Truth

Truth is.... I kind of hate scrapbooking. BUT, I really, really, really love the finished product. And so I plug away at it.

Truth is... I'm not doing so hot at this single parenting thing. I feel like I need a mommy do-over nearly every day.

Truth is... I miss Allen like crazy. Not from a parenting standpoint but from a "my heart hurts because half of me is missing" standpoint.

Truth is... I refuse to think about leaving my friends. It's probably an unhealthy way of dealing with my emotions but I truly don't know if I can handle them.

Truth is... healthy meals are pretty non-existent around here these days. It's not very motivating cooking only for my kids. Is pizza a food group?

Truth is... I've been at a weight loss plateau for 3 weeks. Aaargh. So frustrating since I feel like I'm eating NOTHING. I'm sure it has a lot to do with the fact that I'm not getting my water in. But I really hate peeing 50 times a day.

Truth is... I wasn't planning on this being such a depressing post. Sorry.

Easter 2012

We had such a nice Easter weekend! Allen was able to be home (after almost 2 weeks in WA) and we really enjoyed our time together. We started at an egg hunt and potluck lunch on Friday that a local friend hosts every year. It was a blast, as always.



Saturday morning our Easter Bunny showed up with baskets for the kiddos. We like doing the secular side of Easter on Saturday so we can focus on the sacred aspect on Sunday. It works perfectly for our family.
Carter got an Angry birds blanket, AB activity book, iTunes GC and loads of treats:
Kenna got a lockable diary (such a surprise huge hit), jewelry and season 1 of Little House on the Prairie (we have been reading the books):
Addison got a Tangled nightgown and a water bottle with her name on it (the upside of having a kid with a popular name is all personalized stuff you can find)
Emery got a book, stuffed animal, banana toothbrush (favorite!) plus a few treats. You can see the Cheetos carrots I made for the kids which were so much fun (my kids never get chips so it was a big treat)
We dyed our eggs and the kids tried blowing out eggs for the first time and loved it. They are huge pain to dye though because they float in the dye.
Sunday morning we headed to church for a lovely service. The kids all gussied up in their Easter finery:

Just for fun a little peek around the house this spring season:






One of my big priorities this weekend was making sure that we had LOTS of yummy food for my sad, bachelor-ish husband. I've been making menus for the past 2 weeks. We tried a few new recipes and had a couple of big winners. Saturday morning we made this recipe for coconut crusted french toast:

http://www.twopeasandtheirpod.com/coconut-crusted-french-toast/

It was AMAZING and very easy. I'm on a hunt to find a tropical fruit syrup recipe to go on it next time.

Sunday afternoon we had chocolate strawberry shortcake. Allen is typically not a fan of strawberry shortcake but he LOVED this. The shortcake is not super sweet but pretty dense (almost like a scone) and we loved the unique toppings the recipe called for. I actually made this again today to take to some friends as an FHE treat tonight. It is so.dang.good.

http://www.tasteofhome.com/Recipes/Chocolate-Strawberry-Shortcakes

We also had grilled fish tacos (good but I'm still on the hunt for a to die for recipe) and bleu cheese burgers (our favorite made up recipe ever). I think I delivered on the good weekend food front!

Hope you had a blessed and beautiful Easter too!

1st Quarter Goals

This year I decided to set quarterly goals to keep things a bit more manageable. It is working! Looking at a 3 month completion time instead of a full year is keeping me motivated!

I had a few goals for the first quarter of the year:

1. Finish the Book of Mormon (I finished on March 2)

2. Lose 15 pounds (I am beyond thrilled to say that I have lost 27 pounds since January 1!)

3. Complete 3 projects: Sew Valentine Pillows (January), Finish 2011 Photo book (February), Prepare for kids consignment sale (March)

I completed my January and February projects but had to skip March. The consignment sale I was going to do takes place on a weekend that Allen won't be in town and participants are required to work an 8 hour shift to sell at it. I'm super bummed. What I DID complete was going through every stitch of kids clothing that I have. It took me many, many hours over the course of a week but I now have everything separated by size and season stored in bins (meaning I have separate spring/summer and fall/winter bins for EVERY size). You know how it is, a 2T cardigan gets mixed in with the 3T stuff, etc. I knew I was missing some outfits for my little girls so I decided to tackle the entire thing. It was hideous but it is SO NICE to have it done. I will either find a consignment store or sale to sell out as soon as I get to WA. I have 10 boxes of outgrown kids clothes and maternity clothes to sell! Sheesh!

I also have a few longer-term goals I am working on for the year so I won't report on those yet but I am making good progress. My next quarter won't be quite as productive since our move falls during those months. I have a few things in mind though.

2nd Quarter goals:

1. Lose my last 10 pounds of weight (I know you're going to ask: cut carbs, lots of vegetables and lean protein, drink a gallon of a water every day)

2. Fun TOP SECRET project for Allen

3. Read Thomas S. Monson biography

4. Read the 1st 1/3 of Book of Mormon (to make sure I finish again by the end of the year)

5. Survive

Losing a Tooth, Frost Style : Part 2

I'm pretty sure this is going to become a blog series around here. To see Part 1 (Carter's first tooth loss) go here: Losing A Tooth, Frost Style

Makenna has been dying to lose a tooth for months and when she showed us two wiggly bottom teeth we thought for sure she'd lose something before she turned 7! Nope. She half-heartedly wiggled her teeth even though we begged her to get them out. A few weeks ago I looked in her mouth and realized her adult tooth was coming up BEHIND her baby tooth. It was time for it to go. We gave her a time limit and told her the tooth had to be out by that weekend. She was not happy. It went down much like our first loss with Carter:

1. Many tears ensued:
2. Daddy did a bunch of wiggling to get it more loose

3. Makenna excused herself to another room to pray (I super duper love that both my kids have prayed in this situation or anytime they are scared)

4. Makenna begged to wait a few more days to get it out.

5. Daddy threatened to take it out with pliers

6. More tears

7. Makenna screws up her courage and let's Allen take another go at it:
8. After quite a bit of blood the tooth came out! Happiness and relief!
9. In our tradition our tooth fairy brings a small gift with the first tooth loss. She brought Kenna some new, much loved jewelry:
A couple days later we noticed the adult tooth pushing up behind the other bottom tooth so we insisted that one come out too. Repeat the previous 9 steps! I hope all her losses are not this dramatic!

Spring Break

We spent another fun spring break in Colorado earlier this month. Allen really wanted to come up and hang for the week so it was a little bit shorter than usual (he usually drives me up and flies home to work for the week and then flies back up to drive me home). We still packed in lots of fun though we didn't get to everything on our list. We drove up after work on Tuesday night.

Wednesday:

Slept in a bit and then headed to the Littleton Historical Museum. This is a must do every time we go to CO and my kids love it, just like I did growing up. We got lucky this year and were there right when they milked the cows. The kids all gave it a try (I looooove having adventurous kids!)


I gave it a go and the the kids were thrilled and surprised to find that Allen is an expert milker. He hand milked cows twice a day all growing up and he has not lost his touch! The workers were even surprised at his skill. Who knew?

In the children's museum:
We spent the afternoon visiting with our CT friends, the Crocketts. Somehow I never manage to get pictures of us together. We enjoyed a delicious dinner and had a fun time catching up. That evening I went to RS Enrichment with my mom, who is the leader in her ward and had fun seeing old friends!

Thursday: we headed into Denver and had lunch at Cafe Rio and then went to the Denver Natural Science museum (it has a different name now). I knew we had to get the traditional T-Rex shot at the entrance and I was laying on the ground for this one.
They had a special exhibit on reptiles there that we spent a lot of time at. This is Emery's newest funny face. She does it all the time and we have no idea where it came from!
With the boa:
This huge lizard LOVED Addie. It stayed this way the entire time she stood there. When she moved, it moved. We even had her walk away and come back a few minutes later and it did it again. It was a little unnerving but fun and she loved it.
We could have spent the entire day there and in 3 hours we only saw 1 of 3 floors. We will definitely be going back this summer when we visit again. My kids were in heaven!

Friday:

Allen got a special delivery first thing in the morning. Do you think he was a little excited?! I'm not much of a tech junkie but the new iPad is awesome! He got it so we can FaceTime while he is WA and we are here but we have already had so much fun with it.

We found out some college friends were in town for a wedding and the Partridges squeezed in a couple hours to see us in the morning. Awesome to catch up and especially fun to let our kiddos play together. We cruised with them in 2010 but our kids haven't seen each other in years.

After the Partridges left my parents kicked us out of the house to have an overnighter while they kept the kids. It was the best! We didn't do anything fancy but went out to lunch, did tons of shopping - mostly new work clothes for Allen but we also hit Ikea and a few other stores. I was planning to do A LOT more shopping but now I will have all the stores I need in WA so I mostly made lists of stuff I need/want and will pick up once we get there. That evening we met our friends the Howells for dinner and had a grand time catching up. Afterwards we went to a late night movie. We slept in until 10:30 the next morning and then got a quick breakfast before heading home to our kiddos. They didn't miss us a lick. My parents spent hours at the neighborhood park with them, took them all out to dinner on Friday night (brave) and then took them to see Irish dancers on Saturday morning. Grandparents are the best!

Saturday:

We took the kids to see The Lorax in the afternoon which I wasn't that impressed with but they loved. Our leprechaun, Lucky, dropped off some goodies overnight which the kids loved. Here they are all dressed up in their St. Pats garb:
(this pic is SO getting framed and put up next year! I love it!)

We made these fun rainbow cupcakes:
We had our traditional St Pats dinner of corned beef/potatoes/carrots/cabbage and Irish Soda bread, which the kids gobbled up!
Just a funny picture of Emery. She thought this wig was hilarious!
Sunday we went to church in the morning and then drove home in a horrible wind storm that afternoon. It was bittersweet coming "home" to New Mexico for the last time. We had a blast but it is sad to think we will not be able to jump in the car in come to CO anymore. Thanks to my parents for a grand week!

Makes me Laugh!

A friend of mine posted this the other day on Facebook and I think it is hilarious. Except it's also kind of depressing.

I have loads of blogging to do next week but we are busy soaking up the amazing spring/summer weather around here and putting in some quality family time before we do our first stint apart!

Back soon!

Opportunity Knocked

Ahhhh… I’ve been waiting to write this post for weeks and have been so anxious to share our news! A little background: Allen has been looking around for work for about the last year. He is contacted pretty frequently by head hunters so he has been looking both inside his current company and outside. He has interviewed quite a bit and received a few offers but nothing has been a perfect fit. The location wasn’t right, job wasn’t right, salary wasn’t right… etc. At the beginning of this year I told him I was done looking and that I wanted to commit to staying in NM for one more year and then really focus on finding a new job. Allen agreed. Less than 1 week later he was contacted by an acquaintance he met about a year ago through his current job. They had hit it off at an industry event and exchanged contact information. A year later he had switched companies and was looking to recruit a team for his new company. He immediately thought of Allen and contacted him to see if he was interested.

Allen was very interested and did some phone interviews later that week with the HR team and some other people he would be working with. They wanted to fly him to the company HQs as soon as possible to formally interview. It took us a couple weeks to work out vacation time for him to get up there. They loved him and we had a job offer in hand 2 days after his interview. After quite a bit of negotiation I am happy/nervous/excited to announce that we are moving back to….. SEATTLE Washington! CRAZY! Our heads are still spinning that we have made this decision in less than 6 weeks! Allen will be starting his new job in 2 weeks and will be commuting back and forth until school is out here. I won’t mention the company he will be working for but will say that it is the software GIANT of the world and let you figure it out from there. We have talked to every single person we know that does/has ever worked for the company and have heard nothing but glowing reports about the company culture and benefits. His new job is very cool and he will be providing expertise that the company currently does not have (call me if you want more details). To say he is thrilled for this opportunity would be an understatement.

I honestly never thought we would ever be back in the PNW. We loved living there for the year we were there right after business school. It will be a huge, huge change climate wise but we are super excited. Of course it is bittersweet to leave a place we have grown to love so much. Even though we have always known NM was a short stopping point for us we have made some of the most wonderful friends of our lives here. We will miss it so much.

We will be renting a home for a short time while we figure out where we want to be permanently. We’re not thrilled with that but we want to try to buy a foreclosure/short sale and if that doesn’t work out we will probably build a new home. Neither option is a quick solution but we don’t want to make a snap decision based on the current state of the housing market.

Things I will miss about NM: Living close to my parents, our friends, green chile, balloon fiesta, sunny weather year-round, C&M's school

Things I will not miss: The wind, the drive to the kid's school, brown EVERYTHING

Things I am looking forward to about living in WA: Living near my sister again (2.5 hours away), GREEN, Homes with character instead of stucco, Great neighborhood schools, great shopping/restaurants/culture

So that is the BIG NEWS around here! It is going to be a crazy couple couple of months while we wrap things up here, Allen commutes and I do a lot of single parenting! Wish us LUCK!

Spy Party

Makenna has been planning a spy party for the entire past year. I tried to interest her in some other ideas along the way but she has knew what kind of party she wanted. We had fun planning this party even though there weren't a ton of ideas out there to "borrow." First up is the invites. We made each invited person a "Top Secret" spy file for the invitation. This is the outside:The inside had all pertinent party information and a password they had to decode along with instructions on a secret handshake they had to learn.
Once all the agents arrived at the party they were all fingerprinted to prepare for training. Our spies in training:
The first training exercise was bomb detonation (popping about 100 black balloons):

The second training exercise was getting through the laser beam maze (red string criss-crossed a ton of different ways):
The third training exercise was target shooting (water shooters on a target on our back fence). After the training exercises it was time for the agents to undergo an actual mission. We told them there was a dangerous object hidden somewhere in the neighborhood that they had to get rid of.

The first clue was written backwards so they had to use a mirror to decode it.
The second clue was a map of the neighborhood leading them to an obscure location. The third clue used the same code as the invites and led them to the 4th location. The 4th clue was written on the sidewalk behind our house and led the kids to our neighbors house where they picked up the "weapon" (a bomb piñata)
After they found the bomb we brought it back to the house and destroyed it!
After the activities we had a nacho bar and "bomb" donuts for the treat:
After opening presents (where Kenna was spoiled rotten) we gave out the goodie bags. They included secret message decoder kits, spy glasses (you can see behind you when you wear them), spy notebooks/pens and candy from the piñata.
Makenna had a fantastic time with her friends and the kids seemed to really enjoy themselves! It was fun to pull together such a unique themed birthday party!

Kenna's 7th Birthday

Makenna's birthday was last week and once again we stretched out our celebrating all weekend long. She chose to go to Red Robin for her dinner on Saturday night and loved her gigantic post-dinner Sundae.Allen was traveling for work all last week so we had her family birthday dinner on Sunday night. We had pizza fondue and chocolate eclair cake.
Monday was her actual birthday and we had a big breakfast before school and Allen flew out on his trip. Before opening her gifts:

With her gifts! She got the AG Girl of the year because her name is McKenna! She also got the McKenna sick kit and wheelchair (from my parents), a movie and some new clothes from Allen's mom. She was thrilled to pieces with her new doll and that wheelchair has been played with them constantly this week.

Makenna had a project due at school on her birthday so we were able to go watch her give her presentation on archaeology. She did a great job with her report and her class really loved the mini archaeological dig we brought in for them to try (not pictured).

Her class sang her happy birthday and she got to wear the birthday crown all day! We brought in a healthy birthday treat for her to share.

Since Allen was out of town we went and grabbed a pizza for dinner and then came home in time to Facetime with Allen for a little while (thank you Apple!) We love that technology allows us to talk face-to-face with our loved ones.

A few days after her birthday her darling primary teacher brought her over a birthday treat which she loved. Makenna is just the sweetest girl around and such a blessing in our family. She is a great friend and always has a gaggle of friends around her at church and school. She loves her friends and begs for a play date almost daily. Kenna is very sensitive to other people and gets emotional easily (wonder where she got that from?!). At Christmastime when we were watching a movie about Jesus' birth she got very emotional when Herod's soldiers killed the baby boys. She just cried and cried over it.

She is still my very best helper and is so cheerful running around for me and lending a hand whenever I need it. She still loves to help in the kitchen and is a great big sister and helper with the little girls. She often begs me to let her "babysit" Emery. She also loves to play school or house with the girls where she can be in charge (teacher or mom).

She is doing awesome at school and continues to surprise us with all she knows and understands. She was recently tested for reading and she is reading at almost a 4th grade level. She loves AG books, the Little House on the Prairie series and Magic Treehouse books. She loves playing outside more than anything though and has a bunch of kids in the neighborhood that she loves to ride bikes/scooters/play with every day after school. She is still super girly and only wants to wear dresses and skirts to school but she does love her knit pants/hoodies that she wears on PE days. She loves changing her earrings and nail polish color frequently.

Kenna also loves music. She loves rocking out/dancing in the car and is always patrolling the radio stations in the car for the best music. She is doing awesome in piano and is in the level 1 books now. She has improved a lot and loves to practice. She also loves her dance class, especially now that they are getting ready for the spring recital. She is ready to try something new so she is going to start gymnastics this fall. She has also turned into a great little artist and even one an art contest at school for her grade level last month. She is always writing Allen and me little love notes and leaving them on our pillows and drawing us pictures with lots of hearts and kind words.

We are all just smitten with this girl who is beautiful both inside and out and so happy she is such a sweet influence in our family!