Matthew's Birthday

Poor Matthew has to celebrate his birthday 3 days after Christmas. Luckily, he doesn't mind having a lot of presents in rapid succession. Grammy and Heidi planned a great gift inside of a bunch of boxes, each box being individually wrapped. He was thrilled to be able to unwrap it som many times.


In the end, it turned out to be his favorite book series, the "Captain Underpants" books.


They also got him a Sharks jersey (more to come on that later).


Riding the latest astronaut theme, Julie made Matthew a space shuttle cake. Luckily Matthew agreed that the space ship would look best being horizontal like it was flying, so it didn't have to be an elaborate 3D cake with the shuttle standing up at the launch pad.


For the night of his birthday, we celebrated by going to the Sharks game. He was decked out in his new Sharks jersey, a Sharks Santa hat, and his new sunglasses which happen to have sharks on them (i.e. the glasses aren't officially-licensed).


Grammy and Grampy arranged to have his name put up on the jumbotron during intermission. He loved having his name on the big screen and having "everyone in the shark tank" (really the eight of us in our group) cheering for him.

Christmas

We had a fun two-part Christmas this year. We started off in Seattle with Santa gifts on the 23rd, and then drove down to to Jon's parents in San Jose.

When Santa visited our house, the tree was a bit bare...


...but, both boys got what they wanted. Matthew got a jack hammer, a chain saw, and a weed whacker.


Seth didn't really know what he wanted (or that he even had presents on the way). He got a vacuum which looks like a miniature version of our real vacuum. He loves it.

Santa also brought us a dual screen DVD player for the car (one screen attaches to each of the driver's and passenger's head rests). It made for a much easier time during the 14 hours of driving to San Jose. On our way down, we stopped at some friends' house in Portland and we spent the night in Eugene. We got to spend time with Aunt Mary, drove by our old apartment, and stopped by the law school for old times' sake.

We got to San Jose in time for Christmas Eve dinner. We then had the real Christmas morning. Seth didn't really get into the presents so much, but he loved the paper.


Matthew's favorite present was an astronaut costume which he immediately put on, and has worn the majority of days since then.

Santa Picture

Jon came home from work earlier than usual to go with us to the mall to get the annual Santa picture. It was perfect timing, we walked in and right up to Santa to take the picture. Seth did about as well as expected.
We sort of like the sad-face-Santa picture, maybe because our family's first Santa picture was on of those.
Matthew also had pictures taken with Santa at our ward's Christmas party. We decided not to have Seth endure the torture of a Santa picture at the party.

Visitors

Jon's cousin Nick had to Seattle (Bainbridge Island to be exact) to attend a conference for his work; so his family (Janell, Natalie, and Calvin) decided to come along for a mini-vacation. We were so excited to play host (sort of, they stayed on Bainbridge) for some of the week. We visited the Seattle Children's Museum, Bainbridge's Children's Museum (not much to see), and the Museum of Flight. Matthew especially loved the several ferry rides that we were able to take while they were here. We had so much fun playing and catching up with the Fangers; we wish they lived closer to us. We feel lucky to not only have a great immediate family, but also a great extended family.

Happy Birthday to Me!

Just like the old woman that I'm becoming, I didn't want to do anything too exciting for my birthday. Although I must admit that most of my motivation for wanting to keep it low key was the result of the colds that Jon and I were and are fighting.

Jon gave me one of the greatest birthday gifts ever by working from home for the day. So, he was home to help get us out the door for preschool by 8:00 am and he was home when I came home with two exhausted boys at 12:30pm. He was home to help put ornery boys down for naps. He was home to keep Matthew occupied while I worked on stuff for PTA. He was home to make and clean up dinner. And he was home to put boys to bed. Obviously, I loved having him home. It made for a nearly perfect day; all except for the sore throat, lost voice, and cough.

I'm so grateful for my boys, (the two little ones and the bigger one) who help remind me that my 30 years of life haven't been a total waste!