Spring Break 2017 and Other Happenings

Before we detail our Spring Break, there are a few events and pictures from February and March that I want to include in this post. Tyler and I went on a double date over Valentine's weekend with the Kasallis's, so we had our picture taken at the restaurant. The flash was very bright. We enjoyed the fancy, yummy food; and the place was all decorated for Valentine's. It was a fun evening.

A few pictures of Taryn always make an appearance since she's still with me all the time. Here are some cute ones I took. One Sunday afternoon, Abby was practicing her horn and Taryn decided to "help" her by leading the music. It was so adorable, I had to take a picture and a video to show them playing nicely together. We went to a movie with the Kasallis's one weekend and ended up at Chic-fil-a afterwards for lunch. Taryn and Teagan decided to share their lemonade smoothie and I thought it was the cutest thing. 

We joined the YMCA again since Abby's been playing volleyball seasons anyway. We will have the other girls start soccer this summer through the Y as well. Until the summer, the girls started up their gymnastics classes again. I haven't taken many pictures, but I did get one of Taryn as she works on mastering her cartwheel. Taryn is doing intro to gymnastics and ballet. Aubrey and Tessa are both in the advanced gymnastics class and go twice a week for gymnastics and tumbling. They all love it! Now that Aubrey has learned to ride a bike without training wheels, Taryn has been upgraded to a big girl bike with training wheels. We tried going for a ride one day, so I grabbed a picture after she was all ready to ride, but she's still a little nervous and unsteady on such a big bike. She's sticking with the scooters for awhile longer. 

Like I mentioned, Abby has been playing volleyball still through the Y; and Tyler and I are still the coaches. We coached three teams this past season, but only got pictures of two of the teams at the end of the season. Abby is still enjoying it and looking forward to trying out for the school team in the Fall. Tyler and I enjoy the extra exercise we get and working with the girls to improve their skills. I tell other people that it's like we get our weekly date night every Friday night when we coach. We just spend it with 20 pre-teen girls. Sounds romantic huh? :) 

St. Patrick's Day was right around the same time as Spring Break. We decorated a little, but did not have much around the house. Luckily, we got a fun package full of green items from Grandma and Grandpa Gibbons. The girls posed with their new leprechaun headbands that came in the package. That was pretty much the extent of our St. Patrick's Day celebration.

Now for Spring Break! We ended up staying in El Paso this year thinking that my brothers and their families were coming to visit. But it ended up that kids got sick and some couldn't come, so we had the majority of the week to ourselves. Scott and his family did come up but only for the first weekend. We still enjoyed having them while they were here. They got to see Grandma's new house where they hosted their first slumber party for all the granddaughters. My girls were so excited. We took some pictures before they went to bed and before we left for our night of game playing without any little girl interruptions. 

The two youngest, Nadia and Alexa, came back to our house with the adults, but they still were able to enjoy the beds and pictures for a little bit.

Tyler had taken half of the week off from work when we thought we were going to have a lot of family in town, so we did plan one day to do something "vacationy." We decided to drive over to Carlsbad, NM and visit the Carlsbad Caverns. It's something we've wanted to do since we moved to El Paso, but had never done. Tyler had gone recently with the Scouts from church and Tessa, who's been studying cave formations at school, convinced us that we needed to go soon. We also found out that 4th graders get a free pass to National Parks, so we even got in for free. Bonus! My parents came with us too and we had a very enjoyable day. It was pretty busy, but once we started walking into the cave, it wasn't too crowded. Here are the girls as we waited to check in. 

I took a ton of pictures as we walked through the caverns, but with just the flash and no real sunshine, the pictures are not great and do not do justice to the awesome formations that are there. Here's our family before going down into the natural entrance. 

So here are a few pictures we took of the girls and you can see some of the formations that we saw as we walked and walked and walked. 

There were so many formations! Stalactites from the ceiling, stalagmites from the ground and so many columns. It was amazing! 

 

 

 

The girls all walked on their own and there was very little complaining. We were so proud of them. We did ride the elevator back to the top, so we didn't have to do the walk/climb back up to the entrance. We took pictures outside the visitor center with one of the main signs to always remember our trip. It was a really fun day. 

The caverns are in the middle of nowhere, only near a very tiny town with just a few shops and one gas station. We stopped there to get a few snacks for the drive home, and had fun walking around their tourist shop. The girls found these bar stools and thought they were hilarious. The huge bear statue was a pretty funny sight as well.

We finished off our Spring Break week by swimming. The water was freezing! But the girls had decided to dub it the Polar Ice Challenge and convince people to swim in it with them anyway. They had fun for a few minutes before warming up on the hot driveway or just staying on the edge of the pool playing lifeguard. 

I was happy to have our pool up and running and available for them to swim in this early in the year. It was a great way to end our Spring Break!

All About Aubrey!!

This post is all about Aubrey and her birthday and baptism. She turned 8 on February 10th. She's still our fancy "girly-girl," and she loves that I call her that. She loves to curl her hair, wear dresses, and accessorize. She decided to wear one of her favorite, new dresses to school on her actual birthday, so here she is.
Happy Birthday Aubrey!

Aubrey's birthday was on a Friday this year, so we had a birthday party for her the next day with all of her friends. She wanted to do something big and fun like Rockin' Jump or Bobo's, but she also wanted to invite over 15 friends. I told her she had to either narrow her friends down to just a few to do something big like that, or she'd have to have a party at home if she wanted to invite everyone. She decided on the party at home. We had a make-over, movie, emoji party and here are all her friends after we did makeup and nails. Audrey Kasallis came over to help me do nails, and Abby and her friend Claire did the makeup.

The emoji theme was mostly for decorations and party favors, and we had fun finding things to use. We had balloons and pillows to decorate the house and everyone went home with an emoji cup filled with goodies like emoji bubble gum, emoji lip gloss, and an emoji stamp. We did yellow-frosted cupcakes topped with the emoji bubble gum balls as her birthday cake. We watched the movie Trolls, ate pizza, and opened presents. Everyone had a lot of fun, but with that many girls squealing in the house, it was nice and quiet once we got our house back. However, Aubrey had a blast, so it was all worth it. 

We also celebrated with family (Grandma and Grandpa Black and Kasallis's) on Sunday and Aubrey chose a carrot cake for that celebration. She opened a few more presents and got to enjoy another day of being the center of attention.

We chose the next weekend, after her birthday, to do her baptism, so Aubrey was baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on February 18, 2017. As we prepared for that day, I made a dress for Aubrey using her exact specifications. I knew she'd want it fancy, so I even tried convincing her to just let us buy one online, but she really wanted me to make it.

She wanted her dress to be like the baptism dress I made for Abby, but we added some extra "bling" by adding a trim to the sash, not making the bow and using a fancier overlay fabric and ribbon. She loved it! And she loved telling everyone who saw it what was the same as Abby's dress, and what was different. It was pretty funny. We had two different photo shoots once her dress was complete. We did a quick photo shoot at the end of our street because the light was good, and these were some of my favorites. However, we didn't use any of them because Aubrey really wanted her hair curly and we didn't have time to do that before this first photo shoot.

The second photo shoot we did was at the end of another street in our neighborhood that looks over the valley and I loved how those pictures turned out. Aubrey loved the fact that her hair was curly and some of the pictures showed off her fancy new white shoes. These two (and the one two sections up) were the pictures we had printed and framed to be on display at the baptism and in her program.

 

The actual baptism was held Saturday evening on the 18th. Both sets of grandparents were there and a lot of friends from the wards. Aubrey was actually sick earlier in the week and missed two days of school. It even passed on to Tessa and Taryn, but luckily by the time Saturday morning came, everyone was back to normal. Unfortunately, because we had been sick, Scott and Nevla decided to stay home with their babies so they wouldn't catch any sicknesses, but they had originally planned on coming. Here's a picture of Aubrey in front of the font and with Tyler, who baptized her.

We took a lot of pictures after the program. We loved that all the grandparents were there for the weekend. We ate at Olive Garden afterwards and enjoyed being together with family.

 

Here's a picture of our whole family. Aubrey asked her primary teacher, Sis. Bonilla, to give the talk on the Holy Ghost. She was happy to do it and did a great job. Aubrey wanted a picture with her too, which I thought was a great idea. Sis. Bonilla's son loved Aubrey too as you can tell from the picture.

And one final picture with all the family together. We're so proud of Aubrey and her decision to be baptized. It was a great day and a great event. We love that girl!

And since this is a post all about Aubrey, I might as well add one more picture even though it happened 6 weeks after her birthday and baptism. After a visit to our orthodontist, it was decided that Aubrey needed an expander because her upper jaw is too narrow. Since she was going to have to wear this appliance anyway, they also added what they call a tongue crib to keep her from sucking her thumb. She's now only been wearing it for one week, but she's getting used to it, eating normal foods again, and talking without too much slurring and lisping. She'll be wearing it for at least 5 weeks, but she's been a good sport about it. She complains the most at night when she's trying to fall asleep about missing her thumb, but she's doing really well and handling the situation like a champ. I just wanted to make sure this memory is preserved in our family books forever! :) We love you Aubrey!

January 2017 and Nadia's Sealing

This new year has started off with a bang and has already included a lot of traveling. After the girls had gone back to school for only a week, we hit the road again. This time, we traveled to Dallas to be with my family in the Dallas Temple for Nadia's sealing to Scott and Nevla. Since her adoption in November, this was their next step, and having her sealed to them forever was a big deal. They chose the Dallas temple to be closer to all of the family and because that is where they were sealed when they were married. We traveled over and stayed in the same hotel near the temple as the rest of my family. It was fun to all be together. Here's everyone from our family who was at the temple except for Matt and Taylor who were there, but left before we took the picture.

I took a picture with Tyler and the temple spires behind us. And then grabbed a picture with Scott and Nadia, the girl of the hour. It was awesome because Chloe and Alexa were able to be in the sealing room too, since it was their family. They all looked so pretty in their white dresses. The other cool thing was their sealer happened to be our old stake president when Scott and Nevla and Tyler and I lived in the McKinney stake. It was funny because Tyler kept seeing him walk through the temple and saying he looked familiar, but I never got a look at him until we were in the sealing room. When he walked in, I thought he did indeed look familiar, but as Tyler and I discussed we still couldn't place him until Scott leaned forward and said he was our stake president in McKinney. "Oh yeah!" We were so happy to finally figure it out.

After the sealing and changing into more comfortable clothes, we all met at a Boston Market to eat lunch. Abby and Joseph had stayed with all the kids at the hotel, so we picked them up for lunch too. It was fun to be able to visit and hang out. With Nevla's family combined with ours, we took up the majority of the restaurant.

We spent that evening playing games in the lobby of the hotel. Mom was sad that she forgot to take any pictures while we were all together. Matt and Taylor told us the happy news that she's expecting again! We even got to see the Christmas morning video that they took of Matt when she told him. His surprised face is priceless. We're so happy for them!

The only other big event that we did all together where I took pictures was when we went to an indoor jungle gym called Going Bonkers. The girls had fun climbing through their huge gym, while the older kids enjoyed the video games. I took this picture right before we walked in because the girls liked the animal murals they had on the wall. 

That weekend, we also spent some time at a Nickelcade where all the games were a nickel. And we all drove to Stephanie's house (Nevla's sister), where Scott performed Nadia's baby blessing. It was great that there was so much family together to support Nadia, Scott, and Nevla for these sacred events. We loved that we were able to be a part of it too. 

That was our biggest event from January, but there are a few more pictures that I wanted to include. Tyler brought home his tenor sax after we were in Utah over Christmas and he's pulled it out to play a couple of times. Of course, when he does the girls all have to take a turn trying to make noise on it. They would blow as hard as possible to get a sound, and would be so excited as Tyler played the keys to make it sound like they were really playing a tune. They had a lot of fun. I videoed some of their "performances" but here's the only picture I took.

Finally, to end the month of January, we had some good news and bad news. Abby has been playing volleyball again through the YMCA and Tyler and I are coaching her team again. At one practice, as Abby was running backwards, she tripped and fell on her arm and after taking her to urgent care that night, they found out she has a buckle fracture. It's like a little crack in her bone, but that takes her out of playing volleyball for four weeks they said. That's the bad news, but the other part of the story is that this happened the night before Abby was suppose to perform for her UIL solo competition and she hurt her left arm which is the one she uses to play her French horn. The urgent care doctor gave her a splint that allowed her to still use her fingers, but she was still in pain just from picking up and holding her horn. Luckily, after a good night's rest, she went ahead with her performance; and the good news is that she played beautifully. Grandpa was her accompanist and they have been practicing since before Christmas break. She was the very first to play that morning for the judge; and she had to play in front of a room full of her peers and their families. But she did great, and she got a score of 1 which is the highest score. We were so proud of her! It was so amazing that she persevered and performed with a broken wrist and still scored so well. It was awesome! She's such a trooper. We love that Abby!