybe he'll think of me when he eats his snacks and his lunch.  And if not then, then maybe when he puts on that dry pair of underwear and pants that I so lovingly packed him...

Like I said earlier, I hope you all thanked your mothers today...

Our Family Tradition

My little Becker family has a summertime tradition.  I didn't realize it was a tradition until this year, when Troy said, "We need to build our yearly sandcastle.".  Could it be?  Did we really make a sandcastle every year.  Well, let's see.  

That is the castle from 2006.  We made it to Pensacola, FL before Orry came along.  (Troy and I also made a castle in 2005, but we weren't married and I don't have a picture to show you, so does it count?)  

And that is 2007's sandcastle.  That year we went to Destin, FL.  Orry was somewhere between 10 and 11 months.  Here's what he looked like:

He didn't particularly like the ocean.  But he didn't dislike it either.  When kids go the ocean for the first time it is pretty amazing.  It is such a vast thing to behold.  I can understand the excitement that is mixed with fear as the waves break over their shoulders.  The feeling that they could just be swept away into that big sea...

Now our journey takes us to 2008 and Korea.  That sandcastle was built by Troy and his brother, Trent.  We were in Yang Yang, South Korea, looking at the Sea of Japan.

Here we are when Orry was two, Isaac was a wee little 4 month old, Troy was less bald, and I was rocking a "new mom for the second time" haircut.  This was before we learned that Koreans preferred that we called the Sea of Japan the East Sea.

A year later we were still in Korea.  This time we journeyed to Donghae to build a sandcastle.  And here you can still see the East Sea.  

In 2010 we moved to Houston, TX.  Looking back, it was a good move to make in regards to this family tradition.  Now we live about 1 hour away from Galveston.  So here we are in Galveston, making another sandcastle. 

It was a great beach trip because Orry got over his fear of being in the water.  Isaac was thrilled to jump right in and I think this encouraged his older brother a bit.  

Another reason that it was so great was because we brought our newest addition along for the ride.  (Well, we couldn't just leave her home alone...)

And that is our sandcastle from today.  It was a lovely time filled with sand, sun, and salty water.  

Annie didn't like the sand or the water.  But she did like getting her beach pose on.

Troy was the work horse.  I was the baby monitor.

Isaac kept his shirt on for "swimming".  He sure loved the water.  He loved getting it in his mouth and then spitting everywhere to try and get it out.  

And Orry.  Well, Orry was busy showing the babes where the beach was...