Eliza's 11th Birthday

 The beautiful girl had a pretty unique birthday this year. We had drove out to California the evening before. That morning we enjoyed some pancakes with whipped cream and fruit before heading to Downtown Disney to do a little shopping since we knew we would be pretty focused during our time in the parks and wouldn't want to shop. It is a pretty little place with lots of overpriced shops. :)

After the shopping our older girls went to a concert hall where they helped record a Christmas album with their choir! What a unique opportunity! We knew we had to make this trip happen if for no other reason. Then, it was on to the beach.

A little chilly, but so much fun, especially with the wet suits. 

 I don't know where to even start with talking about this wonderful girl. She is smart, kind, responsible, loving, fun, and just the best. Eliza is such a wonderful daughter and sister. I am so impressed with how empathetic and selfless she is. She genuinely is happy for other people when they are happy. She is loyal and tries to convince me that I am cool when I say that I am not. :) She is an awesome babysitter and loves to care for Holland. Eliza will read Holland story after story while watching her. Eliza is a wonderful older sister to Miriam. They are best friends and playmates (except when there is an occasional disagreement).

Eliza is talented in so many ways. She is doing amazing at learning how to play the piano. She has always been a remarkable reader and devours a book like no one I have ever met. Eliza also excels at math and science and says that those are her favorite subjects at school. During the recent Spring Break she did math problems just for fun. I hope she continues this love of learning. Eliza is also a lovely singer and is thinking of trying her hand at other musical instruments. At the recent intro to middle school band and orchestra nights, she was the only student that we know of that was given the green light to go for any instrument she'd like. Basically she had natural aptitude for all of them. 

I think her favorites were the violin and the trombone. 

Eliza is still her wonderful sweet self at 11. She is just generally happy about life, positive about circumstances, and loving to those around her. Don't get me wrong, I don't think she loves chores, but she holds it together pretty well for them. She is self motivated when it comes to homework, which is amazing. 

Friends playing in the water.

Eliza had the most amazing treat after her birthday dinner pizza. It was a caramel gelato cake from Costco that was simply splendid. This girl still doesn't like chocolate but her taste buds aside from that are quite grown up, which makes her a fun person to eat with. She also really likes cooking and is pretty darn helpful in the kitchen.

For birthday presents this year, she received a plasma ball, which she was pretty thrilled about. Miriam also gave her a book, and I made her a necklace. For the bulk of her present she asked for spending money to have for Disneyland.

This girl is thrilled to be an older sister once again. She had the idea of crocheting the new baby a blanket. It is kind of an intense project, but I am confident she'll do a great job.

Eliza also loves board games. We have entered a new phase with our family where we can play most of our board games with our older girls. It is so fun, but I don't know if anyone likes it more than Ellie. It is almost always her top choice after dinner to play a game. 

She also loves riding bikes, jumping on the trampoline, doing any kind of craft, and practicing math problems. I sure love this girl. 

I actually took Eliza in for her 11 year well check (we missed those last year), and she is staying pretty consistent in her growth curve. She is 64.5 lbs which is the 10%. She is 55 inches which is the 27th %. She seems tall to me, but she is just taller than she used to be. She confirms that about 2/3 of her school class is taller than her. She is getting bigger though and wanted to try out a training bra. That plus middle school next year makes me think she is getting older way, way too fast, seriously.

I thought it would be fun for her to answer some get to know you questions:
1. If you could go anywhere in the world on vacation where would you go?
Oh goodness, I will have to think about it. There are so many fun places. Probably Paris. Paris or...Hawaii. I feel like I have to pick a city one and a not-city one.
2. If you were an ice cream flavor, which one would you be? Why?
I would probably be that yummy caramel one, caramel praline. Because it is my favorite one.
3. What is your favorite cereal?
I really like Special K Red Berries with coconut milk.
4. What is your favorite candy?
Life savor gummies
5. What is your favorite Primary song?
A Child's Prayer
6. Are you a morning or a night person?
Depends on who is waking me up and what I am doing to stay up late. If I stay up super late because of allergies then I am usually a morning person because I am like, "Yes, it is done with." And if someone is waking me up earlier in the morning like 6:30 or earlier for school I am usually, "Can I just go back to bed?" I think we were late to school that day.
7. Are you on any teams or clubs at school? If so which ones?
I do choir with MCO. I just finished soccer at the Y. I am probably going to do violin next year in school, so that'll be fun. If not violin, then trombone is what I picked for my second choice because it is super fun.
8. If you were a crayon, what color would you be and why?
I would probably be purple because it is my favorite color. Purple or blue.
9. What is your favorite season of the year? (remember in most places there are 4 seasons)
My favorite season in Phoenix is Winter because it is so beautiful in temperature, unlike most of the rest of the year. And anywhere else my favorite season is Spring.

Valentine's Day + Holland's First Primary Talk

After we finished our cabinet project, we squeezed in a little holiday fun. It was a busy time: finish a big house project, holiday, birthday, and a big trip. Whew!  Thankfully, we have some fun traditions that made it easy to plan. John gave us each a little Valentines gift. We exchanged cards and had a delicious steak dinner. Yes, we all love freshly grilled steak. We also did our traditional sparkling cider floats. I threw these punny cards together near the last minute, but they ended up being pretty cute. We also did two last minute Valentine's boxes for school Valentines. John and I bought a date book to share, which we are excited to try out. It is focused on dates around the world. 

That Sunday Holland gave her very first talk in Primary. She had recently really turned a corner in her reading and was thrilled to show off her new skills. That, plus just feeling important giving a talk made her so excited to do it. She practiced probably 15 times and wanted to do it all herself. She helped me write it and just loved it all. Super de duper adorable.

This video was a Marco Polo that we sent to my mom of Holland practicing her talk.

Just as a bonus, here is a different Marco Polo of Holland being as sweet as can be to Grandma.

Painting Cabinets + My Mom's Hip

Since I was starting to feel so much better pregnancy wise. We did the next logical thing and took on a massive house project. Haha, it actually feels a little insane, but I know that it is a better time than with a new baby. Plus it gave me something good to obsess about during this pregnancy. The second trimester is typically a little rough for me emotionally (haha, everything is rough about this pregnancy) so this was a nice distraction for all of that. I read probably 100 articles about painting cabinets. So when we actually started the process, we felt very well researched.

First step was unloading all of the stuff from our cabinets. Wow, it turns out that we fit a ton of stuff into our little cabinets. We took over the front room and dining room with kitchen supplies. It was like this for a few weeks, so thankfully we had a bit of a system worked out. I somehow didn't take a proper photo of it, but it was pretty full. We also had to take the appliances out of their locations. Fortunately we could still plug in the microwave and the refrigerator, but there was no using the stove or oven during that time. Also, during the actual painting weekend there was no using the dishwasher. We used disposable dishes that weekend, which felt pretty wasteful, but thankfully we don't use hardly any paper goods like that regularly.

After that was a lot, a lot of sanding. This was maybe the first time that I had ever been grateful to have such a tiny kitchen. It still took us a full day one Saturday to sand the cabinets and doors. I guess part of the process that day was using a degreaser (cleaning it) and deglosser (did nothing as far as we could tell).
We also went through quite the process trying to decide what color paint to get. Turns out that there is a zillion colors of white paint. The recommendations that we read online looked different in person. Then the paint samples that we got at the store didn't match the little paint chips that we had picked them from. Yeah, it was a headache. Eventually though we just went with what we thought looked best, even though it isn't as highly recommended because it is a cooler tone of white.

We did not want to take out the dishwasher because it was kind of a pain to install, so we just wrapped the whole thing in plastic because we super didn't want any primer or paint to get on it. You know, our brand new dark stainless appliances.

We decided to use the heavy duty, super bonding oil based primer. This was a bit of a debate because it has terrible fumes. Also, it doesn't clean up easily since it isn't water based. So I took Holland to the park for the entire morning one Friday, while John donned a mask and went to work painting primer while attempting to not cause any kind of mess with it.

Once again, we think we have this tiny kitchen, how do we have so many stinkin' doors to sand/prime/paint. Holy guacamole. And because we were so well researched we were doing this right, which meant doing a light sanding and wipe down between coats. Just looking at the pictures now makes me feel so glad that we are done with this. It makes John so glad too.

It took a full 3 coats of paint plus a coat of primer to get full coverage on the cabinets. I was surprised by this because we have never had to do more than two. We also ended up caulking some of the cracks in the doors and trim.

John took on a cool aspect of this project to change the hinges for the cabinets. He decided to do hidden hinges with a soft close feature. I love them. There is no slamming of doors anymore. It is pretty cool.

We figured out pretty fast that we needed to paint the soffet, trim and pantry door a matching color of white. Turns out our other white almost looks cream next to this bright white. 

We loved how it turned out, even though it was a ton of work. The next step is counter tops. Yikes that expensive. I'll have to do another post about that after they are installed and hopefully are completely gorgeous.
Our plans are to cut down the bar top and extend the peninsula out a foot and a half to create more counter top space. We are doing this by adding some posts to the right of the dishwasher. Then hopefully soon John will add some open shelving there to add just a little bit of storage to the kitchen.
We figured out that doing the posts really complicated our counter top project. Basically we only found one guy who had done it before (and wouldn't have to have his learning experience be in our kitchen). Of course this guy seems like the most expensive that we have talked to from install to getting the actual quartz.
We think that the adjustments will be worth it though. We went to a couple of stone warehouses and looked at the big slabs. We also met with the installer and picked three samples to choose from. They don't exactly have price tags on them though. So it just happened to work out that the counter top selection we choose is in the highest price point category. Of course.

We settled on the one on the right. Here is it in a full slab. I think it is going to be gorgeous. 

We took a drawer to check the color of white with the cabinets. I just love it. 

On a less fun note, my dad came down to Scottsdale like normal this year to sell his wood at the art show. Unfortunately, even though we had tried to convince my mom to stay with us kids (maybe in a rotation?) she really wanted to live by herself. She lasted only a couple weeks before she fell and broke her hip on the tile. It was a rough time at first. For a good week at the hospital she had increasing oxygen needs. Also, she couldn't keep any food down. It was not good. My siblings were there pretty much 24/7 for a while. My dad of course flew up there and only just now came back to clean up the booth from the show. Kind of terrible all around. Thankfully, we had a couple of weeks with him. I just feel so bad that she went through this. So much pain and so much physical therapy. She was in a rehab facility for about 2 months and only got out yesterday. That's got to have been an effort in endurance for her. 

It's a girl!

Out entire family had been eagerly counting down and anticipating finding out what flavor of baby we were having and the day finally arrived. We were so thrilled to find out. John came with me to the ultrasound, of course, and the technician went through every little thing before she looked at the sex of the baby. The anticipation was killing me. I thought she was going comment about how hard my heart was beating. Seriously I was sweating, heart racing, and she just extended it on and on. I would get little glimpses of the umbilical cord and thought it meant that we were having a boy, but no.

 We had never seen 3d ultrasound pictures before for our own child. That was a fun surprise. But honestly, can we just find out what we're having already??

 Cute little feet!

 Hands in front of her face. 

 The empty cavities in her chest are a good sign that she is able to drink and her body is processing the amniotic fluid. She spent a lot of time checking that. She also wanted to check my anatomy including the placement of my ovaries. Apparently I have "Barbie ovaries." Haha, never been accused of having the features of Barbie before. My ovaries are just where they are supposed to be and completely symmetrical. That's good...I guess.

Eventually though, the technician finally showed us the gender. Another girl!!! We were super thrilled. To be honest, I had been praying and hoping for another girl because it sounded so much easier than trying to figure out boy stuff at this point. I love my little girls more than I can say, so of course I just wanted another one of those. To my surprise though, there was the tiniest twinge of disappointment that we'll never have a son. We're just never going to experience that. Now though, I just wondering what this little one's hair color is going to be: dark, blonde, red?? It really could be anything.

To say that the kids were thrilled is understating it. We did a little reveal box for them, and to be honest, they were almost obnoxiously excited. Then we celebrated with fresh donuts with pink candles. Pretty great day. I still can't believe that we are going to have four little girls! What?? I never envisioned that being my family. I also can't believe that we are going to have to come up with another girl name. Yikes!
And I just have to say that I thought I was having a boy all four times. Clearly, I have no intuition at all. With Eliza I was 85% sure she would be a boy. With Miriam I was 60% sure she would be a boy. With Holland I was 125% sure she would be a boy. And with this little one I was only 85% sure she would be a boy (only because I had been wrong every time before), I really thought she would be. So to recap, I am zero for four in guessing correctly, but I am four for four in feeling super lucky and excited.