Baby zip line

One of Leif and Bjorn's favorite local amenities is the playground at the school across the street from our house. Although the school is for grades 3-8 (soon to change to grades 4-8, I believe), Leif has enjoyed climbing on some of their playground equipment since he was a toddler, and at around a year old, Bjorn is already finding a few things he is able to do there. When given a boost, he's especially fond of the zip line!

Just another day...

Just another day at our house. Yeah, Leif goes around in his underwear a lot. Usually he is at least wearing a t-shirt....

More notably, count the number of boys playing cars on the Car Shelf (known, in some former life, as the window seat in the dining room) in the top picture! Yep, Bjorn is now tall and adept enough to play with Matchbox cars right alongside his big brother. Leif is even occasionally tolerant of this practice.

These days, Leif is a big fan not only of climbing on things, but also of diving and jumping off things, preferably head-first. It's a wonder he has made it to the ripe old age of almost 3 1/2 with no emergency room visits. Knock on wood....

Crazy-hair Bjorn

Leif has long been known for his crazy hair (his head puts on quite a show whenever his hair has not been cut for a while), and now that Bjorn has more than an inch of hair on his head, he can start following in his big brother's footsteps in this arena, as well. The following 'do was courtesy of Aaron at our ice cream stop at the DQ in Hinckley on the way back from the North Shore a couple of weeks ago. Bjorn had gotten pretty sweaty riding for hours in his rear-facing car seat in the back seat of my car (whose air conditioning does not really function), and sweat, as Aaron found, makes a kid's hair spike quite nicely. We'll see if we can recreate this look for his kindergarten school photo in a few years.

Best friends

In late June, we took our first (short) road trip with two kids, heading up to Lutsen on the North Shore of Lake Superior with Grandma and Grandpa B., Erik, Tami, and Vivian for a long weekend. Unfortunately the weather was cruddy the entire weekend -- until the day we had to drive home, of course! As a result, I did not take many pictures. I do have a video of one cute kid highlight from the weekend: Vivian spontaneously declaring (and Leif enthusiastically agreeing) that she and Leif are best friends. They even repeated the declaration once the video camera was on and topped it off with a whole lot of hugging. This was a very sweet and much appreciated moment of harmony between two cousins who are -- how shall I put it? -- sometimes not *quite* on the same page about what to do and how to go about doing it. Maybe when they are not seeing eye to eye we can show them this video as a reminder that they should be nice to each other since they are, after all, best friends (by their own declaration).

Toddler Bjorn

The biggest news at our house this month: Bjorn is walking! He started taking his first few independent steps right around 13 months, and within a week he was walking all over the place. Sigh...hard to believe our sweet Baby Bjorn is turning into Toddler Bjorn. Fortunately, he's still quite sweet, although he is starting to work on developing his toddler attitude.