Summer Fun with CRAAAAZZZZYYYYY Kids

Seriously. Emily, Ally, Lyla, Will, and Chloe are crazy. So much fun to have them all together in one place. A bit overwhelming at times but fun nonetheless.

Crazy Lyla!! (You can see the remnants of her poison ivy on her arms)

Photojournalist Emily capturing the craziness on film.

Will... uh, sure used to drool a lot.

Ok, so maybe Chloe didn't participate in the craziness as much as everyone else.

Woo woo! Super Ally!

Cheese!!!!

Love the combination of his shaggy hair, tired eyes, super smile, and dirty shirt. Pretty much sums up Will.

There wasn't a surface in this house that these kids didn't climb up on to play.

So much fun.

Summer Fun at Meijer Gardens

Catching up on all the photos from all our adventures this summer. This is from when Katherine's brother and family drove all the way up from Texas to spend a week with us.


Butterflies!! Hurray!!


Great times with our cousins, playing in the Great Lakes at Meijer Gardens.

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!!!!

Happy Birthday Ally!!

So one of the only things I love as much as being a Husband and a Father is being an Uncle. And I'm super lucky to have the two best nieces in the world. Today (well technically yesterday because I'm posting htis Friday morning) is one of my niece's birthday!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ALLY MAY!!!!

Ally turns 2 today, which is kind of unbelievable especially since she's just over three months older than Lyla (wait, Lyla turns two in three months? AAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!)

This (and the one above it) are pictures from when we saw Ally and her family in Missouri last July:

Here's one of my favorites from last Christmas:



And of course, who could forget this?

WE LOVE YOU ALLY!!!!

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.

Lyla's fascination with technology

This started a few weeks ago when I decided to make Lyla's bed-time routine a little more engaging so that 1) she'd "know" better when the routine was starting and 2) she'd "like" the process better and thus would be more likely to go to be no problem.

So how did I achieve it? Letting her watch as we heat up her bottle (we still give her a bottle of milk before bed to ensure she gets enough dairy and to help soothe her). She really likes the whole process: pushing the numbers, running away from the microwave to watch from a safe distance (radiation!!!), counting down with the microwave, yelling "beep beep beep". It's all fun. It even is helping her counting because she hears the numbers counting down from ten. Anyway, here's the video.

This next video is a video of Lyla and me watching the first video. This is our third time watching it in a row. She loves looking at pictures and videos on the computer (which she affectionately calls "Pooter"). She usually signifies that she wants to look by pointing at the computer and saying "Will" (her favorite person to see pictures/videos of, Emily and Ally - her cousins - are her second favorite). Anyway, I love how big her smile gets watching and how she recognizes people in the videos. It kind of freaks me out that she's quickly become as (if not more) tech-savvy than I am, but it is inevitable so I might was well enjoy it... and take advantage of it by having her do all the tech stuff for my business. Anyway, enjoy the video.

Mike's graduation from Bethel

My cousin Mike graduated from Bethel College in Mishawaka (aka South Bend), IN with a degree in Awesomeness. Since Mishawaka's only a little over 2 hours from Grand Rapids, we were very happy that we got to go see the ceremony.

Here's our view of the stage.There's Mike with diploma in hand. You can see my cousin Laura behind him and to the left... she'd gone up closer for some action shots of Mike on stage.
The Rings enjoying the ceremony.
You can see (sort of) in this picture the Sudyks (Mike's family). His parents are all the way on the right, about 3/4s of the way up right next to the rail. His sisters, Jenn and Laura, his brother-in-law, Andy, and nephew, Axel are on the same row as his parents but in the next section to the left right on the aisle (look for the baby in the car seat and the man in the blue shirt staring right at the camera... that's Andy).
Me and Lyla. Lyla only got about a 20 minute nap because of the travel so we let her have the pacifier to keep her calm. Despite the lack of sleep she did great all day.
Katherine and Will. Will had no problem sleeping.
Lyla cheering with the crowd as names are called.
Here's video of Lyla cheering, you can just catch her yelling "Yay!" as the video begins.

It was a long day (it took us 3.5 hours just to get ready and get out of the house... traveling with small kids is the nuts). But it was a lot of fun and so wonderful to get to celebrate Mike's accomplishment. I still remember when he and the rest of his family came to my college graduation in 2000. I really appreciated that they made the effort to come out and see me graduate all those years ago and now we've come full circle. Congratulations Mike!!!

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!