Nora's 1st Birthday!

Nora turned one on December 4.  My sister and her family were in town for Thanksgiving, so we had her birthday party that weekend.  We invited family during the day for a chili bar, and had friends over later in the evening.  It was a long, fun day celebrating our big girl!

Nora was SO close to walking on her birthday.  In the few weeks leading up to her birthday, she stared taking a few steps here and there, and started to get brave moving between furniture.   We officially stopped nursing on November 29th, so we almost made it a full year (with formula supplements starting back in July).  Our sweet girl can do sign language for "more," claps and can blow.  She also has her own special way to "blow kisses" which we just can't get enough of.

At her one-year check-up, she was 31.5" tall (99th percentile), weighed 26 pounds, 1 ounce (99th percentile) with a 19.1 cm head (99th percentile).  She had 5 teeth as of her birthday and her first molar broke through a few days later.

Here is a collage of Nora's 12 monthly photos.  So crazy how much she has changed!!

November 2016

Grandma and I have an annual tradition with my friend Rebecca and her mom to see Straight No Chaser in concert at the Fox Theatre. This year Rebecca's sister joined us, which was fun.  We love this group!

Charlie had been in speech through the school district for the past year to help him with his pronunciation of certain sounds.  He was pronouncing the /j/ sound like "d" and the /k/ sound like "t".  This November he graduated from speech!  He liked going but was also happy to graduate.

Grandpa Lang and I took the boys to see the Wild Kratts Live show.  It was so fun!

 Later that night, Nora had her first milkshake.  It was a hit!

 We had a cousin sleepover with Mia and Lily.

Nora got to attend her first Veteran's Day assembly at Jack's school.  They honor Grandpa Clayton, among all the other Vets..

Fall 2016

A quick catch-up on our fall!

I guess the official kick off to fall is the start of school.  Here are pictures from Jack's first day of 1st grade:

If you look closely at this next picture, you can see that my poor little man got sad when he got on the bus.  It was so unexpected and I felt so sad for him!  It only lasted a few minutes, and then he was fine.



Jack's birthday was the second day of school, so I took him McDonald's for lunch at school.  We also brought cupcakes to soccer practice that night for all his buddies.

He also got a new bike for his big 7th birthday!

That weekend we had a joint birthday party for the boys at Pump It Up.

We took the boys to their first concert: REO Speedwagon!  They are big fans, and we had so much fun!  We left before Def Leopard took the stage.  ;)

Then it was Charlie's turn for his birthday!  We did our standard balloon countdown, and had fun celebrating our 5 year old!

 A few different weekend days, we took a neighborhood crew for a bike ride up to school to play.  The first day it was just 5 kids and me.

 And the next weekend the crew grew (and I had Jason as a helper).  So fun!!

 Lots of fun with the neighborhood crew!

 And Jason and I celebrated our 10 year anniversary.  We were invited to a 40th birthday party that night, so we had a nice dinner out just the two of us and then met up with our friends.

Charlie's day care had a fun night at the Magic House (Nora's first time!):

 We celebrated Grandpa's birthday.

 Charlie went to a buddy's birthday party.

We hit up a pumpkin patch.

 We celebrated Paige's birthday:

 We went to a pumpkin carving party with the neighbors:

 I got to go to Jack's Halloween party at school.  He and his BFF got to wrap each other up as mummies.

And last but not least, we celebrated Halloween.  We had 2 ninjas and a Cabbage Patch Kid.

There's our fall in a (not so small) nutshell.