Gretchen's Bridal Shower at the Queen Mary Tea Room

We're Moving!

We bought a house last Friday and can't wait to get into it. The new house puts us very close to both sets of grandparents and will give us more room to grow, with the latest Simon baby being set to arrive in about 3 months.
The house is in Sammamish, which is about 20-30 minutes from where we are right now in Renton. It has a great yard, and is situated on a cul-de-sac in a safe neighborhood. One extra bonus to the house is that it's located across the street from miles of running trails. I'm itching to get back into a running routine after the baby arrives, it's been way too long.
Because of the nature of the house sale (long story-let me know if you want to hear it and we can talk :), we're not exactly sure when we'll be able to move in, but hopefully it will be sometime very soon. For now, we're busy packing and getting our current home ready to rent out to the right family.
We feel so thankful to be able to do this and are amazed at how God orchestrated everything. We are excited to begin this new adventure!

Dinosaurs

Will is pretty into dinosaurs lately (as is Jane, not to be out-done by her brother), which meant that today's trip to the Pacific Science Center was a HUGE hit. Will's favorite game was trying to figure out if a dinosaur was a meat-eater or plant-eater based on their teeth and claws.
As a bonus, there was also a neat bug exhibit and even a great toddler play-area complete with a tide pool containing starfish, anemones, hermit crabs, etc. Most of the toddler section is enclosed which is great for me, being the mother of an independent little woman who loves to wander off and do her own thing. This is new for me, as Will has never strayed far from his Mama's side.
We'll be going back to the Science Center very very soon to see the dinos again and also to check out the exhibits that we didn't have time to see. Roar.

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!
]




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.