Austin's Birthday

Once upon a time, Austin and I used to cook together quite often- we enjoyed trying new recipes and having fun together in the kitchen. Making meals together was like a date night for us. Then we had kids and got super busy and that pretty much stopped.
Until Austin's birthday came along and he wanted to try making sesame chicken together. We watched a few youtube videos and blended a couple recipes together to make an amazing meal. The kids were all over in the kitchen getting in the way, there were far too many steps to the process, and too many dishes to clean up (plus we had to make a different dinner for Trevor because of his allergies), but the finished product was well worth all the effort. Admittedly, I mostly just did meal prep like cutting up the chicken and broccoli and helping Austin locate all the ingredients he would need (he's not nearly as familiar with the kitchen as I am ;) and Austin did all of the cooking.

For Austin's birthday dessert, Asher made brownies- almost completely on his own. I just helped him with the oven because he's afraid he'll burn himself. We also threw in some mint Milano cookies (called Monaco cookies here in Canada for some reason) because Austin loves those and the kids were clamoring to have some too. Because Austin spent a lot of the day at church doing bishopric stuff, it wasn't all that exciting of a day, but we had a very enjoyable meal as a family!

11 Months

Our sweetest little Natalie is 11 months old. Time is going by too fast with this little one and she's growing and developing right along with it! Natalie is a busy little body, into everything that she can find now that she is an excellent crawler. She loves to pull herself up to standing wherever she goes and we have to keep a constant eye on her. We've hit a new milestone with her- she's sleeping through the night and taking consistent naps every day! This is such a huge positive change for me! We finally did some sleep training with her and moved her out of our room into Heidi's room. Heidi is sleeping in the guest room for now, but soon we'll move her back in with Natalie (something Heidi has been looking forward to ever since she found out she was getting a baby sister!). Natalie has also started eating a lot more solids, despite still having only two teeth. She mostly just eats tiny pieces of whatever I'm eating- she loves oatmeal with raspberries, avocado on toast, rice, veggies, chicken. Really, she's happy to eat whatever everyone in the family is eating. I'm guessing that the reason she was refusing to eat any puree about a month ago was because she just wanted to eat with everyone else.  She is a happy little girl that adds joy wherever she goes. Here are the photos I got of her:

And some photos Austin got of her doing her favorite activity: pulling things out of a basket :)
I've found this is a great way to entertain her while I'm trying to do laundry- just let her throw all the clothes out of the basket until I have a chance to get to them and hang or fold them up. 

New Years

I'm a little late on posting this, but we had a nice, quiet New Years Eve and Day. We put Natalie to bed at her normal 8:00, but we let the other kids stay up until about 9:30 watching some shows. We got Trevor and Heidi to bed about that time, but let Asher and Leif stay up until midnight. Once we had all of the little ones out of the way, we got out some games and played Rat-a-Tat-Cat and Bananagrams with lots of snacks. The older boys loved this special time with Mom and Dad and it was fun to play games together without having to stop to take care of someone every few minutes ;)
No one in our family is used to staying up so late (especially Mom!), so by about 11:30 we were all getting tired and we let the boys play Minecraft while I read and Austin did something on his phone. We made it up to midnight, then all crashed.
The next morning, Austin continued what is starting to become a tradition of him making Dutch Babies (German pancakes in his Dutch oven) for breakfast and we had a quiet day around the house cleaning up, planning for the new year, and playing games. The only picture I got was of breakfast: