Foof, birthdays, and imaginary boats!

I was on the news last night! For like, 2 seconds, but still. It was kind of fun. :) You can, of course, read about what I was doing and see the clip at Passing Pinwheels!

The rest of the week has been pretty normal, haha. I was sick a good chunk of it so I don't have all that many photos but I have a few that I haven't posted since I've been doing vacation recap. I don't know if I really mentioned it here, but Mike turned 35 this month! Awwww, we're getting so grown up! The weird thing is that, in many ways, neither of us feels particularly grown up in the sense that...well, we don't have everything as in hand and under control as we imagined we'd be back when we were kids.


Here's Autumn with Lainey at Mike's birthday dinner. Autumn was hamming it up big time so this is the best we could do.


She loved her dress. I think Santa Lainey got it for her for Christmas. Although it wasn't quite Valentine's Day, I couldn't resist putting Autumn in it. I had her hair all braided but it just didn't survive.


For some reason, I feel really, really nostalgic when I see this photo. I don't know, like I'm going to blink my eyes and that's going to be a wedding dress or something, you know?


Now, something funny before WE ALL GET SAD:


This is Autumn's boat. Sometimes it's a rocket. But lately it's a boat. The day we took these pictures, the boat was Lula powered. So. Funny. My mom would put her feet on the back of the box and give it a big shove and then pull it back to her and do it all over again, Autumn cackling the whole time. We couldn't quite figure out how she got herself all scrunched up in the box. Look at her, her head is in the middle of the box.


This month, Autumn also got to go to a birthday party. They had a pinata, the real kind that you hit, not just one you pull strings out of! It took foreeevvvverrrr for them to break it open but, guess what? Autumn's the one who did it! I didn't get a photo of it, but here she is gathering her spoils.


Then she celebrated her victory with some drums.


And CAKE.


:) And that's it for tonight! Now I am off to soak myself in tylenol and muscle rub, ha!

More Beachy Days!

Welcome to the last of our beach photos! It's a little weird to be posting these because it's seriously 28 degrees right now. I'm kind of hoping it'll snow tomorrow but with our luck it'll sleet enough to close the gym and make the drive home awful and then be gone by Tuesday! So, let me dream of being at the beach again...

Here's Autumn entertaining herself with a flashlight. She shined it on the ceiling in such a way that it reflected onto the windows and then cackled maniacally.


Autumn attempted to hold Hudson but I think she didn't have a good grip because, man, she looks uncomfortable here! So funny.


DO YOU SEE HOW GROWN UP SHE IS. I JUST CAN'T.


We wandered on the beach a little Friday, as you could see in the photos, but Saturday we got to spend more time out there. It was remarkably nice for January. I don't know what was up with Autumn but she wore a bathing suit and played in the water even though it was a little chilly even for Mike.


We didn't really expect to play in the water but I put Autumn in a swimsuit just so she wouldn't get her clothes wet. Ryan, well. He figured Tyler couldn't get too wet.


And he didn't. But he did take off his pants. And then...


In other news...I got to hit a golf ball around for the first time. I kind of want to learn to play golf. It felt pretty awkward but not so awkward I never want to do it again. The body mechanics are pretty similar to throwing someone so I had some luck. I hit the ball the first time and hit it more often than not. I hear that's not too shabby!


Oh, there are still a few tar balls around. Yuck.


CANNONBALLLLLLLL!


I feel like this should be an invisible bike meme.


This is the face of a little lady plotting mischief...


This past year, Autumn has really come out of her shell in many ways. She still can take a while to warm up in a crowd, but she's gotten pretty comfortable with the family. I told the Kyle story last post and here she is playing water dragons with Ryan. And then in the hot tub, she was floating around him and sitting by him. Crazy!


Ok, I'm just going to be honest. These pictures are in this post just because I like her faces.







And that's it for the Autumn face parade. :) I do have a couple of cute ones to add...P'd and Lindsay:


Dawwww. So sweet. And another so sweet:


Kyle and Lindsay. I feel like that one should be on a greeting card. :)

Until next week!

Beachy Days!

We went on a bit of a tour for Birthday Weekend. Lauren couldn't come to the beach with us so we stopped in Birmingham to visit with her. I don't know why but I have no photos of that so all of these will be THE BEACH!

Birthday weekend is when we celebrate four birthdays: P'd, Lauren, Lindsay, and Mike. (Also in that 2 week period? Liz...it's a busy time!). Mike asked if we could go to Florida because he just wanted a short vacation and, in a somewhat last minute manner, we got to do it.

When we were going through the photos, Mike groaned a lot at how wintery his skin is, hahaha. I didn't think it was as bad as all that, but he and his dad think he's about the same color as the sand. So, Mike, for your 35th birthday, I gift you with a photoshop tan:


Hahahaha, not bad for a 5 minute first try, huh?

Autumn loooooves the beach. She informed us that we needed to come back in two weeks. I told her it miiiiight be a little longer than that. Autumn also enjoyed having Tyler around because he is her "best friend and [she] loves him."


She also had a great time with the rest of the family. Here she is smushing Lindsay. She was pretty cute with Kyle, too. One night, Ryan, Mike, and P'd were watching Batman and Batman's face showed up really big on the tv screen. Autumn looked up, gathered her toys, and walked out without a word. I didn't really even put the two together until Lainey mentioned it. I just saw Autumn leave! I went around looking for her a little while later, even in our room in the dark, and I heard Kyle call, "she's in here!" And there she was, in Kyle and Lindsay's room coloring on the floor while Kyle read on his ipad. He said she just walked in, closed the door, and sat down!


This is one of the pictures that amazed my mom because it's weird to think that Autumn is getting so grown up. By the way, apparently winter is the time to look for seashells. I've never seen so many pretty ones on the shore. That's what the cup was for.


I thought these next few were cute. P'd "hid" from Autumn. They play hide and seek allll the time. Autumn was kind of oblivious at first.


Then...nope, still oblivious.


Oh, hey, it's P'd!



So sweet.



I think P'd is the one who shot this one. I really like it. He also took the photo of the three of us in the last post, I can't remember if I mentioned that.


:) He took this one, too. I look a mess but so much more healthy than our last beach trip!


I call this The Pied Piper.


And, I think this one is a good one to end on. How beautiful was this sunset?


More beach pics to come! Also, I've been fixing up the look of this blog and the pinwheel blog. Let me know if you have any trouble viewing anything or it looks too weird and I'll work on it some more.

Recovering from...

The beach!! We had a great trip to Florida and to Birmingham for birthday weekend. I'll post a regular update on Sunday. For now:

(click the photo for the full holy cow she's so grown up effect!)

Party Time!

Hey, everyone! If you didn't catch the announcement, hop over to Passing Pinwheels and read about our upcoming adoption! We got the next application in the process on Thursday so we're about to get that going.

I think this is the end of our holiday posts! We started out the year with our usual New Year's Brunch. I had such a good time because last year I was too morning sick to do any cooking so it was an all Costco event. This year went really well though. If you haven't and want to read more about the actual party, you can click here. :) And! All of the photos on this post are courtesy of my brother Donnie! Thanks--these are great! I never get enough photos at parties on my own.

Autumn usually takes a while to warm up to people so she spent about the first half hour looking like this:


My yearly Penny Pic!


When we moved to this neighborhood, I decided I didn't want it to be like our last neighborhood. We only knew a few people on our street...a couple we never even saw! These neighbors are definitely more social just anyway but last year, I went ahead and put an invitation on everyone's door. We had 2 sets of neighbors stop in (we were friends with two other houses but they couldn't come). This year, we had five houses worth of neighbors stop in! They all had super nice things to say about having us as neighbors and about the updates to the house. Even better, our new neighbors came by! They just moved into the cove and are originally from South Korea. They have an adorable 3 year old daughter and a son who wore traditional Korean clothing.


Oh, here's Autumn who warmed up to everyone. Probably mostly due to Aunt Penny. :D It was cute, she was sitting with Penny who was talking to my friend Christy. They told me that Autumn Very Seriously looked at Penny and pointed at Christy (who is home from Brazil!) and said, "I know her."


Remember Frank who doesn't look like Mike except he does? This is his daughter Olivia. She was chilling in Autumn's Tinkerbell chair, nomming on her pretzel rod.



Do you want to know what the popular toys of the day were? Dollhouses. For both genders. The littler girls liked the one downstairs. The boys liked the one upstairs. :) I know, we have two dollhouses but this is what happens when you have the only little girl on the Colley side of the family.


Autumn really warmed up to everyone. She tried to trap Donnie in her room. So he could play more? Take more photos of her? I dunno.


Do you want to know what is so funny about this picture? Mike just came in and asked, "why am I smiling?" Ha! Actually, this was near the end and I guess he was watching Mickey with Micah, Roxie, and Autumn?


And that's the end of our holiday! Thank you to everyone who made it so special. This was better than I ever thought a holiday season without Garrett would be and it's mostly because of you.