Turning our attention back to the halcyon days of 2009, here’s a set of photos highlighting my mom’s 65^th birthday. For the occasion, my dad arranged for the two of them to travel to San José, and for Bill and Leah to fly in from Colorado Springs. For some reason, Joe spent part of the visit dressed up in one of Julia’s old Disney Princess outfits; we’ll need to keep those pictures handy in case he steps out of line as a teenager.

In other exciting news, Julia hit a big milestone yesterday: she went with Julie to Nordstrom to be sized for her very first training bra. Needless to say, she was extremely excited to take this step, and throughout the afternoon, she happily switched among the three bras she brought home. For the first hour or so, she complained a bit that it was uncomfortable, but by the end of the day, she hardly noticed it was there. For obvious reasons, we’re not posting pictures.

On the topic of training, we finally took the training wheels off of Joe’s bike a couple weeks ago. All things considered, he’s doing pretty well. He was up and balancing on his own a few tries after the wheels came off (though he certainly had plenty of practice with them on). We’re still trying to work out the kinks around turning—so far, we’ve only gone around the block counter-clockwise—but he will definitely be speeding around the neighborhood by himself by the end of the summer.