40th Birthday

It's official!  James is now Over the Hill!  The dreaded 40th birthday has come and gone and James survived.  Luckily we did lots of great celebrating to help gently and happily ease him into old age.

The big celebration was a 5 day trip to Lake Chelan with our good friends the Faders and Carter Stevenson. We left Nate with the grandparents and had a super relaxing and fun weekend with lots of laughs, good food, games, great conversations and amazing memories.  The boys golfed 3 days in a row.  Heidi and I both being pregnant got to sleep in and lounged in the sun reading our magazines.  We did finally join the boys at golf on the last day and helped drive the carts.  We only made it through the first 9 holes though and then got too hot and spent the rest of the time in the clubhouse.  We made dinner at night and there were tons of games of cribbage and a late night round of Mexican Train dominoes.  James and Carter both brought their guitars--such a treat to get serenaded!  Some of our favorite highlights were a special birthday dinner for James at Sorrentos at Tsillan Cellars.  James' best friend Russ and his wife Tammy were in Chelan at the same time and got to join us for dinner as well as Heidi's dad and his wife Julie.  It was an amazing dinner with great food, lots of wine, and just really special interactions with some of our most favorite people. Another major highlight was one evening taking Heidi's dad's boat over to Campbell's resort and visiting the Beach Bar for fun tropical drinks and swimming at the beach.  I think James had a really great time and it was a really special way to enter into the forties.  Thank you to our dear friends for making it such an incredible weekend!

The birthday celebration continued into last weekend when we had dinner with James' family.  Again more wonderful time with loved ones plus ice cream cake!

I don't want to speak for James but I think his 40th birthday turned out to be one of the most fun and memorable birthdays he's had which is great considering it's kind of a scary milestone.  Happy birthday my sweet husband and here's to 40 more years!

Celebrating with the Warners at our house

Good buddies--James, Jesse and Carter

Bump shot at about week 35!

Lovely dinner at Sorrentos

Happy birthday!

Great gift from the Seatons

Fun trip to the Beach Bar

Amazing view from our condo

Celebrating at Gramma and Grampa's

Love this photo!  Don't get photos like this often enough

Such a cute couple!

Yummy Baskin Robbins ice cream cake--James' favorite!

Nate loves to help open cards and presents

Spoiled rotten--tons of great gifts this year!

  

Our ChelanMan!

HUGE KUDOS to James who just completed his first Olympic Distance triathlon at the ChelanMan event in Lake Chelan last weekend!!  We're so proud of him!  Lots of hard work and sweat went into training for the event not to mention he just had ACL surgery last fall!  James awesomely conquered the 1 mile swim, 25 miles of biking and a 10K run with a smile on his face and great determination.  And he felt great afterwards which shows he was well in shape.

The weekend was so fun because we got to stay right down the road from the park where the race was held with good friends who were also competing.  It was so great for James to have his tri workout buddies there for support, I loved getting to hang out with the other moms as we cheered on our guys and of course Nate had a great time playing with the other kiddos.  We all celebrated with a yummy dinner on Saturday night.

Nate and I are so proud of you James!!

Just about to begin!

Luckily we stayed close so we got to take a swimming break with baby Hope while Papa was racing

Still smiling even as he gears up to run

Nate entertaining himself while we waited

There's the smile again as he comes to the finish line--what a stud!

Hooray!!

5th Wedding Anniversary

Hard to believe but James and I have been married 5 years!  For our anniversary in May we decided to celebrate a little bigger for the 5 year milestone and traveled up to Victoria, BC in Canada for the long weekend (by ourselves!).  What a glorious time!  Although we missed Nathan terribly, it was so nice to just get some couple time and reconnect.  It's amazing how relaxed we were!  Nathan is a really great kid and not stressful at all, but you realize how constantly "on" you are when you have a toddler that you're trying to keep track of, pay attention to and teach.  It was wonderful to check out for a few days, have adult conversations, get a lot of sleep and just be on our own schedule.

We stayed at a lovely little boutique hotel called Abigail's right close to downtown Victoria.  We really loved it and would definitely stay there again.  It was a nice combo of small inn and bed and breakfast.  They had a wonderful breakfast spread in the morning, appetizers in the late afternoon and cookies upon arrival.  How could you not love it with all that?  And the staff was extremely friendly--always willing to help with restaurant or activity suggestions.

The weekend consisted of renting scooters to take a beautiful ride on the outskirts of the city near the ocean, awesome food, visiting Butchart Gardens, reading, taking naps, playing cribbage, walking around the city, etc.  James also got to partake in a little Cuban cigar smoking session one evening after dinner.  The perks of Canada!  :)  It was just what we were hoping for and a great way to celebrate 5 wonderful years of marriage.

Happy anniversary to the greatest husband ever!  I'm so blessed to be on this life journey with you!

Beautiful ferry ride

Whenever we rent scooters, the big Darth Vader helmets always crack us up!

Beautiful views on the outskirts of the city

My favorite shot of Butchart Gardens

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Cannon Beach

Ahhh the relaxation and rejuvenation of the beach!  I miss it already!  Back in mid-May we traveled down to the Oregon Coast for 5 days with the Warner family.  And Ryan's girlfriend Carly got to join us as well.  We actually stayed in Gearhart, OR which is about 30 min. north of Cannon Beach but we referred to it as Cannon Beach the whole time anyway.  My wonderful parents rented this beautiful beach home about a block away from the beach.  It had 5 bedrooms and a huge kitchen and was such a lovely getaway place. And man did we sack out!  Funny how groggy and lazy you get when you finally let your body have some downtime.

The weekend was filled with lots of trips to the beach and the town of Cannon Beach, lots of eating, walks to the little bakery in town, walks on the beach, flying a kite, playing in the sandbox, roasting smores on the firepit, reading, playing games, taking naps, etc.  It was just what I wanted it to be and just what our family needed! This was Nathan's first trip to the ocean and he absolutely loved it.  We still talk about the beach a lot even now and pretend we're at the beach or going to the beach with our toys when we're at home.  He was relatively brave with the waves and was in heaven splashing in the puddles or playing with his trucks in the sand. He even found his very first starfish!

It was such a fun week.  Now don't get me wrong--we definitely had our moments sometimes.  That's to be expected when the family is together constantly for 5 days.  But all in all we created some really wonderful memories and had some great family bonding time.

We found a starfish!

Such a great beach house for relaxing, playing, and hanging out

Ready for the beach mom!

Flying our first kite--a train kite!

We loved playing in the sand

The beach house even had a sandbox.  Nate played in it about 80% of the time probably.

Relaxing by the fire pit

We love the beach!!

   We also lucked out and got a couple family photoshoots by our talented Ryan.  Here are some of my favorites below:

To see more photos check out Ryan's photography blog at http://ryanwarnerphotography.com/ (and of course if you're interested in hiring him, please let me know!)

Nate Turns 2!

May was an incredibly busy month for us so I'm just now getting caught up on blogging.  Lots of fun posts coming up though because May was a very busy, but very fun month!

First up is Nate turned 2 on May 10!  I can't believe it!  It's still weird to say that he's 2.  Time is flying by. For Nate's birthday we had a really fun day celebrating with friends and family.  We told Nate the birthday plans in April and he couldn't stop talking about it for the whole month.  He would tell total strangers what the plan was for his birthday.  And the day definitely didn't disappoint.

Luckily his birthday fell on a Saturday so we got to celebrate on his actual day.  Our first activity was going to the Woodland Park Zoo!  We were joined by all the family and then also the Faders (Nate's godparents), the Ridges, the Stevensons, and the Walkers.  So Nate had a wonderful combo of his family and closest friends there.  The weather held out and we just had a wonderful, surprisingly non-stressful day wandering around seeing the animals.  The kids got along great and there were no meltdowns!  They led the way to the different exhibits they wanted to see and all the adults meandered around them.  We were there for 3 hours which I thought would be plenty of time to see the zoo, but we didn't even get to see 1/3 of it.  No matter because we had a great time and felt like we got to the important parts.  Our favorites were the giraffes, the gorillas, and the elephants.

Enjoying the penguin exhibit--and praying for the rain sprinkles to stop!

We got to see the giraffes up close!

Gotta love the zoo!

After the zoo, we all ventured down the street to Tutta Bella--Nathan's favorite restaurant!  Tutta Bella is a gourmet pizza restaurant and I used to live right by it.  I probably went there 100 times when I lived in Seattle.  They also have a location in Issaquah now too that we frequent and over time it's become Nathan's favorite place.  I love how he says the name of the restaurant with a full on Italian accent too.  It's a fun place because the food is really good, it's a nice atmosphere, but it's also great with kids and there are lots of families.  We had a great meal and then Nate got to open all his presents and enjoy the yummy cake that Grampa Jay made him.  What a great day celebrating our boy and being with so many loved ones!

Also a big shout out for the awesome photos courtesy of Ryan Warner Photography

Enjoying yummy pizza and salad with amazing friends and family

The awesome cake made by Grampa Jay

Nate opening his new Thomas the Train set with his best buddy Gavin (aka the Thomas the Train expert)

Happy Birthday to our sweet boy!!

Baby Part Deux

BFP on a POAS with an EDD of 9/15 for DS #2!!

So apparently James has been browsing around BabyCenter too much again lately and is only able to speak in baby acronym.

TTC
Megs and I had been discussing TTC so that Nathan would hopefully have a baby brother or sister when he was around 2 years old.  So began the debate of the perfect birthday.  May was no good, because it would be too close to Nathan's birthday, plus there was also Mother's Day.  We briefly discussed June, but that would've required TTC just after James' ACL surgery, enough said.

That got us into July and August.  I've always had a summer birthday (funny how it's always the same month?) and was always kind of envious of the other kids who got to have a birthday party with all their classmates during the school year.  Okay, so it was pretty fun always having a birthday during the summer with the nice weather and all.   But summer also meant James would have to share his birthday, hey, September looks nice!

So we set out for September.  Needless to say, it was a very Merry Christmas :)  I remember Megs disappearing after dinner one night and hearing the distinct sound of a plastic wrapper being opened.  Five minutes later Megs came sauntering down the stairs with a little plastic stick in hand and a satisfied grin on her face.  It was January 8th.

The Bigger Reveal
Our first reveal party was pretty amazing, so we had to work even harder to make the second one just as spectacular (as I write this, I'm sensing a theme with our second baby)!  We finally decided on filling a pinata full of pink or blue colored candy, depending on the gender.  But we would need someone to actually fill the pinata.  At first we discussed asking our neighbors to do it and then giving the left over blue or pink candy to their children.  In the end, we decided that we wanted to find out the gender, by ourselves, alone at home.  If this was to be our last child, we wanted to have our own special moment.

We opened the envelope together and at this point I was pretty sure it was going to be a girl, although I would have been perfectly happy either way.  So I was fairly surprised to see that we were in fact going to have another boy!  Watching Megs expression, I could see that, although her heart was filled with joy to be having another baby, she was struggling to hide the disappointment of not having a girl.  She had wanted so much to have a baby girl that hearing it was a boy took some time and grieving to adjust to the news.  We were soon discussing what a world with two boys would look like, bunk beds, having a playmate, looking up to an older brother and watching out for a younger one, something I never had.  Our new reality was hard to imagine, but left us both with smiles of pure joy.

We weren't entirely sure how to go about the whole pinata thing, but thankfully, it included some strings to pull at the bottom, one of which would give way to the lot of candy.  Everyone took turns pulling the strings, anticipation growing with each failed tug.  Nathan wanted to help whoever was pulling the strings, so it would become a dual effort.  We finally agreed that Nathan should just keep pulling until he found the right one.  What a fitting way to reveal his baby brother, to be the center of the entire event, even though he didn't fully grasp the gravity of the situation that was about to befall him, literally and figuratively.

With nearly all the strings pulled from the pinata, Nathan finally connected with the right string sending blue candy cascading on top of our smiling and laughing boy with cheers from his family.

Photoshoot
We recently had the chance to meet our new little guy and from the initial images, he's going to be a cutie, just like his brother, not that we're comparing!

We are over the moon.

So, here we go again!  We can't wait for him to arrive.

-Written by James ;)




Wisdom from Dr. Zimmer, our OB:

"With a girl, you have to worry about a bunch of penises.  With a boy, you only have to worry about one."

Acronym decoder:
TTC = Trying to conceive
BFP = Big fat positive (pregnancy test)
POAS = Pee on a stick
EDD = Expected due date
DS = Dear son

Out with the Old, In with the New

After 5 years our exciting news is that we are getting new appliances!  We've been looking forward to this day for a long time.  Not that our previous appliances were horrible, but they were just older and more of a cheap version.  The stove always made me really nervous because it got too hot on the surface.

Although I'm so stoked about having newer, upgraded appliances, there is a small part of me that is sad to see our old fridge go.  We have a new stainless fridge and as everyone knows, with stainless you aren't able to hang anything with magnets on the stainless part.  My favorite part about our old fridge is that we covered it in photos/Christmas cards of all our dear friends and family.  The fridge was also filled the past year with kids magnets, Nate's first coloring artwork pieces, stickers, etc.  So everytime I came in to the kitchen, our old fridge just made me happy.  It definitely brought color and light to our kitchen.

I am in no way complaining or stating that I would like our old fridge over our new one, but I just wanted to memorialize our old fridge for the happiness it brought us with seeing the faces of our friends and family and the life/activity of our toddler every day.

With our new fridge, I had to do something--I couldn't just leave it blank, boring and sleek.  So I've done what decorating I could.

It's not the same, but it'll do.  I think the fact that we have way more space, a water/ice dispenser, and fun LED lighting will help me cope with the change.  RIP old fridge--thanks for the great memories!