Colton's Birthday

Colton turned 6!!!  (Over a month ago!)  And now that he's in kindergarten, he actually has friends that he was very excited to invite over for a party!  So we had to indulge him.  I ended up just letting him bring two friends to the bounce house, and because of the way the timing worked, I brought Ryder and Camille, also, and let Kendra and Bentley fend for themselves at home.  Everyone had a wonderful time, and right when they were starting to get hungry, Craig picked up lots of pizza at Costco and we all met back at the house and feasted on pizza and then cake.  So that was a lot of fun!  Yay for Colton finally getting to have a party!

With Walter and Jack!

I was too cheap to fill this thing with quarters and make it go.  But Camille still enjoyed sitting on it!

All the pictures we took of them eating cake were terrible...  Oh, well...

A few days later we celebrated with Grandma and Grandpa.  Colton decided we were eating pizza at Mellow Mushroom, and then getting ice cream at Chaps-- I was thrilled because these are all my favorite places, too (and NO I did NOT influence him on this!!!!), but it did make for a bit of parking and walking and parking and walking.  But everyone managed just fine (yay for Grandpa's new knees!) and he had a lovely time opening his presents at the end of the evening.

He grabbed this one right away and said, This is probably clothes, so I'll open it first!"  Smart kid!

So cute!

And then his final present was a new bike, so that was very exciting!

Happy happy birthday to my big 6-year-old!

Progress!

Shortly after I got all whiny here about nothing happening with the temple that was announced for Richmond, the church finally revealed its location!  AND, it's going to be almost exactly an hour away from me!  After making so many drives to DC and Philadelphia, that almost feels like it's in my backyard!  I'm so happy!!!

Here's the announcement and here's an article about it all. 

Just think-- some time after Camille starts school, I'll be able to just head out to the temple and be back before she's steps off the bus!

That's the Seattle temple, of course.  MY temple.  But I'll consider his new one mine, too!

Welcome Baby Cora!

So remember how my sister Tracy got married last spring?  She and Adam were both in their 40s at their wedding, so they didn't put off having kids at all.  I think Tracy had an appointment with a fertility specialist lined up for immediately after their honeymoon.  Luckily, they didn't end up needing any outside help and it was while we were riding rollercoasters in Dollywood that I got the call that Tracy was expecting!  This was doubly happy news because a) SHE WAS HAVING A BABY!!!  and b) I sort of suspected she might already be pregnant, but was trying not to pry (something I am TERRIBLE at).  So it was awfully fun to be right!  ;)

Because my parents are traveling around the world for the next few months, they decided to send me to help her out a bit after the birth (I can't even tell you how thrilled I was with this arrangement)!  So I've been anxiously anticipating the arrival of this little girl!

The doctors decided to induce Tracy on February 25th, about ten days before her due date.  They started her on pitocin around 10am, and by 9:30pm she'd delivered (naturally!) her perfect baby girl, Cora Patrice, who weighed in at 6 lbs 9 oz, the smallest baby born in this generation of Bentleys!  (Incredibly astute readers might notice that the middle name "Patrice" is shared by me, and Camille.  What you might not know is that Patrice is also my mom's name.  Tracy very kindly checked with me before using it.  I assured her that I hadn't copyrighted the name, so she was welcome to use it, too.  Besides, I think it's lovely and should be used as much as possible!)  Cora is also a family name-- my great grandmother on my maternal grandfather's side was Cora Fluit (she crossed the plains to settle in Utah, except she did it later when there were trains that could take her!  Smart lady!) and Adam's mother is named Carol, so they felt they were honoring both people with the name.  And, in case all that wasn't special enough, little Cora ALSO managed to be born on Janine's birthday, so that was really wonderful.

They had a friend do newborn shots for them right away:

Best. Picture. EVER.

Cora was born Monday.  Tracy and Adam returned home from the hospital Wednesday.  Natalie helped them for a couple days and then I flew out Friday and Natalie picked me up from the airport and took me straight to their home.  I was SO EXCITED to get my hands on this newest little niece of mine!

I've been traveling all day but I don't care!!!

Natalie spent another night at Tracy's house, but now it was my turn to help with taking the baby at night so Tracy could sleep (Natalie had been doing that in addition to chauffeuring me all over and was exhausted). The next day our friends Jeff and Juliana (Juliana is Janine's daughter) came to meet Cora and it was wonderful getting to hang out with them!

Me (holding Cora), Juliana with Mara, Natalie, and Tracy

Mara, liked me.  For a few minutes.  I especially appreciated that her bib matched my shirt!

Natalie needed to get back to her own family, so then it was just the four of us for a couple days (plus other happy visitors dropping by).  I tried my best to be helpful-- I folded laundry, made food, picked up other food, and tried to convince Tracy to sleep more.  Adam and I went to church together (we got a few weird looks from people who didn't know me).  It was really fun to see so many of my old ward members.  Usually when I come home all my sisters come, too, so it was kind of different to be the only Bentley girl there.  Not gonna lie-- the extra attention I got was kind of fun!

Venturing outside!  With a baby!  (And look at their beautiful home!)

Sleepy baby!

Look, she's awake!  And not crying!

And mostly I just sat around holding the baby whenever Adam or Tracy were willing to share!  She is so sweet and precious!

Back in Virginia, Craig took Friday off work, and then his parents came and helped watch the kids on Monday and Tuesday.  That was about as much time as I felt I could be gone, so I flew home Tuesday, getting in at the Charlottesville airport at midnight.  I was so tired, but so happy that I could help out even a little!

Welcome to the family, little Cora!

Another Cocoon Podcast

Several months ago, the ladies who run the podcast Cocoon reached out to me to ask if I would be willing to be interviewed again, this time about how to know when you're done having kids.  I told them I was happy to talk to them, but since I couldn't ever make up my mind, I wasn't sure I would be very helpful.  They assured me that that would be PERFECT.  And now here we have with their final product!  Feel free to give it a listen!

http://www.cocoonstories.com/podcast/25-done-yet/

So Much Celebrating

Between Camille's birthday (on the 9th), Valentine's Day (14th), and Kendra's birthday (18th), the middle of February always feels very busy to me.  Happy busy, but busy nonetheless!

I'm not normally a person who cares too much about Valentine's Day.  I mean-- YES, I'm thrilled for an excuse to go out for a nice dinner, because that's one of my favorite things to do.  But I don't need to do it on the actual day.  So usually we choose a Friday sometime near Valentine's Day and go on a date then.  And that makes me plenty happy.  I am so low maintenance.  But THIS YEAR, the theater near us was showing Moulin Rouge on the 14th.  And I LOVE that movie so much.  And it came out when I was on my mission, so I never actually got to see it on the big screen.  So I had to take advantage of this amazing opportunity.  And lucky me, Craig loves the movie, too, so he was totally on board.  Times like this when I feel like the luckiest person ever.

Now, normally on Valentine's Day, we let the kids each pick something for dinner and then we make it all and call it our Valentine's Day Feast-- we've been doing this for a few years now and the kids love it and since they only like kind of junky food, it's not usually too much work for me, either.  So this year we bumped it up a day and held it on the 13th.  Our menu included chicken nuggets (Colton's request), pizza (Camille), grilled cheese and tomato soup (Ryder), and pigs in a blanket (Kendra).  Bentley had asked for French toast, which Craig was supposed to make, but Craig ended up not being able to get away from work, so we saved that for Sunday night.  But the kids were still delighted with our Feast!

The only real challenge is trying to get everything hot at the same time...

And then on actual Valentine's Day, Craig's parents came and babysat (thanks, Tom and Donna!) and we went out to dinner, spent a little time looking at furniture (we're in the market for a new couch, and it turns out we have weirdly specific needs), and then headed to the theater.  And it was SO WONDERFUL!!!!  I loved every second of it.  We stayed until the end of the credits.  It was spectacular.  Seriously, every song in that movie incredible.  How did Baz Luhrman do it???


So that was a wonderful Thursday night.


Then on Friday we were celebrating the girls' birthdays with their grandparents, so Craig's parents came again and took us all out to dinner at ZinBurger (SO GOOD!) and then at home the girls opened presents and enjoyed Krispy Kreme doughnuts, so that was super fun.

Birthday girls!  (Not pictured: the bike Kendra got!)

Showing off her new present, a long ribbon like they use in rhythmic gymnastics and YES we all like to play with it!

This is such a cute picture!

Saturday, Kendra had her party with friends, which we usually keep pretty simple.  The girls played, decorated sugar cookies, ate pizza, opened presents, and watched La La Land (which was only ever possible because Moulin Rouge paved the way for it!!!).  I think everyone had a good time!  I appreciated Craig making the sugar cookies since I had choir practice that day.  I made a huge batch of frosting and then gave the girls each a large scoop to color or do with as they wished.  They came up with a lot of different colors and we had food dye EVERYWHERE.

Sunday was a relatively relaxing day, and then Monday was a day off from school AND Kendra's actual birthday.  Since she'd already had a lot of partying, the actual day was pretty low-key, but she got her presents from us and I made her a cake, so that was fun.  And she's finally old enough to read the 7th Harry Potter book, so she was very excited about that.  (Also, since Kendra was born on President's Day, it always makes me happy when those two days line up again!)

And somewhere in all there, Colton also had his 100th day of school, which is always a big deal for kindergartners!

And now I should probably have a few days with less celebratory desserts!  Except it snowed and we're all home and hunkered down and Craig is just itching to bake something and who am I to deny him...?

Life is good!  Celebrate, y'all!

Ohio Trip

The real reason we'd gone to Ohio was to give Craig and I a chance to visit the temple together.  Something weird happened around here, where they closed the DC temple for 2+ years for cleaning and renovations (the HVAC unit dated back from the 70s, so it was time) and at the same time, there was a mold problem discovered in the Raleigh, North Carolina temple, so it had to be closed, too. 

So suddenly our closest temple is Philadelphia, which is about five hours away, and requires you to drive through DC, Baltimore, and Philly, meaning you're pretty much guaranteed to hit traffic as you go.  If you try going south instead, you've got the Columbia, South Carolina temple, 6 hours away.  All of this is nearly impossible to handle, and with five kids it's been out of the question for us.

But Craig is good at figuring out the impossible, and it was his idea to visit my sister Rachael, thus getting us within two hours of a functioning temple (in Columbus, Ohio)!  From there, we could do a simple babysitting swap, leaving Rachael with all our kids while we attended on Friday, and then watching her kids so she and Ian could go Saturday.  It made for a LOT of driving (14 hours, total), but it was nice to get to be in the temple with Craig.  And Rachael and Ian were excited for the plan, too, so we made it happen!

The weather went from in the 70s on Tuesday to in the 20s on Friday, and it was windy, too.  One of those fun days where you've been sitting in the car with the heat blasting and when you get out, you assume you can hurry across the parking lot without a coat, and then you get a blast of arctic wind and you quickly wiggle into that coat after all!

So sunny and SO COLD!!!

I'm glad Craig is so good at making things like this happen!  Where would I be without him?


And now, for your entertainment:

Colton found a picturesque spot!

Camille needed to copy him then, except she posed as a fighter, of course...

Ryder continues to be weird...

Camille is 4!

My baby is four years old!!!

We were in Ohio for the weekend, which meant that Camille got to celebrate her big day with a couple cousins to play with!

My crazy little girl!

Craig took her to get a haircut (which we happily referred to as her "birthday haircut" even though Craig and Bentley also got haircuts without the fun excuse!  ;)  I think her hair turned out adorable-- why did we wait so long to do that?

I baked her cake while she was gone (no small feat in an unfamiliar kitchen!) but I saved stuff for her to lick!

She pretended to nap with Daddy!

I actually remembered to bring a couple presents for her (she'll get a lot more on Friday when we celebrate with Grandma and Grandpa)

And her cousin Nolan was VERY excited to get to play with her new My Little Pony!

I brought frosting, but nothing no cake decorating tools.  Because I don't actually own any...!

Happy birthday to my crazy little girl-- our life is such an adventure with her in it!

Fabulous February

This last Saturday we had NOTHING SCHEDULED.  AT ALL.

Do you know how rare that is???  We were so excited!  We did so very little all day and it was so wonderful.  AND, Bentley's walking pneumonia was finally clearing up (did I even mention that on ye olde blogge???  It lasted nearly a WEEK!), so the kids are mostly healthy (knock on wood)!  Craig figured out how to stream Redbox movies, and he made the kids watch Groundhog Day.  Only Bentley really got it, but they still had fun.

Colton came home from school with this awesome mask that he'd made:

Happy Groundhog's Day, y'all!

And THEN, as if that weekend wasn't amazing enough, the weather warmed up this week and today it is in the 70's!!!!!  It won't last long, so we're trying to cram in as much fun as we can before it snows again. 

To celebrate, Camille and I actually left the house and did fun things.  I bet you didn't think I was capable of being fun any more, didja?  First, I signed us up for a free little art class offered through UVA's Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Museum (which I didn't even know existed).  I guess the idea is to get moms to actually bring their kids to museums.  But the joke's on them, because I already love  museums!  I suppose the other goal is to get some exposure to this particular museum, so in that case, they succeeded beautifully.  I will happily go back there any day!  Not only was it small and easy to navigate with a kid, it's set up in the Pantops area here, near the new Martha Jefferson hospital and the location is gorgeous-- some old house up on a hill, turned into a museum, and there's even parking (unlike all of the UVA grounds!).  I was thrilled.

Here's the mask she made.  I want to hang it in Craig's office...

After that we ran a couple errands, grabbed some lunch, and decided to go walk the Trails at Monticello.  It occurred to me that we could enjoy a walk just the two of us, with no rushing and no goals and-- with it only being the two of us-- possibly no one even whining!  How easy is that???  So off we went.  We meandered.  We read the labels on the trees.  We stopped to pet every dog that came our way.  (Camille is very brave and always asks the owner's permission first!)  We made it to the first bridge (which means we walked at least half a mile, but in our case a bit more since we wandered up and down a few other trails on the way).  We went down to the pond to see it better and witnessed several groups of Canadian geese fly in and splashed down into the water.  We ended up with 24 of them, and it was a riot to watch them swim underneath the surface and then pop back up again like balloons, or roll over in the water, trying to bathe themselves!

Carter Overlook

Watching the geese.  I'm giving myself bonus Mommy points because: a) I did her hair and b) I even matched the rubberband to her shirt!

 

This is such a quintessential Camille look.  She's thinking, Why are you taking my picture when you could be watching these geese?

Sometimes, I manage to ignore the laundry and vacuuming and actually be a good mom!

Also, cherry on top, this happened this morning:

They called themselves the Hugging Group

Don't get too fooled by this post, though-- while I've been typing away, I'm constantly being interrupted by crying children.  Nothing's perfect.  But early spring weather goes a long way toward making it feel pretty great!

Sick Bay

We were hoping that Craig could take Kendra and Bentley to the Museum of Science the next Monday, since it was Martin Luther King Day.  And since I like getting to hang out with Craig, we were even thinking that maybe we could all go.  Unfortunately, that morning Bentley had the same fever that Kendra had had.  So he had to stay home.  Which meant I was was staying home, too.

Craig took all the other kids, plus a couple neighborhood kids, Abby and Scarlett (who are sisters).  Bentley dozed on the couch, sunk deep in his fever.  And I put in my headphones and got to work switching bedrooms around.

This seems to be a January thing for me, a weird need to rearrange furniture, almost always in the form of who sleeps where.  This time, I was switching rooms for Ryder and Camille.  Ryder and Colton have been sharing a room for a year now, which means that Ryder has had to carry the weight of Colton's inability to sleep through the night (Yup!  That's still going on!).  We figured it was time Ryder got a break.  And Colton and Camille have been begging to get to share a room, so that just made sense.  Plus, Colton refuses to sleep by himself (or ever be in a room by himself, really), which meant that on nights when Ryder goes to scouts and is out late, Colton was impossible to deal with.  This new arrangement should help with that, too.

The good news about this switch is that I didn't need to move any furniture, so it wasn't physically demanding.  But having said that, I was still amazed by just how much STUFF my kids managed to accumulate!  And of course, being just after Christmas made it all even worse!  So it was a lot of work.  BUT-- it was a lot of work with NO KIDS underfoot!  So I was probably a thousand times more efficient?  AND I could throw stuff away!  That made me pretty happy.  And added bonus-- as I sang along with my headphones, Bentley's bird chirped right along with me, so that was pretty cute!  It's almost like being in a Disney movie!

Ryder's new (to him) room!  Actually, this was his room when we first moved here, too!

Colton and Camille's room!

The BEST thing about trading rooms is the chance it gives you to throw out a lot of the junk that accumulates-- random crap from birthday parties, clothes that have never been worn, toys that never get played with, art projects that have been saved for longer than necessary, garbage that has gotten shoved under beds and forgotten about...  It's a good feeling to de-clutter some! 

While I was hard at work, poor Craig was not having a very successful day at the museum: Scarlett started crying halfway there (she only just turned 5, so I guess it was all too much for her, although her sister was able to help a lot!).  And then they were only at the museum for a little while when Kendra suddenly didn't feel all that great after all.  I'd worried about that happening-- I knew she wasn't at a full 100%, but I had no way of telling just how much better she actually was.  I'd tried to ask her and she'd assured me that she was fine, but clearly we'd all over-estimated her recovery.  Anyway, it made for a difficult day and they left fairly early.

I did my best to scrounge up some dinner for everyone and then headed out to choir practice!

The next day was a teacher workday, so the kids were still home from school.  Craig got to work from home, too, which was handy since I had made an appointment for Ryder to see an allergist!  He keeps getting these little red, itchy bumps, but I could never pinpoint what was causing them.  After the school nurse called, I figured it was time to actually have him tested and see if we could figure out what he was allergic to.

So we started with the basic skin test and discovered that he is allergic to EVERYTHING:

The nurse actually yelped when she saw how his arms had reacted.  Now, the good news here is that he reacted to both the positive AND the negative testing parts (see? on his right arm, near his elbow?), so any reaction smaller than the negative one, the doctor said we could discount.  He just has insanely sensitive skin, apparently.  The bad news, though, is that even ruling out the small reactions, the ones left are dust mites (same as Kendra), and...  corn and soy!  If you live in America today, it is nearly impossible to eat ANYTHING that does not contain corn or soy!  (Really!  Check out this article!  Bottled water and apples both contain corn!!!)  But the silver lining is that he isn't all that allergic to them.  So the solution is that he gets claritin (or zyrtec) every day.  Which is a little lame.  But not tragic and not scary and life-threatening like some people's allergies.

So we'll survive.

After that, Ryder got to work on his pinewood derby car with daddy.  That was a LOT more fun!  Ryder really likes building stuff with Craig in his workshop.

We got the TV hung on the wall!  YAY!!!  Now we just need to replace ALL OUR FURNITURE...

This is a super cool toy that Colton got for Christmas from my sister Leah-- it's a 3D printed moon that you plug in and it lights up!  Isn't it beautiful???  And it's a perfect nightlight, too!!!

Camille fell asleep on my lap.  I think Colton is already keeping her awake all night long, poor thing...

This last Monday, Colton had the same fever that Kendra and Bentley have had.  He slept on the couch like this for two hours, despite all the noise going on around him:

Poor guy!

Camille came running home from Scarlett's house to ask me if Scarlett could put makeup on her.  This was the result:

Scarlett has a real future in the makeup business! 😂

Trying to do FHE while Camille hugs/chokes Craig.  And coughs on him.

This is why I hate January.