april in pictures

and now, for a brief moment in time, i am caught up on my blog. i'm trying to be on top of things before the baby arrives. 

jonathan found his birthday present "hidden" (not very well, obviously) in the garage a few days before his birthday. he's been on a strider bike, so he has great balance, but needs some practice with pedaling.

these are from his actual birthday. our baby is four years old! good thing we have another one on the way. jonathan is so tall that i've felt like he's been four for a while now, so it's nice to have him actually be the same age as i imagine him to be. he is at a really fun stage right now and we sure love our four year old.

he got this umbrella (which is already broken), and some construction legos, which he is playing with under the legos, along with his sisters. 

 

he went through many choices for his cake previous to his birthday (a puppy cake and a panda cake, to name a couple), but thankfully, settled on strawberry shortcake for the actual day. no complaints from me, both from the prospect of making and eating it. 

my friend, kenton, from law school, and his family were in town for a few days, so we met up with them downtown and went to ivar's for lunch. it was so fun to catch up with them. they were really great people in law school and still are. i can't believe how big their kids are (some of the kids pictured are their nieces, too). it's been nine years since we've seen each other.

 

jonathan loves to strike strange poses when i try to take his picture. 

out for a family walk one evening: 

 

these are my favorites: 

 the kids had spring break this month, so we spent a lot of time at parks. they loved this merry-go-round.

this boy loves digging in our backyard. 

he informed my this is his workbench. 

we had several abnormally warm days in april, including one day where it got up to 90. our kids had a couple of big waterfights with the neighborhood kids and some other friends, which jonathan thought was the best thing in the world. here he is taking a break with me for a few minutes:

i am notorious bad at taking pictures of myself during pregnancies and have tried to be a little better this time around. here i am at 29 weeks: 

jonathan with his tools and books of "instructions:" 

randy and i celebrated our tenth anniversary this year. we went to san francisco as a couple in october and counted that as our ten year trip, so we decided to celebrate the actual day as a family, a kind of family birthday party, with a staycation. we rented an airbnb in edmonds that looks out over the puget sound and spent a couple of days/nights there, hanging out as a family, eating fun food, and playing at picnic point beach, which was a two minute walk from our place. it was just what we needed. 

we started out the weekend by going out for pizza:

an attempt at a family picture. unfortunately, jonathan was not cooperative and we were pretty backlit at this point. 

this was our view. we had beautiful weather for the weekend, with a couple of gorgeous sunsets. 

the airbnb had a little firepit, so we had s'mores both nights and roasted hotdogs one of the nights. 

here are some pictures from the beach: 

we attempted a hike at meadowdale park, but abandoned ship about a half mile in. the kids were cranky and i am big and pregnant. can you spot jonathan in the picture?

we also played lots of cards during the weekend. it's fun to have my kids be old enough to play games that i actually enjoy. our current favorite is five crowns. 

after ten years, he's still my favorite and i love him so much more than the day we were married. we make a pretty good team. 

march in pictures

this is another series (similar to one at the end of the last post) where i was trying to get a good picture of jonathan. he gets goofy when the camera comes out.

some of the kids hanging out in bed with me:

in march i headed down to utah alone for my annual sisters' weekend with my mom, sisters, and sister-in-law. as usual, it mostly consisted of us hanging out, talking, playing games, and eating good food at my mom's house. but we did also go to the grand america hotel for high tea and down to provo to attend the provo city center temple open house.

here are some pictures from our fancy tea:

even the bathroom was fancy.

these are from the provo city center temple. this used to be the provo tabernacle, where i attended many church meetings, concerts, and my law school graduation. six years ago, it burned down and they rebuilt it as an LDS temple. before temples are dedicated, they hold open houses where anyone can walk through and see what the inside looks like. our sisters' weekend happened to fall on the last weekend of the open house, so we all headed down to tour the inside of the temple. it is a beautiful building and i'm grateful i got the chance to see it.

this is a magnificent tree across the street from us that blooms in a glorious display every spring and on top of that, smells divine. i think i have this same picture from every year we've lived here.

madeleine is our little bookworm:

jonathan gets these ideas for projects that he wants to do and is very persistent about having us help him accomplish them. recently, he decided that he wanted a birdhouse, so after nagging randy for a couple days, randy finally relented and helped him build one. the girls helped him paint it when they were done with the construction.

jonathan was reading out on the front lawn for some reason:

baby bump picture. i think this was at 25 weeks:

madeleine got croup in march and was pretty miserable. we took a miserable picture together.

these are pictures from the kids' easter egg hunt. being the awesome mother that i am, i handed them a couple of bags of candy and our empty plastic eggs and told them to fill them up and do an easter egg hunt for themselves in the backyard. but since they asked nicely, i agreed to at least hide the eggs for them the first time (they like to do it a few times, since the hunts don't last that long).

 

random picture of jonathan in an awkward sleeping position:

we had some warm weather throughout march and my two youngest do not like the heat. they get that from me. i believe this was during a 70 degree heat wave on the walk home from school. they insisted that we stop in the shade and rest because it was too hot to carry on. heaven help us come july.