Has it been three weeks??? Yikes!!!

Well we're back after a 3-week hiatus...we've had a busy few weeks and there's no way we're going to be able to remember everything so I'll try to do a quick re-cap. Apologies to my mom and dad, because their visit is going to get condensed much more than it deserves. But that's life, I guess!
So first of all, as Jason so slyly mentioned in our last post, we are officially ready to announce that we have baby Berk #3 on its way, due to arrive sometime in late September/early October. We're about 15 weeks in at this point and so far all tests have pointed to smooth sailing. No word on boy/girl yet - that won't be for another 6 weeks or so but we'll post it here as soon as we know. For now, a baby picture...takes a little imagination, but this is a 3-D picture of the baby's face and upper torso. It's oriented vertically, and the baby's face is the upper middle blob. looking slightly down and to the right. If you really squint, you can make out the nose and the shadows of the eyes and mouth. Anyway, I went to a baby shower recently where a mom-to-be was proudly showing off her 3D in-utero photo, and quite frankly I thought the baby looked horribly deformed. So no offense if you just don't see it or think it looks awful! The doctors assure me that everything looks normal. :-)

Now to take us back in time to our wonderful visit from my parents, which followed on the heels of our wonderful visit from Jason's dad Herb. The arrived on a beautiful, warm and sunny but windy Wednesday afternoon and got to tour our house and grounds, and of course spend quality time with the boys.

Then they got a taste of the incredibly bizarre range of weather conditions we have here in Boulder; we all woke up Thursday morning to a yard blanketed with snow and big, fat flakes falling from the sky. But we took advantage of it, bundling the kids up to take them out. Logan got to make his first snowpeople, and Zach took a ride on the sled. Mimi, PopPop and Logan also had a snowball fight. BTW, sorry about the layout troubles here...

The snow stopped falling that afternoon and disappeared over the next day or two. By the time they left on Monday, it was as warm and sunny as the day they'd arrived. In the meantime, we took them around to visit Logan's school, see some of the parks we love to go to, and they also watched the kids for us while Jason and I got a rare morning to ourselves to go out furniture shopping. We went back to the store at which we'd bought our bedroom furniture and made our saleswoman ecstatic by buying dining room and living room furniture. Now, in just 10-12 more weeks, we'll finally have furniture in our two front rooms!

As I mentioned, we toured several parks with mom and dad, some pictures of which follow. I should mention that both of these locations are very close to our home - the first, Birmingham Park, is about a 15-minute drive into the mountains, the other, Boulder Creek, is a 10-minute bike ride from our house. Logan has discovered that his favorite thing the in whole wide world is to throw sticks, rocks and pinecones into running water. What child wouldn't be fascinated by that? Zach loves it too, of course, but he has that 21 month-old combination of enthusiasm and lack of good sense that makes me inclined to leave him home when we go to these parks.

I should also thank my mom and dad for helping us out so much around the house. They put on their handy hats and gave us some great advice about the house in addition to physically helping us make progress on settling in. There was so much else that happened during their visit but There just isn't time to get it all down now, not to mention the two weeks since they left. Jason's traveled a bit, we've had some beautiful family adventures and there have been rough patches too. But overall we are incredibly happy here and hope some day you'll all get a chance to see Boulder in person.