Love Notes

Jayden is constantly writing me love notes. I have piles of them around the house. He writes them to Josh and Sidney too, but I just love the ones for me. I found this one in an envelope taped to my bedroom door after I got out of the shower.  He is growing up so much.

St. Patrick's Day

We get really into St. Patrick's Day.  And since this year it was on a Saturday Josh got to join in on all the fun too.  He took the kids to get donuts for breakfast, such a special treat.

We went to the parade uptown and it was a lot of fun.  We arrived early enough for front row seats and had fun people watching.  It was a sea of green, lots of fun.  After watching an hour and a half of the parade we left.  It seemed like no end was in sight, and we left at the wrong time because Star Wars showed up, so we had to hold Jayden up to get a peek at it.  It was way fun, the first parade we've ever taken the kids to.  They scored candy, necklaces, and got to pet a ton of dogs.

Sidney wasn't the only pink thing there. 

We decorated with a lot of green.

We had a green lunch. 

Did a treasure hunt. 

 

Josh barbecued for us and we had a very green dinner with green dessert.

Sidewalk chalk. 

Made a funny craft, leprechaun faces.

And we played a cute rainbow game.



Lately

The past few months we have had: stomach flu, regular flu (although not technically the flu, even though all the symptoms were present), bronchitis, pneumonia, really bad coughs and colds, voice loss, and I'm sure something else I'm forgetting about.  It has been almost nonstop.  I've never missed so much church before.  And I'm sick of it.  Now we're just bracing ourselves for allergy season.  So I've slacked some on the blog.  My camera hasn't made it into my hands a lot this winter.  Here's a tiny bit of our life.

Sidney stuffed her mouth full of grapes and her smile was hilarious.

The kids before church one day.

This little lady was sitting on Kiron's lap the other day eating a snack.  Very sweetly, she turned to her, batted her eyelashes (something she does a lot to get what she wants), and then wiped her hands on Kiron's face.  Kiron was so grossed out, and asked her what she was doing.  Sidney's reply, "I thought you were a napkin!"  Whenever she talks, she adds something to the end of a lot of her words.  It's always, "I want some cheesey." It's never just muffin, it's muffiny, or blankie, or pillowy, etc.  Sometimes the words are really funny.  Also, she's been trying to learn the difference between male and female and the other day she said something to Josh, like, "Daddy, I'm your female."  It was really funny and random.

I love it when Jayden gets off the bus and he's wearing something made at school.  It was Dr. Suess week.  He is growing up so much, but at the same time he's still so young.  He's my sensitive little guy.  I made him cry a couple days ago when I was saying how fast he's growing, and how I'm sad we won't be able to cuddle together when he's all grown up.  It made me tear up too, seeing him cry like that.  So that night we cuddled up together and watched a movie.  He also cries during The Prince of Egypt when Moses's mother puts him in the basket in the river, and when I read Puff the Magic Dragon to him.  He has a big, sweet, loving heart.  Love this kid!

Weekend Getaway

Josh and I took our first ever trip without our kids.  We've never had a chance to do it before, reason #117 I wish we lived by family.  His sister has come to live with us for a while, so her first weekend here we took off before she could say no.  We went just for a couple of days, but it was so nice to have some time alone, to be able to sleep in until 10:00, and then not waking up to a kid in my face asking for breakfast.  We headed up to the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina to a cabin.  We had plans to go to the hot springs but we were so relaxed and cozy in the cabin we got too lazy and didn't go.  We were also going to have a campfire but the weekend was so crazily windy that didn't happen either.  We did get to hike the Appalachian Trail.  We can now check that off our bucket list.  Not that we have one, but if we did, we could  mark it off.  We didn't see any wildlife, but we did see some bear droppings right on the trail.  Lucky us.

Did I mention it was super windy?  I thought I was going to blow off the mountain. 

This is where the cabin was.  The advertising failed to mention that it was located near other houses.  Not a touristy spot at all, which is fine, but not the secluded spot it claimed to be.  It was right by a few houses and a small church.  And the drive there was really freaky.  We passed a bunch of shacks and houses that looked like places you would find psycho killers.  And the fact we were out of cell phone range didn't help either.  The cabin was nice, however, but I feel lucky we left alive.  We laughed a lot about a lot of things this weekend.

The other thing was that there were no restaurants nearby.  Just scary ones I was not about to enter.  We ended up eating at the grocery store deli the first night, that's how bad it was.  Something always seems to go wrong on our vacations, but that's what makes them memorable.  It was a really great weekend!

Sidneyisms

First of all, she's killing us with her pigtails.  Her hair is almost long enough to pull it up all the way.  I'm still mourning the loss of her hair.

She has been saying the sweetest things to me.  About 10 times a day she'll say, "Mom, you're so sweet."

  "Mom, you're so precious." 

"Mom, I love you."
"Mom, you're so cute."

"Mom, you're so funny."

It never gets old.  And along with it I get the cutest smile.  Oh, she kills me!

Pop Century Resort

I did my research to find the best value resort on property.  Everyone said this is the best one for a number of reasons, and I'm so glad I followed the advice.  I'd recommend it to anyone considering the value resorts, although they're opening a new one this year, which looks like fun too.  I think some of our best time was spent at the hotel.  We went back every day to rest for a while.  The restaurant there had a huge selection of food and desserts that we took full advantage of, definitely regretting it by the end of the week, but enjoyed it anyway.

Pop Century is very kid appealing.  There are different buildings representing decades from the 1950's to 1990's.  We were in the '50s area.  The stairs were inside giant bowling pins that the kids loved walking up and down as much as possible.  We spent one evening after dinner walking around the grounds and found all kinds of fun statues.  This was one of my favorite parts of the week, actually.  I think for all of us.  Simply because it was more relaxed, the weather was perfect, and we were all less stressed with less people around.  In fact, the kids both wanted to walk around and take more pictures again, but we never got around to it.

The picture quality is really bad on some of these.  It was dark and the kids were all over the place so I didn't have time to really make adjustments. 

There is a bridge crossing the lake with each decade lining the wall.  We had to take a picture of Josh with his birth year.  And then Jayden wanted to take pictures of every single one. He also took a bunch of pictures of us together.

Look closely and you can see Jayden about halfway up.

Every day we walked down this path to the main building to catch the bus.  We have no idea why, but every time Sidney would say, "Watch out for crocodiles!"  We came to expect it each day from her and she never let us down.  It gave us a good laugh.

We stayed in the building with Tramp.  Sidney liked that it was purple.

Even bedtime is more fun at Disney. 

A bite of tye dye cheesecake. 

Mickey waffles.

Sunset from our room.

On the day we left we were really sad.  Jayden kept saying how fast the week went by.

Jayden wanted to give me a mad face too. 

Despite the puking, the sandbox incident, and the exhaustion, I think our trip was a success.

Here's the shirt Sidney got for free because she threw up.