May 22, 2004

Here's a little flashback, ten years ago today Max and I went to our first prom together. I was a senior and Max was a junior. It was held in the Crystal Ballroom downtown Portland. We had dinner on the back porch of his parents house and then went to the dance. 

We were both sporting the braces!

We went bowling after the dance. 

It was some fun times with my best friend!

Documenting

I've never been very consistent at journaling and the random journals I have done are really awkward...just ask the two living people that have read them (Max and Anna) On second thought, don't ask them. Yikes! Anyway, In the LDS church there is a strong focus on family ties and part of that is documenting your life events so that future generations can learn about their ancestors (and for many other reasons) In a Sunday school lesson a long time ago we were learning about keeping a journal and someone had mentioned that a main reason they keep a record is to make sure that they live a life worth recording. I loved that. Make your life worth documenting and interesting enough that people will actually WANT to read about you. I guess that is what keeps me writing on our family blog. I love that we have our story written here at least from the time we got married. I like that our pictures and stories are all together and we will eventually get our blog printed in a book. And hopefully our future children and grandchildren will enjoy reading about the lives that we have tried to make noteworthy.

That is not what I meant this post to be about...I wanted to show off our photo books, which is somewhat related.

Shortly after Max and I got married, My amazing sister in law Elizabeth put together a wedding photo book for us. It was one of the most amazing gifts we have ever received. That made me want to continue to create an annual photo book or family yearbook. And that is just what we have done. We now have a collection of 6 photo books, one for our wedding and another for each year we have been married. There have been many occasions where Max or I are trying to convince the other to do something exciting or new and we use the argument...think of the pictures we can put in our photo book. (Speaking of making your life noteworthy) You can read about paintballing here, Max used the photobook argument for that and somehow convinced me. Sadly, I don't think I added any paintball pictures to our photo book because it was so traumatizing. Anyway, this post is getting really random.

Here are our family photo books

And our amazing wooden sign came in the mail! 

And that is a little bit about our attempt at keeping a family record. 

Month old Miles

We survived the first month of having two little boys. We love our little boys and some things have gone much easier than expected and then there are some things that have surprised us. 

Miles has been growing like crazy. He loves to eat and poop. He is even a decent sleeper. When he was in the womb he would always start to be active right at midnight. I could set a clock to it so I assumed that we would have a hard time adjusting his day/night schedule. I guess I shouldn't speak too soon but he hasn't had any trouble with being awake for long periods of time at night. He will just wake up to eat then go back to sleep. I think we got lucky on that because I remember pacing the house in the middle of the night with Charlie for hours trying to get him to go back to sleep. He usually sleeps for 3-4 hours stretches but we have been lucky to get some six hour stretches already. Since he is gaining enough weight now we don't feel like we have to wake him every 4 hours to feed him. I do however have to make sure I don't go longer than six hours without pumping so I have to occasionally wake up to pump in the middle of the night when Miles is still sleeping. Definitely my least favorite part! Over the last week or so, Miles prefers to be held while falling asleep. Before then, he had been content sitting around anywhere and falling asleep on his own. He still is content most of the time just sitting and observing which really makes it a ton easier to play with Charlie, get my pumping done, and even do some blogging.   He really has been a delight to have in our family. Even though it's not that fun to get up in the middle of the night, I think it has definitely become easier with the second child, or maybe it's the fact that Max gets up with me almost every time to feed the boy while I pump so I don't have to be awake twice as long. 

PS, we think Miles is almost a breast feeder which , if you know me and our issues, is a huge miracle and we hope to not be pumping much longer and that Max can get more sleep. 

Miles was a month old on Cinco de Mayo so we tried to get a little festive. For the record, Max got this blue blanket in Spain when he was in the eighth grade and said it had never been used so it seemed like a great occasion . 

I still feel like Charlie is adapting well. He likes his little brother but mostly leaves him alone and hasn't shown any signs of jealousy. He will occasionally hold his hand, ask to hold him and he sometimes even shares his toys. (and then gets disappointed when Miles wont hold them). We've found that Miles will kick his little Soccer ball if we put it by his feet so we've had fun playing with that. 

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So there you have it, we are going to make this two kids thing work!

5 Years

We got to celebrate 5 years of marriage this last weekend! They have really been the best 5 years, and even though we go through new and challenging experiences we continually grow closer to one another. With Miles being so small we decided to celebrate most of our anniversary as the family of four that we are.  Max had to wake up really early on Friday to go into work for a couple of hours and set up for some sort of marketing event. I got to wake up early to both boys crying...not ideal but it's life! We had a busy and somewhat traumatic morning with some grumpy kids but all was made right when Max came home with breakfast for us. We ate it all up then took our time getting ready to go to the wooden shoe tulip festival. I had only gone once but I was the bus driver and didn't venture far from the bus so I was excited to go and spend the day with my little family. And here are some pictures from that. 

This kid never stops jumping (or "dumping" as he calls it)

We apparently came at the end of the festival when they were already pulling up some of the tulips and grass. So we may have missed out a bit but there were still tons of tulips and it was beautiful! 

Big shoes to fill

All the cow cars had names...we figured this one was close enough to Charles...even though I have no intention of ever calling him Chuck!

We actually didn't ride in any of these cars...just sat and rook pictures. Haha

Sweet brothers. 

The brightest tulips in the field 

My favorite thing about newborns is that they cuddle up and sleep anywhere!

Charlie was doing something to make me laugh in this picture.

Tiptoe through the tulips!

With all the vast beauty around him, Charlie's favorite place was this mud puddle. He loved throwing clumps of dirt in it. And he only got his feet a "little" muddy.

After sitting on this bench for a little bit, Max pulled out a poem he had put together. It reminded me of the ones he had written when asking me to prom and I loved it.

After walking among the tulips, we went to play some farm games like these duck races!

He got so excited!

I spy a duck hoarder

After playing on the playground and sharing an elephant ear we got on the hay ride to head back to our car. We were all getting pretty tired. We got in the car and went to Jamba juice Just Max went in to get us drinks while I stayed in the car with the boys and pumped some milk! .

We then headed home in time for my mom to meet us there so Max and I could have a little alone date for our anniversary. We decided to spend some special time at the Portland Temple where we were married 5 years earlier. We hadn't been back to this temple to participate in the sealing ordinances since our wedding so it was extra special to spend that time together and remember the blessing promised to those that are sealed in the temple for eternity. The only downside of this is that it was so peaceful and we had such a busy day with little sleep that we had a hard time staying awake. 

Oh, and here are some pictures from our wedding day at the temple, taken by the amazing Anna!

I'm glad that we were able to spend some alone time together but we were excited to get home to our boys and to go to sleep.My mom survived just fine with both boys and we were super grateful for her willingness to watch them. 

So the traditional gift for the 5th anniversary is wood. We have never really followed these traditions before but Max was interested and did some research and found these wooden anniversary signs. He was going to order it but then decided he wanted to show me and we could design it together. We really aren't that great with surprises. We like to make sure our "surprises" are exactly what the other one wants. So these are from this ETSY store and here is a sample. Ours is still being made but will look the same only with our names. 

The next day we continued the celebrations by going to the Cheesecake Factory as a family. Max had never been and we have been wanting to go. This was also my reward for making it another week of pumping milk. haha Max and my lactation consultant decided it would be great to make a weekly incentive plan to keep me going. So far it has been working but that is another story for another day. Charlie was a little pig at the cheesecake factory. Here he is shoving a whole corn dog in his mouth while his other he had his other corn dog prepped for his next bite.

But lets be real, Max and I were pigs too. The food was great, and it is always fun to prolong celebrations. 

Anyway, the point is that we had an exciting anniversary even if we didn't get a ton of "alone as a couple" time. We'll have lots of those anniversaries in the future when our kids are grown. We love where our lives have led us in these 5 years and we are excited to spend the rest of forever together!