Welcome to our World

Let's continue with the report on birthday parties even though it will knock things out of chronological order, shall we?  I can't believe it, but the time has come for N's first birthday.  Typing that just hurt my heart.  I get actual, physical pain every time I allow myself to think about it.  The year has just gone by too fast and I'm not ready to say farewell to my last baby.  What a joy this surprise baby has been.  I am so grateful I get to be her mommy.  She is sassy like K, active like D and sweet like M.  Don't know how she could be a perfect mix of the other 3 to tie them together, but she is.  At her check up this morning she was in the 91st percentile for height and 38th for weight.  Tall and skinny like her daddy, just as I suspected.  She has 3 teeth, can wave bye bye and says words like Mama, Dada, Hi, and Owie.  That last one came in handy after receiving 3 shots today.  Poor thing.  Way better than...

 M decided to have her first ever birthday party with friends this year since her brother D had his first friend party when he turned 4 last summer.  Tinkerbell is a super fun theme to work with and she only had 4 people to invite:  every girl from her preschool (K & E.R.), every girl from her Sunbeams class (E.F.), and every girl neighbor that was 4 already (N).  lol.  Made things easy for me.  And D only got to be there because he promised to wear either his Peter Pan or his Jake and the Neverland Pirates costume.  He was Jake the entire 3 hours of the party & didn't complain a bit.  Bless his heart!  I happened to see an adult Wendy costume at a consignment sale and grabbed it and had our Natalie wear M's old Tinkerbell costume that is still way too big so we just threw it on top of her jammies.  My partner in planning crime was my dear mom and she was also the cake maker, as is tradition.  I scored exactly wha...

Is the month of March always this busy?  It has come and gone in the blink of an eye.  On the first of the month we got to celebrate Mary's first birthday since Natalie is just a month behind her in age and I feel like the entire month was a party.  I invited people I visit teach over to celebrate Dr. Suess's birthday, the YW had a combined birthday party for the entire year, Kaelah began taking piano lessons, my mom and I took Danny and Michelle to Discovery Days more than once, we started trying to meet friends at the park but the weather didn't always cooperate, so Marie & Tanya brought their children to our new house for the first time and Dan took Kaelah skiing.  Somehow we managed to fit in a trip to Ikea (to purchase porch furniture) and the zoo and the lake were Meigo can swim and sledding near by.  We also managed to scare D & M by using food coloring to change the toilet water and the milk green on St. Patrick's Day.  The idea that leprech...

The night before President's Day our friend Maryann called up to ask if we could go to the DMNS with them.  Danny was already signed up for a soccer clinic and a date with my mom afterwards, so us girls headed to Denver without our boys.  This was our first time going with these friends and we had a blast.  Yes, we really like this place.  We finally branched out and didn't spend time in Space Odyssey even though we just had to hit up the Discovery Zone.  We also got to peak in on the new Discovery Zone that is set to open in June.  Doesn't look like much yet, but we'll still be back to see it this summer.  I felt like the new expansion was mostly wasted space -- lots of places it would have been better to put a floor in than leaving it open to the ceiling two or three floors above.  But if you've seen our new house, you know we don't have any of that up to the second floor stuff going on.  We maxed out the square footage to obtain a huge pl...

February allowed for some sweetness:  I got to help with Kaelah's class Valentine's Day party while my mother babysat my other 3 children, it was our turn to teach co-op preschool and the children loved seeing Natalie crawl around more than they loved circle time, Dan finished painting the vanities we were given the girls couldn't be more thrilled, Michelle and Danny let me take a picture of them in their Minnie & Mickey outfits because "they are going to get married some day"  (we've tried to talk them out of it & have given up), we got to go dancing with our friends for Valentine's Day -- one of my favorite annual traditions, our baby started crawling up the stairs like a pro, and we thought our neighbor's new Chinese restaurant was delicious (especially the red bean ice cream).   Danny and Michelle took a gym class at the rec center again, reminding us that we are so excited to take classes in a real gym this summer.  The two of them al...

We had an amazing vacation in Walt Disney World the last week of January.  We learned a lot from our first trip in 2011 and reaped the benefits and only could have asked for one thing more:  less rain! Let me start from the beginning and be as thorough as possible, mostly because I've had a lot of questions about the details.  Please be aware that one of my grandmother's admonishments was to travel while we were young.  She told us that by the time you are old enough to retire chances are traveling will be uncomfortable or later, in my grandparent's case, my grandfather got Alzheimer's. Preparations In October we got a Disney Visa and made reservations at the Art of Animation Resort , complete with the medium level dinning plan.  As soon as I could I reserved all our sit down ("table service") meals and used the new Fast Pass+ service on the My Disney Experience app.  I did a ton of research, mostly while feeding the baby, trying to memorize the ma...