Such a fun day!! I have to say, after Parker’s 2nd birthday, I was a little anxious to start this day because turning two was a ROUGH day on our little man. But we had so much fun!

We started the day with a Paw Patrol themed breakfast in our jammies with Dad before he went to work and maybe finished breakfast with a ring pop. 😉 I mean, you only turn three once, right? 😉

Next up, we headed to the zoo with our dear family and friends!! Gammy, Aunt Nicole and Gabriel, Miss Eryn and Junie and Miss Shannon and baby James all came. We had the best time! Parker was just SO HAPPY the entire time there.

Attempting to get a group shot on the weird chair that everyone has to get a group shot on. Apparently it was hot on Parker’s legs, so he wasn’t super excited about this part.

Mr. James. Such a sweet baby – Parker doesn’t care for him much yet since he can’t play, but Eisley is just in complete infatuation with the “BAY! BAY!” 😉

I packed some cupcakes, a candle and a lighter in the lunch box and we all sang to him. He was so cute. 🙂

We dragged our sleepy selves home, took a little rest time and Eisley took a nap. Jon got home soon after and then it was time for our very early dinner reservations for Red Robin.

Cuties wanted to sit together on the same side of the booth. Which was SO WEIRD to be sitting next to Jon at a family dinner. Ha! Usually we are on man-to-man defense with the boys and we stick Eisley on the end of the table so we can do zone with her. 😉

This pumpkin loves to eat out. LOVES it.

I love this picture!! The waiters all came and sang to him and he just thought it was the coolest thing ever, especially when he got a sundae out of it. 😉 The theme of the day was basically Sugar.

Then we had to go home and dig into those presents he’d been staring at all day! He was SO excited about them!

He got a teepee, a bunch of books and a new water bottle. Parker is SUPER into Where’s Waldo right now – he spends hours reading Waldo books every day! We even went to the library and hunted down the only copies in the whole city. So he was SO excited for a new Waldo book! This just made me laugh so hard – we were busy setting up the teepee and he just climbed in the box and started reading.

Hanging out in the teepee!! It’s such an adorable little thing!

They quickly discovered this was a great place to read. We put the teepee up in their room and I find them in there ALL the time. Such a fun fort for them!

Little sugar during his birthday song. Goodness, I just love those sweet little cheeks!

And, of course, we had to lick off the whipped cream from the candle. Such a fun, fun, exhausting day for our big three year old! Love my Parker Bear so much – I can’t believe he’s already three!

Sweet boy,

Today you are THREE years old!! I just cannot even believe it. You are growing so fast!

You are just such a fun character, Parker Bear! You are so sweet and so snuggly. You love to be at home and you would prefer to spend your entire day in your jammies. 😉 You love NOTHING more in this life than your brother’s time and attention and if Nathan can’t or doesn’t want to play with you, there is very little that will console you.

You love to read. You would read 100 books a day, if I had the time and voice for it! You love to color and you love to “do school” like Nathan. You are starting to get so imaginative when you play and I love seeing the worlds you create in the playroom with your cars and dinosaurs and action figure guys! You love to make giant messes and you do not love cleaning them up. 😉 We’ll have to work on that this year!

You still have your short list of approved friends, but other than that, you’re not a huge fan of hanging out with people. But, you’ve gotten so much better this year at trying new things! You did Bible Study School and loved it and you did Puggles and LOVED it! You are growing and changing so fast!

When Nathan is home, you still want to do everything Nathan is doing EXACTLY like Nathan is doing it. But, when Nathan is gone, you really love being in charge. 😉 You love to pick the show to watch after rest time, you love getting to build blocks and make garages and you love to tell Eisley what to do and exactly how to do it.

You are so funny and you say the most hilarious things! Your dinner prayers are some of the funniest parts of our day. You come up with the most random, weird things to talk about and you rarely stop talking when it’s just us around. Your laugh is so loud and awesome and it’s just my favorite thing when you just bust out laughing at something. You laugh with your whole body!

This year was such a HUGE year for you – we moved houses, you exchanged your own room and a crib for sharing a room in a big boy bed and you started wearing big boy underwear. You are growing so quickly – and sometimes faster than you like. 😉 You are beginning to handle things so much better the older you get – moving was so tough for you but you quickly stepped up into the role of being a big helper as we fixed up our house! You have completely become our little jokester and if you notice that someone is sad, you will crack the most random, weird jokes just to try and get them to laugh. I love that about you!

You are just the best middle to this crazy train I could ever imagine! We love your spunk, we love your goofiness and I pray so much that God uses your strong will to His glory. You are our favorite Parker Bear and we could not love you more!!

I love you, sweetheart! Happy birthday, my big three year old boy!

Mama <3

So nice to be back in our own beds! And I know two kids who severely missed their sister, even though she was only gone a couple of days…

Ha! This girl – she has the whole family wrapped around that tiny pinky finger. 😉

Wednesday morning, Nathan had a character parade at his school which just meant we all had to be up, dressed, fed and walking out the door by 7:15 that morning. Thankfully, I’d done his costume before New York, but we were still running out the door in a rush that morning. He looked so adorable though. They had to dress up like a character they’d read about this year, so Cat in the Hat was the obvious choice for Nathan. 😉

Wednesday was also our ninth wedding anniversary – cannot believe it’s been nine years! In some ways, it seems much less and in most ways, it seems like much more. I have a hard time remembering life before Jon and all these silly heads. We are definitely in the shoulder-to-shoulder stage of marriage where we spend most of our time together next to each other tackling the day. On this night, we put the kids down a few minutes early and had a late dinner just the two of us. We decided a stay-in-date might have to become a tradition. 🙂 Our anniversary has become a little more difficult thanks to an event three years ago tomorrow – our little Parker Bear was born!! So good to have time with just us though. Love my Jon. I’m so thankful for him!!

Oh my goodness, last week was SO much fun!!

My sister, Cayce, moved to New York last October for work. It was SO sad. I’m so excited for her and I love that she’s living in a city she’s always wanted to, but I hate her being so far away! My mom was planning on going out to see her on March 10th and like six days before that, she called and said she had extra points and asked if Eisley and I wanted to go with her and surprise Cayce.

Cue the panic. 😉 Ha! I talked to Jon, Dad offered to take the boys on Friday, my dear friend Eryn said she could watch Parker on Monday while Nathan was at school and all of a sudden, we were packing and getting ready to leave! I told Jon I was so thankful that we had basically NO time to think before this trip, because too much longer and I would have talked myself out of it completely since this was the longest I’d ever left the boys. But they did FANTASTIC and everyone had a great time!

Our travel did not go as planned – thanks to some pretty massive New England storms, we ended up having to switch flights in Chicago and fly into Newark instead, then we took a train to NYC and then took a subway to the hotel. I think we basically hit every form of transportation on Friday. 😉 But the surprise was so worth it!! It was FREEZING COLD in NYC. I have not been this cold in I don’t even remember how long but it was so so cold!

We went to this awesome Italian restaurant the first night. So, side note, after being there for the weekend, I am convinced that Eisley was possibly the only baby in Manhattan. People just fawned over her the entire weekend. And she totally ate it up. This place was so cute – the waiter and the busboy just could not stop talking to her, the chef came out and declared her to be the most beautiful baby he’d ever seen and brought her out homemade Italian gelato with strawberries before dinner even came, they had live music and the singer dedicated a song to her… it was just ridiculous. 😉 Meanwhile, Eisley was just totally milking it and smiling and waving and clapping after every song and dancing to the music. The busboy kissed her hand as she left and the chef gave her his business card on our way out. So funny.

Cayce had to work the next morning, so Gammy, Eisley and I took our time getting ready, went to Starbucks for breakfast and then took the subway down to the Financial District where Cayce works so we could meet her for lunch. We walked around a little bit first and saw a few different fun places from some of our favorite TV shows. So fun to see in person!

It’s so tiring to perform the whole day. 😉 She slept the whole way on the subways back up to the hotel.

Little Miss at the Disney Store in Times Square. We probably spent almost two hours here and she just went from princess to princess to Minnie and then latched on to this suitcase and dragged it around the entire store. Ha! It was a really cute store and made us so nostalgic for Disney. 😉

Snuggling with Auntie Cayce before bed. 😉 Love this!!

The next morning, we were up and ready to go by 10. Ha! Such a nice, slow morning! Eisley was not super excited to get back in the Ergo but she was still so happy to have us all to herself.

Trump Tower!

Me and my best girl. <3

We had lunch at The Plaza and Eisley and I split a dark chocolate crepe from the crepe store there. Oh my goodness. SO messy and SO worth it!

I mean, we had to get a picture of Eisley by the Eloise sign, since she’s named after an Eloise. 😉

And we had to check out the American Girl store with our hat-haired baby girl. 😉 She LOVED the Bitty Baby floor and just yelled, “BABY” and pushed the strollers around the entire time. Since we never are in NYC, we had to splurge just a bit and Eisley got her very own Bitty Baby, even though she might be a bit young for her now. But, I figure we likely won’t be back before she’s a year or two older and it’s such a fun souvenir from such a fun girls’ trip!

On the escalator at the Disney store! I thought it was so fun that it was modeled after the scene in Tangled!! Gammy was so sweet and bought Eisley the suitcase that she fell in love with – so fun. She loves her “backpack”. 😉

After I’d given her the baby – such a sweet little love.

Thanks to the blizzard, we ended up having to switch our flights to leave a day early and we didn’t get home until after midnight on Monday. Eisley slept the entire second flight from Houston but was up the entire first flight, so it made for a LONG day for me and Gammy. But I’m so thankful that we got to go! Thank you, Gammy, for such a FUN, wonderful girls’ trip!!! And HUGE thanks to Jon, Dad and Eryn for taking care of things back home – the boys had the best time too!! 🙂

Oh the joy and gladness that it is FINALLY getting close to warmer weather!! Ha! We have been feeling so cooped up.

Nathan’s class is studying Russia and one of their optional assignments this week was to make pretzels like I guess you can buy at street vendors there. WELL. This was not the “30 minutes of familt fun!” that was advertised on the pretzel recipe page, but they were delicious. Delicious and destructive – it took me almost an hour and a half to clean my kitchen afterward.

One of my sweet friends lives in our neighborhood and she had a baby girl a few weeks ago! We walked down to meet her and Eisley was just in AWE of her – she loves, loves, loves babies. It’s so cute. 🙂

Nathan’s best friend in school is Daniel and Daniel does taekwondo, which means that taekwondo is about the ONLY thing we hear about right now. For Valentine’s Day, Daniel gave little valentines that were coupons for two free weeks of lessons and Nathan about DIED. We finally got the time to do it this week and he was so hyped up and excited. It was hilarious. He loved it so much!

Little Miss discovered a VERY fun trick this week! 😉 On Friday, I was trying to read with the boys and noticed her quietly walking over to the couch with all the clean laundry on it, pick up a couple of socks, quietly walk out of the room and then return empty handed. I finally stopped reading to see what she was doing and found a whole pile of clean socks in the trash can. Those third kids, man. Sneaky little ones. 😉

Pushing little sister around the yard. They are so cute. 🙂

Aunt Cayce bought this outfit for Eisley before she was even born and it finally fits!! Her expressions just crack me up. Ha! She LOVES this sweatshirt and finds it all the time and just carries it around the house yelling at me until I put it on her. 😉 Someone is getting FEISTY in her old age. 😉

We were playing one afternoon after rest time when Eisley was still sleeping and Jon had Nathan and he was just so funny. He is really at a very fun, super imaginative stage and it’s just so cute. I rarely have time when it’s just me and Parker but we soak it up when it happens. 🙂

Crazy head got into the box of winter stuff. 😉 Notice that she is basically naked and yet she still has on her shoes. Because #shoes.

Poor Kody. Parker LOVES him and thinks that Kody is his best friend. I really wish the feeling was mutual. 😉

This weekend was fun and nuts all at the same time. 😉

I walked in to check on her before I went to bed and found Eisley sleeping in my most favorite position that babies get into the other night – oh my goodness, I love this. When their little tush is in the air and their cheeks are all smushed… it’s just like the most heart-melting thing ever. 😉

These three – goodness. I love watching them play nicely together. Sometimes, we have days where it’s just one fit after another but the days when they are playing sweetly are just the biggest blessing.

And look who came to visit!! Nonnie and Papa O came out for a long weekend and the kids went nuts. So fun to see them! They always spoil us rotten.

 

Seriously, I am SO ready for spring. I’m not ready for the allergies or the wind or some of the non-fun parts, but I am really ready for warm weather again. Our house has been freezing cold again this week thanks to more snow/freezing rain. Spring is so close!!

I’m pretty sure this is Eisley’s most favorite spot in the house. Ha! She LOVES to play in the dishwasher. She loves to load it, she loves to unload it and if it’s cracked open at all, she wiggles those tiny little fingers in, yanks the lid down and goes to town.

I dropped Nathan at parent drop-off after yet another snow/sleet and he was getting his backpack on and had the audacity to look this old. I spent the whole day in mourning over how fast his childhood is passing. And as soon as I picked him up from school, I threatened him with swaddling every night again unless he slowed down. 😉

Completely unplanned, we ran into Gammy at our grocery store one day after school. Ha! The kids were ecstatic. 😉

I forgot to include this picture about our Valentine’s Day! Aunt Nicole invited us over and we spent the morning making so many fun crafts. Such a sweet thing for her to do. Then she made us heart-shaped grilled cheese and little hand pies. The kids had so much fun!

Looking for Waldo together. These two are the BEST of friends and the WORST of enemies right now – they just fight like cats sometimes and I get so frustrated but then they have so many times of these sweet moments and it’s just so good for my heart. I tell them often that they are each other’s best friend. Parker has so much hero worship for anything Nathan does right now – for both good and bad. 😉 I pray for them to love each other and grow up to love each other more every day.

Three little weirdos at lunch. They were cracking themselves up about something. Love when they are all having the best time together!

We had kind of a low key week, which was SO nice!! On Friday, we met some friends at a trampoline park in town and the kids had so much fun. I basically had to pry them out of there. 😉 At one point, they got so excited and yelled for me to come over and told me they had a “super awesome trick” they were going to do and then did this:

So stinking cute. I hope they always think it’s a super cool and awesome trick to run down a trampoline together holding hands and jump into a foam pit. 😉

On Saturday, I took Eisley to go visit Shannon and baby James and came home to find the boys on their bikes out in the cul-de-sac with Jon. Nathan was too busy riding to take a picture but I convinced Parker to pause for a second. 😉

Little cutie head. 🙂

Sunday, Eisley was not having it when I tried to drop her off in the nursery (and Mom is a bleeding heart when it comes to the baby. Always. I am the worst at leaving my kids in the nursery) and she was not having it in the service, so it was the foyer for me and the teething grouch. 😉

Sassy pants. She has gotten feisty, especially when she’s cutting a tooth.

Such the proud little walker now. She was everywhere. A really sweet older couple were sitting out in the foyer too and they kept watch me chase her around and laughing and at the end of the service, the man came up to me and told me their youngest was nineteen and I needed to just soak in every second because it seems like yesterday they were out in the foyer with her.

I think with Nathan, I would not have believed him. With Parker, I might have believed him a little more. But with Eisley, I cry every time she does something new because Nathan was just this little and I was just taking him out of the service. And now he’s in kindergarten. It really does go too fast. 🙁

 

So, we discovered something about our Eisley girl this week.

This girl loves herself some shoes. 😉 Ha! I took her and Parker to get some new shoes for the spring at Payless (Gammy already got Nathan a new pair, so he was set!) and she seriously wanted to try on every. single. shoe in the entire store. We settled on the brightest sneakers on the planet. 😉

Such the little model. 😉 She was SO proud of her new shoes!! She brings them over to me constantly to put them on her. This morning, it was at 7:35am and we put them on over her footie pajamas. Ha!

The boys decided to do a basketball game so they set up the chairs so we could all go watch them play. 😉

I got a Hobby Lobby gift card from Aunt Nicole for my birthday and one night Jon had a meeting with a real estate client at the same time as the boys’ Awana, so Eisley and I dropped the boys off and hit the clearance section. They had a TON on clearance and I think Eisley was pretty much over it by the third aisle. 😉 Ha! We left empty-handed, sadly. Unlike the pirates in Pirates of the Caribbean, nothing called to me. 😀

Possibly the biggest thing we have realized in this fixer-uppering is that the house is just never going to be DONE. Every single time we finish one thing, we find a hundred more things that still need to happen. It’s nice and encouraging. 😉

But one thing we are really bad at doing is looking at the house and only seeing what still needs to be accomplished rather than what has already been done. So, on cleaning day this week, I decided it was about time to put up some “almost done” pictures. We still have a few little odds and ends and decorations, but most of the big stuff is done!

I absolutely LOVE how it’s turning out. When we discovered our little infestation issue after we bought the house, I was so so sad and I cried constantly over it because I just knew that we’d made the biggest mistake ever buying this giant money pit of a house. But Jon has been quick to remind me that we got it at such a good price because of all the work it needed. A good thing to keep in mind as we take on these projects!!

The biggest transformation of the house has definitely been the kitchen, so I’ll start there. Originally, when we bought the house, the goal was to deep clean the existing kitchen, live with it for a few years and then remodel when we’d saved up for it. We had a pretty big chunk of money in savings that we had already marked for the flooring, painting and backyard. But, like I said, we found an infestation along with a ton of just nastiness and nightmare-inducing grossness and after trying our best, we realized we could never get it clean enough. Plus, we couldn’t figure out where the mice were getting in without ripping out the cabinets.

So, we decided that we could live without a functioning backyard but we couldn’t live without a functioning kitchen, took our backyard budget and stretched and penny-pinched as much as we could. My amazing dad came and helped us measure and install and level cabinets, Mom came and painted and gave us color advice and God was so good. Home Depot had major sales on all of the things we needed, when we needed them, in the order we needed them. We got the cabinets on a 30% off deal, we got the appliances on a major sale and when we went in to order the countertops, the man told us to wait a week and they were also going on a huge sale with free corner rounding AND the one we liked the most was the cheapest option to begin with. We installed almost everything ourselves (except for the countertops and appliances, which were free installation. But the cabinets, hardwood floors, pantry doors, all the cabinet pulls, the blinds, etc. was all us), which also saved us a ton of money.

So. All that to say – it has been stressful, expensive and Jon and I have both (and my poor parents in the beginning, bless their hearts) poured some pretty significant amounts of blood, sweat and tears (mostly mine) into this house. I used to cry all the time from just sheer exhaustion and wish we had just stayed in our last house because we loved it and it didn’t require any work, but I can honestly say that I truly do LOVE this house now. It is such a blessing to us and the space is just such a wonderful thing with all these busy, loud kids around! I love that we have completely made it ours. I love our neighborhood and two dear friends live within a 6 and 7 minute walk from my house. God is so good to us.

Okay. Enough of the sentimental rambling and onto the pictures!! 😉

Just to refresh the memory, here are a couple of before shots of our kitchen the day we bought the house:

And my kitchen now:

I absolutely love how it turned out! I really felt like white cabinets would just brighten the space so much and be such a nice contrast to the new paint color. We cut the wall and shortened the breakfast bar to make it all the same height and it opened the space up so much. We have plans to refinish our  barstools (and likely table and chairs) to match one of these days. 😉 And I’ve slowly been decorating! Most of it are things I already had. My favorite piece is the fence on top of the cabinets – it’s actually our old fence from our old house and I love the memories of it!

Another couple of views:

My pantry doors were my birthday present and I love them. 😉 Funny how your birthday wishes change over the years. Ha!

We still need to add the quarter-round around the bottom of the cabinets and our plan is to add beadboard on the sides of the island and ends of the cabinets, just as a little something extra. Maybe we can tackle that project this summer. 😉

And that’s the kitchen! On to the dining room! Here’s the old view:

And the dining room now:

In this room, the biggest thing we did was take out the nasty appliance garage. It was in the corner where my bulletin board is now and was about 5.5 feet high and just covered in some black, nasty stuff. We took down the old blinds, got rid of the top window coverings altogether and redid the floors, trim, paint and light fixture.

The dining room set was my grandmother’s on my dad’s side. I have SO many memories of this set and I absolutely LOVE that something that was so cherished by my grandmother is now in my home! We had basically zero dining space in our old house, so we have been truly enjoying having so much space for us to gather with friends and family.

When we bought the house, we had no idea what we were going to do with the front living space.

It still amazes me how dark this house was. There is so much natural light in this house!! We knew we would probably do another living area, so we decided to take up the tile and put carpet in here as well. We also decided to carpet the hallway and the area under the stairs. Originally, we were just going to kind of keep this room pretty simple and maybe try to find a used couch somewhere, but we ended up turning it into a playroom.

This was just the best decision!! It gives the kids so much space, all their toys don’t have to constantly be in my family room and they have room to run around. There’s often a fort or fire station or restaurant happening in here. Love seeing their imaginations have room to come to life! Aside from paint, trim, flooring and blinds, we didn’t do a ton in here. I stained the tops of the little short walls to match the staircase, but that’s about it.

The old staircase:

Oh the carpet runner. It was just my fave. And the new:

As I was taking these pictures, all the clouds came in, so I had to turn on some lights. And Kody apparently decided that a few pictures needed a real life model. 😉 I love how this turned out. Originally, we were going to do hardwoods connecting the dining and entry and continuing down the hall, but I’m so glad we went with carpet. Parker sommersaults from the playroom to the family room every day and we’ve had a couple of getting-used-to-stairs accidents that made me REALLY thankful we had carpet and padding at the bottom there. We stained the banister, painted the rails and took off the window coverings again so we could actually have some natural light in here.

Which brings us to the old family room:

SO dark. So depressing. We started by ripping up all the tile and getting rid of all the wires sticking out everywhere – a good plan with kids around, I think. 😉 I stained the beams and painted the trim. We also got rid of all the old blinds.

The family room now:

Kody is just following me around at this point. 😉 First off, it’s amazing how much the carpet, new blinds and paint makes such a HUGE difference!! I love our family room. We still need to put things on the walls, but it’s come such a long way.

I already did a little something on this, but we did a few more fixes, so I’ll just put it in here too. Here’s the old weird closet that is just to the left of that last picture:

Seriously it was just creepy. Here’s what we did with the space:

I LOVE our school room! I’m so thankful that we ended up doing this here. It’s so nice for the kids to have space to work and cut and make a mess and it’s very easy to just clean everything up, shove all the books in the closet and go on with life. 😉 When we are doing school in there, the kids pull their desks out so I can write on the white board and when we are done, it takes no time to just push them right back up against the wall. Those desks are some of the best $6 total (well, not including the paint I used to refinish them) I ever spent. 😉

And that’s it!! You’ve now seen almost all of the downstairs except for my laundry room and downstairs bathroom, but those before and afters will have to come another day. 🙂 If you’ve stuck with me this far, thanks for reading this incredibly long post. Ha! So much fun to to go back and remember where this house was and how far we have come. It’s been a TON of work but there has been so much reward in the process. Parker likes to call us the “family team” when we are in the middle of a project and that’s exactly what we’ve become. 🙂

More to come soon!