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"

UW Spring Football Game

John and I decided to bring the kids with us to UW's annual spring football game last night. We stopped at Dick's Drive-in before hand for some deliciously greasy burgers and fries and then headed to Husky Stadium for the action. I mostly chased the squirmy kids around the stands, but from what I did see, the Huskies looked good.
In other Husky news, all Husky basketball fans continue to wait to see if top recruit Terrence Jones sticks by his verbal commitment to head to UW next year or if that dirty coach from Kentucky will steal yet another of our basketball recruits...

Snapshot of Will

Will currently LOVES puzzles, making towers, driving his emergency vehicle toy trucks, wrestling, and playing make-believe (ex: turning his room into Hawaii and playing at the beach which is his bed).
He likes to get 'into character' and be whoever he's pretending to be whether it by "Bad Guy Mike," "Worker Will," "Doctor Will," "Boris von der Borch the Pirate," "Dragon Tamer Will" or any other of his dozens of alter-egos. When in character, he insists on being called by his character name.
He is so loving and makes it a point to say, "Mommy, you're beautiful" on a daily basis.
Naps seem to be a thing of the past, but Will still complies with an hour-long quiet time in his room so we can all have a break in the middle of the day.

Here is Will posing by one of his favorite puzzles (fyi: Melissa and Doug puzzles can be found really cheap at Ross as I discovered last weekend):


Favorite quote from Will today: "Mom, my poop was green! Isn't that great? You know why? 'Cause green's my favorite color!"

Celebrating Grandma Needge

We had a fun "indoor picnic" last night in celebration of Nedra's 50-somethingth birthday.