Cute quote from Will:

"I'm not ready to get a haircut today, Mommy. How about I get a haircut in a couple weeks. A couple long, loooong weeks."
:-)

I appreciate Will's humor, especially on days like today when Jane's running a fever and is very cranky. She sure is snuggly, though.

Playing dress-up

Jane got an adorable new tutu handmade with love by our dear friend, Lyssa. Jane adores wearing dresses and mommy's high heels. Yesterday, she even turned some white ruffly baby socks that she's outgrown into "gloves" and wore them around all morning.
Here's a pic and video of Jane in her new tutu:


In the spirit of dressing up in fun clothes, the kids got out some old Halloween costumes to try on. Will's outfit is the spider costume that my MIL made last year. I think Will has grown about 5 inches since then as I couldn't even pull it up all the way.

Young Life Bocce Ball Tournament

This was our 4th or 5th year participating in the Sammamish/Issy YL Bocce tournament. It's always fun to help raise money for such a great organization, whose goal is for middle and high school kids to know Jesus.
The rain stopped long enough for us to enjoy an evening of fun and domination as my team (Laurel, Kerri Whitworth, Alison Greer and I) brought home the coveted bocce trophy!
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Thanks to our friend, Bryson for snapping some great pics:


















And here are a few more from my slightly less awesome camera:

Meal Swap

I enjoy cooking for our family, but meal planning is always a daunting task for me, because time and sanity for meal planning/prep is getting increasingly difficult to come by. It was especially tough when I was feeling so sick during the earlier weeks in my pregnancy. I'm feeling better now, and am planning to re-vamp my meal planning skills.
I was excited when my friend invited me to join in her monthly "Meal Swap" group as this will hopefully give me new recipe ideas and will also take the burden off of meal prep a few nights per month.

This meal swap consists of each person making a main entree in bulk and exchanging it with other group members, so each family ends up with a variety of meals to freeze for the month. For this round, there were 7 total families participating, which means I ended up with 6 great freezer meals that will help with my meal planning for the month. I decided to make my mother-in-law's Chicken Cordon Bleu recipe which freezes well and is so tasty. It wasn't a big deal to buy all of the ingredients in bulk and mass-produce the meals.

My parents gave us their old deep freezer that we have in our garage, which makes it easy to store lots of frozen meals.
It feels good to have lots of homemade meals ready to go at my finger tips.

Simons Love Cheese

Seattle's annual Cheese Festival at Pike Place Market is this weekend and we took advantage of the sunny day to head over this morning with the kids. We arrived at 9:45 (sampling starts at 10 am) to ensure minimal lines and maximum cheese consumption. So delicious. I bought a baguette and would tear pieces of it off to eat with the cheese which made sampling even more tasty. I was impressed by our kids, who tried every kind of cheese that we did and didn't thumb their noses at even the stinkiest of cheeses.
I should've taken notes because now that we're home, I can't remember what my favorites were, they were all so good. I even enjoyed an amazing garlic goat cheese, and I don't normally like goat cheese.
I'm also just now realizing as I type this that in my enthusiasm to consume as much cheese as possible, I forgot to check if any of the cheese was/wasn't pasteurized. Oops. Oh well, at least I'm far enough along in this pregnancy that it (hopefully) won't matter too much if I ate some funky cheese.

May Party

The past week has felt like one big party as we celebrated my birthday, my mom's birthday, a friend's upcoming baby and Mother's Day. We've been having so much fun and are so thankful for the family, friends and children that God has blessed us with.
To top it all off, we had our mid-pregnancy ultrasound this morning and got to see our precious baby kicking around in utero, sucking on his/her fingers and toes (looks like we'll have another binky lover in the family). After finding out the gender of both Will and Jane via ultrasound, we agreed to wait until baby's birthday this time around. Something about waiting for the doctor to tell us "It's a BOY/GIRL" as she holds up our new baby for us to meet for the first time sounds so special so we agreed (after much deliberation) to wait. So far, the ovewhelming consensus from guessers has been "BOY"