Showing posts with label nathan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nathan. Show all posts

Friday, May 12, 2023

Birthdays and concerts!



The end of April and the beginning of May is birthday season at our house, with 3 birthdays in just a couple of weeks!! Nathan turned 10...



And Luke turned 12!!

Abigail and Nathan decided to share their birthday lunch, which was fun to sneak them both out of school for some special time. 



Abigail's birthday dinner (a few days late). 



My parents flew out a few weeks before graduation so that they could stay with our kids while we went to Europe with Abigail, which also meant that they got to be here for Luke's last band concert of the year!!



And lucky Luke had a lot of people to carry all his locker stuff home so he didn't have to deal with it on the last day of school. 




 

Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Nathan is 9!!





Our little Nater-tot is 9!!! His birthday treat request was ice cream sundaes and boy does he know how to load one up! Here's the IG post I wrote on his birthday: Nathan is NINE!!! It’s hard to believe that scrawny little baby with the eyelashes that were almost bigger than his face has grown into this perpetual motion machine. Nathan is super bright, loves to read and create things, is insanely social (he had the best time last weekend with 9 buddies at his birthday party!), and has absolutely encyclopedic knowledge over a huge range of topics (global politics, engine design of any car he passes, WWII armaments, etc.). His favorite dinner is brown rice, orange chicken, and green beans; his favorite car is the Corvette C8 or a Mustang GT Boss, and his favorite plane is the A10 Thunderbolt or the Warthog. He loves to draw incredibly detailed sketches of aircraft carriers loaded with lemmings, and he is hands-down our best hiker by age (and our second best hiker period!). He is ALWAYS ready for an adventure and is incredibly quick to recognize someone else’s efforts on his behalf. Happy happy birthday, Nater-tot! We love you SO much!!!



For Nathan's birthday, he really wanted a Grizzy and the Lemmings party. We ended up kind of riffing on the fact that Grizzy and the Lemmings live in a national park? Canada? and doing an outdoors theme with a hot dog/marshmallow roast and making survival bracelets out of paracord (and everyone took home their new bracelets and some flashlights). 



I forgot to grab a picture before a few friends left! Whoops!



Everyone had a great time and I love how Tess is completely unfazed by all those boys, haha! 



Neil demonstrating how to make the bracelets


And a closeup on the Grizzy and the Lemmings cupcakes (my friend Steph did a similar party a few months later and made the most AMAZING cake!!!). 



Hard to believe our little Nater-tot is already 9!!!



Seems like just yesterday he was a baby...






And from Nathan's birthday lunch--every time I take everyone out to lunch I always ask a bunch of questions and save the answers on my phone; it's so fun to go back and reread the answers to them as they get older. His birthday lunch was four months late because life...whoops.   


Most recent dream: it was Costco mixed with Marsh and I was trying to jump off on a blanket to turn into an F-22 raptor but it wouldn’t work and then a storm came and I tried to run back to our house but instead I went to Jack’s house and then it ended and I went back to our house and it was a Marsh plus Costco and then we got horses 

Current favorite book: Five Children and It

Favorite thing to do after school: sit down on the floor and look at my Lego sets 

Favorite food: homemade orange chicken with jasmine rice 

Favorite hike this summer: Avalanche Peak 

Favorite treat: chocolate frosted cake with blue icing in the middle 

Favorite thing to do as a family: go camping 

Favorite foods that other people whine about: homemade chicken nuggets 

Most excited for about being 9: playing with my friends and family


 

Wednesday, December 01, 2021

Fall little things and big things





Lots and lots going on this fall! Above: a bike ride Neil and I took a couple weeks ago when the leaves were really at their peak.



Some pics of Abigail getting ready for homecoming--she looked (and looks!) so beautiful! No pics with her date by her request, since they broke up a couple weeks ago. 



While Abigail was at homecoming, we hosted a big party for Juliet's friends at our house (which then expanded to Isaac's friends too). It was a fun night--lots of bonfire time and backyard night games. Of course, the only pics I got were Luke setting up...



...and Isaac cleaning up (burning the last of the firewood. It's a thing). 


I'm not even going to try to keep these in order since the process of transferring photos from my phone jumbles everything! 

Launching rockets with the Activity Days kids (Neil was in charge of this one and it was so fun!). 


One of our friends turned 60 and designed his own party, which was seriously SO fun! He invited whole families instead of just couples and we had a 5k color run, sumo wrestling, tons of backyard games and yummy food, and wound up with everyone throwing pies at him. A very unique party and one that we all really enjoyed (we have some extremely competitive adults when it comes to duck duck goose and Dizzy Izzy). 



This is the time of year when I have to limit myself to only taking one picture per run because it's just SO gorgeous. One Friday the weather was particularly gorgeous so I ran a half-marathon after I dropped Matty off at preschool and the clouds were so good while I was waiting at the roundabout that I had to take an extra photo!



And then my other allotted photo. I made myself wait 8 miles to get this one because I knew it would be so good! I totally plan my routes this time of year based on leaves. 



Case in point: 



Then I make everyone go back with me on Sunday walks. 




Oh gosh I just love fall running.



This is the time of year when I always get a home improvement itch! This year it was our exterior siding...



PS notice the moss on the sunroom roof? In a classic case of project creep, we just signed the paperwork today for a new roof. Sometimes I get started on a project and I'm like WELL THIS WHOLE PLACE IS JUST FALLING APART ISN'T IT?! Kind of like when you start cleaning something and realize how gross everything is and how you thought your house was clean but you're actually living in squalor with hand smudges on your walls and dusty baseboards. (Note: my walls are smudged and my baseboards are dusty.) 



We paused to take our kids to the ward trunk or treat and then looked at the forecast when we got home and were like, oh dang, we better finish the last 45 minutes worth of painting. 



I'm realizing I uploaded the photos that still have ladder marks in them, so please rest assured that we did go back and paint those spots. ;-) And we have bedraggled fake spiderwebs everywhere since it was the day before Halloween when I took these. 


Love this color!! The wood siding is Hale Navy by Benjamin Moore (same color as our kitchen island) and the stone is Avorio White limewash by Romabio. We added the raised beds last year and I limewashed the stone the year before that. Next year's project is converting the sunroom--hopefully!



Another quick little project--stripping out all the caulk in our main floor shower and hanging new doors. Relatively easy update and it makes such a difference! (I took a photo of the process but apparently nothing of the finished version...)


Lots of morning tea around here (Matthew is partial to Trader Joe's harvest blend and I love Celestial Seasonings Bengal Spice) and this is my favorite cup yet. 


The little boys and I waited for four hours for their first round of Covid vaccines--we got them the day after they were approved!! Such a relief. 




Cute Matty in some of cousin Caleb's clothes that they passed on to us!! Such a fun box to open. 




Juliet had her end of season banquet for cross-country!





And started getting in some good cross-training days...


Lukey working on our Halloween week calendar






Cheering on some cute friends in the school musical (Isaac was home with a fever, poor kid, so Nathan happily took his ticket). 



Lots and lots of walks with Matty. 



And hitting the playground with friends every time we had good weather and could squeeze in an hour! 



Matty's hair is a whole thing right now. Sometimes he rubs it up in his hands to make it super crazy...



...and then sometimes he asks for us to style it "like that mean boy in Harry Potter" (Draco Malfoy). He is currently really into the Draco hairstyle and wants his hair like this for every Sunday. 



Not sure why I took this but it is a pretty typical thing--I usually try to fit in some strength work in the mornings while Matty is home because he is really into the various Peloton instructors (if I do a class with Andy, you know that Matthew picked the class that day). Matthew will often do the class with me or just sit here and comment things like "Mom, you're getting pretty strong, but you're supposed to be going faster." 


"Hey Mom, do I look like a really cool guy?" 



And to take us out, here is Neil rocking a fever and "helping" to put away groceries. I came in from the car to find this and started laughing so hard as I realized that if Neil were to ever get drunk, he would probably do exactly this. Haha! Kind of sad though because this is the one that took us all down the week of Thanksgiving and you can see that I was SET on butter for that butterific holiday. (Good sale, gotta stock up.) 








 

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