Happy Birthday Aunt Anna!!!

My little sister Anna turns six today! Whoa! We can't wait to see her and the rest of the family next weekend at the annual Ring Family reunion. We'll have to be sure and sing Happy Birthday to Anna while we're there.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANNA!!!!!

Happy Halloween!! 2009 Edition

This year for Halloween the Rings were in Wisconsin for Aunt Julie's wedding. The wedding was on November 1st and the day before was a full day of preparations, spending time with family, and (for the kids and me) adjusting to being in a different environment. Because it was such a full day we didn't have time to take the kids out to go Trick or Treating. But that didn't stop us from getting dressed up and posing for pictures.

This year Lyla dressed up a Winnie the Pooh (dressed up as a 'Hunny' pot). And lil' Will dressed up as Pooh's buddy Piglet. You'll recognize the Piglet costume from last Halloween. Unfortunately this year we didn't get to carve pumpkins or go out in our neighbor's scary grave yard... but we did get over-stimulated and over-tired... so that was fun.

Enjoy the pictures!

Happy Birthday Emily!!!

Wow! I can't believe my little Emily is FOUR YEARS OLD!!!

She went from this:


To this:

For those of you who don't know (how can you not know?), Emily is our niece. The first born daughter of Katherine's brother Dave and his (awesome) wife Faith. We've been so blessed to have Emily as our niece and to have been able to see her as much as we have since we live so far way from her (boo). Emily for sure holds a special place in our hearts. She and her sister, Ally, are right up there at the same level as our own kids (Lyla and Will... remember?).

One good thing about Emily getting older is that pretty soon she'll be old enough to come up and visit us on her own... not that we don't want David and Faith to visit, we're just looking forward to some niece/cousin time with Emily and Ally.

Anyway...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EMILY GRACE!!!!!

WE LOVE YOU!!!!

Ring Family Reunion 2009

So I was going to start this out by reminding you about our trip to St. Louis for July 4th last year (2008), but it turns out I didn't write about it. I only wrote 4 blog posts last July which I'll chalk up to having a 7 month old and the fact that it was summer.

Anyway, since you don't know, my family (the Rings) has an annual reunion in St. Louis, MO. It's been going on for like 16 years but last summer was the first time I (and thus Katherine and Lyla) had been. We had a blast, enjoyed seeing a ton of my extended family, and showing Lyla off to everyone. So we decided to return this year in order to have a blast, see a ton of my extended family, and show Lyla and Will off to everyone.

We drove down on Friday July 3rd and it took us about 9 hours, which isn't bad for having to stop frequently to feed a baby. We definitely were worried about having the kids in the car for that long but they both did fine. Arrive Friday and spent the next two full days visiting with family, eating a ton of food, drinking beer (sorry if you're offended by that but it is part of the weekend's events), playing with kids, and NOT taking pictures.

One of the things I've noticed about having two kids is we hardly have time to take photos any more. I thought that it would be because the novelty would have worn off by the second kid, but that's not it. I love taking pictures of Will, he's so adorable and stinking cute. Unfortunately, having Lyla run around makes it hard to focus on taking pictures. Plus our digital camera is O-L-D old and the compact flash card will take about 10 pictures and then get an error requiring it to be reformatted, which means stopping, uploading all the pictures onto the computer, and resetting the card. And if you only just started reading this post, back up a few lines because I just explained that WE DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THAT!!!

So if you want more pictures of Will and Lyla, feel free to donate either a new digital camera or a new compact flash memory card. We'd appreciate it.

The main thing we were looking forward to about this trip was Will getting to meet all of my family. Which, he did. Magnificently. Here's a list of people that Will got to meet for the first time (and Lyla got to interact with for the first time where she could remember who they were and interact with them... which was super cute.):

My dad, aka Grandpa Ring, aka Mosquito Mike (his nickname back in the days when I was a kid and we used to wrestle... we don't do that any more):

Aunt Julie (I think this photo is funny because Lyla seems to be baffled by that plastic Easter egg):
Uncle Jeff:
Fei, Uncle Matthew, and Aunt Anna (I'm bummed that I don't have pictures of them with either Will or Lyla because there were definitely opportunities for some cute ones. Fei if you got some with your camera, please email them to me.)

Here we all are. This is the first time my immediately family has all been together in awhile so it was definitely a great trip.

Here's a cute one of Lyla and Will posing together.
This one it pretty cool. It's a picture of all the Ring men. From L-R: Uncle Pat, his son John (my cousin), John's son Allen, my brother Jeff, Dad (in the red shirt), my brother Matthew, me, lil William, my uncle Bob, my cousin Mike, my uncle Tom (Mike and Robert's dad), and my cousin Robert. Very cool.
Here are Mike and Rob talking with Katherine (Will's in there too).
Here are John and Allen, avoiding being photographed.
Here's my camera's version of the annual group photo. It was a very muggy day and the lens had fogged up. Great jorb, camera!! (Seriously, anyone want to donate a new camera?)

The trip was short but definitely fun. I would have liked to spend more time visiting but we didn't have it. Plus we had to head out on Sunday to get to Branson, MO where we spent a week in a vacation rental with Katherine's family. I'll post pictures from that trip soon.

Will fans

First off, Will is 6 weeks old. We can hardly believe it. He's growing a lot to and has really filled out in the past week or so.

Since Will was born a lot of people have been wanting to come by and see him. Especially the people from our church (seeing as we missed four weeks of church - two of the Sundays we were in the hospital), so we've had a bunch of visitors which has been great. Unfortunately I don't always think to take pictures because either we're busy and I can't remember where the camera is, or our stinky camera from 2002 is slowly dying and replacing it is not top on our list of priorities, or our friends insist that you don't take their picture even though for the past 3 weeks they've given you a tremendous amount of grief for not taking their picture when they visited you in the hospital... you know who you are.

Here are some, but not all, of the people who've visited us in the past 6 weeks.

The McDowells:


The Wammacks (sorry other Wammacks, I don't know why I didn't get pictures of you):
The Hawkins's:


The Greg (Greg is my roommate from college who drove into town while he was on a work trip. Unfortunately the rest of his family couldn't come visit):
The DeBoers (I guess Luke was camera shy):


The Adams's (except Tom who was, well, busy with other plans... and didn't invite me... grrrr.):



We're looking forward to many opportunities to visit with more friends and family this summer. We're planning a vacation in July to visit St. Louis and then Branson, Missouri - first for the Ring Family Reunion where we'll see my dad, Fei, Matthew and Anna, hopefully my brother and sister, plus a number of my aunts and uncles, cousins, my dad's cousins and other family. Then we're headed to Branson to spend time with Katherine's brothers and parents. I can't wait for Emily and Ally to meet Will and to see the three girls running around and playing together. Yay summer!

Christmas, San Antonio style

We were lucky to be able to spend a few days over the holiday down in San Antonio visiting my family. We drove down from Dallas the Saturday before Christmas and spent five days down there. It was really good to see my dad and Fei and Matthew and Anna. Lyla had a lot of fun playing with Uncle Matthew and Aunt Anna, being smothered with love and attention from Fei, and cuddling with Grandpa Ring. She even learned how to say Grandpa, which sounded more like "Mmmm pah."
Here's Lyla's Ring-genes in action:
Yay Mmmm pah!
Lyla's number 1!
Hey Uncle Matthew, can I ride Flicka?
Aunt Anna is so cute!

I can walk, Dad. I just choose not to.
Matthew is growing up so big.
We left on Christmas Eve to go back to Dallas so the kids opened their gifts on the 23rd. Lyla got a cell phone.Anna got Hello Kitty stickers and gear.
Matthew got Monopoly Junior.

The night before we left we went out to dinner at Anna's favorite restaurant: Applebees.Anna, I thought you loved Applebees?
Are you sad because your daddy is busy telling all his funny stories to Lyla instead of you? (I love this picture.)
We had a wonderful time in San Antonio and were sad we couldn't stay longer. The saddest part was that my brother Jeff was supposed to fly in from Portland the same day that we arrived. But because of the huge snow storm they had, all flights were canceled for 3 days and he didn't make it. So we were sad we didn't get so see him. But we did get to eat at a yummy Thai restaurant, so it wasn't all bad. Hopefully Uncle Jeff can make it out this spring or summer to meet his niece and nephew.