The Blondes of Winter

Thatboy is still incredibly close to his best friends from high school.  I remember the first time I met Magski, I felt so much pressure for her to like me.  After all, she'd been in Thatboy's life much longer than I had, and a good word from her would go far.

His little group has hit similar milestones at similar times.  Magski got married the summer before we did.  (Vegas got married a couple years earlier.)  And within the past 3 years, we've all had our first children.  Our first, male, blonde children.  Each about a year apart.  Each tiny little blonde terrors.  Each wanting to be just like the bigger one.

While we were up visiting the inlaws, we had our very first playdate with all three boys together.  We took them out to Tilden Park where they could run around being small boys.  Doing things small boys do.  Like playing with sticks in the dirt.

Cheeks was so excited when the big boys presented him with a stick of his own. But he is just starting to enter the toddler phase, so he did less drawing with sticks and more chewing on them. 

He wanted to do everything the big boys were doing, but he's just not there yet.  Next year is going to be much more fun.

One of the reasons Magski picked Tilden Park was because they had a steam train for us to ride.  She knows how much Thatbaby loves trains, and Ace is a big fan too.  In fact, at Ace's request, we got to ride around twice!  The second ride Ace and Thatbaby got to sit together on the seat, which was very cute.

In general, Thatbaby and Ace were incredibly cute the entire time.  Ace rode to and around the park with us, sitting in the backseat with Thatbaby and singing as loudly as they could.  We played a cd and every song was met with Ace chiming in "I know this song!"  And Thatbaby echoing "I know this song too!"  He wanted to be just as cool as his older friend.

We also, after getting lost a couple of times, made our way to the Tilden Park Carousel.  Magski and I took turns taking family photos, which ended up with me playing stunt artist as I maneuvered through a moving carousel and jumped, one handed onto an animal near the lion Thatbaby had ridden on.

Cheeks had fallen asleep on the way to the carousel, so it was really the two older boys enjoying the ride around and around.  And they certainly enjoyed it!  Even though Thatbaby managed to pick a non-moving animal, because he really wanted to ride a lion, he still cried when we got off because he wanted to go again.

Although I'm sure a lot of that was due to the fact that he was fairly napless that day.  After the carousel, we headed back to Magski's house where the boys rode bikes, scooters, and skateboards up and down the street.  At one point, Thatbaby was riding Ace's scooter, Ace was riding Thatbaby's skateboard, and Cheeks was on Thatbaby's bike.  It's going to be really fun watching these little blondes grow up and play with each other.