Ready or Not, Here Comes . . .

30!

And I am NOT ready!!!

If you watch this clip, you'll understand how I'm feeling. This clip works, too.

It's funny how having a birthday has never bothered me before, but I've been dreading this one for years and now have decided I no longer want birthdays. I can't help wondering if I just stomp my foot, lock myself in my room, and change my diet to just hot dogs and mac&cheese if that will be childish enough to keep me 29. :( My husband said I can stay 29 forever, but that's what old people do. (I won't say how many "anniversaries" we've celebrated for my dad's 29th birthday.)

I wanted to handle this birthday with grace and acceptance, but it took me half an hour this morning to stop crying and just get out of bed to face a day of birthday wishes. Yes, crying over it is lame, I'm sure. But having no sleep (thanks to Lacey and Matty) as well as having a rotten cold at the height of its rottenness probably isn't helping my emotions today. Dan has spent months planning today in his head and I don't want to ruin anything he has planned with a bad mood or let this stupid cold get in the way. He had the kids pick out roses for me last night and they are super excited for today.

Please, someone else tell me they had a hard time with this birthday!! If I'm just being crazy, maybe keep that to yourself today. ;) Typing this out has helped a bit already.

My 2 Runners

Thanks everyone for the kind words and comments after my last post. I must admit it's nice to know that people are still out there reading what I'm writing and I'm not just talking to myself (which is what happens here at home when I try to get my kids to clean up their messes.)

Back on the 13th, my kids got signed up by their fun Aunt Dawn to run a race in Alpine. Dawn has become a runner in the last few years and loves to get the kiddos involved when she can. Matty ran with her once last year, and Jossy decided she wanted to participate this time as well. We met up with Uncle Sean and their cousin Emi when we got there.

At the starting line

Dawn ran along side Matty (it was just around one block) while I got to "run" with Jossy. I put that in quotation marks because the first half couldn't really be called running. It was me carrying my shy little girl who refused to take one step with all the crowds and just wanted picked up. About 1/3 of the way through, I convinced Jossy that there was a prize waiting for her at the end (which there was) but she had to run or walk if she wanted it. She got right down and started running. I was so proud of her for doing that! She walked off and on, but really did pretty well running.

As they crossed the finish line, a man was there to give them high fives and say, "Congratulations! You got first place!" Then they handed each child a first place blue ribbon and a sucker. My kids love that they got "first place." It's all just technicalities anyway. :)

Catch Up: Summer's End

This may be the longest post ever, but I promise some of the cutest pictures ever! :)

It's amazing how quickly I get behind in blogging. It's been a low priority lately I guess. We've been super busy trying to do as much on our "Summer Bucket List" as we could before school started. I've felt in a bit of a funk, too, when it comes to this blog. There are hardly any comments any more for some reason, so feeling like few people read it makes me wonder why I bother writing it. But then I remind myself I really want to publish these entries into a blog book as a family journal of sorts some day, so I keep going. Guess even if no one reads it, at least my kids will enjoy having it someday. Not to mention this blog does still serve as a sort of outlet for me.

Anyway, like I said we've been busy the last few weeks, so I'm going to stick a bunch of stuff in this post and give some items their own post later. I'll try to condense with collages.

NEW LENS

I got a new lens recently and have had way too much fun playing with it. It's the same one my sister-in-law Angela let me try out on her camera back in June. I'm really loving it. It rained the day I got it, so I let the kids run in the rain again so I could play with it. These are all handheld shots from a good distance away, even the ones of the flowers.

He was sad a ladybug had died and honestly cried about it.

SWIMMING

We went swimming at our old apartment complex with our friend who still lives there and kindly lets us go with her. The kids had a great time. This was Lacey's 3rd time in a pool, and each time she does better with it. I couldn't believe it, but she actually fell asleep in my arms while we were in the pool! Neither of my other kids ever did that.

PICTURE FUN

For some reason, the day I took Lacey's pictures in her green dress the other kids decided they needed their pictures done, too, so we did a few impromptu shots.

Matty's time became what we like to call "The Many Faces of Matty." I'd name an emotion and he'd show it to me. These are just a FEW of the many, many emotions we took that day. So fun!

Since everyone was getting pictures for fun, I thought it would be interesting to take some of our varied eye colors. Hope this doesn't creep someone out. Lacey's eye color is difficult to see in this lighting, but at times in person it's clearly a dark dark olive green. Who knows what it will end up as.

BUBBLES & REC CENTER
One day we took a trip up to Grandma's house to go swimming at her nearby rec center. While we waited to leave, Matty got out some bubbles while I had fun taking pictures with that new lens I mentioned.


While Matty was blowing bubbles, Jossy was busy playing in a new playhouse Grandpa and Grandma just got. Lacey was chillin' in the grass with me.

We had a great time playing at the rec center that day and went back a week later because it was so much fun.


Lacey was EXHAUSTED after 3 hours of swimming but didn't have her binky so she went to town on her hand instead for about an hour in the pool.


FOR CUTENESS SAKE
Oh, just because.

Well, that post just took me 2 hours between editing and resizing pictures, changing code on blogger, deciding which pics to show, creating collages, yadda yadda yadda. Still to come: the zoo, first day of school, and Jossy's first race. Hopefully I'll get around to them soon.

The Great Comparison

I've wanted to post baby pics of all my kids since Lacey was born, but just haven't ever gotten around to it. Every once in a while Lacey looks just like a picture I remember of Jossy or Matty and I want to post them all but actually finding the pictures detours me.

But this last Sunday Lacey wore a dress for the first time that I once took pictures of Jossy in, so I did my best to recreate a couple for comparisons sake.

I then tried to find one of Matty about the same age and scanned it in.

And here's a baby picture of me about the same age. I couldn't find one of Dan at that time because I think his mom still has all his photos, but here's at least his newborn picture (which I had to get off our wedding video as a screen shot.) I wish I had a better one of him.

So who do you think everyone looks like?

4 Months

It makes me sad to have my baby growing up so fast. She is such a joy, I just want to keep her a baby forever. She absolutely loves attention and smiles at just about anyone who will give that to her. She's gone swimming for the first time in the last month and has been several times since. Lacey wasn't sure of it the first time but now she's used to it and can be in the pool for hours.

Lacey can roll both ways now and has learned to be pretty content on her tummy. She reaches for toys and puts them in her mouth, and she's still totally entertained by watching her big brother and sister play nearby her. She's still not a good sleeper and we're up every 1-3 hours with her, just depends on the night. I. Need. Sleep.

Everyone in this house loves talking with Lacey. She's hilarious as she learns all the sounds her voice can make and uses them to have conversations. She has an adorable happy baby squeal that just melts your heart.

Waterfalls and Friends

It was hard to say goodbye to our friends Laurie, Andy, and their kids in Portland. Laurie had a baby who was just 7 weeks old yet he was the size of my little Lacey (who was 3 months old.) Pictures were mandatory. :)


On our way home, we stopped just a little past Portland at Multnomah Falls. The kids loved seeing a real waterfall. They were sad we weren't going to go hike up to the bridge. I wish we could have because I've never been up there and always wanted to go, but we had a lot of driving ahead of us and needed to get going.

This is the only photo we have of all of us from our whole trip . . . and Lacey's asleep in the carseat.
Go figure.

We decided to take 2 days to drive home instead of doing it all in one as we did on the way there. We stopped for the night in Boise to stay with my cousin and didn't get there until past 10PM. We left Sunday morning around 11 and stopped in Jerome, Idaho for a surprise visit to our friends Mike and Amanda Bingham whom we hadn't seen in 4 years. We thought we'd just stay an hour but we stayed about 4. It was so good to see them again, and our kids loved playing together. We then stopped at my parents' house to feed Lacey just an hour outside of our home. Again, I thought we'd stay an hour but stayed much longer. We didn't actually pull into our driveway til midnight and we were TIRED!!!

And thus ends the seemingly everlasting coverage of the Great Taualii Vacation of 2011. :)

"The Soft Beach"

Friday of our trip was our last day to spend on the beach. When I checked out of the hotel, I asked the desk clerk for any suggestions on a good beach nearby that wasn't the one accross the street (which was super busy.) She recommended a few and we drove to one of them that I had also heard mentioned online as a good one. It was on a bay so the kids were able to play in smaller waves, but the ocean was just a 3 minute walk from where we were playing. The sand was SOOOO much softer than "Mom's beach," so the kids referred to this one as the "Soft Beach."

We had some major issues on this beach, but again, that's part of the "crap" I'm not going to rehash. So instead here are some pictures to make you all think our day was nothing but marvelous. ha ha :)

Dan and Matty enjoyed building together

Jossy liked looking for "awesome rocks" and digging in the sand (when the wind wasn't pelting her with it.)

We shared the bay with a group of seals all day.
We watched them go in and out of the water and swim around.

Lacey and I spent much of the day chillin' in our tent o' awesomeness.
Honestly, the wind was so bad it kept beating me in the head. Not so awesome.
Since I couldn't dig in the sand or anything while holding the baby, I wrote Dan a message with my feet.

Towards the end of the day we had had it with our ultra windy location and moved to another.
No tent this time, but every one was much happier. We should have moved sooner.

Jossy playing her favorite game: Run From the Camera

Matty made new friends (big surprise for such a social butterfly.)
and together they built "crab paradise." Some locals catching crab gave the kids their crabs
that were too small to keep so that they could live in "crab paradise."

The Best Part

Going on vacation with 3 little ones can hardly be called a vacation. It's more like parenthood times 5. Every normal day stuff seems even harder when you're on "vacation." So our favorite part of the day was when these little rug-rats finally went to sleep (3 hours past normal bedtime) and we got just a few minutes to ourselves to enjoy our Tillamook fudge and watch something quietly on TV before we were ready to zonk out ourselves.

Notice we even had a vaulted ceiling in our room? Pretty cool.

And just because I don't know what other post to stick this picture into, here's an extra of the kids at the hotel.