ostrich mating dance, chef hats, and celebrations

random weekend number 2, people.

gabe: my biggest little chef. we were blessed by some friends who gave us some hand-me-downs...among them was a home depot apron. -that plus the chef hats from a recent field trip have made my little men very eager to help in the kitchen.

saturday was asher and judah's gotcha day anniversary. TWO YEARS of being a forever family of 6. 

when i wished judah happy gotcha day, he was so excited. when i asked him what we were celebrating, he said he didn't know. --but i'm glad we got the point across that it was an exciting event. ;)

i explained to him that it's the day we remember and celebrate becoming a forever family. -that God let us adopt him into our family. and we are so thankful. i didn't get that far with asher's conversation. i tried to have this meaningful moment discussing the beauty of adoption and he was more interested in gum. i get it. 

this is us at our triple birthday celebration/gotcha day celebration. 

my sister came in and we went to a wildlife ranch. since three birthdays and two gotcha days are in the same month, we combine it and have some family fun. parties take it out of me and can cost some money, so we went a less-expensive way and really enjoyed ourselves!

my sister and asher. at one point, asher was so tired and there were no animals, so he hummed a tune and threw out a piece of food at a time, resembling a flower girl at a wedding. we enjoyed it. 

these are my handsome boys. they were excited that they were all wearing sleeveless shirts to show their muscles. lots of the time they are fighting, but sometimes they work really hard to all get along and help one another. --like working for 10 minutes and changing shirts so they could all match in sleeveless-ness. 

 beautiful.

here's the gun show. bam. muscles galore.

i love the picture below of elijah. if you look closely, he is holding a flower in one hand and a few arrows in the other. 

cowboy hat+arrows+flower=awesome, thoughtful, masculine little man.

chef hats. asher's face is brilliant. 

a sicilian donkey. they were eager to eat and were so sweet. what a cutie.

at one point in the tour, we saw ostriches doing a mating dance, which is funny in its own right, but was HILARIOUS to me because in college i watched the jeff corwin experience or something and it showed the mating dance which consists of the wings being way out to the sides and it throwing its head back and forth while shaking its feathers. --well i decided i could re-enact it anytime i wanted (apparently i had lots of free time in college). so i did. and we have pictures to prove it. and now my whole family got to see it. and now my boys act it out. so we are a rather large family of awesome ostrich mating dance pros.

broadening our horizons one discovery-channel-moment at a time.

that's how we roll.

 hope you all had a blessed and fun-filled weekend.