Evan's Birthday, and a Visit from Cousins!

When we got back from San Francisco, regular life started up again.  I found some cool mushrooms in the backyard, we got back to our schoolwork, started up a new year of Primary at church, and Corinne got her first professional haircut!
   

Doing school outside is fun, but not always effective.

  
One afternoon, our neighbors showed us a nearby hike we'd never done before.  It was beautiful, and really fun to get to know this family better.
  

  
I had my first (eight week) ultrasound, and got to see that our newest little one was indeed in there, and not twins!
    

  
One Saturday, we went to the Classic Video Game Expo.  It was smaller than we expected, but we had fun looking at old consoles and silly knicknacks.
   

Yeah, we had to buy this.

Elise made another cute craft at Activity Days, and Evan continued to enjoy his kindergarten class at co-op.
  

  
I found the kids' Calvin and Hobbes randomly open to my all-time favorite Calvin comic.  I act this way all the time when I'm upset.
   

Evan turned six years old!  I can't believe it!  He requested Lucky Charms for his special breakfast.  After eating hers for awhile, Corinne informed me that she was "done".  Some things are just universal, and don't need to be taught.  Evan's gifts included a new bow and arrows and a pair of real rollerblades (so he could learn to play roller hockey someday.)  I swear we did stuff besides serve our kids sugar that day, but apparently it's all I got pictures of.
    

Happy Birthday, sweet boy!

  

All Done

Elise made Evan a giant cookie.

Vanilla-Oreo Ice cream Cake

  
That weekend, we did Evan's birthday party at the Little Gym.  It was great.  No planning or cleanup - I just had to provide cake and goody bags!
   

Corinne was feeling a little wimpy that day.

  
The week after Evan's birthday, we got to watch the cousins for a few days while Kyle and Kelli went on a cruise.  I was a little nervous about it, but it was a lot of fun.  We mostly stayed close to home and played, although we did make it out to the park, to Cub Scouts, and to IHOP at one point.  It's so neat to see my kids building friendships with their cousins - it's something I missed out on growing up.
    

Arya is the yummiest baby alive.

  

Learning about Boy Scouting (a Webelos requirement)

Toy Food

  
Evan got his blue stripe in preschool taekwondo.  He's in a hurry to move up to the "big kid" class, but this one is perfect for him right now.
   

San Francisco

On New Year's Day, after sleeping one night at our house, we left again.  Ryan was attending the AFA Conference in San Francisco, and we all drove up with him to spend a few days in the city!  
  

Our Hotel

The first exciting thing that happened, the morning after we arrived, was that I confirmed we were unexpectedly expecting our fifth baby!  It was a shock.  And kinda cool.  And crazy.

After that, we headed over to take the cable cars with our friends, the Palmers.  We waited in line for about an hour and a half to get onboard, then it broke down for awhile, then got us to Fisherman's Wharf.  We walked around, ate seafood, and watched the street performers before heading back to our hotel to swim.
   

  

 
On Sunday, we did Chinatown and Lombard Street, then drove north to the Golden Gate Bridge.  It was much nicer weather than the last time we did the bridge, but the little kids made Ryan crazy nervous.  We spent the rest of the day driving randomly around Sausalito.
  

  
In the mornings, when Ryan had his conference, we mostly hung around the hotel pool.  The kids goofed off while I worked on our blog, and Elise mostly played her new 3DS (because we'd forgotten her swimsuit).
   

On our last full day there, I took the kids across the bay in the morning to hang out with the Palmers.  We went to an indoor playground called Bounce-a-Rama, where Connor scrounged over five dollars in tokens from under the games.
  

The kids "bonded" over their individual video games.

All the balls in the ball pit were labeled "Proberty of Bounce-a-Rama"

On our way home, we drove along the coast and stopped in Monterrey for an hour when we saw this rainbow.  We thought it would be fun to drive down through Big Sur, not realizing that there was no way out once you start through there.  We got stuck driving in the rainy, cliffy dark with no cell signal, but we didn't die.