The Great Outdoors

One of our favorite parts of our new house is the big backyard. Now that the boys are walking almost all the time, it's much easier to just let everyone roam freely and explore.

Alex and Maguire love to climb up and down the deck stairs, play peek-a-boo through the railings, fight over the slide....

...and could literally spend hours (Maguire especially) staring at our backyard neighbor's dogs.

Plenty of time is also spent figuring out potential escape routes from all angles. And if you're thinking that gap between fence and house is much too small for someone to squeeze out, you'd be wrong. Just call him MacGyver -- despite having one of the biggest heads around, Maguire is capable of wiggling into/through/out of some of the teeniest spaces.

Ellie has a new favorite outside activity (which I'm sure is endearing her to our many senior citizen neighbors with beautifully manicured lawns) -- blowing dandelion fuzz off of every dandelion that crosses her path.

Bear with me on this next one, I had to let her do a crazy face before she'd smile for me.

And with boys, there's always lots of bug-gazing and stick eating to be done.