OBX: Wrap-up

While I would say the biggest excursion we did during our quick OBX trip this summer was our day at the aquarium, we did a few other things as well!

First, we went all the way up to Duck to go to the Sanderling Inn pool, as my aunt has a membership there due to owning property in the area. Waterproof camera for the win!

We went to lunch afterwards at a cafe in Duck and got some delicious desserts after lunch!

Second, I took the kids one afternoon to a trampoline center in Manteo to burn off some energy. Pretty fun place, and it worked to get rid of that energy!

Henry wasn't ever able to knock Natalie off of this joust, so it wasn't his favorite thing, but this video is pretty cute (this was before he got upset).

We tried this first climbing area multiple times - we called it the ninja warrior course because it was really hard! Natalie made it up onto the first of those thin, red climbing pieces and didn't get any farther. Henry was unfortunately too short to reach from one part to another for much of it, but I give the kids a lot of credit for not giving up and keeping trying (while we all laughed a lot at their failed attempts).

Third, on our last morning there (before heading home later that day), we finally hit the beach! The kids and I got up very early for sunrise donuts on the beach, some seashell hunting, sand digging, and ocean swimming. Advantage to going to the beach at that time of day, in far south Nags Head - the beach was empty!

While I wish we could have spent more time at the OBX this year, I think that we got a lot out of our 3 days there!

Lucy - September 2018

As I trained for my half marathon, Lucy went on lots of walks with me in September! I go a bit slower when she's with me (cause you know, we have to sniff EVERYTHING, MOM!). But still, she's a lot of fun to walk with.

Plus, it tires her out! She does love cuddling up in soft spots, particularly when the kids are there.

Or, her favorite position on the floor (and we won't say any more about that! Keep it clean!).

Lucy started doing a couple of new things in September, as the school year began. First, she likes to sometimes lie outside of my office, on the landing, and occasionally sits there looking all cute. I swear we don't put her behind bars!

The other new thing Lucy started doing is learning what happens around 2:50pm every day...it's when the kids get off the bus! Around 2:30, she typically wakes up (because, you know, afternoon nap time), and starts pacing near the front of the house. When she sees the bus come down the street (the bus passes in front of our house on its way to the bus stop), she gets all excited and watches out the window for the kids. It's too cute!

And of course, some playtime videos! One of the new things Lucy got to do in September was meet our friend (and realtor) Gwen's new puppy, a beautiful Great Dane who was littler than her at the time, but isn't any longer!

And, we discovered that Lucy learned how to catch, all on her own! Look at that use of feet. It makes me think of when my dad taught us to use both hands with the glove to catch a softball.

Henry and Lucy

10 days of no posts! Ack! It's like I was inundated with recital week (and shooting about 4,000 photos), then traveled for nearly 8 days straight for work. It's been quite the couple of weeks! I did prep a few posts that I planned to post while I was traveling, and between picking up a rough cold in Canada last week and needing to get through those 4,000 recital photos...well, posting just didn't happen. Luckily, that means that getting this out tonight is pretty easy!

One day in April, Henry and Lucy were being too cute playing together, which of course led to adorable videos to share here!

We discovered that Lucy could do quite athletic jumps up onto the couch; this was new at the time (in April); she's old hat at it now!

Then we started playing some with the slo-mo video feature on my phone, which Henry wanted to use to take the following video. I'm not sure if it's going to show up as slo-mo (I think it will?) but it's pretty great either way. He's an acrobatic little guy!

January 2018 randomness

I found a bunch of random photos and video from the month of January, and since they were quite cute but not enough individually for their own posts, I threw them into a post all together. This goes roughly chronologically through the month, starting with New Year's Eve, and all of our kiddos being adorable together on Natalie's bed (before we made them go to bed so we adults could start our game night).

At Natalie's birthday party (more on that soon), one of her friends gave her a few bath bombs. So, for the first time in a long while she took a nice relaxing bath in our jacuzzi tub. Nothing like pink bubbly water!

While I was on one of my trips (and I was gone for most of the last half of January), Evan sent me this fantastic picture of the two of them after getting haircuts.

Evan also sent me this shot of Henry, which I absolutely love. He is just too darn cute.

At one of Natalie's Showkids rehearsals prior to their competition at the end of January (definitely more on that soon!), their instructor asked the girls to all come wearing gloves (or socks, as some chose!) since they do a LOT of touching during their dance and it was the height of flu season. The girls took some silly shots and their instructor sent them out to us. Too cute!!

One one quiet weekend morning, while Natalie was at dance, Henry and I spent some time reading at Starbucks by the fire. Love sharing this with him!

And finally, Henry in one of his partially improvised/partially choreographed dances. Love the creativity.

Atomic Jump during Christmas break

By December 27, everyone had cleared out of our house, and it was back to being just the 4 of us. My company is incredible in terms of holiday leave - the company is closed the week between Christmas and New Year, and with a couple of days off before Christmas, I think I ended up not working for about 11 days, without taking any PTO. Incredible! And gave us lots of time to recuperate after hosting everyone.

However, Evan did not have the whole week off, so the kids and I got to spend some good time together. One day during that week, the kids' school had a fundraiser at Atomic Jump, where 40% of the proceeds during that afternoon went to the school. I can get behind that! I bought an hour of jumping for the kids, and watched them as they had fun.

The best way to show their jumping fun isn't with photos, it's with videos! So, enjoy.

Saturday fun day

On the first Saturday of June, the kids and I found ourselves home alone for most of the day (Evan had a number of events going on). This led to lots of fun for the 3 of us. For me, the fun was...playing with my new camera! It had arrived a few days before, but the lens I ordered had gotten held up. Once I finally got it redelivered by UPS, it was time to put lens to camera and see how it worked!

First thing was to play with the ISO, and see how much light I could bring in through the aperture. This photo isn't technically good (the focus is NOT correct on Henry at all), but I still like it!

 I learned that the camera allows for multiple exposures to be taken at once, then stitched into one photo - it's ghost Henry!

 On this one, the focus is SPOT ON the eyes of the middle stuffed animal (which is what I was trying for) - the new lens definitely gives me better focus ability than I had before!

And why was I taking photos of the kids' stuffed animals? Well, they decided to set up a pet shop in the living room.

 There were sections for all of the different types of animals; I chose to purchase my very own pet alligator!

 Although the variety of dogs was quite tempting as well.

 Soon, the pet shop game turned into a weighing animals game. Also fun, and a bit more scientific! I approved.

 After the kids had cleaned up, I realized I needed to have Natalie try on all of her dance costumes before the dress rehearsals the following week.

But of course, she couldn't be the only one to dress up!

 

We so rarely get these kinds of days at home, when there are no real plans and the kids can just play. I'm really glad this got to happen, and I could be there to document it!

Christmas break videos

I'm going to skip my Christmas post for a bit, only because it's going to take a bunch of time for me to write it, and this week I just don't have the energy for it (especially after pouring through all of those Nutcracker photos). There's been a ton going on, and my brain is just tired. But, there's no question that looking at cute videos of the kids help, so...here are a few post-Christmas videos!

One of the presents that the kids received was new Magic Trax! My parents got the kids a set of these a couple of years ago, and they love setting up the tracks all over the house. They had seen advertisements on TV for the new version, where the tracks and trucks glow, and so my mom got them for the kids for Christmas. Of course that led to a video of them driving around in the dark!

From that modest track (of just the new pieces), the kids then brought up the rest of the track pieces from the basement and set up a much more extended track. I believe this sat in the living room for about 3 days...I don't normally allow that (this is more of a basement activity!), but it was holiday break, so why not :)

Total non-sequitur now, but because it happened at the same time, I'm including the video here. Henry loves showing me his "hip hop" moves, and I particularly enjoyed this dance. He really knows how to move that body!

Winter break roller skating

After having multiple parties at the Purcellville roller skating rink in 2015 (including Natalie's birthday party!), we didn't go to the rink as often in 2016. However, after the craziness of the fall, and the holidays, my friends and I from dance decided to have a meet-up there for our girls to hang out...and to give us a chance to relax too!

It was nice going on a weekday, during break, because the place was EMPTY. I'm so used to going there on weekends when there are multiple birthday parties, it was really nice to go when the skating floor was pretty empty. Here was when we first got there:

We managed to get a picture of all of the kids together...and even a shot of us moms! It was so nice to spend a couple of hours there - chatting, skating, and relaxing.

One of the most fun things about this rink are the dance/party games...that are so similar to what we did when I skated in middle school! Don't think that Natalie would know "YMCA" without this rink :)

Fun in costumes!

Early in September, both kids received new costumes. Natalie was given a bunch of hand-me-down costumes from her friend Zabby, and Henry (who was jealous of Natalie now having half a dozen new costumes) was allowed to pick our two costumes at CostCo (as he only had one before then). This led to a costume photo shoot (which I still have to finish editing!), as well as lots of costume wearing for playtime. Over one weekend, I took these videos and wanted to share them here :)

First up: Jedi Jasmine battles Darth Vader!



Second: Kylo Ren shows us all his sensitive side, using the keyboard.

Bike riding man!

I have a ton of posts to write (and I seem to keep adding to them each day)...frankly, right now I'm a little overwhelmed by it. And at 9:45 at night, after I just spent an hour backing up hundreds of photos and videos from my phone to my laptop, and organizing them all, I don't quite have the energy to piece together a witty post detailing a bunch of photos from some event.

So, instead, you get a recent video that I just pulled off of my phone: Henry showing off his new bike-riding skills! He's finally gotten enough skill and strength to get up hills, ride over bumps, and go a lot faster. It's about time to take those training wheels off as well, I think!

Easter Weekend 2015

Despite not having any family visit this year, or even really planning anything, the kids actually had a pretty good sampling of Easter activities this year. It started just before Easter weekend, when the kids spent the day at Essie's (because it was during spring break). She planned some fun activities with them, including egg dying...which was fine with me, because then we didn't have to do it at our house!

 

 They also made Easter cards for Evan and I - super cute!

 I managed to not go overboard with Easter baskets (even if it looked like I did) - almost all of this was from the dollar store! The only real exception were the Crayola color alive books (I'll post about those later). The kids were very excited with their Easter gifts!

 And Evan was nice enough later in the day to set up an Easter egg hunt outside for them - despite it not being very difficult, they had fun finding the egss!

 We also went out front so Natalie could practice her roller skating. Love watching her do this...she's getting pretty good!

Roller Skating Fun!

My friend Kelly and I discovered that due to scheduling conflicts, we weren't going to be able to bring our girls to each other's birthday parties (December and January). So instead, we got together for an afternoon of lunch and roller skating early in January, to celebrate just the 4 of us! I had told Kelly about the roller skating rink out in Purcellville, and she knew that her daughter would be very excited to go. In fact, both of our girls have their own skates! So we headed out, had some lunch at a delicious burger place in Purcellville (yes, I ate a veggie burger!), and then went over to Skate.

I absolutely adore this skating rink. It totally reminds me of the places I went in middle school - it's like it's stuck in 1992. It's fantastic, and cheap. So how can you beat that?

 I know it looks like the place was empty except for us - it really wasn't. Going on the weekend means 2 birthday parties happening at the same time, as well as anyone else who just came to skate, like us. However, when the birthday party guests all needed to go eat...that meant we almost did have the rink to ourselves!

 

They of course did the limbo; Natalie and Sydney were very excited to make their way under the limbo stick. Natalie went through mostly by ducking (she was nervous to try to bend backwards, for which I can't blame her!). That's her on the left. On the right is Sydney - she did try to bend back, and just about made it. I snapped this photo just before Sydney landed on her buns! She was a good sport about it though.

The afternoon was so much fun; can't wait to go back again! Natalie spent over an hour just yesterday outside in her skates; she loves it, and I'm happy to reinforce this activity. I'm also thinking that it may be time to let Henry try skating; I think with the helper "rollers" to hold onto he could do quite well. Hopefully we can get back there soon!
And of course we love hanging out with the Parsons family - check out my previous post from our afternoon visiting with them, and the fun the kids had doing their performance!