Sunday, June 1, 2014

Happy 1st Birthday, Zoe!

Gah… I love this girl!!

We threw a family b-day party for Zoe's first. Levi and Colt are perusing the spread.

Colt loves Pirates Booty.

Grant and Stephen were able to join us! 

Zoe loved some of her favorite foods: turkey, bell peppers, carrots and grapes.

This is one of the best cake pictures we got. She started off slow, then got to it!

This year has flown by! We have been busy with moving, homeschooling, church planting, and just life, but it seriously seems like all I did was blink and my baby turned ONE! 

Tatum and Eliza LOVED riding in the Jeep together. These girls are fun together :)

Bang Band and Hazel

Zoe loves holding my cell phone. It's getting hard to take pictures of her (or anyone else) with my phone b/c as soon as she sees it she freaks out/screams until the phone is in her hands. 

The big ONE!  

Zoe is a busy girl! She's fast too - takes off before you know it :) 

Zoe, 
You are our sweet, silly, smart, laid-back, tough, curious girl. We love everything about you. Before you were born, your dad and I went back and forth on what your middle name should be. One name we considered was Joy, but nixed it because it was short just like Zoe. Therefore, we went with Faith. While we still love the name Zoe Faith, you bring so much joy into our lives that I often wonder if we gave you the wrong middle name :) We love you to pieces! 
Love, Mom

May

Ty and I headed to Dallas for the Catalyst conference this year. Our childcare ended up falling through. Zoe came down with hand, foot and mouth so we were taking her with us to the conference as to keep her from sharing her germs with our nephew, Axel, who was also being watched by my parents. Then Jennifer ended up sick in the middle of the night with a stomach bug, so I missed Friday morning of the conference to watch the kids while my dad was at the hospital with her. I made the afternoon/evening of the conference. Then, my dad got sick in the middle of the next night, so Saturday morning I came to pick up the kids. We decided to bring them to Catalyst with us! Thought they'd love the music… but it ended up being too loud for them to enjoy :( Fortunately, they had lots of fun games set up outside, so the boys raced the hamster balls over and over again during our lunch break. Fun times! Dad and Jennifer, thanks again SO much for watching our kids for us. Even thought it didn't go as planned, they had fun with you while they were there. There's always next year! ;-)



Tatum has been into makeup lately. I think this has been spurred on by our neighbor who has her own kid makeup that they play with quite often. Anyway, one day I discovered this stinker putting on my lip gloss in the car. Earlier in the day she had put lip stuff all over her eyelids, so at least this time she kept in on her lips :) 

Tatum and I also attended the Mother Daughter Tea at Westover. It was fun to color our own tea cups and eat some fancy food. She loved having all the attention to herself and talked the whole car ride there. 

Ugh! This was outside our bedroom patio door the other day. I could live without these being so prevalent around my house.

Ty and I celebrated our 12th wedding anniversary! We didn't get a sitter on our actual anniversary (we celebrated the next day with a delicious sushi dinner. Random story- also eating at Uchi with us was an actress we watch on tv quite often, Robin Tunney aka: Theresa Lisbon from the show The Mentalist. She sat 2 seats down from us at the sushi bar. It was fun to star watch as we ate!). Anyway, I thought it would be fun to celebrate our marriage in an extravagant way with the kids. It's never to early to teach them to celebrate love and marriage! So, we set the table with our finest and busted out the nice glasses. The kids had fun drinking apple juice (a delicacy in our house) in their wine glasses. 

They also had fun blowing out the candles over and over again :) 

Colt was trying to master the art of extinguishing the flame with wind created by his fingers. This is one of Ty's specialties that the kids try to imitate.

Tatum continues to sport her Elsa braid daily… though I've changed it up to add her bangs into the braid now so she has less whispys throughout the day.

More baseball! Go Colt!

Having fun in the dugout.

I love how the boys are so close in age that they can be on the same team some years. The team was very young and lost most of their games, but they all had fun and learned a lot! I should also mention that Ty was their assistant coach this year. I think both Ty and the boys had fun spending all that time together at the games and practices. You are a great dad, Ty! 

Thought this was cute! Zoe is a trooper and is so go with the flow (I guess most 4th kids have to be). She was so cute sleeping in the car after church this day. Guess we didn't get home fast enough for her. 

Sweet cheeks

Colt's kindergarten class at Veritas. I'm not really sure why kindergarten graduation is a thing now, but it is, so we went to show our kid how proud we are of him. 

Here's Colt's class. They all received rocks with a character trait written on it that exemplifies the student. Colt's rock said, "thoughtful." 

My thoughtful boy

A family snapshot in Colt's classroom

That same afternoon, we headed over to Levi's preschool as he graduated from Pre-K! (He's on the right end, blue shirt.)

Here he is with his teachers, Ms. Kristi (left) and Ms. Tina. He loved school this year and is ready to rock Kinder next year! 

Tatum with her teachers, Ms. Karin (left) and Ms. Stacey. Her teachers were so perfect for her and so much fun. She is REALLY going to miss them this summer! 

I got my phone out to take a pic of the kids playing on the porch one day and you-know-who noticed. Here she is reaching for the phone. 

And now she's crying b/c I wouldn't give it to her. I sure do hope her propensity for my phone doesn't mean she will like expensive things her whole life ;-) I'm always so worried she's going to drop and break my phone.

A few selfies with my baby… still reaching for the phone.

She's been curling her tongue like this A LOT. 

I love kissing this cutie! 

On our way to the boy's end of season t-ball party, Colt decided to wear all of his baseball hats from each team he's ever been on. 

We hit up The Thinkery (Austin's new children's museum) before schools get out next week. Tatum really enjoyed this plexiglass that she could paint and squeegee. 

Levi enjoyed it too… He got paint all over him :) 

Aunt Ashley was awesome enough to join us (it was so nice to have an extra pair of eyes to watch the kids!). She was able to show Colt lots of cool things with her super arty eye. Check out her work at Morning Lion Art.

Zoe is as excited as I am that this blog is officially up-to-date. Now maybe I will start posting in real time!!