It is almost 1am, so I am going to keep this sweet and short.
We celebrated Caitlins b-day this weekend by heading down the shore and then having a little party at home afterwards with a homemade cake and of course Tinkerbell everything decorations (becauase that is Caitlins favorite).
We had some friends join us and my Mom happend to be in town too, so it was alot of fun.
Now that I just spent an hour updating the look of my blog I don't really feel like writing much. So this post will probably be pretty short.
This past week we had a very exciting thing happen in our family. My first baby was baptized. I guess I can't really call him my baby anymore since he is 8 now. I still think he is though :)
It was great timing because we were able to have my whole family come out and spend a week together before my parents were officially off to Abu Dhabi.
We spent the 4th of July together and had fun staying together in a house in the Poconos.
And Caitlin had so much fun playing with her cousins, especially Annalise and her new found friend Lillian. The whole week was alot of hard play and we are now back home with our typical day to day hard work. I am sure my next post will probably be Caitlin's B-day that is coming up on the 1st of August. I can't believe how time flies, she will be 4 years old. I won't even have a toddler anymore. SO much fun watching these kids grow :)
Tyler's' birthday was about a month and a half ago and I am finally getting around to posting these pictures now...better late then never.
We all had a a lot of fun. Even JC :) (I love how he was even wearing the right color for our section)
It's the first time the kids have ever been to something like this and they loved all the sword fighting. They even announced Tyler's b-day during the performance.
Caitlin got the "Queen of love and beauty" ribbon for the yellow section. She thought that was pretty cool.
The girls (of course) loved the princess.
Overall, it was a fun night and everyone went out with a smile :)
We are having Tyler's baptism next week and very excited for my family to come out. Can't wait to see everybody. Will post more pictures then!!!
I know I am really, really behind. But....(and of course there is a but) :) I have been sooooo busy the last few months.
This new position at work has meant long hours and more responsibility. I am working on my constant balancing act between work, family and my me time. Luckily I have a great husband who supports me and has been a great stay at home Dad the last few months so things are working as smooth as they can.
So to catch up....I am going to go from most recent to least recent:
I went to Columbus last week to be with Kels, Kevin and Annalise while they added the newest addition to their family. Jonah Patrick Lawrence was born at 8:29pm on Wednesday May 13th at 7lbs 13oz after about 12 hours of labor.
We recently took a trip to Ohio over Easter as well. We helped Mom and Dad pack up their house in preperation for moving to Abu Dhabi as well as take a few things off their hands. Such as their furniture and anything else they were willing to give up. The kids had fun spending Easter with their cousin Annalise.
We celebrated Samantha's B-day at Buffalo Wild Wings and finished it off by watching How to train your Dragon in 3D.
We also enjoyed a trip to the Cincinnati Childrens museum.
We then enjoyed dinner at Joes Craab Shack where Samantha got to where a funny hat and ride a play horse around in celebration of her birthday:
Last but not least we finished the trip off with a visit to the Columbus Zoo:
We have enjoyed having family only a few hundred miles away and look forward to many more visits. The highlight of the visit for the girls was the shopping trip to the mall where the girls got to ride the carousel and go to build a bear and get matching bunnies.
Going back a few months.....within the first weeks of living in NJ we experienced some crazy weather, including alot of snow.
That didn't stop JC from driving around though :)
It has been a great few months in NJ and we look forward to spending more time here and the summer to start here and spend some time together as a family.
JC is going back to school and things are going to get crazier then they already are but I look forward to the challenge and look forward to JC being able to accomplish something he puts his mind to.
Well we are officialy in New Jersey now. I do not have any pictures to post yet, but will try and get them ready for next time.
It has been a pretty crazy few weeks and we are so grateful to all be back together in one place now. After we found out that we would be moving we started planning and trying to figure out the best way to make this move. It seems that no matter how much we planned, anything we decided changed shortly after :). But it has all worked out in the end and I think everything has gone pretty smooth for a cross country move.
We were trying to find a place to live that was within about 30mins of my office. I was hoping to keep it under 30mins but we ended up going with a place in Belle Mead which is about a 35 min drive (without traffic). There are great schools in this area and we have so many friends in the area that I think it will be the perfect place for us.
This past month I have been in a hotel for almost 3 weeks, which has been kind of nice hehe but it will be really nice to have a place I can call home.
If you want to know the craziness of how we got everyone out here. This is the breakdown:
Sunday Jan 17th my Mom flew out to Austin Monday Jan 18th my Mom,Caitlin and I start the drive to NJ Wednesday Jan 20th arrive in NJ around 3am, my first day back at work and Kels and Annalise come out from Ohio :) Saturday Jan 23rd Kels, Mom, Anna and Caitlin go back to Ohio/Kentucky Sunday Jan 24th - Friday Jan 29th I work and search for a house for the week Friday Jan 29th Ty and Mantha fly out (all by themselves)and JC starts driving out Saturday Jan 30th I drive about 500 miles round trip to meet Kelsey somewhere in PA to pick up Caitlin and we are now almost all back together -1 Sunday Jan 31st JC arrives in NJ
We were finally all together again and for this past week we have been waiting to hear back from the places we applied to live and waiting for our stuff to arrive. We heard back from two places, one in Branchburg, NJ and one in Belle Mead, NJ. We decided to go with the place in Belle Mead and all of our stuff will be arrive on Monday.
So the big move in day is coming soon. I am excited to get the kids registered for school this week and hope they are happy with their new school and friends. The kids are pretty excited about all the snow here and we are going to try and make some time to get out and play in this crazy white stuff.
I will post some pictures soon. Not sure when we will have internet hooked up at the new place but hopefully soon :)
I have been really bad with keeping up on posts. I can't believe it has been two months. So much has happend in the last two months and there is so much more to come.
Where do I even start??? I guess it would be Halloween since I am SOOO far behind. For halloween we did a "Tinkerbell/Peter Pan" theme. Caitlin was Tinkerbell of course (because she is obsessed with tinkerbell), Samantha was Rosetta (tinks good friend...watch the tinkerbell movie to see), Tyler was hook (or a scary pirate), JC was Peter Pan (doesn't he look good in costume?) and I was Wendy.
We went to a trunk or treat at our church a couple nights before halloween and then headed over to Cabelas for their annual trunk or treat on the 31st. It was alot of fun as usual.
THANKSGIVING: For Thanksgiving we stayed home with our little family. I think this is the 4th year we have done that. As usual JC made an awesome smoked turkey (I know it looks burnt but it is just smoked) and it was the juciest turkey yet yummmmmmm.
We were also dog-sitting for a friend and the kids had alot of fun having a dog to play with for the day.
NEXT.....
CHRISTMAS TIME
WAIT!!! Reverse, go back, we can't start celebrating Christmas until after December 1st because that is JCs B-day....so HAPPY BIRTHDAY HONEY!!! We went to Carinos to celebrate JC turning the big 3 2 :) and I can still rub it in since I am not 30 yet...hehe. Just wait until it hits. I can't wait! So after Dec 1st we offically start celebrating but.... our decorating and celebration was slowed down a litle by the chaos in the house. Tyler got sick with the flu and we did not think much of it until the 3rd day he woke up with his eyes blood shot. I brought him into the Dr that day but his fever was gone and they did not see any problem with him going back to school so away he went. (I am mixing the timeline up a little since this all started in NOV but it does lead into my point I promise :) ) Well on the evening of Thankgiving Tyler started to get this weird rash on his legs, we thought they were just bug bites at first so we did not do anything about it. After we had dinner we realized it was getting worse, so we had him take a warm shower thinking that it may be an allergic reaction to something he was exposed to outside. Well....once he got out, it was worse.
The pictures do not show how awful it looked. He had a ton of red spots all over from his waste down. They were dark purple in the middle and swelling quickly. We decided to take him to the hospital and many worrying hours later we finally discovered that he had something called Henoch Schonlein Purpura (HSP). This was a relief after thinking that it may be somthing called Kawasaki disease, which is much more life threatening and more difficult to manage. The HSP started going away but crept back the following week (1st week in DEC) which is why I am mentioning it here. In the meantime both Samantha and Caitlin had caught the same flu virus that triggered Tyler's HSP and we had someone sick in the house for weeks straight. After Caitlin was over the flu I started to feel sick and ended up with Strep throat.
Needless to say, the Christmas decorating was delayed a couple weeks but it did occur :) Here are some pics and Caitlin got to do the honors of putting the angel on the Christmas tree.
We also went to the church Christmas party and go to see Santa but those pictures didn't turn out that great so I decided not to add them.
And a few days later we headed out to Utah to spend the days before Christmas with my family. As always, it was a whirlwind trip, packed with alot of things to do.
The kids were very excited to see the snow and they got to go sledding with their cousin Annalise, along with making a snowman and snow angels.
Caitlin and Anna had fun riding together in the car and seeing Santa. After Santa left to see the people in the next car Caitlin said...That was great!! She was so enthusiastic about Santa this year...it was alot of fun.
Lauren delivered this large 9lb baby on the 17th (the day we arrived). I heard she was amazing and we were so grateful to be able to enjoy the first few days of his life with my brother and his wife. I know they will make amazing parents and am so proud of both of them.
We celebrated Christmas with my family a few days early since we were coming back on the 23rd to spend Christmas day at home since JC could not join us on the trip (due to work). You can see the picture of our fake fire on the TV that we used while we un-wrapped presents. Doesn't it just make you want to get a cup of hot chocolate?
Another highlight of the trip was G-ma and G-pa taking us to go to see The Princess and the Frog (the new Disney movie). The girls were spoiled and had these cute outfits my Mom bought for the girls that were all princess and the frog. They wore them to the movie and thought they were the hottest thing in the movie theater (I thought they were pretty cute too but of course 2 out of 3 were my own kids so...I may be a little biased).
It was so cute to see all of them in their black and red together. The 1 year olds were not so thrilled about it, but I still think they turned out cute.
I know this is a pretty long post so I will try not to draw it out any longer, but the last thing I wanted to add was the news we found out just before going out to Utah.
WE ARE MOVING BACK TO NEW JERSEY!!! I was offered a promotion on the condition that we move back and we decided to take it. So....here we are off on another adventure. We are still trying to figure out details of when, how and where in NJ we will be living, but we are excited to be moving back and will really miss the friends we have made here in Austin.
So I know I have been really bad about posting lately...it has been over a month :) It is just that crazy time of year with school and upcoming holidays.
I made a visit out to OH/KY last week to visit my Mom and Sister. We had a girls weekend and it was so much fun. It is nice to get a small break every once and a while and just to girl stuff. I also got to see my cute niece Annalise. She is so energetic. It was so beautiful out there, we do not have many fall colors here in Austin so it was great to see the gorgeous fall colors.
We also got a new car this month. I wanted to add the ode to the wonderful Toyota Camry. The car had 309,000+ miles on it and I am sure it would have gone another 30,000 or more if I was willing to dump the money into it, but since I was able to take advantage of a state cash for clunkers program I was glad to have a down payment not out of my own pocket (atleast for the moment) and all I had to do was trade in the Camry :) So here is good bye to the most realiable car I have ever seen...
We got a Pontican Vibe and it wasn't exactly what I wanted because I was hoping for something with a third row seat but everything with that feature was more expensive then I was willing to pay. I was going to take pictures of the new car but it has been raining so much that everytime I go to do it there is rain. Mantha took some pictures from the inside though (this is all I have for now):
Samantha has had this new obsession with using my camera without telling me. Apparently the other day she actually brought it to school with her. The way I found out was when they wanted to play with the pictures on the Wii and I went to look for my camera and couldnt find it where I left it. She then comes out of her room with it and when we open them up to look at them, these are the picture I see:
Well to end this post I thought I want to add this great picture I took of Caitlin in her high chair the other day. She loves to be the "class clown" of the family and does anything to get a laugh.
Welcome to the Slater Family blog. A little family history. JC and I were married on Feb. 16th 2001 in the Mount Timpanagos temple in American Fork, UT. I cannot say marriage has been easy but it has definetely been worth it, we have been through some hard times and have grown to love eachother more through it. We have been lucky enough to create three beautiful children through our Union. Tyler who is 8, Samantha who is 6 and Caitlin who is almost 4. We are living back in Jersey after living in Austin, TX for a couple years. It was great middle ground for us. There is me who loves to live near a city and JC, who would like to live in the middle of no where(can't survive without a place to hunt and fish), Austin gave us a little of both. Compromise.....something we have learned pretty well :) Now we are in New Jersey chasing my career while JC is attending school and aiming to recieve his degree to get his career moving in the direction he wants. Where we will we go next....??? I don't know but whatever it is look forward to it.
