over the highway and through the suburbs...

my sister and her sweet husband take such good care of jesse and i. i just wanted to take a few minutes to illustrate all of the many reasons we love going to visit them, and why we are so grateful to have such wonderful family in our neck of the woods:

jesse and heath are pretty much best friends forever (0r bff's for those of you who are more with the hip lingo). they both have spiderman t-shirts, like to talk about good guys vs. bad guys, and love their chocolate milk. heath and i were having an intellectual discussion the other day about which members of our family are boys and which ones are girls. after assuring me repeatedly that jesse is most certainly a boy, i decided i would ask the ultimate question: "who do you like better, heath, me or jesse?" he didn't even hesitate. response: "jesse. do you wanna play with my transformers?" it certainly doesn't hurt that heath is the smartest and funniest child in the world (not that i'm biased at all). heath is still the only person i know that can get jesse to genuinely smile in a picture.

not only is heath handsome, but his little brother wade is also particularly charming. i actually dreamt the other night that i had a baby girl whose beauty baffled everyone i encountered. after waking, i realized that the baby girl was really just wade in a dress. however, i think you can see why i can't imagine a more beautiful child.

last weekend, jil and dave let us have jesse's birthday party at their house, and jil helped me make jesse's cake (and by helped, i really mean that she did all the hard work while i stressed about school and then let me help decorate). to top things off, they gave me a present too (hooray for aprons!)! does it get any better?

heath has taught me that being a big brother is really frustrating, but at the end of the day, no matter how many of your toys your little brother may have put in his mouth, you have just got to have fun and help a little guy out.


frankly, the whole place just keeps me grounded. thanks for letting us make your house our second home, guys.