Birthday Shenanigans

I totally forgot to wait until I had a 'blowing out your candles' picture before I posted Jayden's birthday, so he gets 2 in one day!

And I never did get that 'blow out your candles' picture.  I lit the candles, we sang, my camera was ready, and while Jayden took a big inhale, Willow blew the candles out - she claims she just wanted to try them out.  So I relit the candles for Jayden, but then he blew them out as fast as he could before Willow could get to them again, and I had no time to pick up my camera.
This is his, "I beat Willow to it, this time!"

For Jayden's birthday dinner, we had a very spring PNW dinner.  Jayden wanted salmon, and then I cooked up asaparagus and rice.  For dessert, (he hates cake remember???) he asked for an apple crisp, which I was alright with!  De. Licious!

After dinner, since we'd already opened presents, we decided to use some of those presents (thanks Aunt Lisa and Myrons!), and the kids and Royal had the first water-gun fight of the summer.  I automatically get out of having to do it because I get to be the picture taker.  :)

Happy Birthday Jayden!  We just love you to pieces!!!!

Happy Birthday Jayden!

I feel like I have been planning and celebrating Jayden's birthday for weeks now!  And it's finally here!!!  But isn't that how everybody likes their birthday celebrated?  I believe I declare the entire month of June my birthday month! 


Today, Jayden turns 6!  But on his last day on being 5, Jayden finally lost his dead tooth!  It has been hanging on for way too many days now and I am so glad to see it gone!

I let Jayden open his presents before we even ate breakfast today, because I find it's just torture to wait.  Both Royal and I grew up having to wait to open our presents until after school/dinner/whatever/too late in the day, so I decided since I am a grown up and can do whatever I want, I was doing it early this year!  And it is fantastic!  I'm totally keeping it this way from now on!   We are now living in a sea of Lego's and Angry Birds, but I love it!

Pirate Party

Today, we had a birthday party for Jayden's 6th birthday!  His birthday isn't until Tuesday, but who wants to have a party on Tuesday????  Not me!  This year, he wanted a pirate party and I thought that was something I could get behind!  There are lots of great things out there for pirates!

We had a big surprise for him this morning that arrived a couple hours before the party started.
Here are my pirates, dressed and ready for the party, trying to figure out what in the world it could be. (Jayden drew on his and Willow's beards, in case you were wondering...:))

A huge jumpy pirate ship!  (check out Jayden's face! :) )

 

 My mom and I made Krispie Pirate Head Pops!

And we had a pirate dress up station, with bandanas, eye patches, ear rings, tattoos, and a blow up cutlass!
  Here is the ship full of little pirates running around!

 Then we also had a treasure hunt for gold coins!  The kids were "suppose" the find gold coins in 5 different locations around the yard, then show their coins to Pirate Royal and he gave them some treasure.  I forgot to get a picture of the treasure, but it was a little treasure chest full of gold and silver necklaces, rings, gold coins, and gold wrapped candy - rolo's caramel kisses, and peanut butter cups.  The 5 locations included the dog house(not shown), the sand box, underneath the slide platform, in a bucket under the willow tree, and on the balloon wall, which to get to the coin you had to pop a balloon!

And we had a pirate ice cream cake!  Jayden has decided he does not like regular cake at all, so ice cream it was!

After everybody left, Royal got in the ship with the kids!

Pretty sure Royal had as much fun as the kids in there!

The Wandering Goose :: vol 1 :: The Wandering Begins!

Today, we finally bought our travel trailer!  It only took me 3 years of hard, hard work of convincing Royal that this is going to be So. Much. Fun!  And I'm not sure he's convinced, but he's at least sick of me talking about it and showing him pictures and talking about it some more!  :)

I really wanted to name our trailer Hazel, because that is what my Papa Jim named his trailer and I always remember riding in his big blue truck on the way to the ocean to go camping and him always talking about the "Hazel Suckers" a.k.a Semi-trucks.  But Royal was not keen on the name, so we had to come up with something else.  Because a trailer HAS to be named!  (at least I think so...:) )  And we ended up settling on Goose.  Goose is what Royal and his family always called his Grandma Mary.  Grandma Mary bought Royal lots of savings bonds while he was growing up that are just starting to come due, and we used some of his savings bonds to help pay for the trailer, so in part Grandma Mary helped fund my trailer dreams and I'm just sure she would have wanted to go camping with us!  At least she would've had somewhere warm to come and sit while we dug her limit of clams at the beach!  :)

The kids are really excited, they already have picked out their beds and also spent a couple hours in it this afternoon watching a movie.  And then we ate dinner out there.  You have to do some dry runs before you head out on the road!  :)

 

Where Royal and I will sleep!

 

Where the kids (and potentially cousins/friends!) will sleep!

We aren't quite sure yet where our first camping trip will be, but it should be within the next few weeks.  And you can bet I'll be posting pictures for sure!  :)

Promotion

Tonight, Jayden was officially upgraded from this


to this!

Under Royal's supervision,  Jayden mowed the whole yard all by himself!  Just in time for his birthday party this weekend!

Walking Home

The weather here for the past couple of days has been so great!  I guess that tornado on Saturday blew in some nice calm weather!  (fyi, that tornado ended up only being a couple miles away from our house, which if it had been during daylight hours, we totally could of seen it!  And you know I would of ran outside to get a picture of it just to put on our blog.  Because those are the things I am going to WANT to remember!!!!  but don't worry, I was in the basement with the kiddos glued to the weather man trying to find out how bad it was gonna get!)

But anyway, back to today.  Jayden wanted to walk home from school, so Willow and Sam and I walked to his school to meet him.  I brought the stroller for Willow to ride in, but on the way home Jayden kept complaining of his feet hurting, so he decided to ride in it himself.  Uhhhhhhh, he's a little big now, he's feet practically drag on the ground....

Then Jayden decided he wanted to walk Sam, and then that made Willow want to walk with Jayden too.

And. Oh. My. Gosh.  The walk home took For. Ever!  Jayden, my little environmentalist got really concerned about all the litter (or as he calls it, 'glitter', he won't listen to me about how glitter is pretty and litter is not, he keeps telling me I'm wrong, it's called, 'glitter', so for now, 'glitter' it is!) that was on the side of the road, so he started picking it up and putting it in the basket under the stroller.  Eventually we found a plastic bag on ground and he started filling that up too.

When I was trying to hurry him along, "Oh just leave that there!  For goodness sake, I want to get home already!  You've picked up enough, lets just walk faster!"  Jayden says, "Mom, God would not be happy about all these people glittering on the side of the road and ruining his earth.  He's gonna be glad that I picked it up for them"  And then I was quiet.....

Easter Baptisms

Easter is on April 8th again this year.  It was on April 8th 5 years ago.  5 years ago to the day when I saw Willie alive for the last time.

I didn't want to do Easter this year.  I didn't want to get out of bed.  I didn't want to relive a week where the holidays, dates, and days of the week miraculously all line up again, leading up to the day my brother died.  Then I heard at church they were going to be doing baptisms during the Easter service this year and I thought that this would be the perfect time to do it.  To give my day, my April 8th, an additional meaning, a bigger meaning.  I had never been baptized outside of my Catholic infant baptism and there are lots of reasons/excuses why I never had.  I have believed in God and loved Jesus for as long as I can remember, but sometimes I wish I had had this dramatic conversion, where there was a definite line between my former self and my new self, but that just isn't how my story has gone, so it has taken me until I was 33 to finally step out and be consciously baptized the way Jesus was.

I once felt like God wanted me to be baptized when I was in college.  And thanks to my need to be perfect for people, I just chickened out and never told anybody that I wanted to be baptized.  (for goodness sake, what would people think of me???  how many years had I been a Christian??? and I hadn't been baptized??? what was wrong with me????).  But if I had, all I'd of had to do was be up in front of our church and do it, which in itself for me created panic.  God has a funny sense of humor.  13 years later, God asks me again to be baptized.  This time on a very sad and painful day for me.  And I still was going to have to be up in front of the church, which still makes me feel panicky, but I was also going to have to do a video testimony that would be played in front of the whole church on the big screen, right before I was baptized.  Talk about anxiety and panic.  A little piece of advice : Do things the first time God asks because it seems the 2nd time around, he's going to make you wish you'd listened the first time.....ahem...Jonah anyone????? :)

I totally hesitated even putting this stuff up on my blog.  I rarely talk about personal things, feelings and all that.  But not one person from my family could be here with us today, so I thought I'd put this on here for them and because this blog also marks important (and not important) days in our family's lives, and I'd have to say this is a pretty important one.  Did I mention Royal got baptized too?  Unfortunately he doesn't ever post on my blog, so you don't get any of the inside stuff from him, so you'll just have to watch his video.

This is my video playing on the big screen.  Willow yelled, "MOM!  You're on TV!"

And my baptism.

And here's my video testimony.  They actually played a shorter version during the service, but my friend Liz, who does the video editing, gave me a longer version to post on my blog for my family.

Rachel Lovingfoss - Full Length Easter Baptism Testimony from Eastside Community on Vimeo.

And Royal's video playing on the big screen.

Royal's baptism.

And Royal's video testimony.

Royal Lovingfoss - Easter Baptism Testimony from Eastside Community on Vimeo.

Easter Things

We dyed some Easter eggs on Friday (notice Willow's hair...it's pre-haircut!)  :)

Not that we ended up hiding any of these eggs, we had more than enough plastic eggs to go around, so they pretty much are for making deviled eggs for Jayden.  :)

After church today, we had a whole grip-load of people come over for some BBQ'd salmon and whatever else food people brought.  It was a lot of fun and my house is not nearly big enough to house that many people, but we made it work.  Thank goodness it was sunny outside, so we could spread out in the backyard as well!  :)  The kids did a quick Easter egg hunt and I'm pretty sure we have more candy now than we did at Halloween. :)

One of the families who came over were our friends Corie and Brandon.  They just had a sweet new baby girl named Annabelle, 5 days ago.  I was so happy Corie decided to brave leaving the house with a newborn into a house full of people.  Turns out I wasn't as happy as Willow.  She LOVED Annabelle and begged to hold her.  Once she did, she was very protective and wouldn't let anybody else touch her.  I was a little surprised with how much Willow loved Annabelle, because Willow does not play with dolls, or play house, or play babies/mom much at all.  She's more concerned with riding her trikes/bikes/scooters and playing on swings with her best friend Emery down the street.  But it was so sweet to see.  And she keeps telling people that she's getting a baby sister, which leads people to ask me if I have something to tell them......I do not.

First Hair Cutting

Notice, I said hair cutting, not hair cut!  Where is Grandma Norma when I need her????

Now, I knew this day was coming.  Everyone always talks about how eventually kids will cut their own hair.  And I totally assumed Willow would find a pair of scissors and take them to her hair, she has always had an opinion about everything, why not her hair?  I just never though it would be Jayden who cut her hair.  He's usually such a rule follower.  But, I walked outside to find Jayden and Willow behind Royal's truck with a pair of red scissors and Jayden snipping something off the top.  And when I come up and said, "What in the world do you think you are doing?"  Jayden says, "I'm giving Willow a haircut!"  I say, "That's not okay!"  To which he says, "Well, I didn't know that"  And I ask, "Then why are you hiding while doing it??"  Jayden : "Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh"  That's what I thought!

Willow is now the proud owner of some crooked bangs.  I am so thankful Jayden didn't cut them down to tiny spikes.  And with her crazy hair-do today, I actually don't think they look half bad, I kinda like them, but I didn't by any means tell Jayden that.  I had to pretend I was mad at him so he would hopefully never do that again because who knows what the next time's results would be.

And when I told Willow I was going to have to take a picture of them,  Jayden comes right up behind and says, "You're taking a picture?  Don't they look good? Don't you like them?  I think they look so good!"  and Willow says, "I have such beautiful hair!"

Maybe Grandma Norma can give Jayden a few tips and he can be our official hair cutter in between Grandma Norma visits,  and I can finally give up trying!

Puddle Jumpin'

We've been having some rain storms the past few days.  And that makes for a river running down the road that is perfect for jumping in!  Also, with the rain usually comes the wind, as you will see in the pictures...

And if it's fun with boots, then it's going to be twice as fun without boots!

And you might as well see just how much of a splash some wheels will make too!

Willow's Hair

It's a miracle!  After the past 3 years of watching me coat my hair in mousse and then attempt to tame it with my diffuser, Willow asked me to do it to her hair.  And sadly, she's going to have to get used to it, she has inherited my kinda curly, kinda straight, extra frizzy, extremely snarly, out of control hair.  There's no hopping out of the shower and letting it dry.  It either has to be "helped" to be made curly, or "helped" to be made straight, or pulled back to be ignored for the day. 

Here's to hoping for a new Willow hair trend in his house!  I give it about a week before I catch her in the bathroom emptying my entire collection of bottles of mousse and gels and straightening lotions onto her head....