Well, we are getting caught up in a sloppy, shorthand way. Here is a dump for lots (but not all) of the things that happened in the spring of 2024. AND because I haven't blogged in forever, the formatting and picture placement are all over the place.
Classic.
We will tiptoe through the memory tulips BACKWARDS. Starting in May and ending in February.
Buckle up.
Wyatt and Oliver came out to spend a little over a week with us. Wyatt wanted to be here for all of the graduations and we were due for a grandson visit. Oliver is cautious and thoughtful around us. He doesn't know what to make of us and is slow to warm up. We love him lots and enjoy every second of this thoughtful caution around us.
He loves to watch the Tinkerbell movies on Disney. We also introduced him to Tangled but Tinkerbell remains the undisputed champion of Oliver's heart.
One afternoon I took Oliver and Wyatt down to the San Jose Children's Museum. We used to go all the time when Wyatt was little. It a "whose-life-am-I-living-right-now" moment I realized I had pictures of Wyatt doing all the same things Oliver was doing twenty years ago! Take a gander at these photos for proof. I'll be crying in my cold cereal while you do:
We introduced Oliver to the Pacific Ocean, Pizza My Heart, and beach days. He especially loved eating lots, and lots, and lots of sand. Oliver takes after his father...
We played games and did tricks for Oliver, nonstop. He remained cautious.
In a miracle I got to go out to the Washington DC area and help my best friend pack up her house for a move. There are blog posts on here featuring Anne and Ashley. We have been best friends since 2004 when our husbands were at Stanford together. We've seen each other through a lot of hard things and thanks to Marco Polo our friendship is a strong as ever. After cleaning, organizing, and packing for the weekend we celebrated with a trip to a Korean Spa/Sauna and dinner out. It was so fun!
Colter turned 12! He got a few gifts and some love. May is a hard time to have a birthday...especially years when everyone is graduating or being promoted from one school to another!
Clare finished her job teaching ballet to toddlers and started a new job selling cookies to teenagers. Fun!
Everyone humored me for a Mother's Day picture:
Clare and Logan went to Senior Prom together (so cute!).
Like lots of people, we were able to see the Northern Lights on the night of May 10th (I think) because of my social media habits. I happened to be checking Facebook around 8:00 pm and all of my east coast friends were posting about how they could see the Northern Lights in places a far south as Tennessee! SO I set an alarm and we went out around 11 pm. You couldn't see much with the naked eye but if you took a picture with your phone camera the lights really showed up! It was awesome!
Clare chaperoned for outdoor ed with her friends. They got to chaperone Colter's class and it was so fun. Colter is our very last elementary schooler but only the fourth to do outdoor ed because Adell was a 5th grader over COVID. Boo! I am so glad Clare got to be there with Colter. They both had a good time! Even though someone in Colter's cabin clogged all of the sinks and toilets and turned on the water flooding the bathrooms. It was a mess and very bad news. Colter didn't know who did it. It was a frustrating end but the rest was fantastic!
Well, May could have been its own post because we did a lot in MAY! I finally threw a Met Gala Party! I've been wanting to do it for years and finally pulled it off in the year I have three kids graduating from three levels of school. What a year! All of my friends came to play with costumes and chat. And we raised a little over $300 for a local women's shelter. It was so fun!
Clare had her final dance show as a senior at the high school. High school dance team is a little catty for some. Clare endured some drama last year but had a lovely senior year. We are so proud of her for all of her dancing and hard work!
Will and I went over to the other side of the bay to support one of his investors, TJ Rodgers, while he hosted a wine event. It was pizza and talking shop...shop like favorite movies and maybe a business deal or two.
April brought our very last elementary school open house night! I remember when we moved out to Danville and the second year we were year attending the kid's open house super pregnant (I think it was on my due date). I wobbled from class to class (three kids in elementary school at the time) seeing their projects and wishing I was at the hospital having the baby instead. But Colter kept his own counsel and waited several more days to be born.
So it was with a heart full of open-house-memories that I wandered around ONE classroom seeing all Colter had worked on. Lots of mixed emotions, for sure. Colter's class put on a wax museum of historical figures. Colter was Daniel Boon and did a great job! I made his costume in one night. (Just like I did for Amelia Earhart/Clare back in her day. You can scroll down on this post to read all about it.)
We got the exterior, roofing, and some trim work done on the shed (remember this post is backwards...so keep scrolling to see how things started.)
Wyatt came out by himself for a week during spring break. It is hard to be a single dad without family near by to help. He needed a little break and we were so happy to have him home. Wyatt and I got to go out to the beach one day and we got lots of family hikes in the green hills. Wyatt got his turn in helping build the shed. It has been a family affair!
Clare had her very last dance team competition. I cried a little bit. Seriously, this girl is so incredible and I don't have the words to describe how proud I am of her. I wish I wrote this up in real time when her competitions were happening so I could describe it better. Sigh!
At the start of the new year I noticed this weird bubble in my vision. It was like what happens when you stare directly at the camera when someone takes a flash photo then you have little light bobbles in your vision for a while. Except this was not going away. The doctor said it was a bubble of fluid on the back of my eye pushing up on my cornea or something? Anyway, reducing stress was the first line of defense. It got better for a bit then came right back. So the next solution was to be injected with dye and a laser used to seal off the blood vessels in the back of my eye so the fluid would stop collecting. Fun!
I had the procedure done and then was photo sensitive for a week! It fixed the eye ball vision thing but I couldn't expose my skin to sunlight for a week so I went around looking like Carmen San Diego for a bit. Worth it!
The shed got walls and roof trusses!
Adell painted this inspired by Monet and making Adell's version of her, Colter, and Clare by a pond. SO AMAZING!
Family Easter photo:
Building walls for the shed:
Clare turned EIGHTEEN! She is an adult now!
We started working on the shed on March 23rd (I think). We had it all scheduled out and expected to finish in about 6 weeks if we worked every weekend. Surprise, Mother Nature decided we should get rain every weekend all spring so we got set back pretty quickly. Still we started and kept going all spring. It's been a labor of love with every child helping to build some part or another. What a project...
March was Missionary month at church.
Will and I celebrated our 24th wedding anniversary in Las Vegas.
Lorien kept an eye on Adell and Colter one day in San Francisco when Will took them all into the city while he had a work meeting.
OH! At the very beginning of March, after 40 years, I got my ears pierced! Clare got her doubles as a birthday present and Adell got her triples because she is always up for another piercing. Adell did her doubles her self over Christmas break last year (insert angry mom face here). Clare has been asking for her doubles for a long time. I told her to make an appointment and I would get my ears pierced at the same time. We were supposed to have ID for everyone. I didn't have anything for Adell so she pretended to be "Lorien" whose Kaiser insurance card I happened to have in my wallet. It made sense that Adell/Lorien was older than Clare because Adell/Lorien had her doubles already. Good think the tattoo parlor didn't ask a lot of questions, just what her date of birth was. Smarty pants Clare had prepped Adell seconds before "so your birthday is November 8th, right?!"
Adell charmed us all as the junk man and a toot sweet dancer in the middle school musical Chitty-Chitty -Bang-Bang. We loved seeing her on stage! Clare choreographed all of the dances (just like last year).
Sorrow of sorrows, Will's company officially moved out of their San Ramon offices. I used this office during COVID while everyone was working from home. It was my little escape where I took my certification classes for Life Coaching. It was my office to meet in person clients and my solitude when the house was too full. I remember when Will's company finally located over to this side of the bay. It was such a needed break after years of him commuting over an hour (sometimes two hours) across the bay for work every day (each way). We were sad to move out of this office space but most of the employees work in Utah now so it was time.
In February I got a visit in with Wyatt and Oliver.
I got to meet up with an old friend from Boston days, Brent Allen.
I helped Lorien clean and organize her apartment!
Check this before and after!
While I was in Utah for the long weekend (President's Day weekend) Will took Colter and Adell down to Costa Rica to do a wrestling workshop and have ADVENTURES!
I also got to spend a couple of days having a sisters weekend with my sister, Jennifer, and my sisters-in-law Shellie and Annette. The whole weekend was busy but so much fun!
Oops, one more set of pictures of Colter helping me move stuff out of the office in February:
Another February miracle was seeing another old friend from Boston days, Suzanne Feinstein! We met for lunch before she drove down to San Louis Obispo to see her son at college.
And we had the cousins over for a Super Bowl Party in February. Good times...good spring recap.
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