Tessa Turns Ten!!

We had another birthday in the house; and having two kids in the double digits just makes me feel double old! Tessa is in the middle of the 4th grade and she really loves school. They had spring pictures at school a couple weeks before her birthday and she really wanted me to buy the picture packet because she liked the background and her pose. The funny thing was, she was sick at school that day. I even picked her up early because the nurse called and told me she had thrown up in class. Luckily, she hadn't really thrown up in the classroom, but had made it to the bathroom; but she definitely was sick and you could see how pale she was in the school picture. I also don't like spending all the money on a few pictures, so I usually take my own. We found a spot in our backyard that had a similar feel as her pictures and took our own that I thought turned out so much cuter. And even better, they're free. Tessa was happy with them too. Here's our favorite one with Tessa posing the same way she did in her school picture. 

Here are a few more from our "photo shoot." I can't believe this girl is ten years old. She is still our outgoing, sweet, loving, bubbly, jumpy girl. She's very good at keeping everyone happy and making everyone feel included. We love her kind heart.

In school, Tessa does really well. She loves science and after learning about stalagmites and stalactites, and prompting us to take that trip to Carlsbad Caverns, she also spent a lot of time trying to create her own cave environment. We tried making it a couple different times and after having stalagmites and stalactites grow in our own kitchen, we finally took a picture before cleaning it all up. 

Tessa turned 10 on March 24th, but that was such a busy day, we did the majority of our celebrating the next day, which was a Saturday. We did have time for a candle in her cinnamon roll at breakfast and to open a few presents. We also took a picture before leaving for school to have one from the day of her actual birthday.

I was also able to go to her class at the end of the day to deliver donuts to her and her classmates. They sang happy birthday and always love getting treats. I was going to take a picture of Tessa and those who were around her, but her teacher, Mrs. Adkins, had them all go out into the hallway to line up so I could get a picture of the entire class. It was so thoughtful. I love it!

On Saturday, Tessa was able to pick a couple friends to join us for her birthday celebrations. We went to a movie and saw Beauty and the Beast and her friends Romni and Blaire joined us. We picked them up early and had donuts on our way to the movie theater. 

After the movie, we had to take Abby to a volleyball camp that she's in, but the rec center is right next to a park, so we let the girls play while we waited for Abby. I didn't get any pictures at the park, but as we loaded up the van to take the girls home, I grabbed one more picture of Tessa with Blaire and Romni as Tessa opened her presents from them. 

That afternoon, Tessa got to pick the place to eat lunch with our family. She chose Koze, where they cook the meal in front of you. We had just gone to one a couple weeks ago, and Tessa knew then that she'd be picking that place again for her birthday. The food was yummy and they even brought out her ice cream sundae with a candle in it.

On Sunday, we celebrated with the Kasallis's and Tessa wanted a turtle cheesecake for her birthday "cake." She still loves all things dealing with turtles, so she thought it was the perfect choice of birthday treat. Tyler is our dessert maker and he made this delicious cheesecake for us all to enjoy. 

We spent the entire weekend celebrating Tessa's birthday, and we had a great time doing it. We love this girl and are so proud of the young woman she is becoming. Happy Birthday Tessa!

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!