California - Irvine Memories

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Thrifty Ice Cream

Northwood Castle Park

8 Alondra

Fun with Brooklyn & Zelda - Nail painting, movie watching, In-N-Out

Easter with Nana

The girls and I spent Easter weekend with my Mom. I've never had my girls dye eggs for Easter before, so my mom was excited to break out all her egg dying kits.

A lot of the dyes that she had were old and not working well, so we opted more for painting the eggs.

We went strawberry picking. Always fun.

We went to the community Easter Egg Hunt. It was set next to the water and was just gorgeous.

The Easter bunny that was there was pretty creepy. During the hunt, Charly found one of the bonus eggs, but she refused to go near that bunny to get her prize. Leland went and got it for her.

We took the ferry with some friends over to Aurora Fossil Museum. It was a cute little place including a fossil digging site filled with leftovers from a local phosphate mine. We found lots of shells and sharks teeth.

Topsail Island

We spent a few days in Topsail Island, NC with Chuck's family.
The whole crew.

Our girls. They loved having all the hair accessories from their aunts. I don't do the bows as big as your head like they do and the girls loved looking through them.

Our family

Grammy & Papa and their grandkids

The weather was not the best, but the cousins still had a great time.

This is where we told the family about our new baby. We put together these great reunion shirts. Everyone drew a self portrait of themselves. Our family is above the 'S' and we put a little stork by us. I was the one who printed the shirts, so the big reveal of the reunion shirts was also our announcement. It was great!

 

Chuck got up really early to take pictures of the sunrise. I enjoyed my sleep and enjoyed the sunrises through the 300+ pictures he took.

On our way home we stopped in New Bern, NC. It is such a cute little town.

New Year's Dinner

I decided I wanted to try out starting a new family tradition and have a fondue dinner for New Year's Day. Everyone really enjoyed the "new" way of eating dinner.

In a cheese sauce we dipped: bread, shrimp, kielbasa, broccoli, potatoes, and bread.
For dessert, pretzels, bananas, apples, and pineapple dipped in chocolate.

More cousin fun

Playing dress up and doing a fashion show.

At the Children's Museum. My niece, Sarah, clearly did not want to get on that dinosaur for the picture.

Rathburn Cousins

Celebrating cousin Noah's birthday

Happy New Year picture

Christmas in NC

Christmas in NC with lots of Gates cousins meant a lot of fun.

Grammy-Go to bounce house and out for doughnuts.

Acting out the Nativity Christmas Eve.

New pajamas. Leland - Tinker Bell, Lucy - Spider Man (the obsession now on its 2nd year), Charly - Cars

Sprinkling "reindeer food" off the balcony. The camera really picked up on the glitter which made the pictures really cool.

Waiting to come downstairs.

Can you tell there is a Cars theme going with the Charly?

Reading all the blog posts from the Gates Family gifts of Service. We all read them together with the missing family members on Skype.

Wonderful hand carved African creche from Grammy and Papa.

Grammy & Papa

We were able to welcome Grammy & Papa home from their 18 month LDS mission to Congo, Africa. The girls were so excited to see them after getting to see them only on Skype for so many months.

After many hugs, kisses, and tears the first stop was a hot chocolate from Starbucks.

Then the remainder of our few days with them revolved around food...steak dinner with vegetables not from a can, yummy OJ, whole milk, yogurt, hot dogs.

They were very jet lagged and fell asleep often, but we managed to do some fun Christmas festivities. We toured the state Capitol building and the Governor's mansion.

We then made a few stops along the RVA Tacky Light's tour.

A week with cousins

Back in December, Chuck's cousin David passed away. To enable Chuck's sisters to be able to go to the services in Utah, I watched my niece and nephew for a few days. We had a great time playing together. I had a 6, 4, 3, and two 2 yr olds for 5 days. It was exhausting.

Zetta was the little princess who wanted to be in dress ups all day long. Charly enjoyed having a super buddy with Houston.

My aunt and I took the kids to the Festival Of Lights at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens.

The favorite discovery of all was the train display. Around the outside of the display were buttons the kids could push to make some of the figurines or buildings do things. One button made a house smoke from fire then the fire truck would come. It was awesome!

We wore those kids out. It was so much fun.

When Hock and his brother came to pick up the kids at the end of the week we acted out the nativity story together several times so that everyone could take turns with different roles.

We then took a chilly stroll down by the James before they headed back to NC and stopped by the Richmond Battlefield National Park building.

My girls know right where to go for the Civil War dressups in the National Park building.