Daddy!

Daddy has definitely been the word of the day this weekend! Things that have other names have suddenly become "daddy" and of course, the real thing is the best! Braden was very glad to see Anthony at the airport yesterday and Mommy was, too! 3-weeks is a long time and it makes me appreciate even more the sacrifice that our military families make going away for such long periods of time. Anthony will be leaving more now that he'll be flying regularly again, but nothing should compare to 3-weeks away! Although he has already warned me about a trip to Fiji as I'm sure he'll have to stay when he goes there. That's the bad thing about his new plane... it's got a lot farther range and I think the owners plan to take advantage of that! I'm just hoping I get to go along every once in awhile!

Braden and I had a good week together. We've found a great woman named Toby who comes to the house to watch Braden. She's awesome and I feel so comfortable with her. She's like a surrogate grandma! She'll cover until the real grandmas (and Poppa) come the first week of November and will be here, for the most part, through February! What a blessing!

On Friday Braden got to go to an event with me. I'm on the Board for an organization called Operation Sharehouse Phoenix. It's a program that brings together volunteers to package high-protein meals that are sent to school feeding programs and emergency situations around the world. The kick-off event was Friday (World Food Day) and 100,000 meals were packaged! It was cool to be a part of and Braden had fun "helping," too. If you want to learn more about Operation Sharehouse, here's a website for the lead organization - www.stophungernow.org. It's just getting launched in Phoenix and we hope to package millions of meals to help end hunger around the world.


We made sure Braden didn't get shipped to Haiti with the rest of the meals.


He and Amare Stoudemaire's son had fun playing with his truck.

The Zoo is literally less than 10-minutes from our house. Now that the weather has gotten beautiful (with the exception of this hot weekend!) we got our membership and plan to go there regularly. We've gone the past 2 mornings. I love the thought of Braden growing up seeing cool animals on a regular basis!


The tiger was having fun playing with a keg.


Braden loved the window where he could keep his eye on the tiger.

I love the giraffes and they have a great spot at the Zoo.

We watched the brown bear taking a nap by the little waterfall.

Braden gets to stop and smell all the pretty flowers, one of his favorite things to do.

Don't worry, it's just the otter exhibit he's getting so close to.

And they were sleeping peacefully in their little logs.

The zebras get to eat right near the viewing wall. It felt like we were back in Tanzania!