Family Portrait

I decided that it was finally time to have our family portrait taken by a professional photographer. We've had several casual pictures taken by family and friends, but we've never actually had our picture professionally taken. So, here it is:

My Little Helpers

These pictures were taken awhile back on our way home from our roadtrip. But, I just stumbled upon them and thought they showed really well how much the kids like to help. We had stopped at a produce market and had several bags of fruits & veggies to carry. The kids were more than willing to step in and offer to help carry!

Music Fun

We went to a 2 year old birthday party a couple of weeks ago (Happy Birthday, Liam!) and the kids had so much fun! There was a lady who played the guitar and sang songs while the kids played with little musical instruments. Josiah loved the huge drum (unfortunately, didn't get a picture of the huge drum) and the girls liked the shakers. It was such a great idea for a toddler birthday party and the kids had a blast!

Alana & the Apple Slices

Alana has recently decided that she likes to hold the bowl of whatever fruit I happen to be serving and divy them out to her brother & sister. Well, a few days ago I had given her the bowl to hold. A few minutes later, I noticed that she had not only emptied the entire bowl of apple slices onto her tray (definitely not sharing them with her siblings), but she had taken a bite out of every single slice! It was too funny! And she was so proud!



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2 Butterflies & a Monkey

We were fortunate to have a few different Halloween/Harvest parties to go to this year, so we decided it'd be fun to actually dress the kids up. Josiah was a monkey (a rather cute little fat monkey) and the girls were butterflies. They LOVED getting dressed up and, in fact, wore their costumes several times this past week. The girls were a little jealous of the monkey costume and so they each took their turns wearing the monkey costume around the house this week. Lots of fun!

Alana small & mighty

Alana never ceases to amaze us. She is all about organization. I'll never forget our first Sunday at Regen church. We were picking the kids up from the nursery and the helper told us the kids were sad most of the time but that Alana really perked up when it came time to clean up and put the toys away. She hopped into action putting toys in all their proper places. Her crib is pictured below. Note the organization of her stuffed animals, she clearly got this from her Mother.

Recently, we have gone up to the top of the backyard where there is a plastic slide from the previous owners on the top of the terrace. We had quite a rotation going, lifting a kid to the slide and then watching them slide down. Alana decided that she wanted to scale the wall. Sure enough, she was climbing a 5 foot stone wall all by herself after just two attempts.

Our first official "Jardine 5 Hike"

Eric & I used to love to go hiking. In fact, several of our first few dates were spent hiking. We have both always had a love for nature & the outdoors. However, when 3 little people came along our opportunities to get out and hike were very few, if any. So, we decided that the kids were finally old enough to go on their first hike. We found one of our local parks and set forth on our first official "Jardine 5 Hike". Believe it or not...the kids were awesome! Not only do they share our love for being outside and exploring, but they actually ended up walking/hiking much farther than I would've thought. Yeah, so our hiking days aren't over. In fact, they are just beginning! :)

The Fake Haircut

I had gone out to dinner with some of my girl friends one night while Eric's parents were visiting. I left before the kids went to bed and so Eric & his parents were both there to put the kids to bed. Well, when I got home later that evening, Eric showed me some pictures and said that all the kids had gotten haircuts. Immediately I thought, "Really, the girls didn't need haircuts!" Eric replied, "Well, we started off only giving Josiah a haircut with the hair clippers, but the girls really wanted one, too. So, we decided to go ahead and give them one with the clipper, also. See...look at the pictures!" He then showed me the pictures below, in which I just looked at with super huge eyes! After a few seconds of torture he says, "Naw, just kidding. We only pretended to cut the girls' hair so that they wouldn't feel left out." Hee hee. Big huge sigh of relief...

Vegas Cont...

These are just a few random moments from our Vegas trip. The first group of pictures were taken right before Eric & I left the kids with Grandma & Grandpa and ventured off on a side trip for a couple of days to Zion National Park in Utah. We've had a hard time getting any good family pictures of all 5 of us, so we decided to give it a try...

Alana getting ready for the "goofy" picture:

Our official "goofy" picture:



This picture was taken in the Disney Store and you can see that the girls have gotten the hang of the whole "shopping" thing...

Fun at the Vegas mall: Alana was a little shocked that the bus actually moved.

Pre-bedtime reading with Grandpa:

Josiah & Grandma enjoying a story (Josiah is sportin his favorite new hat from Nani & Papa from Ghana):

Fun in the Car

The kids AMAZED us at how well they did in the car! We were in the car a LOOONG time on several days and the kids were awesome! We would make stops to let them run around for awhile, but overall they were pretty content to just hang out and go with the flow. On our way home, we decided to stay the night in Yosemite. The drive from Las Vegas to Yosemite is no "exciting" drive in the least, but we were able to find some fun along the way. We were literally in the middle of nowhere. We pretended like we were on a roller coaster (like the kids even know what a roller coaster is), but they sure got the hang of it!

Dancing to Garth

One of the reasons we decided to go to Vegas was because Eric had gotten tickets to see Garth Brooks at the Wynn. We aren't super big country music fans, but who doesn't like Garth? And we were told that he puts on a really good show. So, we bought a few of his older CD's and listened to them in the car. Well, apparently the kids like country music because they were happy to dance for Garth. This video was taken while we were at Eric's parents house. We were eating dinner outside in the backyard enjoying the warm evening weather of Vegas...

Jardine Road Trip

We just returned earlier this week from our "Jardine Road Trip". Eric's parents will soon be moving to the bay area (yeah!), so we decided to take advantage of them still being in Las Vegas before they move. Our first stop was to visit our good friends, Brad & Cindy in Springville,CA. They graciously let our whole clan stay the night so that we didn't have to make the whole drive in one day. We had so much fun hanging out with them and their sweet pups, Blitz & Giggles. The kids especially loved the dogs, although they were a bit intimidated by them at first since they were probably half the dogs size. They also loved exploring new territory and especially climbing the big rocks, or as the kids would say, "Biiiiiiiig Rock!"