Project Life :: Week 2

:: Here are the pics from January 8-14 ::

A beautiful winter sunset

A & O getting into Nolan's toys! Poor guy!

So we decorated our gingerbread house a little late this year. Nolan had to put EVERY single pice of candy on!

A walk in the cold

A tired girl who refused her morning nap!

Linking up with The Mom Creative

A Comparison

I love looking back at pictures of Nolan and seeing what he was doing in regards to what the girls are doing. The girls are bringing back to many memories of Nolan as a baby and it's fun to find pictures of them doing the same things!

Olivia in the bottom of the exersaucer (excuse the bad iphone pic)

Nolan doing the same thing in December 2009

It's crazy to see how much bigger he was than the girls! He started crawling and moving way earlier than the girls did. I look at the picture of Nolan and can't quite believe he is already 2.5. It goes so fast!

It's not always raining in the Northwest...

It's been an unseasonably dry and cold winter here in the Seattle area. Having moved from Southern California, I have struggled with the wet weather and last year was no joke. It rained. A LOT. But this winter has been mild as far as rain goes. We have had a lot of sunny and cold days, which I will take any day over the rain. I snapped this photo with my iphone. What a beautiful sunset!

Project Life :: Week 1

So many of our pictures this week we taken with the our phones, so that is why the quality isn't the best! I use the weekly format, so I don't always have a picture for each day, although I try!

A & O's 8 month photo shoot a couple of days late!

Nolan drinking a green monster smoothie.

A & O loved watching the pups run around in the backyard!

All three kiddos playing together...one of my favorite sights!

Out on a walk with Nolan. Lots of fun finding sticks, branches and rocks!

Addie loves her food!

Olivia trying out the mesh feeder for the first time. She LOVED it!

:: Linking up with The Mom Creative ::

2012 goals

1 :: Get connected. We are moving in 2 months and intend for this move to be our last. We have moved a lot. Too much. But this move came unexpectedly and it is a place where we have always wanted to end up and raise our kiddos. So we are going for it! We want to find a church community to be a part of, I want to find other mamas to hang out with, and we want to find couple friends. It's hard and intimidating to start someplace over and be the "new person", but like I said, this is it. Our (hopefully!) forever home, so we will be making it a priority to get plugged in and build community.

2 :: Read, read, read! I haven't read nearly as much as I would like in the last couple of years. Pregnant and reading just never went together for me and neither did newborns and reading. But we are out of that stage and I'm looking forward to diving back in. Here's a short list of books I'm looking forward to in the next year...Also, I will be hitting up the library for these whenever I can. Trying to not spend so much money on books this next year. I could walk into a Barnes & Noble (or online at amazon) and spend WAY too much.

Columbine Already started this one!

Crazy Love

If You Want to Walk on Water, You've Got to Get Out of the Boat (I think we own this one, I just have to dig it out of the box)

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

The Litigators I'm a sucker for John Grisham...quick and easy reads!

There are plenty more, but hoping to start here...

3 :: Get dressed each morning. Don't read that the wrong way...I'm clothed, just in my pajamas and I tend to stay in them most days, all day. This is really happening for two reasons. 1 :: none of my clothes fit. For reals. This baby weight is still hanging around. Having twins really wreaked my body. I refuse to buy clothes at my current size because I don't want to spend the money, but mostly I don't want to be this size. So losing the baby weight and eating healthy are goals for the year. 2 :: I just had twins. And I have a two year old. I'm proud that I get them dressed most days! It doesn't leave a lot of time to work on myself. But I'm getting to the point that I want to. And I NEED to. If I can spend a little time on myself each morning (exercise, shower, quiet time) before the kids get up (instead of getting up with them) I think I will be more awake and more engaged with the day.

4 :: Run a 1/2 marathon. I guess this could tie in with the whole baby weight be gone thing, but it's more than that. Running keeps me sane. It's my quiet time to think, pray, and be with my thoughts for awhile. Running has been a huge part of my life for 16 years and is currently like that long lost friend that you want to get back in touch with. It's time to become BFF's again with running. I miss it.

5 :: Dates with the hubby. They just don't happen much anymore. Thankfully, we have family where we are moving to and I'm hoping that will help us get out a little more and spend time away from the kids!

Green Monster

Nolan can be a bit of a picky eater. It is just about impossible to get him to eat vegetables (just like most 2 year olds I hope!), but he is all about fruit and loves smoothies. Thanks to pinterest, oh how I LOVE pinterest, I discovered the green monster.

The green monster is a smoothie loaded with fruit and spinach. You aren't supposed to taste the spinach. I thought to myself this is too good to be true and how haven't I known this all along?? After looking at a wide variety of green monster recipes and each one being a little different, I whipped up one for Nolan and I to try. He loved it! I loved it! I was sure I would, but with Nolan you never know! Fresh spinach will now be in regular rotation at the Lynch house and at least I know he is getting some greens now and again, along with those dino nuggets he loves so dearly.

My version of the green monster:

1 banana

1 cup mixed berries (not necessary if you don't have)

1/2 cup vanilla yogurt

1/2 cup orange juice

some ice

1-2 cups of fresh spinach

2 tablespoons ground flaxseed

It's a new year...

I have neglected this little blog ever since I started it. It overwhelmed me. I wanted to document life with a newborn (now 2.5 year old), but I just couldn't seem to commit to it day in and day out. Once I missed blogging about a few fun events, I felt I had to blog about those before I wrote about what was currently going on...which has been a lot in these last 2.5 years. I haven't written about our move to Washington, how hard it was to leave sunny southern California, getting pregnant again, finding out it was twins (surprise!), the birth of our beautiful girls, our growing toddler, and the chaos and joy that have surrounded these past 8+ months since the girls have been born.

I, of course, have stalked plenty of blogs, and many times have come back here to update events that happened ten months before, because for some reason I couldn't shake the feeling that it just had to be done in order!

Well, now it's a new year and I've decided to put my back into this blog. And guess what? I'm picking up with the right here, right now. I do hope to go back and put some of our major moments of the last couple years on the blog, but if not that's ok. I'd been thinking about this the last few weeks and the new year just seemed like as good a time as any to pick it. Then, this post from a blog I read, sealed the deal.

So here's to starting where I am.

Image from Chokola

Zoolights

Every year during Christmastime the Point Defiance Zoo uses a gazillion lights and wraps them around every tree, building, plant and animal (ok, not animal) in the zoo. We headed out in the freezing cold to check it out. We were all quite impressed! Definitely something we will do again next year with all three kiddos!

Hunting for a Christmas Tree

We met up with Sean and the fam in search of the perfect Christmas tree. We found a little farm just south of Tacoma with hundreds of trees that you cut down yourself. Nolan loved running in between the trees! We had a hard time determining size and ended up with tree that was pretty big. Nolan's favorite part was eating the candy cane after we were done picking the tree out.

Copy Cat

Nolan watches us so closely these days and likes to do whatever we are doing. Nate was putting together an IKEA desk (always a fun task!) and Nolan decided he would help out!

Winter Wonderland...or not

Normally I would be extremely excited about snow. I love it. Skiing, snowball fights, building snowman...all of it! But not so much this time. It started out innocently enough. Cold, but not frigid, temperatures and a few inches of the white stuff. It was Nolan's first time experiencing it and he had a lot of fun (see pictures below) until his hands got too cold.

Well, later that night the temperature starts to drop and the wind picks up. (Another topic, but we did NOT realize how windy it gets around here...a problem when you are surrounded by trees.) Right as we are putting dinner in the oven the power goes out. Not completely uncommon, thanks to the wind and trees, but this time it was out for 20 hours. And it was freezing. Like 10 degrees outside freezing. Our house was in the 50's. I'm cold pretty much all the time, so this certainly didn't help things, plus I'm pregnant and still dealing with morning/all day sickness...it wasn't a good combination.

Around 11 am I got desperate and starting calling hotels in Gig Harbor because most of the town still had power. I found a couple of rooms (Nate's parents were visiting for Thanksgiving) and started packing. Literally the car was packed, and we were about to climb in and head out when the power came back on. Praise the Lord! I turned the thermostat up to 80, took the hottest shower and crawled into bed for a nice warm nap!

JUMP!

Gig Harbor has an indoor bounce house place that Nolan loves! We have been a couple of times now and he just has so much fun. The best part is that kids under two are free! We plan on spending some time here now that winter weather has started to settle in. Nate was able to go with us and Nolan loved having Daddy around to play with!

Look at the smile on his face!

Life with a toddler

Nolan is routinely pulling stunts like this! He is able to get into so many things now and he does it so fast! He's so cute though, we can't get mad at him!

And look, he's so proud on himself!

Surprise...Surprise!

We headed to the doctor for my 12 week ultrasound appointment and this is what immediately popped up on the screen:

My first thought was, "hmm...that looks like two heads. That can't be right! Maybe I just don't know what I'm seeing." I look at Nate who has a half-smile, half-shocked look and I realize that I was right when I saw two heads. Our doctor then asks us if we know what we are looking at and I say, probably very loud, "Is that TWINS??"

Well, yes it is! We are expecting two bundles of joy next spring. We are very excited and very nervous! What an adventure this is turning out to be!

Halloween

We dressed Nolan up in his monkey costume and headed to Gig Harbor for Halloween. Most of the businesses in the harbor pass out candy and a lot of families head down there. Nolan was sure what to think at first, but pretty quickly he figured out how to play along so he could get candy! It was a little on the cool side, but we had a great time! Nolan even stopped on the walk back to the car, plopped down and started eating candy out of his basket. He was in heaven!

Spooner Farms

My dad came up for a visit in October and while he was here we headed to Spooner Farms to pick out some pumpkins! Nolan had a blast looking at animals, climbing on pumpkins and exploring the pumpkin patch.

We ended up leaving without getting any pumpkins, but we still had a great time! We will be back next year!

Our First Home

On September 21, we signed the papers to our first house. Throughout the summer we watched the house being built and stopped by almost weekly to check on the progress. We did the final walkthrough and then went over to the office to sign all the paperwork. We weren't able to move until the weekend, because of Nate's work schedule, but on September 25 with the help of friends we were able to move into our house.

Not quite completed in the picture, but oh so close!

Seaside Cross Country Meet

In September we headed south to Seaside, OR for Sarah and Veronica's cross-country meet. V wasn't running because of an injury, but we were able to see Sarah run. I ran at the same meet when I was in high school, so it was fun to be back and see one of my sisters running in it. Nolan had a great time, there was a lot of open spaces for him to run as well! The drive was a bit long, as I was experiencing a lot of morning (all day) sickness at the time, but it was well worth it!

Go Sarah!

Silly faces after the race

Shopping & OMSI

Towards the end of August we met my mom and the girls in Portland for a little back to school shopping. After spending a couple of hours at the mall we headed over to OMSI, which is a hands-on interactive science museum. Nolan had a great time with his Aunts! It is so nice being able to drive a couple of hours and meet up with them, definitely one of the advantages of our big move North!

Hanging out in the car with Jenny

Nolan asleep during the first part of OMSI

What a cute family!

Sarah kissing Einstein

My husband with his forest friends