Birthdays!!!

Ok, so I know I'm a bit behind on this post. Stay tuned, though, cause I've actually got a few in the works, coming soon.

So since last we left off, we've had two birthdays that need reporting on. Eliora turned 5 on January 27th. She decided that for her birthday she wanted to go Ice Skating, so the whole family got to go and make an afternoon out of it. All the kids got to use the little PVC training cages, which I still think are pretty cool. Kaela was getting rather proficient by the end. Once Darian stopped crying, he actually did have fun too - of course we pushed him around most of the time, with him hanging off the cage and his feet barely scraping along the ice. I can't say I would expect much more from a 3-year-old. :-)

Kristin made Eliora a pony cake, and we opened presents.

Then on February 6th it was Kristin's birthday. I surprised her by waking her up to her house being vacuumed by a robot:


As a word of explanation on this gift - when I learned this thing exists, I immediately saw immense value in it. With four small kids, it often feels like our house is NEVER clean. This essentially gives Kristin one thing that she never has to really worry about. What's even cooler, it has made it so that now we're much better about picking clutter up off the floor, so that the vacuum can run each night (well, most nights, at least ;-). Kristin always wakes up to a clean floor, every morning.

So after we watched Willikins for a while (yes, we had to name him, and yes, that's after the butler out of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series), I served Kristin breakfast, followed by cake and ice cream. Yeah, I know, chocolate cake for breakfast is supposed to be bad, but nobody complained. Not even Kristin.

We then packed all the kids up and went on a 45 min drive to visit the birthing center (closest one we could find). We got to meet all the staff, who were friendly and helpful, and in all it was a great experience. We're excited for the next few months as we get ready for baby Johnson #5.


After we drove back, had lunch, and put the kids down for naps, it was late afternoon and we got to pack everyone back into the car to take them over to our babysitting group. I then got to take Kristin out. Originally I'd hoped we could go bowling, but apparently winter is "busy season" for bowling, and they have a lot of leagues that bowl, and nowhere had a lane that we could use. Undaunted, we then decided to go out for dinner at Applebees, where Kristin was sung to and given a free dessert. After dinner I took her window-shopping at the mall, where there was a really cool kitchen store with all sorts of neat gadgets. All in all it was a lot of fun - two very special days we got to spend appreciating two very special people.

Stay tuned - I'll be putting up some posts in the next few days to show the cool stuff we've been doing in our Kitchen since we got here. And we've done a LOT, so it will take several posts.