King Henry for a Day

(Jenn) So Wednesday was Henry's birthday. He's 2 years old -- I can't believe it! He is suddenly such a big boy. Henry's already taking after me in his understanding of the importance of birthdays. He seemed to know how important he was from the minute he woke up on Wednesday. I played along and let him be a king for the day -- he got to choose everything! I tried my very hardest not to say no to him. For breakfast, he wanted his oatmeal cereal with sprinkles. Once he tasted it, he realized that it wasn't as yummy as it looked, so he wanted muffins instead. So he got to help me make pumpkin muffins. He helped with the stirring and wanted to taste all of the ingredients and lick the spoon a lot! After breakfast, Henry chose to go to the park, then play with cars and trucks, read books, sit on the potty (!), bring the ride-on truck down from the attic, go to the library, and go to the store. After Ben came home, Pat and Bernie came over for cupcakes and ice cream, and Henry got to open presents.

Of course, Henry's birthday didn't just start on the 28th. The celebrations began last Saturday with a birthday party at my mom's house while we were in Utah. It was a "Car" party, as per Henry's latest obsession. Here are some pictures to give you an idea of how much fun we had:

The racecar birthday cake (we had to hide it from Henry because he REALLY wanted to play those cars! He pulled them off immediately when we brought the cake to him for candle-blowing time!).

All of the kids got to ride in Grandpa Griffin's "yellow fancy blue car."

Grandpa was pretty excited to fire up the engine and give them all a ride. Sophie later reported, "Grandpa had a REALLY hard time driving the car because it is SO old!"

Grandpa let me try driving the car! Let's just say I didn't quite make it all the way into the garage before stalling it.

This is Henry's birthday playdate with his playgroup. We had this party the day before his birthday at our house! Everyone enjoyed licking the frosting off the cupcakes!

Utah Week

(Jenn) So technically we went to Utah for Dan's wedding, but we got to do lots of other fun things while we were there. Here are a few:




A trip to Provo to visit BYU with the kids and eat all the good Provo food we've been missing.










Fun times playing with cousins at Grandma's house (here is Henry wearing Ben's old cowboy hat, playing with Megan and Baby Seth).






A Hayride with the Iversons at the Dibble farm (brrrrrrr!).












Dinner afterward at Café Rio!







The Turkey "Bowl" with the Griffins. Henry and Ivan as a team beat me and Ben in the "couple bowling" round. 115 points!










Here's Henry with his prize money! The plan was if anyone got a turkey, they would get $50. Since that didn't happen, Grandpa Dave just doled out the prize money.






Snacktime with cousins at Grandma Lori's house. Check out her newly remodled kitchen!







We love candy cane cookies! My dad makes these nearly every other day from the day after Thanksgiving until after Christmas. A pretty yummy tradition!

Dan's Wedding

(Jenn) So Dan completed the Iverson family on Saturday, November 17th by marrying Autumn! Now all six kids in their family are married! It was a gorgeous day and a beautiful wedding in the Mt. Timpanogos temple. What an elegant bride, a charming groom, and a neat day altogether.

Our 4th Anniversary

(Jenn) Today is our 4th wedding anniversary! Can you believe it? The past four years have been marvelous and have gone by so fast. Like a good wife, I put together a little video to celebrate our anniversary. It's just a compilation of some of the best pictures from our 4th anniversary photo shoot. You'll be convinced by the pictures just why Ben and I are so attracted to each other, even after all these years.

Really, you should probably only watch this if you are really bored or tired. Just a warning before you push play!

Veterans' Day Weekend

(Jenn) Ben had work off on Monday for Veteran's Day. He has so few days off that we feel like we have to take advantage of all of these little holidays here and there! Anyway, it worked out perfectly that Amy and Dave also both had the day off on Monday, so we took a little trip to New Haven, CT.

We are SO excited to have such good friends living only 1 hour and 40 minutes away! We took the drive on Sunday after church and arrived at the Choules' house just in time for a lovely Sunday dinner. We laughed and talked and played games, and we just enjoyed being in the company of a wonderful couple in their beautiful home. I love being around Amy and Dave for two main reasons: 1) Amy makes me laugh more than any other person on this earth, so it's a blast to be around her, and 2) Amy and Dave are so madly in love with each other, being pretty recent newlyweds, that they remind me how much I love Ben and how lucky I am. They can't seem to find any fault with each other, which is a good reminder to all of us of how we should treat our spouses.

On Monday, Amy and Dave worked on getting us to fall in love with New Haven. I'd say they did a pretty good job! We took the Yale campus tour in the morning. It is a BEAUTIFUL campus, and I'm sure Ben would absolutely love going to school there next year (and I would love it too). After the Yale tour, Amy and Dave took us to see New Haven's downtown, a fun vegetarian restaurant for lunch, the part of campus where Dave goes to class (the Divinity School), and East Rock where we could see a view of the city from above. Everything about the day was beautiful, and we all imagined together how perfect it would be if Ben and I end up in CT next fall (Ben's doing applications now, and Yale is one of the 9 schools on the list). We had dinner and sang hymns together before finishing off the trip with ice cream. It really was such a beautiful time that I almost felt removed from real life and taken to a scene from Stegner's Crossing to Safety. What a blessing to have such good friends so relatively close!

Kara and Dave's Weekend

(Jenn) I'm playing blog catch-up today, so I'm going back a couple of weeks on this post. It seems like since Kara and Dave visited, I haven't even had a chance to come to the surface to catch some air! We're so busy getting ready to take another trip to Utah for Dan's wedding and Thanksgiving.

Anyway, We have been so lucky to have family only 4 hours away (on a good day with minor traffic) in Virginia. We have visited Kara and Dave and their family three times now, and it's been so nice just to have a home to go to and be with family. Last time we were there, we talked them into bringing the whole family up to visit us!

Nate had a few days out of school last weekend, so it was the perfect time for them to come. Our accommodations aren't quite as nice as theirs (our "guest room" is the living room), so for Kara, Dave, and the four kids, it was a tight squeeze! But it was so much better than having them stay in a hotel because we got to spend LOTS of time together, especially playing games and talking after the kids had gone to bed! If any of you have visited us, you know that our bedrooms are TINY, and so they really did use every inch of floor space as Nate, Jessica, and Caleb spread their sleeping bags out using the corners of Henry's bedroom floor.


We had a great time with the Ludlows. Ben and I babysat while they went to a Broadway show; we had church on Sunday and made sugar cookies with frosting; Henry and I went with them to the Statue of "Liverty" on Monday(which is what Jessica calls it); we played games at night; and we ate out at the Grand Luxe Café (yum!). On Tuesday, they toured the Federal Reserve and the Museum of Natural History before they went home.


I didn't get a lot of great pictures of the weekend because it was so hard to get 5 kids to all pose together at the same time! But we had a great time, and Henry especially enjoyed playing with all of his cousins.

Black Out Forever!

(Jenn)
So I've been "tagged" like 5 times this week and probably a few more times in the past month or two, so I'm finally going to do it and then say "Black Out Forever!" It's not that I don't enjoy reading all of your tag posts -- they are fun. It's just that I feel guilty when I never get around to completing my random things about myself or questionnaire or whatever. Okay, so which "tag" should I do? I just tried listing 6 random things about myself, and that's HARD, so I'm answering the questions from my cousin Kristina's tag and then posting a few random things about me. Here goes:

1. Best thing you cooked last week: Apple dumplings. Shug was here and we cooked and ate a lot of good food, and the one recipe she absolutely insisted on having was my Grandma Griffin's apple dumplings (basically little apple pie packets baked in a pink cinnamony syrup). A handful of those Griffin recipes are legends with my college roommates. Yum!

2. If money, time and babysitting were no object, where would you go and with whom? I would definitely go to London with Ben. I would show him EVERYTHING. And yes, we would have a babysitter.

3. When was the last time you cried? About 2 1/2 weeks ago when I finished reading These is My Words by Nancy Turner. I sobbed in bed so hard that I thought I would wake Ben up. You should read by book review here, and you should read this book. Do it.

4. 5 things you were doing this month 10 years ago:
- Studying for Beastie D.C.'s European History class with a bunch of crazy friends
- Trick-or-treating (yes, I trick-or-treated in high school. Did you?)
- Taking driver's ed
- Becoming good friends with Ben and starting to email him regularly
- Practicing "Lace" Christmas songs including "All I Want for Christmas is You" and "Hey Santa"

5. 5 things on your to-do list today:
- Go jogging
- Clean house
- Order wedding gift for Dan-o
- Babysitting 7 kids while parents go to Broadway show
- Prepare for YW class tomorrow (It's Saturday)

6. 5 favorite snacks:
- Candy! (jelly beans, caramel candy corns, sour balls, Hot Tamales, Reese's Pieces, etc.)
- Cookies
- Toast with cinnamon sugar
- Wheatables
- Cereal
(Do some of you really eat healthy snacks? Hmmm)

7. 5 bad habits:
- Eating lots of sugar
- Picking up speech habits and patterns of people around me
- Falling asleep in movies, esp. the temple movie
- Forgetting to move my car on street sweeping day
- Leaving fragile items in precarious places (this drives Ben crazy)

8. 5 places I've been:
- England
- France
- Holland
- Italy
- Yellow Grass, Saskatchewan

Okay, and now 3 random things about me:

1. I correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation in my head every time I read anything. I guess it's the English teacher in me.

2. I adore kids, but I don't love babies. I really want to have another baby soon, but I have a hard time getting used to the idea of taking care of a newborn. They're so hard to take care of, and they're not very interesting! I need to get over this soon.

3. I give Henry a lollipop and a package of fruit snacks EVERY time we go on ANY sort of shopping excursion. I think I'm probably a horrible mom. Oh well!

If you haven't been tagged yet and want something to do, consider yourself tagged!