Carrot cake by Addison

Addison loves to bake and one of her favorite things to bake is a carrot cake.  It is a lot of work and time consuming, but it is delicious.  Most impressively, she has honed her skills to be able to bake the entire thing herself.  Aunt Bonnie recently visited, in what we hope will become an annual visit as she visited us at the same time last year, to help us get settled in our new house (thank you, Aunt Bonnie) and Addison wanted to bake something for her.  Addison also shared some with some of our new neighbors who have been very welcoming to us.  They appropriately impressed with her baking skills.  

Happy Birthday Regan!

Regan has really gotten into bike riding within the last year.  Both of my kids have.  A big factor in choosing our new house was whether or not the kids could still ride their bikes safely.  Regan loves to ride to a local coffee shop and do homework or read her book.  She has been riding my bike or Matt’s bike since she grew out of the last bike that we bought her.  We have offered to buy her a bike, but she has been resistant and content to ride our bikes.  The one problem with that is that we could never ride as a family, but time is very limited around here and it was really never a problem.  The only thing she really likes to spend money on is books.  Almost as long as she could ride a bike, she has wanted to do a triathlon.  We registered her for one last year, but she broke her wrist and couldn’t participate.  This year she was able to participate and she was the fastest swimmer in the whole event and she did really well in the run, but her bike ride was the slowest in her age group and caused her to be last in herage group (6 out of 6).  The other kids had really fancy, I don’t want to know what they cost bikes.  Or as she texted me “the kids with the fancy bikes beat me.”  This lead to her finally agreeing toa new bike that she didn’t have to share.  I asked the bike shop people for a recommendation on a bike that she could ride around town, but would also be good for one triathlon a year and they recommended a trek.  They had one on sale, but of course it wasn’t the right size.  Anyway, here is a picture of her with her new bike on the side of our new house as well as a picture of her triathlon results. I know nothing about bikes, but bike people tell me it is a good bike.  We celebrated by riding as a family to a local Mexican restaurant for dinner and I hope we are going to make riding as a family a thing.  

We’re back...

After a long hiatus, I am thinking about blogging again.  I stopped, because I got super busy with the kids and social media became a thing,  but now my kids are older.  I am still super busy with them, but they now have a lot of opinions.  I should say they have always had a lot of opinions, but now they know social media exists and they have opinions on what is posted about their lives and I have to respect those opinions.  I do not want to be put in the cheap nursing home.  I’ve seen them, it’s not pretty.   I think blogging can be a way for me to document what I want to remember and for close family to enjoy (like it was when they were little.  Before social media took over all of our lives).  I plan to start from now, but to go back and post past things, as time permits,  mostly to get pictures and videos off of my phone.  As always, I will try to use proper grammar but there are a lot of holes in my education.  I have gone back and read some of my old posts and ouch with some of the grammar. I will also blame it on baby/toddler exhaustion.  I am a work in progress (as we all are, hopefully) and I am working to improve every day.