A little bit of nostalgia

The other day when I posted the picture of Brendan in his cute little corduroys and blue denim shirt, I went searching through my files to find a picture of Alex in the same outfit. While I was rummaging around I found several other pictures that just made me smile. I tried scrap booking for a while, but in all honestly, it took far too long to cut out, and paste all those pictures and little die cuts and such on the paper, not to mention the fact that it made a mess. I think this blog has become more of a giant electronic scrap book for me. Here are some of the pictures that I found that I just had to share:

This is my wonderful Grandma holding Alex when he was about 4 months old. Yes, you heard that right, she's MY grandma. That makes her my kids' Great Grandma. She is really one of my favorite people in the world. She and my Grandpa live only about 10 minutes away from me, and the 3 kids and I troop over every Monday morning and visit. They are in their 70's and currently have my Mom, and 2 of my brothers living with them. One brother is still in High school, the other just turned 20. One of the reasons why it makes me so sad that my MIL Jeanne lives so far away is that I have always lived so close to my own family. It makes me sad to think that my kids won't have the opportunity to see their grandparents all the time like I did growing up. This is totally aside from he fact that I actually lived with my grandparents for about half of my childhood.

My wonderful Grandma is also one of the few people that I truly feel comfortable leaving my kids with. I suppose it helps that she's a free baby sitter, but I know she loves and will take good care of my kids on the rare occasions that DH and I actually get out just the 2 of us. I know that I can always rely on her to help me out, or need someone to talk to. I just adore my Grandma :D
This is Alex's very first friend, Kathryn. Kathryn is the first child of our very dear friends Calamar and Katrina, and is only a week younger than Alex. I have known Calamar (no, that's not his real name) longer than I have known DH, but lost contact with him shortly after I got married. I got a call one evening a little over a year later and heard his voice on the line. "Guess what?!" he said
"No, you guess what!" I replied
"I'm getting married!"
"Wow! Congratulations! Now you guess what.... I'm pregnant!"
"Wow! Us too!"

I first met Katrina at their wedding, and she looked lovely in her home made renaissance wedding dress. They have been our closest friends ever since, and ironically our kids have continued to stay close. As I said, Kathryn is a week younger than Alex. Our second children are 2 weeks apart, and she is now expecting their third child in June.
As you can see, although they are close in age, Kathryn had a lot more hair, and more substance than Alex. I'm sorry to say that Alex started out as a good 8lb baby, but once he learned how to move, that somewhat drastically shrunk. He was far more interested the world than in food.

They have grown a bit since then, as you can see here at Shaya's birthday in January. Isn't Kathryn such a pretty big girl now? As long as Calamar and Katrina don't move out of state, I hope to have many more pictures of us all together in the future :D