Happy Day!

Alright I know I have failed miserable at making 2021 but "blog year" but I have an excuse. ;) For some reason my photos stopped uploading to my Google account (which is how I normally add them to this blog) and I couldn't get it to update or sync for the life of me. I checked it this morning to find that it had finally updated! I'm very excited. 

It's already backed up my newest photo, which is of the boys and their Valentine's boxes before they headed out the door for school this morning. The snow storm stomped all over Valentine's Day so they are finally getting to have their parties at school today.

Hayes wanted a baseball theme and Parker wanted Nintendo Switch. They were so excited until we actually started making them and then quickly went from a kid project to a mom project, as far too many things do. I almost spelled out "Parker's Mom" and "Hayes's Mom" on their boxes just to freak them out, but I decided against it in the end (mostly because I was too tired by the time I got to the name portion of each box). 

Anyways! The boys were so excited about them which is basically my goal in life, so that was nice.

They both went to school with Nintendo Switch themed cards and suckers. I love how these turned out!

And I used Lily's birthday graphics to make her Valentine's cards for our party at church. (This was two weeks ago but feels like two years ago.)

Here's Lily's unicorn-themed box. I tried to not spend any money (I spent some on the boys' boxes but not much!) and was able to recycle her leftover birthday stuff for her box.

Lily, age 4: "Dad, isn't my box so cute?" 

Bryan: "Yep, it's pretty stinkin' cute." 

Lily: "Stinky? It's not stinky. (*smells box*) No, it's not stinky, it's just cute."

Fast-forwarding to this weekend. We had fun watching Master Follies on Saturday night via YouTube. I taught Lily how to do a Kappa K. I feel so sad for the clubs this year and all that they're having to change because of Covid. Follies was always one of my favorite weekends of the entire year in college are some of my absolute favorite memories.

Bryan still thinks the whole thing is really lame. 

Nonnie and Pops also surprised the kids with a giant Valentine's cookies bouquet over the weekend. It was so cute. Thanks, N and P!

School was canceled all week last week and by the end of the week, I was very much feeling like Graham looks in the below photo.

A little annoyed and tired of other people making him do things. ;)

But in all seriousness, we were very fortunate to not have too much real drama last week like so many others across the state. We lucked out big time and are apparently on the same power grid as one of the fire stations so we never had any issues with power or water. I am so thankful but was also so sad to see so many others struggle. 

We were in the teens and single digits almost all week but it warmed up enough on Friday (and the SUN came out) for me to venture out and document some of the outdoor activities on our street.

All of the kids went outside every day regardless of the weather. Favorite activities included sledding down our neighbors homemade snow ramp and being dragged around the street on a canoe. Hayes was probably the most committed and didn't really care how cold it was. He came in one day to reveal that he had layered two pairs of jeans over his pajamas which made me laugh. Layering jeans sounds awful.

 

I did a terrible job at taking photos.

Here's to Snovid 2021! Do not ever happen again.

 

What's Going On

Alright, 2021 is my year to regularly start documenting our family's life. I'm determined!

If you read this, I'm going to do my to post on here M/W/F. 

Unfortunately for this goal though, January is a pretty dry time as far as photos and general busy-ness goes around here, so I don't have a ton to share.

Here's what I've got:

Cheesy photos of a crazy Graham and Lily.

And Graham using his newly found skill of climbing the stairs. This child is such a mess. He makes me laugh all day long. Except for when he is screaming over his oatmeal being all gone.

Graham has also been pulling up on everything in the last couple of days and is so dang proud of himself. (He's also teetering on the line of over-confidence and has taken a few tumbles much to his dismay and bewilderment.) We're about to have a walker here pretty soon! 

I also have been trying to clean and organize a few things including but not limited to my jewelry draw and our pantry. 

Yikes.

Much better. 

Going back in time a bit more---we enjoyed New Year's Eve with my parents at Uncle Julio's and made a last minute "Happy Birthday 2021" cake to celebrate "midnight" with the kids. 

My Mom and I went to the Dillard's New Year's Day sale and got some of the cutest things for mostly Graham and Lily (plus a few athletic things for the big boys) and we met up with everyone at Norma's in Frisco (selected purely because they had black eyed peas and Lord knows we all need some extra luck after this last year). It was SO good and Parker even managed to nonchalantly pull out a tooth while we were there. I'm happy to say that the tooth fairy DID remember to run by the house sooner rather than later this time! 

Seeing Nonnie and Pops was a fun way to end Christmas break. We also loved our trip to Lubbock! I'll do a quick recap on that next time. 

Bye!

 

Changes and a Bit of Normalcy (!?)

If there is anything to give you an indication of how hard it is for me to blog, this post is it. I wrote this on August 25th and am just now getting to publish it, mostly because I don’t have the energy to re-write and repeat myself since I have a lot of catching up to do.

Please enjoy my musings from three weeks ago. ;)

____________________

Well it’s been a year since I last posted so I thought it was high-time do an update! I’m such a great blogger. 

What has changed in a year? Um, a lot.

Let’s see...we added a whole new human to our family. Graham. He is our very favorite.

Pandemic.

Bryan became an independent public adjuster.

We lived with family for a few months.

We moved to a new house in a new town.

Hayes started kindergarten.

😅 I’m tired.

——

Lily also went to her first gymnastics class this morning, so I suppose for the sake of starting somewhere as far as photos go, I’ll start there.

She loved it and ran around saying things like “SUPER SPEED! YEAH!” If you know her than you know that this is “so Lily”. She makes me laugh (and also makes me SO stinking tired) on an hourly basis.

She was very concerned about getting too hot (🙄), getting to take a turn on the uneven bars, and getting to learn “back flips”. We hit the jackpot and basically got a private lesson since there was only one other girl in her class. She can’t wait to go back and I can’t wait, either!

I took baby Graham’s 10 month photos today (I still need to edit them for Instagram and am also two weeks behind.)

Isn’t he just the cutest little thing. I can’t with him. He was posing for the phone big time today and it was so funny. He is about to cut at least two more teeth on top (he may already have but I can’t ever get a good enough look!) He is such a dream baby. (Except for when he misses nap time like today when we were at gymnastics. It was not exactly fun to hold a squirmy baby while wearing a mask in hot gym but you do what you have to do I guess. 😉)

He is also FINALLY consistently sleeping in his crib! I say this like it’s his fault when it isn’t, we just have had too crazy of a life to move him from the Nap Nanny until the last few weeks. 

On the big boy front, they have LOVED being in school and I pray/worry every day that it stays that way and that schools stay open. I’m tempted to delete this just so I don’t jinx anything but I will leave it (for now). Our school district was literally the only 5A district in the metroplex to start in-person, but that’s a topic for another post!

Here are a few photos of their first day for the sake of making sure it is documented. 

I’m not kidding I was just staring at his newborn fingers and toes two hours ago. 

This one, too! 

I just about had to grab Hayes by the collar to keep him from jumping out of the moving van on the first day of kindergarten. Since we weren’t allowed to walk them in this year I had to snap a quick picture as he basically ran into the school. (I would be more sad but quite frankly the disappointment from the amount of “normal” things not happening this year has started to be replaced with a really fun numbness in what I assume is some sort of coping mechanism.) 

Precious boys! Ugh. I love them so much and wish time would not be such a complete thief. We’ve had great reports from both boys regarding their teachers (whom I’ve never met in person but seem very adorable over Zoom!) This is a weird world, y’all.

I’m going backwards a bit but since I’m apparently turning this into a school year post I feel that I must share our back to school dinner which we have the night before school starts. I very last minute decided to decorate the table this year with the boys school supplies and am already planning my for table next year. I love this stuff.

I also did our tradition of laying out backpacks and their “first day” outfits (and I will do it for as long as they will let me....) and put together some easy/ lazy but IMO cute and useful little gifts for their teachers (because I’ve learned a few things about teacher gifts and the key is that they really just want a good gift card and something they actually use like fancy pencils. It’s not as fun as I would like but it’s the truth.)

In other news, we have been absolutely loving our new neighborhood, including its proximity to the grocery store and Sonic (FIVE minutes), but probably our most favorite thing has been our neighbors and street! The kids have a blast running around and in and out of houses every night with the other neighborhood kids. 

Here is Hayes at our neighbors birthday party which included a “bubble truck”. I did not know these were a thing but now I’m glad I do!

Here are my kids with two of our other neighbors having a movie night with lots of popcorn and sugar(And the lovely backdrop of our house which is clearly still in need of decor and paint.)

We’ve also really enjoyed the neighborhood pools the two times were able to snag tickets for the evening (it’s times like these that I find my 3am insomnia very beneficial because without it we would have been out of luck and someone else would have snatched them up!!)

I’m tired and this post is never-ending so I will wrap this all up with some random photos. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions on the whats/hows/whys. 😂

Bye!