Michael's Birthday

Yesterday was Michael's 32nd birthday. I've been celebrating birthdays with him for 12 years now- since he turned 20! That doesn't really seem possible. When Michael turned 20 I gave him (among other things) a NY Yankees hat. He still has it. All of the gifts that year were from just me. This year he got gifts from Spencer, Ginger and me.

This is one of two shirts that Ginger picked out.
Spencer got him three pricey (really pricey!) chocolate bars. Spencer helped with the opening by sitting on Michael's arm.

I got him a football video game for the Wii. I might regret that choice in the coming months. Spencer looks CRAZY in this picture.Do you see the little monkey on Spencer's overalls? Spencer and I went to the mall on Friday. He was sitting in the stroller and, as we walked through the baby section at Sears, he pulled that outfit off the rack, pointed at the monkey and said "ooh ooh ooh ah". I had to buy it after that performance.

After we opened presents my mom baby-sat while Michael and I went out to dinner at Morton's Steakhouse. I forgot the camera at home so there are no pictures. Take my word that it was a nice restaurant.

I made cupcakes for Michael to take to work last Friday. We kept a few so that he would have something to stick a candle in. This is our "Michael's 32nd Birthday Family Picture"
And "Michael's 31st Birthday Family Picture"
Obviously Michael's birthday is May 30th, so his golden birthday was when he turned 30. I threw him a big Golden Birthday party. That's his golden cake. Notice he wore the same shirt for 2 birthdays in a row. We didn't notice until right now!

The baby pool

We broke out the baby pool for Spencer's first dip of the summer. We start mommy and me swim lessons next week so very soon he'll graduate to the big boy pool. Today is also Michael's birthday. There will be another post about that soon. Maybe I'll wait until tomorrow though so I can include pictures from tonight. We're going out for a fancy steak dinner at Morton's.

Spencer helped fill the pool.

Ahhhh. Refreshing.

Bath toys are totally appropriate for baby pool use. He discovered he could stand in the pool and play with the water table. Apparently we need a bigger back porch.
Just for comparison sake, this is Spencer last year on June 1st before his first ever dip in the baby pool. He's so little.

Flashback Friday

Two years ago on June 2nd, Nathan and Kendra got married in Santa Barbara. These are some of the pictures taken on my camera from the big day. The photographer took even more gorgeous pictures but I don't have copies of those.

Here we are before the ceremony.

If you look closely you can see the bump that is little, tiny, unborn Spencer in my belly. I was in my 6th month of pregnancy.
My original family unit
My brothers
Nathan and all his groomsmen The bridemaids

The happy couple just seconds after being pronounced man and wife
The bride and groom with their respective parents

Me and Michael in front of the rose garden

Wasn't the location just breathtaking?

The reception was right next to the beach, but somehow I didn't get any pictures of that. The photographer did though. You'll have to go visit Nathan and Kendra and look at their wedding album if you want to see beach pictures.

The cake.

Nathan with a genuine smile. Probably his first and last.

We're dancing to Mack the Knife- it's our special song.

My grandmother with all of her grandchildren and their spouses. Starting with my grandma (I think it's obvious who she is) and moving clockwise: my cousin Zach, his wife Stacey, my brother Nick, Michael, Me, my brother Nathan, his wife Kendra, my cousin Alex and his wife Tionna.

We've gotta get Nick married off.

Happy Anniversary Nathan and Kendra!!!

Born to be wild

Now

20 years from now?

Flip-flops

I'm so proud of my little boy- he has his first pair of flip flops. I'm not sure why I feel pride, because he had nothing to do with the actual purchase of the flip-flops.

How freakin' cute are these feet?

If he's anything like his mommy this is just the first of many, many, many, many pairs. Seriously, I was once forbidden by my own mother to bring home any more flip-flops.

Reading

It took me about 18 months after Spencer's birth to get to the point where I feel like I can read anything longer than a magazine or newspaper. I am not the type of reader to read a few pages here and there and take a couple of months to read a book. I like to sit down and read chunks at a time, especially if it's a good book. And really, why would you keep reading if a book isn't good?

The first book I read was Julie and Julia, My Year of Cooking Dangerously.

I wanted to read it when it first came out, but for reasons I don't even remember, never got around to it. The movie version is coming out this summer though and I wanted to make sure I read it before seeing the movie. It was good. Not great, but good. It made me me want to eat a lot of French food.

The second book I read was The Time Traveler's Wife.
Again, the movie version is coming out and I wanted to read the book before seeing the movie. It was excellent. Right up there with my favorite books of all time. I'm trying to get Michael to read it now so we can discuss it in depth and go see the movie together. It's taking a lot of convincing.

I still want to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It was sold out when I went to buy it though. After that I have nothing on my list.

Suggestions????

Memorial Day

Memorial Day

Happy Memorial Day!

We spent our Memorial Day having a great time at Desert Breeze Park in Chandler. The park has a fabulous play ground with all sorts of things to climb and walk across and about 10 different slides. They also have carnival rides, a splash pad and a train. The real reason we went was to let Spencer ride the train.

Here he is looking longingly at the train. We waited until right before we left to ride it.

Spencer was brave and went down all the slides by himself.

He was not so brave at the splash pad. There were lots of big kids and he wanted to stay pretty close to us. He did splash around a little bit.

Spencer rode the merry-go-round for the first time.I'm not sure who had more fun- him or mommy.
He was in heaven going on his first train ride.It looks like he is about to be run down by this train, but he was safe. The conductor wasn't even in the engine yet.

This ride cost 50 cents. It was worth it for a 2 minute break.

After we left the park we went to lunch with Nathan and Kendra who were in town for the day. Then we went to a outdoor/fishing/camping/etc. supply store with them. Spencer had a great time playing in the tent.

Now we're back at home and waiting for Spencer to have a meltdown because he didn't get a nap today. Looks like an early bedtime for tonight.

Date Night

Michael's parents are in town for the holiday weekend. That means free baby-sitting for us, so we had a date night last night. Date nights are few and far between and we had been looking forward to this for a while.

One of our New Year's resolutions was to go to the movies once a month for the whole year. Pre-Spencer we went to the movies 2-3 times a month. For his entire first year of life we went 0 times. We miss movies! We haven't been doing very good with our resolution though. We saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in January and that has been it.

Last night we went to see Terminator Salvation. It is very good. I highly recommend it. There are some gaping holes in the logic of the plot and some far fetched ideas in the story, but if you can ignore that the action is stellar. At one point, in a particularly tense action sequence, I leaned over to Michael and said "This is so good I can't even breathe".

Christian Bale is significantly less lispy in this movie than in the Batman movies. He still needs some voice therapy for what I suspect are vocal fold nodules.

Ooh. Scary!

After the movie we had dinner at Pei Wei. All in all, a great night.