Community Helper Day

 At Caleb's preschool, last Thursday, it was community helper day. So, all the kids had been asked to dress up as some kind of community helper. Well, thankfully we have some great friends who have lots of little boy dress up stuff - because the Andersen house is pretty limited to princesses and super heroes!

So, after going thru their dress up stuff, we came up with a policeman, fireman and doctor. We brought all 3 home to see which one would fit Caleb the best for a day at school. But, the boys had to have some fun playing with their new cool dress up stuff first!  which meant the camera had to come out because this much cuteness MUST be captured for future reference.

Mooresville has no reason to doubt with the Andersen brothers taking care of stuff!

This baby's face kills me! I'm glad they have a Daddy around to do the disciplining because it doesn't happen as much as it should from me!  But who can blame me really? because that's aLOT of sweet going on!

Caleb was pretty much set from the beginning on being a DR. And who can blame him? He interacts way more with drs than he does firemen or policemen, so it only made sense :)

 Wouldn't you love to have a drumming Doctor?

and here he is all ready to go to school!!  He had lots of fun at Community Helper Day and even came home with a Dr. bag he made in his class! Who knows, maybe one day he will be Dr. Caleb.....only time will tell :)

Cadence the Dancer!

Chris has always called Cadence his "beautiful, beautiful Cadence Shae" and this past Thursday when she put on her new dance outfit, complete with bun, the saying was as true as ever. It literally made me tear up to see how big she is getting. We are so proud of the girl she is becoming and it is so fun to have a front row seat to see it all take place.

So, she got all dressed and off we went to Ms. Charity's Shuffles and Chaines. We had gone a couple of weeks ago to get her outfit and order her shoes so she was pretty excited about going back!  Cadence is in a homeschool class that meets for an hour and 15 minutes. Included in that time is a bible study/devotion, ballet and tap. We were thrilled to get there and realize there are 2 little girls in the class - and Cadence is one of them! I am so glad for the individual time and attention she will get :)

Here she is in the studio complete with her ballet slippers!

Chris took her to the class so he can have some time to study outside of the chaos of home but I did get him to take some pictures of her first time :)

He said she went thru all 5 ballet positions and did some stretching stuff during the ballet portion. 

The tap portion he likened to clydesdales stomping which made me laugh so hard! Evidently there was music playing and they would stomp in time to it. These pictures are a little clydesdale-ish! :)

We are so proud of her as she gets bigger and gets to experience all these new things. We will do this for at least this school year. One week in she's pretty excited! I'm hoping it will stick around!

Dumping Daddy's Phone

We took all the pictures from Chris' phone and put them on the computer last week. While most of them aren't really blog-worthy because they are pics the kids have taken themselves, there were a few that are worth sharing. So, here they are!

We had a fun few days hanging out at a friends pool. 

 Opening a package from Aunt Lizzie and Uncle Shannon!  Everyone loved their books even tho I didn't get pictures of everyone :( Sorry Liz!

We went to Wake Forest for Cora's first birthday. It was SO much fun to spend a couple of days with most of the cousins and GiGi, Poppa, MeMee and Aunt April. It is a lot of kids tho!

 That trip also was the first time we stayed in our new (to us) pop up camper. It was a pretty successful maiden voyage. 

 We're hoping this precious boy sticks around for a while!

Our beautiful girl at her finest :)

 and it's hard to imagine life without Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue. He's a part of most every day around here...

We're so grateful for this life God has given us and even this season with all our littles. It's exhausting and super fun all at the same time and we couldn't imagine doing anything else at this point in our lives. 

Camping with our C-Group

Labor Day weekend, we had planned to go camping with our C (small) group. We were so excited about some time away in the mountains with our friends. And the new pop up camper didn't hurt either! 

So, we loaded up and headed west to Franklin, NC. 

While Chris set up the camper, the kids found ways to keep themselves occupied.....

I'm pretty sure Creed is eating out of the dog bowl here. 

This is how the kids ate as we stood around looking at them. Our kids did such a great job camping! We talked about it driving home and decided that we should camp way  more often because it's lots of fun and the kids do so well. They're real troopers with the outdoor part and find things to do and play with and hardly fight at all. It's glorious!

On  Sunday, we thought it would be fun to go hiking up to a waterfall. So, here we are all caravaning to the waterfall. The drive was beautiful!  The place we had planned to go to wasn't open (boo) but we found another waterfall complete with picnic sites (yay!) and so we were off!  What was supposed to be a not-so-difficult hike just a mile or so turned into to much more than that. and because we aren't great hikers and slightly out-of-shape it was more difficult than we anticipated. But we had a great time and tried to laugh and sing our way both up and down the mountain :)

it's much more difficult than it looks to carry a kid that way. But Baby Shaun did great!

and then we were there!!  This breath-taking (according to a random lady on the trail) waterfall that was nice but not what we expected by the definition "breath-taking" although it certainly did take all of our breath to hike to it, so maybe that's what she meant.....

Exploring around the waterfall. I'm so grateful for these people that we do life with. It was so much fun to hang out and have everyone share in entertaining kids and hauling the load up a mountain.

After we made it back down from the waterfall, we stopped at another place along the road where there was a river you could jump in. It was a pretty big jump down to the water and some of us passed on that much fun. But others of them thought it looked like fun, and went for it! I heard it was cold :)

Cadence and Sam watching the others jump off the cliff. 

These people have been such a blessing in our life. They have become great friends that were completely unexpected and yet now we can't even think of what we would do without them. I love the way God works those kind of relationships out!

Creed is 2!

We started our day of celebrating Creed like this. 

From there, we waited for Daddy to get home from a meeting so that we could open presents!  Everyone tried to be really patient with all the waiting :)  and at last, it was time!

He really was excited - just on the inside :)

This precious boy LOVES some trucks and tractors!  and obviously everyone knows it because most of his presents and clothes were somehow vehicle related. and therefore, he "wuffed" all of them!

a super fun puzzle from Aunt Lisa!

New shoes from GiGi!!

A tractor from Mimi and PopPop

a big digger/bulldozer from GiGi and Poppa

Bath fun from MeMee

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Daddy especially loved the Santa sweater vest :)

How on earth did our boy get this big??

Creed had requested a tractor cake and has really been talking about it since Caleb and Cadence's birthdays a month ago. At first he thought he had to have Buzz and Woody like Caleb but once we explained that he could have ANYTHING he wanted on his cake, his most consistent answer became a tractor cake. So, thanks to google images, we pulled it off :)

I made the cake with Cadence during naptime, so when Creed woke up, he was ready to see his cake!  

Little did I know that meant he would need to taste test the cake, but he did, so we just got the camera and decided to document the fun and fix the cake. After the third fixing of the cake (Caleb thought he needed a turn to taste it too) we got smart enough to move the cake to save it for our evening fun.

After all the cake fixing. we thought maybe a distraction was necessary so out came the paints! and everyone got to paint a picture

After painting came baths/showers for everyone (because they were necessary) and the off to bowling with friends!!  It was such a fun evening because the kids really got into the bowling part. Cadence did great at it without having to use the ramp and the boys loved carrying the bowling balls up and pushing them off the ramp. Although I'm sure the bowling alley people would have loved it if we wouldn't have allowed them carry the balls because sometimes they were too heavy and would end up dropped on the floor....oops...

Nachos, Pizza and Cheerwine seemed like a perfect dinner!  and then we washed it all down with cake!

I think it was a successful cake in Creed's world :)

and everyone else's for that matter......

More bowling and hanging out with our friends. We are so grateful for the Kales and Hannah and Justin and the parts they have played in Creed's (and all the Andersens) life over this past year. We are truly blessed in the friend department!

a few presents later, and we were all done!  

It's crazy to think that our baby boy is 2, but he is!  and we are so grateful for these 2 years that we have had the opportunity to parent him and can't wait to see what the next years bring!  We are excited to see what all God does in our Creed Samuel.....

Happy Birthday Buddy!