A wedding and a baby!

Well, this post was going to document an amazing weekend of a family wedding and a new nephew. Which is all super exciting. Then I realized that I had a bunch of other photos in my phone that don't need their own post so they are going here too. 

So here I go...

I've been trying to convince my mom to come down to Portland to watch my kids on a Saturday so Max and I could go to the temple. She was finally able to do it. And she and Don came down with the works to make a gourmet breakfast with the boys. So Max and I got to enjoy a much needed date!

So we took these Not-so needed selfies. We enjoyed walking around and counting 4 weddings and wondering when brides started looking like little babies. we are getting old. 

 Immediately after our date we loaded up in the car to make our way to Salem for a Baertlein family reunion. And we were super late but we were able to see some relatives and I only took a couple of photos by the stained glass!

And this odd photo of a bunch of Baertlein boys managing their excessive energy with wall sits. 

That time Edwin was just being adorable...well that is most of the time!

 He saw his brother peeing in a bush and was trying to figure it out...

On Labor day, Charlie and I were awake before everyone else so we decided to take a run to the new park by us. We had the park to ourselves and it was an excellent impromptu mother/son date!

 And of course there are going to be chickens in this blog post...they only sleep up in the rafters now. Weird birds.

 But they have bonded nicely/

But one night right after we built our run...they got confused at night and one of the birds (Rita) decided to fly up into a tree instead of go into the coop, and it was really hard to get her down. Max eventually broke off the branch she was on.  Cool story.

 And we are still enjoying our baby chicks, which are a lot bigger than this now....

Miles and I made a chicken swing one day, but the chickens didn't really like it. Charlie is forcing them to enjoy it here. 

 He's still a pretty big fan!

One day we had some errands to run near the temple and so we spent some time walking the grounds on a beautiful day!

And now we get to part of the main post. My Step Brother (weird technical term) got married up in Toledo Washington (about 1.5 hours north) Josh and his Bride Valerie looked stunning and the whole event was absolutely beautiful. It was great being able to enjoy a wedding and not worry about photos, but then again, I wished I had brought my camera, because it was a beautiful event!

 Miles would not leave Grandma's side, and didn't want to share her with Grandpa Don.

"Max eating a cupcake"

And I ironically didn't take a photo of the Bride and Groom but we are super excited for Jared and Valerie

 The following day we took a trip down to Eugene to meet our brand new 2 day old nephew. And I got to take photos of him and his family!

Anyway, the wedding and the baby were the main events of this post. Exciting times around here! 

Traipsing through the Forest

I feel a little bad that we've felt that we CAN get out of the house more now that Charlie is in school, we'll just say he's my most unpredictable child and sometimes its just not easy to leave the house with him and his 2 brothers. Anyway, we will definitely have more adventures with Charlie in the future, but for this outing with my two younger boys, we enjoyed running through the forest and I was so grateful that Edwin was so willing to run and even run in the direction we wanted him to run, so I didn't really need to carry him much. Also, Miles and Edwin have never really been that friendly with each other, not really mean, just indifferent to each others' existence, they seem to compete with each other for their parents affection, You can observe them fighting over Max's lap in church. Or maybe we should just be more affectionate parents. haha...anyway...Spending time in the forest does good things for these brothers.

There's Miles, lifting logs again...he must be training for the highland games or something.

You should caption the following photo...

Some captions previously mentioned by friends include...
"When you party like a rock star, sometimes you get a tummy ache."
"I need to lay off the juice boxes?"

Haha anyway, give it a try! 

So the brothers are working on bonding here...

The stump where Miles has many photos...it's falling apart faster than expected.

And there you have it! Quite the pleasant outing. No tears were shed and everyone was happy.