[the above photo was taken a couple days ago at her birthday party. yes, it was an alice in wonderland party and yes, olive was alice. ]

today, our little olive becomes a little bigger olive as she turns 3 years old. as much as one might tend to say, “i can’t believe she’s already 3″, i almost can’t believe she’s only 3. i really can’t remember a time when olive wasn’t here. avoiding all cliché, my life is deeply incomplete without hers.

i’ve never had an addiction. well, at least the kind that necessitates an ‘anonymous’ group. you know, the kind where you get up and say, ‘hi, my name is ryan and i bite the heads off of my little ponies or i’m an alcoholic or i like to lick concrete.’ never been to one of those.

but it might be good to reveal, publicly, to readers of this blog one of my lifelong dark not-so-secrets.

i’m a crier.

for the first time. in almost 8 years. christen and i are going on a proper(ish) vacation.

without children.

yes friends, we’re escaping. we’ve somehow brainwashed my parents into believing that they’d have a good time if our children stayed with them for 3 days (yeah, it’s a relatively brief vacation, but we take what we can get…). they bit and we’ll be dropping them off and heading to kansas city for a few days. (we’re very thankful for them and our kids are super excited…and i think my parents are also.)

just a couple weeks ago, i wrote a birthday note to lucy as she turned 4. no doubt, i laid on the sappy pretty thick. for max’s birthday, i wanted to take just a few minutes to tell him a couple things as he celebrates one year on planet earth. i can neither confirm nor deny the sappiness that may or may not flow forth in the remaining paragraphs.

it’s so hard to completely avoid cliché with these types of post. the reality is that many of the clichés are entirely accurate. yes, time has flown by. yes, it truly does feel like just yesterday you were born. and yes, it also feels like you’ve been with us forever. just a year later, it’s hard to imagine life without you, max.

i’m reminded regularly that blogging truly is a completely vulnerable, public diary. my thoughts—for better or for worse—flow forth in relatively unadulterated streams. sometimes it’s brilliant…and far more often, it’s pretty, well, not so brilliant.

recently i was thinking about the fact that whatever i write on the internet will be forever present. yes, forever. it will never. go. away.

my kids will read it.

and my grandkids will probably read it.

and, in the end, i’m ok with that. (i think?)

as many of you know (and i’ve been meaning to blog about it for those who do not…), we moved into a new house a few weeks ago and we’re loving it. we have double the space, a big backyard and the house is just beautiful.

one of the not-so-great things is that the girls have had a hard time adjusting to bedtime in their new bedroom upstairs. it’s not really that they’re scared, but actually, that they love their room (and playroom) so much that they just don’t want to go to sleep every night. since being here, we’ve had a couple nights that we literally spent 2 hours from the time they got in bed until they were actually sleeping. it’s been incredibly frustrating.

if you listened very closely a couple days ago, you could hear the collective gasp of the residents of little rock, the state of arkansas & the entire south. why?

because it snowed.