Saturday, November 22, 2014

Kara is 5!

It's hard to believe, but Kara is 5 years old. Wow, where does the time go? For Kara's 5th birthday, she decided she wanted to have a big party for all her friends at our house. We had 17 kids (17 kids, all 5 years old and under!) at our house for the party.  Amazingly, nothing got broken and no one got hurt!

We had activities like storytime, Play-Doh, pin the tail on the donkey, and pass-the-bag (kind of like musical chairs except you pass a bag and if you get caught with it when the music goes off, you have to put something on).  However, the kids are old enough now to know that parties include cake.  We had at least three kids asking how much longer until cake.  The party was a huge hit, and all the kids had a great time!

Link to pictures

 

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Visit to Shorter - Fall 2014

Early this month, we packed up the girls and went to visit the family down in Alabama. This was Emily's first flight since she was just a tiny baby, so we were a little nervous about her. For the most part, she did very well. She even passed out for about an hour, which made the time go by much faster. Kara, of course, handled the flight like a champ... as long as she had a screen (Mommy's iPad or her LeapPad) to look at.

While we were down there, Justin, Heather, Sean, and Robin McD came down to visit us at Mimi and Papa's house.  We hadn't seen them in almost two years, and we'd never met Robin!  To paraphrase Heather, "Robin and Emily are best friends, they just may not know it yet!"  Emily and Robin got along pretty well.  For the most part they just played next to each other, though Emily was not too happy when Robin took a ride on her Mickey airplane (her favorite toy at Mimi and Papa's house).  The girls even held hands walking around outside, which was pretty sweet.  Kara and Sean got along really well, mostly because Kara led Sean around the whole time they were there and Sean seemed okay with that.  Sean was such a good sport doing crafts and even reading to Kara.  We also had a little birthday party for Kara.  Overall, it was great to see our friends.  Hope to see you guys again soon!

On the last full day of our visit, we headed into Montgomery to check out the Montgomery Zoo.  It's a really great zoo for kids.  It's not too big, so we could check out almost the whole zoo.  Plus, it has a pretty awesome playground and petting zoo.  We even got to feed giraffes!  The girls both had a really great time.

The trip home was just plain no fun at all.  An arctic front moved into Denver while we were down in Alabama, which caused delayed flights leaving Denver.  We checked our flight status before heading to the airport.  At that time it said our flight was still on schedule; however, about 15 minutes after getting dropped off at the Atlanta airport, we got notification that our flight had been delayed.  In the end, the flight was 2.5 hours late taking off, so we spent almost 4.5 hours at the Atlanta airport.  The flight went pretty smooth except Emily was pretty irritable.  We realized about halfway through the flight that she felt quite warm.  We hoped that if she could just get a good night's sleep, maybe she'd feel better.  We landed in Denver about 8:30 (almost 2.5 hours late) to single digit temperatures.  While Dad was waiting on the jetway in the freezing weather, Emily was throwing up in the terminal.  Fortunately, after that, Emily started acting much better.  Then, Dad forgot one of our bags on the shuttle while we were trying to get everyone and everything to the car.  He had to chase down the shuttle through the icy parking lot in 0 degree weather.  Whew, that was brisk!  Fortunately, the drive home went off without any hitches, and our travel day concluded safely.

All in all, it was a good trip, and it was great to see everyone!

Link to pictures