Going to School

Ever since reading about Stephanie Nielson's tradition of a back to school feast (5 years ago!) I knew I wanted to something similar. James was looking forward to his feast for weeks. He got to pick the menu this year:

Honey Ham

Cucumber Salad

Sweet Potatoes

Hawaiian Rolls

Chocolate Cake

I'm pretty sure he told every random person who would listen about his feast.

 

 Paul and I thought a long time about a simple, yet meaningful family theme for James' first year of school. Our theme comes from Ephesians 4:32: "Kindness begins with me."
We will take this school year to study the life of Christ, who is the perfect example of unfailing kindness.

I ordered our family theme star (also stolen from nienie) from Piggy & Dirt. I absolutely love it and can't wait to have our own collection of beautiful stars to remind us of our themes over the years and to inspire our children to let their examples shine brightly.

At the dinner table we picked pencils with topics out of a jar and discussed all the things that we felt were important to talk about the night before school:

Choosing the Right

Being Kind

Helping Others

Being a Good Example

Listening

Obeying the Rules

There were several gifts on the table for James that related to our family theme.

I got this copper key chain from Littlefield Lane for James to take to school with him (attached to his backpack) as a constant reminder of our family theme.

I decorated crowns from Socials for the kids to remind them that they are children of God.

After dinner James received a priesthood blessing from his dad and we all felt ready for this next phase of life.

Bright and early Thursday morning I drove James to school. There was tearing up on my part, but no crying! James is adjusting to the rules (being quiet, sitting still, etc.), but he's loving Kindergarten!

We did it! We survived the first day of school!

Willardson Family Reunion 2014

Last Christmas my brother gave everyone the gift of a camping trip for Pioneer Day weekend. Let me just preface this by saying that a few of us developed a very serious paranoia regarding BEARS. So, while we were super excited to see each other, my sisters and I were pretty much freaking out about BEARS for months. Paul, my dad, my brother/brother-in-law all just laughed at us and told us how unlikely it was that we would have a BEAR encounter. Well...

We got to drive up through Yosemite to get to June Lake. It was such a gorgeous day and Paul was so happy to finally have a vacation. The kids were really good for the drive. We ran into a little traffic, but it didn't delay us more than an hour.  When we got to camp we promptly set up camp and had fun seeing everyone. We carefully packed all our food and scented items in the BEAR locker before going to bed. We were almost asleep when we heard a very loud pounding noise on the bear locker. I was pretty convinced that it was my brother or my dad playing a prank on us since they knew how scared we were. Paul found the bear locker wide open and the Red Vines were missing. I automatically assumed that a family member in another campsite stole our treat. Paul said he heard something that sounded like a BEAR eating our Red Vines, but it was so dark and all he had was a weak little flashlight. About 30 minutes later we heard more pounding and a neighboring camper yelling "GIT!"

Yep.

BEAR.

Needless to say, we didn't sleep so well that night. Or the next. Or the next.

The next day was filled with some interesting adventures. First we went to Mono Lake to see the tufa rock formations. After that we decided to explore some beaver dams, but the path that one would usually take to visit said beaver dams was too soggy for exploring. The man in the visitor's center told us that there was a little road we could take to see a waterfall so we decided to take our picnic up there. The road was TERRIBLE. Actually, calling it a road is a joke. It was not a road. It was off-roading in fuel-efficient vehicles. I'm surprised my parents' Prius didn't fall apart. Anyway, when we finally got to the top of this road we discovered that the waterfall was less than impressive but decided to eat lunch there anyway. The mosquitos also had lunch.

Mono Lake Tufa

Trying to get a picture with the Tufa

The men

Later that day we decided to go to the beach at June Lake where we were staying. It looked so beautiful from the road. When we got there we realized that sandals were NOT the proper foot attire. The beach was covered in horribly painful little rocks. I think it took me twenty minutes just to walk out there. That being said, once we were in the water it was beautiful and mostly everyone had a good time.

June Lake beach

On Friday some of the men went fishing while the rest of us headed toward civilization and explored the town. It was a cute little town and we had fun going in to all the little shops. That night we went out for pizza in Mammoth Lake and did some night exploring. It was a really great day. The night, however, got a little sketchy when we heard COUGARS and WOLVES. As if that wasn't enough, the pizza apparently didn't sit well with a few people. James threw up everywhere at about midnight. I don't recall sleeping at all that night.

Amelia and her cousin Alice. They are 2 months a part!

The women

Pee-pa and James fishing

Amelia is such a momma's girl right now

at the poison pizza palace. Actually it's called Nik-n-Willie's

On Saturday we went to town and back to Mammoth Lake to spend the day. It was so beautiful. We got ice cream at a cute little toy shop and I think everyone was so relieved that it was our last night sleeping among wild animals that we all finally slept!

Me and my baby sister

 It was sad to say goodbye to everyone, but we are so happy that we all got to get together. Love my crazy family!

five

My baby turned five! Not sure where the time went, but I'm still in a little bit of denial over it. It hardly seems like it's been five years already.

James is currently attending kinder-prep classes with some kids from church in preparation for...kindergarten, obviously. He loves it, even though he gets kinda antsy sitting still. He's still super sweet,friendly, affectionate and loving all while being your average crazy, wild, funny, overly-obnoxious, vocal, and temperamental little kid.

He loves green SO much. He tells everyone how much he loves green. He's obsessed with minecraft, angry birds, and board games. He likes meat and cheese sandwiches, long walks, and grilling with his dad. He adores his little sister. He can instantly calm her and makes her laugh SO hard. It warms my heart to see how much they love each other.

His best friend is a little girl from church. They first met at a ward family dance and they danced together all night long. They've been kinda disruptive in primary with their constant flirtation! We've had what seems like a billion talks with him about what is and isn't appropriate at church, not dating until he's 16, etc. Come to think of it, I don't think he really knows what "dating" even is. This last week he was blowing her kisses during sharing time :/

For his birthday we had a minion party. Our ward has a lot of great kids and it ended up being a pretty big party with 11 kids and 8 parents all crammed into our little house. James had an absolute blast.

On his actual birthday we got him a (green) bike. He hasn't really shown much interest in a bike until recently. Every time we would take him to test one out he would give up on peddling so we didn't push it. Well, he decided he was ready and on his first bike ride he rode for a mile!

Minion craft bucket. The kids made some very original minions!

James' one request for his party: purple minion bean bag toss. I painted it on a foam poster board. I think it turned out pretty good!

Paul carved this out, but we forgot to get the licorice for crazy hair. Ooops! The kids didn't notice.

Caught this funny face mid-swing. It took all the kids getting two turns to finally bust this thing open.

James and his best friend.

And what minion party would be complete without minion cupcakes?

James' minion creation. 

The Lovely Month of May

Our favorite, most stressful month of the year!

We celebrated my birthday by taking the kids to Morro Bay. It was beautiful, but sooo much colder than we thought it would be so we ended up paying a ridiculous amount of money on tourist sweatshirts. James had a blast combing the beach. He found 3 intact sand dollars! I can't tell you how many years on the beach I've spent looking for just one! Beginners luck I guess. There's a really cool playground with a play ship. We got some fish and chips and had a really great time.

The next week, Paul and James went on their first Father & Sons Campout. They went to the beach again and had a blast. They saw a rattlesnake and James was taken by surprise when a freezing cold wave knocked him off his feet. They smelled of campfire and tracked lots of sand into the house when they came home. I read an entire book and snuggled Amelia (and kept a baseball bat at my side just in case) the whole night.

my happy baby

Then James started complaining of a sore tooth. At first we thought it was a case of popcornkernalitis, but after careful inspection I realized that the back of one of his molars had a pretty bad cavity. I hadn't noticed it before because it was on the backside of the tooth. So we made a trip to the dentist. They weren't able to get the bitewing x-rays due to his super sensitive gag reflex, but the dentist said his mouth looked really clean and that there shouldn't be any problems. We made an appointment for the next day to put a crown on the tooth (gah!). We went in and they gave him a "sleepy" drink and had us wait for it to make him drowsy for about an hour, then they took him back and got the x-rays and discovered FOUR small cavities between his teeth. The dentist was shocked because his mouth had looked so good. Needless to say I felt like the worst parent in the world that day. But the dentist was nice enough to take care of all of it while we were there and James was asleep. After that I had some errands to run and while I told James not to bite his tongue or cheeks, I failed to mention that he should avoid gouging holes into his face with his fingernails. For some reason it never crossed my mind that he might do that while his face was numb. But he did do it. It's been a couple weeks now and he's still got a big red mark on his face.

For Mother's Day, Paul made me dinner. James brought home a packet of wildflower seeds from church and insisted that they were sunflowers. Amelia made it through two hours of church without melting down! It's the little victories. Mostly I just snuggled my babies and thanked my Heavenly Father for them. I have the best job.

We went to the YW camp fundraiser at our ward. They had a family dance, pinata and taco dinner. James had a blast dancing! He said he wanted to dance with a girl but he couldn't find one, but then a girl came up and "looked into his eye" and he knew he would dance with her. She's his best friend now.

taking a swing at the pinata

For our anniversary we had a special FHE and anniversary dinner where we talked about eternal families. Paul brought me flowers and that was that. I think it's funny how when we first got married we both felt the need for grand gestures and now we are just happy to have a quiet evening and go to sleep early when the kids go down. I wonder what it'll be like when we're actually old! 

My parents visited for Memorial Day, which coincided with Paul's birthday.  We went up to Sequoia National Park and visited some humongous trees. It was beautiful. We got a year pass so we will be going again. We loved the smell of the trees and fresh air and the cooler temperatures. We stopped for ice cream in Three Rivers on the way back. It was such a great day (despite the A/C in our car giving up the ghost)! Amelia misses her grandma. She got spoiled being held 24/7.

Amelia loves her grandpa

Amelia is in her stroller in front of us...we didn't abandon her for a photo-op

At the ice cream/candy shop in Three Rivers

still picking at his face

We went to dinner at the Black Bear Diner. Kind of a fun place after our nature filled day in the mountains.

On Sunday we celebrated Paul's birthday (and James got an early present from Grandma and Pee-pa). Paul wanted a patriotic cake so I obliged. I was nice and didn't put 38 candles on his cake.

It's been a super fun, super busy month (as usual)! 

and then we moved...

for the 9th time.

Paul got a job with another company and they wanted him to start right away...in California.
I frantically started packing and trying to find a place to live. I had near-daily panic attacks up until I found us a house to move to.

Our San Antonio house

The trip out here was horrendous. HORRENDOUS. If you are ever thinking that maybe a 4 day car trip with a 3 month old is a good idea-- FLY. I wish I had flown with the kids. Instead I got to drive the car with the kids. Alone. And it was so loud that I couldn't talk to anyone on the phone or anything.

I love Western landscapes. 

Little Miss Amelia clocked in over 18 hours of relentless, loud, nerve-shredding screaming. James, as usual, was the perfect road-tripper. He never complained or asked the dreaded, "are we there yet?" Even as Amelia would cry for hours on end, he would just stare out the window without uttering any sort of complaint.

We left early Saturday morning and drove all day until we reached the Holiday Inn in Las Cruces, New Mexico. We were all so ready to get out of the car. Google predicted the car ride would be around 8 hours but we knew that with a big truck and multiple stops for the kids that it would take a bit extra. It took us 12 hours. Not great time.

Such a tender moment. He loves her so much.

I was thinking ahead and brought some Easter baskets for Sunday. We hid James' in the hotel room and he was really surprised. Then we headed to see some friends in Arizona. Once again, what should have taken us six and a half hours ended up taking 11. We finally rolled in to my best friend's part of town and stopped off at a church building to park our huge moving truck and feed the baby. Went to start up the car and the battery was dead. I was just grateful that we were so close to our friends and could get a jump. I wish that we could have spent more time with them. That made me sad.

At this point we knew that what we had slated as the final day of driving would end up getting us close to our final destination, but there was no way we would make it in time to pick up keys, so we ended up staying over night in Bakersfield, just two hours away from our new home of Hanford, California. Monday was the hardest day by far. Amelia screamed all day. She rarely slept. My nerves were totally shot. James was so on edge he just started bawling for the last hour of our trip, which made me cry. I can handle one crying baby, but two? Ugh. So there we were, flying down the 99 just crying our eyes out. That's when Paul went ahead and booked us a room, ordered us a pizza and we all passed out.

How the kids felt about being out of the car in Bakersfield.

On Tuesday we slept in, ate breakfast and made the last leg of our journey. Miraculously, both kids slept through it. Probably from all that carrying on the day before.  We drove through the neighborhood and parked the truck at the house. I was feeling pretty proud of myself for picking a good neighborhood. It's so hard to blindly rent a place that you've only seen online. It's a good part of town and while we are only going to be here for a year and half, at least we aren't on the edge of the ghetto like in San Antonio.

The hotel had a pancake machine. 

Well, then we picked up the keys and went home to check out our new place. I realized that the lawn was looking pretty dead. That should have been a giveaway that the previous tenants were slobs. When we opened the door the smell of wet dog hit us pretty hard. It was terrible. The place appeared to be very dirty. There were holes in the walls, dirt and dust everywhere, the bathrooms smelled of urine. At this point, there was no going back, so we called up the rental place and told them that they needed to come smell the house, because it was really bad. They ordered some deodorizer treatments for the carpet (apparently they'd had it cleaned but then never let it air out). They told us that they paid a cleaning lady to clean the place and that it had been much worse. We went to Walmart and stocked up on cleaning supplies and I started mopping the walls down. That's when I realized that what I had originally thought to be dirty walls were actually poorly painted, mismatched colors. So the walls have these shadows from darker and lighter paint streaks. I mopped them thoroughly anyway to satisfy the OCD in me.  I will never understand people who treat property that isn't their own with such disrespect.

Playing soccer in the backyard in California

The Elder's Quorum came to unload the truck in the evening. This is around the time that I realized we had a spider infestation. So I started spraying bug poison everywhere, which actually made what seemed like a million spiders and random bugs flee into the house. Luckily they met a timely demise. I don't like bugs. After the Elder's Quorum left, I put the kids to bed and I went to bed. Paul went to the garage to look for something and apparently there were hundreds of roaches! He spent a good hour in the garage trying to spray and keep them away from the things we had in there.

So here we are nearly a week later. The boxes are mostly unpacked. We are getting another deodorizer treatment for the carpets, and the grass is coming back to life. I think that this house is totally worth the week's worth of deep cleaning and care that we put in. We are in a great neighborhood, and a wonderful ward. I'm really excited to be in a small town for a change. Brings me back to my Aguanga roots.