Pumpkin Patch...

Good day off activity: carving pumpkins. Can you tell which one was free-hand? Yeah, me too.
Pumpkin guts. Yuck.
The kid loves his pumpkins.

Spiderman Birthday...

At long last (though 2 weeks early), Tate's Spiderman Birthday party!
Time at the park with his friends, pumpkin decorating, and cake. It was a good day.

Camping w/ Tate

These awesome fall days and nights gave us the idea to set up the tent for Tate and camp out at Wakefield State Park (a.k.a. our backyard). In hindsight, setup would have gone faster if we started while the sun was still up.
Tate was very excited to have a tent in the yard (and upset when it came down today).
Tate and his mom. She, being..."great with child"...opted to sleep indoors. Good call, considering the air mattress gradually lost air until I was basically sleeping on the ground.
Tate likes camping. He slept straight through the night. It was a little cool, but that just made him hibernate all the better. He's a happy camper (sorry, I couldn't resist).

More STL Pics...

Tate at the Science Center.
Watching traffic on I-64 through the triangle. Never gets old.
The STL zoo had a baby giraffe. It was pretty cool, especially after all of Tulsa's giraffe issues. If you don't know what I mean, go to images.google.com and search "Tulsa giraffe." Unless you're squeamish; then don't.

The STL

The pained look comes from the fact that Tate likes to steer by pulling my hair. He was a pretty good trooper and walked most of the way, though.
We got to see the chimps eating veggies; I made sure to point out to Tate that even monkeys eat their vegetables.
Tate by the penguins. I forgot how much I love this zoo. You could literally reach out and touch a penguin in the indoor habitat (that is, if there wasn't a guy watching to make sure you don't). As it was, the penguins were doing belly flops, so we got a little penguin water on us.
And of course, we had to take a choo-choo ride.

FL2...

Tate loves the beach! So, it worked out that we planned a joint family vacation with the Witt's this year to the Florida panhandle. In case you're wondering: no sign of oil except for the anti-BP shirts in the souvenir stores, BP claims office in one strip mall, and cheaper rate we got on our rental house. Works for us!
Tate got to spend the whole week with some of his best friends in the world (he's the one on the right with the super-white hair): Walker, Lanie and Jackson.
Our little surfer boy. Tan skin from swimming a ton this summer to go with his bleached-out hair. The kid is a fish.
Tate and Walker: 4 months apart in age, used to live 4 houses apart (now about a mile), and pretty much best buds.

Accommodations...

Did I mention that we had the ultimate "pastor hookup" for the wedding? The couple who owned this condo on the beach go to one friend's church in Ohio in the summer and Nate's church in Florida in the winter. All that added up to us getting to stay in a place where we were serenaded by waves hitting the flour-soft white beaches. Oh, yeah. I could get used to that.

Nate Gets Hitched

Good times with college buddies 7 years after graduation. What's that? We should go on another baseball trip. Well, okay...
Tate and Dean were pretty much the only little kids there. The good news is, they carried the cool factor and brought all the right dance moves.
Now, there have been Concordia pictures taken in various settings: Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota...none of those places had palm trees in the background, though.

Mickey's House

I took this picture for the express purpose of posting it on this blog without my wife's permission.
And this picture I was fine with being on the blog, because I make such a fine pirate.
Despite the scowls for pictures, he really was having a good time. Really. No, really.

Florida.

Nate and Jacqui's wedding was good enough reason for a trip to Florida, but how could we resist stretching it a couple extra days to see Mickey and Shamu?

We had one great day at each place. Tate was into it big-time.

I Go Airplane?

Yeah, we have to pay for a seat for him now, but he's a good traveler. Can you tell he was excited?

Home. Run.

So apparently T-ball wasn't enough of a challenge. Now, Tate wants us to pitch him the ball. The scary thing is that every once in a while he hits it. If the Twins or Cards were smart, they would use a draft pick on him now.

Slugger.

He's got a small strike zone and a big swing. The kid's gonna be an OBPS machine (it's a baseball stat thing). The machine says things like, "Keep your eye on the ball!" and so does Tate. "Hey, Batter, Batter!"

Visitors

And Kevin and Meghan came! We're waging a not-so-secret campaign to get them to move from Memphis to Tulsa; it's only a matter of time till we wear them down.

In order to woo them, we did lots of entertaining things like make them help us stage a garage sale. And we drug them around looking at houses in our mad dash to find one before we have to be out of this one. So that was fun.

Somehow they still like us anyway. We like it when they visit; we like to visit them too (also something we did in the 4 months we weren't updating our blog).

January 22 - May 13

He's bigger. He talks more. He does more. He's more entertaining. What did you expect? It's been 4 months since we last posted.
But where was the public outcry? This kid is, after all, awesome. At least we think so.

Really, not much has happened in the past 4 months, except...

...Eric is no longer "Associate" Pastor. Just "Pastor." No adjectives needed.

...Tate's tonsils are gone...and his adenoids...and he's got new ear tubes...and he gets sick less now...and he now has an attachment to his "hospital bear."

...Kristen is expecting a baby due in November.

...We're outgrowing our house and interest rates are still low, so we listed our house.

...We sold our house.

...We bought a house and are closing and moving on June 1.

...Tate now has a T-ball set and a swing like Jeff Bagwell (look it up if you don't know who that is).

...Kristen and Eric went to New Orleans for a mission trip.

...Kristen went and hung out with a couple best friends from college in Nevada.

...We pulled a piano in a U-Haul trailer from...basically...Canada on the longest, shortest roadtrip to see family and friends ever.

...Having cut the aforementioned roadtrip short, Eric had 3 funerals in 2 days immediately after we got home from that trip.

...Kristen finished her 1st year of grad school.

...Kristen worked through Meningococcemia Meningitis outbreak at the PICU (sad deal).

...Tate is awesome on his bike now, except for when he flips over the handlebars, splitting his lip or skinning his nose in the process. He has a helmet now.

...A bunch of other stuff.

And we didn't update the blog once. Oops. Well, we're back. Hope you didn't give up on us!

No More Snow...

Now that the weather is in the 60's again, I thought I'd post the pictures of some of the last remnants of our Christmas Eve snowstorm (gone by mid-Jan). Tate learned to throw snowballs. These things are important in raising a boy.

Little Lance Armstrong?

What can I say? The boy is fast.

Bike Ride...

We finally got a little warm weather, so Tate got the chance to take his new bicycle for a spin.

QB 1...

He's better at catching than the video shows, but he has a better arm than hands at this point.

With that blonde hair, he looks like the second coming of Boomer Esiason.

Our Polite Child...

Amazingly, Tate does have pretty good manners overall. Lots of "please's" and "thank you's."

Christmas Presents: the Train...

For as long as these videos take to load, I sure hope someone actually watches them.

Here's Tate playing with his trains. And yes, I know it's sideways.

Christmas Video...

For choo-choos: "Thank you, Santa."