Another Halloween for the boys. This year they both started off being Stitch, but last minute decided he liked Owen’s old Buzz Lightyear costume. Armada definitely knows how to do trick or treating. When we first moved here and our neighbor told us to expect 600+ kids, I thought he was exaggerating. He was not. So many kids and so much candy to go around from everyone in town.

Owen filled his bag up in about twenty minutes after just going down our street. Levi was loving the inflatable shark costumes, thinking it was baby shark.

I love that this is my backyard right now. Especially this time of year before it’s completely dead, you can still see the colors and you get to peek into the woods and see the sunrise.

I still can’t believe they didn’t put the main bedroom on this side of the house though 🤔both boys get to wake up to an excellent view and we are looking into our neighbors driveway 😂

We took Levi to check out all the farm animals. He got there just in time for feeding them.

Rachel made homemade pizza last night from this recipe she found from some YouTubers she enjoys. I thought it tasted delicious, it had a perfectly crisp crust and just the right amount of toppings. Levi, who is picky about everything he eats even ate an entire slice. I would recommend adding it to the weekly rotation for the foreseeable future and switching it up with different toppings.

Update 10/29/2024

Had a BBQ chicken version for lunch. 👍👍

This past weekend, it finally felt cool enough to put on some fall jackets and head over to our local pumpkin patch to pick out a pumpkin, and more importantly take some photos of the boys 😁 While we were there, Owen took his time (but found one right away I’m pretty sure) to find the perfect pumpkin. Levi was just excited he can finally walk around and spent his time happy to be moving around the pumpkins.

I recently figured out a way to get access to an old facebook account that I thought was long gone. It was made using an email of a domain that I owned at the time, but then let expire. I ended up buying that domain again, then using iCloud to get the same email and doing a password reset on facebook. Once I got in, I was able to get to the photos that I shared back around 2010.

There were these ones from my 2008 deployment. My dad got to ride back on what they call a tiger cruise from Hawaii to Everett, Washington. I don’t remember too much about that time, because it was the end of a deployment and I was probably ready to be off the ship, but it would be great to go back to Hawaii with him sometime and NOT take a boat ride :)

Then in 2009, while he was visiting we went on a seaplane tour of the Seattle area.

Rachel and I went to Lexington, MI today to celebrate our five year anniversary a week early without the kids. We got lunch at the Cadillac Hotel, where the ambience was better than the food. The food wasn’t terrible, just not the best. Then walked by the river that divides Michigan and Canada and took the trail to the old coast guard ship they’ve made into a museum. In five years, we’ve gone from one kid to two, from a cat family to a cat a dog family, moved from 850 sqft house to 1650 sqft, and to keep with the doubling theme grown in our love 😘

My Dad drove for a visit and brought along my nephews, Nolan and Dallas. They got in on Friday, at the perfect time since I just had taken the steaks off the grill and was starting to cut them up when they walked in. Levi was a little suspisious of everyone at first, but by the end of the night he was already trying to take snacks from my Dad on the couch and run with the other boys. While they were in town, there was a Halloween festival in my downtown that the boys got to dress up for. My dad and I took all the older boys to Lexington, Michigan while Rachel stayed with Levi so he could nap. The boys got to see Lake Huron, do their kites on the beach (apparently my dad just keeps kites in the back of his trunk… just in case) and then hit up the candy store. Sunday, we went to Activate which was a mix of games that light up on the floor or patterns you follow around and try to solve with others. That one actually looked like a lot of fun to do with just adults as well.

Over the years, I’ve started several blogs. I think my first attempt was during my time in the Navy. That blog probably had one or two posts, but this was before smartphones. Even the laptop I had felt like it weighed 20 pounds, and since WiFi wasn’t everywhere, I’d have to go to an Internet cafe overseas to make it work. I’m sure I tried a few more times, but with social media, I never really got into it.

I wish I had kept up with it. It would be nice to look back now and see what I was thinking and doing during my last year in the Navy or my first time going on a date with my wife. So, this is my attempt at starting something now. I might blog a lot (like too much, where it’s more like a one-way Twitter), or I might blog once a year. I don’t really know yet.

Currently, I’ve been married for almost five years, have two sons, a red toy poodle, and a cat. I’ve had the same job since 2010, first working out of an office in Iowa and now working remotely in Michigan.