March Trip Part 3 - Portland!

We stayed at my mom's in Portland for a total of 5 nights. We had fun seeing old friends and spending time with Mimi & Del.

We also went to the Children's Museum...

Played Wii Bowling (they tied at 125 points!)...

Visited my Grandpa Thomas at his new residence (accompanied by my Aunt Ruth)...

And went on an "e-benture" (Maren speak for adventure) on the Max.

And of course enjoyed snuggles with Mimi!

March Trip Part 2 - Anniversary!

After about 18 hours at my mom's house (no pictures) Greg and I got to get away overnight for our 7 year anniversary!! The kids had a blast with Mimi and Del (no pictures), and Greg and I had a BLAST on our date.

We had made a hotel reservation at the hotel where we got married ...only to realize as we walked up to the actual place - I had made the reservation at the wrong hotel! Somehow I had mixed up the name in my head (don't ask me how)...so we stayed at a nice hotel, but not as nice, or romantic as staying where we got married...maybe for our 10-year.Our disappointment was short lived as we planned how we would spend 24 hours without the kids! What did we do? We walked ALL around Portland. We hadn't taken a car downtown, so we literally walked for about 5 hours and it was SO FUN! We went to restaurants that we used to go to when we first got married, we went to Powells, shopping (Greg got a replacement wedding band), and to the Chinese gardens.
This was taken in the park blocks near the PSU campus (I graduated just 3 months after we got married!).
After a little rest and wine/cheese appetizers, we got dressed up and went out to dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant in Portland - Thyphoon!

I think this might have been the highlight for both of us - we haven't had good Thai food since leaving Chicago 2 years ago...and this place has AMAZING food. We even got complimentary coconut ice cream to celebrate (YUM!).

The next day we got to sleep in, linger over coffee at Starbucks and then head back to be with our kids and Mimi and Del. We had a wonderful time and are so grateful to them for watching Joel & Maren so we could do this!

March Road Trip - The drive

Ok, I know this is long overdue but I have not been very motivated...we still don't have a camera, so once I post pictures from this trip, that will be it for a while!

Maren fell asleep behind the I Spy book about an hour after we left home!

The drive was beautiful! We had nice sunny weather all the way to Hood river. The Columbia river was so still it looked like a big mirror - see the train reflection on the other side?

And then, here's what it looked like when we got to around Hood River...wet, and cloudy! And we hardly saw the sun again until we were driving home and got out of the gorge!

We were ahead of schedule for getting to Portland, so we stopped here...Multnomah Falls! it was raining pretty hard, but it was so much fun, and it was still beautiful!

March...here and gone

Well, March was a pretty uneventful month...I didn't take too many pictures at the beginning of the month, and then we went on our trip to Portland and the Coast...where our camera got dropped in the wet sand. Ugh. SO I have a bunch of pictures from our trip but I can't get them out of our camera at the moment. Hopefully I'll be back soon with lots of new pictures!

Random February Pictures

Our sweet friend Anne sent thse flowers to us in the middle of our 3 weeks of sickness. They also happened to come on the same day that I got the bad hair cut and was really sad. Good timing...thank you Anne!

Maren is in a coloring phase...so cute.

My Aunt Ruth came to visit the third weekend in February and we had SO much fun in the short time she was here! She got right in and played with Joel at Camelback park! We also played lots of games and she played with the kids A TON! They loved her just as much as I did growing up (and still do!)

Posing...

Happiest when she has Daddy to herself...

Joel fell into a wrought-iron fence at school and caught himself using only his mouth. He had a fat lip for a couple of days, but it didn't bleed too much and Uncle Doctor said it probably wasn't bad enough for stitches. Ouch!

We went to The Ram on the last day of the month...they were having a "kids eat for $1 special" in February, so we wanted to take advantage of it! The kids got balloons and that is always a treat. Notice Maren wearing Joel's t-shirt...she wanted to wear it to bed!

I almost forgot!!

I went in for a trim a couple of weeks ago and I went in looking like this:

...I came out looking like this:

(Ok, so I didn't have the top hat and bow tie on, but other than that it is identical - long flaps over my ears and very short in the back)

She had messed it up so bad that I had to go pretty short again in order for it to look good. Here is the after, after:

I actually really like it, it was just hard becuase I had just spent the last 1 1/2 years growing it out from VERY short! And Greg has said that he prefers it this way, so I may just keep it like this!

Almost back...

Is anyone else getting sick of seeing my boring Valentines Day pictures?! Me TOO!! (I'm not crazy about the new background either....) I realize that it's been almost a month since I have posted anything - Sickness is to blame for most of it, lazyness for the rest. :) I'll be back with some pictures soon!

Valentines Day

Someone in our house has been sick for about week, so Valentines Day was very low-key. The kids had a few little treats to open and then we had a family movie night.
I had made these little heart books for each of them - they have pictures and little notes inside. It was fun to make them and they really like looking at the pictures.

Monkeys

January Recap

January was a pretty uneventful month and I didn't take very many pictures - until the last week when I took pictures of EVERYTHING for a Week in the Life project I was doing. See My Creative Blog (link on the right) for pictures from that.

The really big news this month is that Maren is POTTY TRAINED! We are on week 2 of her being completely potty trained and she has only had one day in that time where she had an accident! We are so proud of her...she really did this herself and she is already going all night and naps without a diaper. Yay!

Also, Greg had his final ordination interview in Chicago last Sunday and he passed with flying colors! He now has the green light to be Ordained at the Covenant Annual Meeting in Portland in June! I am so proud of Greg and all his hard work to get to this point - and we are looking forward to the the Ordination ceremony in June.

Greg has had his fish tank going since about October and we are loving it! The kids love helping feed the fish every day and looking at all the critters in there.