jonathan's birthday

i'm not going to lie, this wasn't the best birthday we've ever had. it wasn't christmas of 2011 bad, but everyone except me had been sick all week with nasty colds and the girls decided to add pink eye on top of that. the kids were all simultaneously whiny and cabin feverish and nobody was at their best.

thankfully, jonathan was only turning one and had no idea what a birthday should feel like. the girls, on the other hand, were a little disappointed with my lackluster efforts at making jonathan's birthday a little more special. in my defense, i did blow up some balloons, which jonathan loved and chased around all day, and i did make a cake for him. more on that below.

for jonathan's birthday, we got him this little tikes climbing/slide structure. i got it for a song on craigslist and even though he's still getting the hang of it, he likes it now and i'm sure that it will get plenty of use in the future.

the whole cake thing was a bit of a disaster. it was 6:00 and he had already been ready to go to bed for a couple hours, so he was exhausted at this point. i should have just skipped the cake and put him to bed, but the girls would have killed me. i made a lemon cake, because that's what i wanted to eat, but in retrospect, it probably wasn't the best choice for a one year old's birthday cake. he shoved it in his mouth, and after chomping it around a couple times, started crying and spit it out. i think it was too sour for him. see pictures below. they are humorously pathetic and sad.

i've since made a gingerbread cake (yes, his birthday was only two days ago) and i fed him that with applesauce on top, which is how we traditionally eat it, and he loved that. i'm pretending that was his birthday cake. 

 

to make up for the cake, we gave him a few bites of vanilla ice cream. he really hasn't had anything sugary before the cake and ice cream and definitely hasn't had something this cold, so it was pretty fun to see his reaction. i recorded it but it's on randy's phone so i'll have to upload it later.

here's to a healthier second birthday.

a year with jonathan

my baby boy turned one year old today. the year has flown by, as they seem to do these days. it's been an eventful year. hard to believe i was sitting in a hospital room in utah a year ago.

i was going to do a post with a picture from each month of jonathan's life, but when i went to choose the photos, i had too hard of a time narrowing it down. so instead, i just picked some of my very favorites. it ended up being more like three from each month. 

 

 

 

 

 

i love you, baby boy.

easter fun

the beauty of being low-key about holidays is that your children get excited at the smallest efforts. every year, madeleine begs to dye easter eggs, so i invest in the $1 paas egg dying kit and we throw a dozen eggs into the dye. the girls love it.

diane was even reasonably decent toward the camera. no scowls and only a couple funny faces.

 this year i even went crazy and threw stickers on a couple of them and rubber bands around one. i don't have any "after" pictures of that one, but it was pretty fun, especially for the amount of effort i clearly put into it - straightening each rubber-band so the lines would be crisp and even. like i said, low expectations.

randy's mom sent us some plastic easter eggs and on sunday afternoon after church, madeleine handed me her easter basket full of those eggs and told me to go hide them in the backyard so that she and diane could do an easter egg hunt. between jeanie and madeleine, i had all of the work done for me. randy and i scattered the eggs around the yard and the girls loved it.

since sunday afternoon, madeleine and diane have played "easter egg hunt" over and over in the backyard. it's the gift that keeps on giving.