Port Townsend

While Pat moved the last of our stuff into the new house, Nolan and I met up with Gigi, Yaya, and the Revards in my favorite weekend getaway spot, Port Townsend.

Nolan's favorite part of the entire trip was riding on the ferries. Despite the freezing sideways rain, Nolan insisted that we watch the boats, so we did!

Once on the boat, he went a little crazy with excitement. He pointed out every single boat, bird, wave, and anything else he saw out that window..and made sure everyone else around us saw them too.

We took the Bainbridge Ferry so the first part of our trek was on the ferry and the remainder was in the car. I was hoping that Nolan would nap once we got off the ferry but that didn't happen. He was too content watching movies on Yaya's DVD player.

I'm not complaining though, at least he was quiet. We've had a few disastrous road trips where we all end up frazzled and crazy by the time we get to our destination. This trip was nice and relaxing and we got to Port Townsend just in time for some statue posing and lunch.

Cam, Em and Clementine arrived after lunch and the kids visited the Museum at Fort Warden. It's tiny but the kids played in there for a good hour. The next day, the rain took a break but it was still pretty chilly out. We bundled up the kids and headed to the beach for some kite flying.

Everyone got a turn!

I think I'll wait until some warmer weather to go again.

Nolan turns 3!

Nolan turned 3 on January 12th. Since we were in the middle of packing, planning a huge event and I was still feeling like pooh from my pregnancy I decided to give myself the year off of planning a big elaborate b-day blow out and save my ideas for next year.

Thank goodness I did as the morning of our quiet family party we woke up to Snowpocalypse 2012 and no one could make it over. Luckily Yaya had stayed the night so she was able to play in the snow with us, eat some cake and open a few presents.

Nolan didn't seem too disappointed with the change of plans.

Especially when he saw his choo choo train cake.

He still talks about that cake everyday. When it was my birthday he tried to talk me into getting one...we went to frozen yogurt instead. Sorry Noli!

Happy Birthday Baby Bug!

Updates

Wow, almost 2 months since my last post...sorry about that! It's not out of lack of going on, in fact I blame the exact opposite problem. It seems like as soon as January hit we were scrambling to get things done. We were juggling so many projects that I think we are just now able to take a breath, hence my ability to finally sit down and blog. I guess I should start off where I left off, or maybe a little before that.

In early December we found out about this. I'll have to type up a separate post on how i found out and how I told Pat as it's a pretty good story.

Kind of a surprise as we had just decided that the time seemed right to have another baby in the house and poof it happened. We were super excited to spread the good news when I started having complications. My hormone levels weren't right, I wasn't feeling right and it just wasn't looking very good. Luckily my Dr was able to intervene and probably saved the pregnancy by putting me on some extra hormones since my body wasn't making them. They told us I would have to keep taking the hormones through the first trimester, then at 12 weeks take a leap of faith and go off them hoping for the best. Scary right?

I followed the directions given to me even though the pills made me super sleepy (their other use is as a sedative), crazy hormonal and pretty yucky feeling all around. I went off of them and waited. After the longest 2 weeks of my life I finally had my follow up appointment to see how things were looking. They looked great and we were finally able to share our news on my birthday. Now I'm 16 weeks, or 4 months pregnant (official due date is August 14) and was able to hear the heartbeat yesterday for the 3rd time. And in another 3 weeks we will find out who has been given us all this trouble!

Along with all that "excitement" we have had many other things happening around here to keep us busy. For most of the month of January we were preparing to move out of our cottage. Pat found us a great little rental property in West Seattle that would give us this space we need now that we're adding a 4th (or 6th if you count the cats) member of the family. We were really hoping to find a property to purchase and move into but there wasn't much on the market that fit our needs so we figured we can rent for a while and save some more $$ for a bigger house down the road. We moved in the end of January and are still working on getting settled. I promise a picture tour once I'm able to unpack or at least hide the remaining boxes.

Nolan's big transition in the new house was that when he came home (he was staying with Yaya while we were moving) he had a big boy bed set up. We had prepared him for a few weeks for this transition so it wasn't too rough. We had one rough night where he kept coming out of his room but after that he was back to his regular sleepy kid routine. It's pretty funny to see what he has gathered into his bed when he gets up in the morning or what position he has fallen asleep in. On this particular morning Nolan was straddling the 5 blankets he had in his bed, along with the 2 pillows, 8 cars, 5 books and a ball. Pat said he's found him a few times sleeping on the floor with his bed full of toys. I think we have an early hoarder on our hands! We don't really care what he needs, as long as he keeps sleeping 12-14 hours at night.

The new house has all kinds of things too keep us entertained including a huge park right down the street where Nolan can feed the ducks, play on a jungle gym and run out all his energy. But the most reliable source of entertainment has been the chickens next door. There are 12 hens and 1 rooster that are a great distraction for Nolan and the cats. Our landlord warned us that they sometimes get out and so far it's only happened once. They were pretty easy to wrangle back to their pen but I was pooped out from laughing so hard. The picture above is of the great escape after I cornered them in the little alleyway between our house and their yard.

Then in mid February I once again planned the WestSide Baby Tea. This is my biggest event of the year, and this one was the biggest one ever. With 530 attendees and raising $175,000 it was a record breaker in many ways and I couldn't be more proud to be a part of it. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures as I was crazy busy orchestrating everything and staying hydrated. But West Seattle Blog was there and wore a great article about it. You can check that out here. I'm hoping to have the professional pictures soon.

After this event I of course got my post event cold and took the whole house down with me this time...sorry boys! Now that we're starting to feel better I decided it was time to dive into my biggest challenge yet, potty training! Nolan isn't super motivated to learn but I signed him up for preschool starting in the Fall and he has to be potty trained by then. The countdown is on so I picked him up a pack of training underwear (they have extra padding to help contain accidents but feel and look like regular underwear) that he's been wearing during the day. Today was day three and we finally had some success with keeping the underwear dry and went pee in the potty twice. I'm hoping we can keep this momentum up as I would be one happy mama to only have Nolan out of diapers by the time this next one makes it appearance. I'm getting ahead of myself...

Anywho, those are the reasons I've been unable to blog. I hope you can forgive me?

Holiday Happenings - The Big Day

Christmas Eve:

After we finished out last book, I asked Nolan to take a picture by the Christmas Tree. This is what he gave me.
Take away the blanket and cup and I got this.
Finally I got this gem, with the snow shoe covers on his head. Oh well!
Per usual, Cortez looked beautiful under the tree.

The next morning:

Nolan found this easel under/beside the tree.

He also got these fun light up bath toys.

His stocking had to be the favorite of the day. He found sticky toys that hung to the window.

And a reindeer Pez dispenser.

As well as many other things as seen in the aftermath.

Holiday Happenings - Pre Christmas

Wow, it's almost been 6 weeks since my last blog post. Sorry about that! To quickly catch you up, we hosted Thanksgiving at our house. Despite Nolan coming down with a 102 degree temperature the day before Thanksgiving and having to postpone until the weekend we had a great time, in fact I think a weekend Thanksgiving worked out even better! Then it was pretty quiet after that for a few weeks. Nolan continued to go to school, I worked away on all my Christmas diy projects and Pat kept busy with his pasta. Life was pretty bland around these parts.

Thank goodness for Christmas activities! First on the calendar was the Festival of Trees, we went last year and had a great time and this year our friend Heather designed one of the featured trees so we were practically celebrities! Nolan was in quite the mood so we didn't stay long. Just long enough to check out some of the other trees.

take a pic with Santa. Annabella and Nolan were still too scared to sit with Santa so the mommas jumped in.

Next I got our Christmas book advent project completed and ready to go. Each day we would open and read one of the books. It took Nolan a few days to get into it but by the end he was asking for more books.

I'm working on compiling the list of books we put together over the years if anyone is interested. Should be on Amazon's listomania soon, if I have time to get fancy, I'll post a link here too. This is definitely something we will be doing for the long term as I think we all started to look forward to our book time.

We also spent quite a few evenings driving around checking out all the light displays in our area. This is one of our favorites, the lights go along with music.

We also checked out the Christmas Ships after many recommendations. We were late and only caught about 12 minutes worth of the show but Nolan is still talking about it. So I'd say it was worth it.

The picture at the top of the page is Nolan acting like he wasn't trying to sneak open one of his gifts. He ended up holding out until Christmas day but many of the packages had proof of his impatience.

Photography by Nolan

Nolan can get pretty impatient with me when I'm trying to get a good picture. Now when I bring out the camera he immediately stops doing whatever adorable thing he was doing and runs away. So when he found my camera the other night I was surprised that he wanted to use it. After a quick tutorial I let him take a few pictures around the house. Side note, Pat cried conspiracy as he figured I let Nolan have it so he would break it and I could get a new camera. Not at all what I was thinking but good plan babe!

Nolan seemed to know exactly what he wanted to capture as he quickly ran around snapping away and brought it back to me to see how they turned out.

A picture of his bin of "bubbles". They are actually water beads that I put in his sensory tub.

His favorite car of all, green vroom.

The bottom of Pat's slippers. I guess I know what Pat needs this Christmas, those things are looking tired! Pat was pretty pleased with this shot as he hates pictures of himself. I guess I know where Nolan gets his hatred of cameras from.

He took this picture of me that I actually really like! Great job Nolan!

Here is a picture I took of him right before he took that picture of me. We were obviously grasping for any sort of entertainment that evening.

I didn't even know we had this camera setting, it's called color accent. This is a picture of his train station.

I was pretty impressed with these as I assumed when we got the camera back that it would be broken (shoot, it wasn't), or full of smudgy, blurry pictures. I think he was shooting his favorite things and I'm pretty proud that Pat and I made that list.

Spooky Bath Time

Since we went trick or treating the Saturday before Halloween, Pat and I weren't sure what to do with Nolan on the actual day. We He didn't need any more candy that's for sure so we decided to stay home and just hand out candy. He was cool with that.

To make the day a little special I told Nolan we would have a spooky bath time. I turned out the lights, filled the tub a little more then usual and put light sticks in the water. The bubbles hid the actual sticks and made a fun glowing effect. Sorry the pics are so grainy. I took pictures in the dark so the lights would show up.

It didn't take Nolan long to find down the sticks. He actually turned it into a game, he'd throw them in the bubbles and then search for them again.

He ended up going to bed with those and carrying them around long after the light had worn out. I would say he had a pretty good Halloween. I'm thinking of handing out those glow stick bracelets instead of candy next year. Pat thinks our house will get egged. Thoughts?

Trick or Treating: Cowboy Style

We met up with our friend Bella (aka Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz) and did our very first Trick or Treating Halloween. The business district in our neighborhood did a day time trick or treating the Saturday before Halloween. Perfect for first timers!

He was pretty antsy to get things going, here he is waiting for dad and ignoring my posing requests.

We finally we get there, and my camera dies...this was the last picture we got. I'm dressed as a pirate. Pat was dressed as a dad that would rather be watching football.

Thank goodness for iPhones! Here are the cowboy and Dorothy previewing their loot.

They did pretty good considering this was their first time and the streets were really really crowded. I guess kids learn pretty quickly when candy is involved.

We let Nolan eat whatever he wanted while we were out. When we got home it was straight to bed to sleep the sugar off. When he woke up his candy had magically disappeared! He never asked for it though so it all worked out.