2011 in photoreview: march

March was a great month for  several reasons, but it was also a very busy month.

We had some gorgeous weather. I especially love to go for walks and hikes before it warms up enough for the TICKS to really get active. the boys were loving a chance to get outside for a while somewhere other than their backyard. i am always grateful for these moments of spontaneous brotherly love. 

this was, of course, when noah was independent enough to do the walking but still pretty much followed on caleb's heels and didn't stray too far form the path. this turned 

out to be a disappointingly short phase.

noah was also at an age where he would manage to take naps that were not long enough to leave him completely rested but long enough to prevent him from just rolling over and going back to sleep on his own. most of the time naps, while necessary, were followed by an hour or more of him being inconsolably cranky or downright just screaming.

 this was a rare occurrence: drifting back to sleep in aunty's arms, which would never have happened if mommy had been the one to get him out of bed. 

these days, he does this with seb, snoozing an extra 30-45 minutes on seb's chest in the morning and allowing seb to snooze along with him. if mommy gets him out of the bed all i hear is 'eat! eat!' 

totally unfair.

seb came home for R&R! and he was home for his birthday, which caleb was extremely excited about, since birthdays and birthday parties were just starting to make sense and he knew they meant CAKE and BALLOONS!

 we traveled to st louis to see seb's parents and went to the butterfly house near there. naturally, didn't take any pictures in the fabulous butterfly house, just of them at this playground right next to it. caleb was pretty much glued to seb during R&R. 

while seb was home for R&R, he had to go to a conference. you read that right. we were actually supposed to have R&R in january but they knew he had this conference coming up in march. and why pay to fly him twice when we could just make him (and us) wait two extra months and fly him once?

actually, i take part of that back. it's not the money saving move that bothered me. goodness knows they need every red cent they saved. what bothered me was that instead of putting all of his R&R before or after that conference, they split it up and plopped his conference right in the middle. because at the end of the second leg they planned to whisk him off to ANOTHER conference. 

in light of this, we decided that instead of telling the kids "daddy's home! daddy's leaving again! daddy's home! daddy's leaving AGAIN!," we would pack up the insane amount of stuff required for traveling with two toddlers and go to his conference with him, 

to beautiful although still very chilly hampton, VA.

thankfully, if you have to fly to a strange place in the middle of R&R living out of a hotel while your husband you haven't seen in 9 months is busy all day at a medical conference... hampton is apparently a great place to do that. there was a ton of stuff to do, that the kids loved. 

our first stop was an awesome nature center we'd be at every week if we lived there. 

the kids got to be up close and personal to all sorts of things..

each other, 

turtles, 

more turtles, 

climb inside of turtles? this place was awesome, and i swear it had more than just turtles!

we headed to the beach on a grey, chilly day. there was a beach to go to. 

we were not deterred. we were just extremely cute.

when i told my mom we were planning this trip, i suddenly thought, wouldn't it be great if she went with us? time with the kids, help for me, vacation in hampton? i barely completed the thought in my head when she volunteered.  them apples, they don't fall far from their trees, now do they?

noah spent a lot of time reacquainting himself with a daddy that left when he was 9 months old and had only been around on the computer since then. he spent much of that time on daddy's shoulders, which may not have been all that interactive, but it certainly was a new perspective. 

literally one block from our hotel (we could see it from our room) was an air and space museum that was FREE to military and families. sweet!

trying out a flight simulator

i practically had to drag caleb kicking and screaming from the cockpit of this old plane they had set up. i had to promise him daddy would bring him back again some evening.

 he was in three-year-old-boy heaven.

noah knew there were buttons, and that buttons were fun. but no idea he was supposed to be flying a plane. much easier to move along to the next station.

we managed to head to yet another beach (we were there for a week) and got there just as it started to sprinkle. we didn't care. we'd spent 45 minutes finding the place and were not about to admit defeat. plus there was a long weathered boardwalk to the beach 

that was completely noah's cup of lavender earl grey.

if i hadn't had two kids in tow i could have curled up under a blanket on a beach chair with a hot mug of that lavender earl grey and sat there for hours.

 i love grassy hilly beaches like this, even on a grey chilly day.

caleb was consumed with roaming the hills, to the point that we had to make him stop because he couldn't summon the strength to get to the top and not go down the other side. 

one of our last hampton adventures was an aquarium. caleb took a lot of convincing to get this shot. even though it was just a head, it was a very realistic head.

not so much convincing required for this one. i think it may have been his idea, actually.

this is about as good as group photos go with this crowd. noah was getting pretty weary of the hotel by now, naps were hard to come by, and we were getting to bed really late every night.

 i was dreading the the flight back, since the flight in to hampton included a 45 minute screaming fit. (this despite computers, movies, toys, snacks, yaya, and offers mommy graciously extended to nurse him while sitting snug up to a strange man). i think i was crying by the time he finally fell asleep from the exhaustion of his tantrum. by the we landed in hampton i'd actually decided he wasn't coming with me on my next plane trip scheduled for april. but he surprised me by sleeping through most of the trip back and only fussing towards the very end. 

we came back to st louis and returned to the snow. seb took the chance to lend his dad a hand with the heavy layer covering the drive.

caleb desperately wanted to go out and we hadn't planned for snow in march, so he wore my jacket in this nice little jedi ensemble. 

and though it was freezing, we were trying to maximize the quality daddy time, we took to the zoo, and shivered our way through as much as we could tolerate before catching a train back to the entrance. it was such a relief to see how noah was doing with seb. all that skype had paid off, and while he didn't really look to daddy for help or comfort when he was really upset,

 he wasn't skittish or shy around him either. 

i've been excited about these updates (both remembering the year and just the fact that i'm actually POSTING something) and am also excited to finish the year recap so i can move on to more current ongoings (i'm hopelessly rigid about the whole chronological order thing) but one thing's for sure: i gotta get me some more sleep. so probably no more of that three-posts-in-a-day business. but i'm not going to repeat last year's abysmal efforts.  even if no one else reads this stuff, i love being able to go back and remember, and i want my kids to look back and discover themselves. 

ok, enough sweet mushy drivel. on to april!