Jacob turns 6 (but doesn't look a day over 5)

Little Jacobie just had his 6th birthday! He does not seem or look six years old to me, but sure enough he is. :-) Fran and Lyle were able to stay for his birthday too which was wonderful!

For his birthday I went to the school and had lunch with him in the cafeteria. Brandon stayed home with Nana and Papa, so it was awesome to be just me and him (well, and the rest of the lunch room).

After lunch I headed home to get the brownies that he passed out to his class.

Then I picked all the boys up about 20 minutes early from school and we headed to the movie theater. We saw "How to train your Dragon."



Then we meet up with Steve at "Ryan's" which is a southern food buffet restaurant here.



Cake and ice cream was next


and then the presents.

From Steve and I, Jacob got a new lightsaber that makes noise and lights up. From Nana and Papa he got some money, and a tatoo maker thing. And then he got all sorts of birthday money in the mail. Aunt Kristin and Uncle John, Grandma Great, and Grandma and Grandpa Allred. Thank you all for thinking of Jacob. I am going to take him on Saturday to spend all that money.

And then to finish the evening off we got a sweet phone call from the Skinner family. They called and asked Steve to put them on speaker phone and then with everyone gathered around in clear and beautiful voices they sang Happy Birthday to BRANDON!. Hahaha it was hilarious. Steve corrected Laura and she couldn't believe she got the wrong nephew. I told Jacob that they were just joking with him and wasn't that a good joke. He honestly wasn't paying much attention anyway, so it wasn't like he was offended. But it was very thoughtful of them to call. We love you Skinners.

Now for those 6 wonderful things about Jacobis:

1. Jacob has a love relationship with his Crocs that I have only heard of girls having with shoes. He asked me every morning, including in the winter what day it was to find out if he could wear crocs, cause he is not allowed to on PE days. It just made his day when he could wear them to school. Often times I also need to tell him to take his shoes off when he is getting in to bed. He is not allowed to wear them to bed!
2. Jacob has these adorable little things on his face called freckles. And he seems to just get more and more. When he was smaller Steve would ask him what is all over your face, and Jacob would respond, "polka dots" except he had a lisp when he said his "s" so it sounded adorable. Because of that, whenever Steve would come home from work, he would ask Jacob if he could have a "polka dot hug". That was a special kind of hug that only Jacob could give. So, Jacob would hug his Dad and Steve would say that he got one of his polka dots. Steve still asks Jacob to give him polka dot hugs and Jacob is always more than willing to share those polka dots.
3. Jacob has been a star student in kindergarten this year. Once again I am amazed that a kid who went to school not recognizing all the letters of the alphabet can come out of Kindergarten ten months later and can Read! He read "Green eggs and Ham" to me the other day and did 95% of it by himself. Amazing. And he is well behaved at school too which is a big relief for me.
4. He played his first year of sports this year and choose soccer. He did AWESOME! And I was really surprised. He had no idea how to play when he started, but by the end of the season was kicking the ball the right direction, stealing it from the other team and making goals. He did great.
5. Jacob likes to tell every detail of a situation. Especially if he thinks he was wronged. If someone bothers him or hurts him, he will come and tell me every little thing. His story will go on for fifteen minutes. Now if you know me, you know that I don't let it go on for very long before I ask him to be quiet and deal with the situation, but I still laugh sometimes at him going on and on and on.
6. I posted this long enough after his birthday that I can tell you, he lost two teeth since his birthday. Birthday was on Thursday, he lost one at school on Monday and one at school on Tuesday. I have never known anyone to loose two teeth that close together, but he did and everything seems to be fine. His teeth are tiny though! Oh and the tooth fairy took four days to come to him! She must be getting old and very forgetful. We have come up with some valid reasons for her tardiness though. I am sure she didn't expect him to be loosing teeth this close to his sixth birthday, so she wasn't checking in on him yet. :-)

Stone Mountain

In the middle of May my in-laws Fran and Lyle came for a visit. We started their stay off with a trip to Stone Mountain. It is a small amusement park near Atlanta that Steve and I had heard was lots of fun. We drove up Friday after school and stayed in a very nice $80 hotel. Saturday morning we headed over to the park. I thought it was such a cool park. Not nearly as expensive or crowded as Sea World or Disney, but we all still had a great time. The boys Favorite stop is this place called the "Big Red Barn" and I really don't even know how to describe it. There are about 2000 soft squishy balls all over the place and then four stories of machines that suck and blow these balls all over the place. You can put them in guns and shoot them, or throw them at whomever is in your way. There was a huge machine that went up the middle and about every 15 minutes a siren would go off and it would spit out tons of balls all over the place. The boys loved it and it was great fun to watch them play.

{Jacob is collecting balls in his bag so he can go feed them to the machines.}
{This was one of Brandon's favorites. You just put four balls in this thing, turn the wheel and the balls drop off at the end and fall to the first floor from the second floor. }
{Steve was entertaining Brandon most of the time we were here, and whenever Steve needed a rest he would sit on a bench and have Brandon fill up like four bags of balls. It was so funny cause Brandon was trying to put so many in his arms and he kept losing one at the top every time he added on at the bottom. We were enjoying watching him. }
Another thing we went on was the cable car that took us up to top of stone mountain. Once we got to the top there was a huge area of rock that you could go out and explore on. And you could look down over the Atlanta area. It was beautiful.

{You see us down by the chain link fence}
{Fran and Lyle in front of stone mountain. There is a carving of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis on the front.}

They also had a "4D" movie that was about 20 minutes that was lots of fun. You wore your 3D glasses, but it also spit water at you and your seat moved with the earthquake, and occasionally we would feel big gusts of wind on the back of our neck.

Then that evening we waited until dark for the laser show to start. They put pictures up on stone mountain made from lasers. The theme was southern music and so a lot of the songs were about Georgia and Alabama. It was really neat to see.


Because of the laser show we got out of there way late. We left Atlanta about 11 and had a 3 hour drive ahead of us. Steve once again got us safely home at 2am where he crashed in bed for a couple hours before heading to church the next morning.

New York For Jessica's Birthday!

NYC blog minus pictures. I will be getting pictures next week and will add them.

On April 22nd I flew to NYC and had the first of a long list of vacations over the next couple of months. Jessica Sue was having her 30th birthday on the 24th and my sisters Alicia and Laura and my Mom and I decided that that was a number that should get some special recognition. So...we all flew to her house in NYC where she is working as a teacher at an inner city school(her spanish really comes in handy for this job) and where she just graduated with a Masters in Education. She is one amazing women who has so many things going on. She always seems to be doing something to help someone else. She is awesome!

Anywho... so I got to NYC on Thursday night and we immediately hit the town. Jessica and I meet up with Alicia, Laura and Mom who had been touring all day in the city, and we went for a walk along the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a very cool walk especially at night, and a great opportunity for me to catch up with my family that I haven't seen in a while. Jessica gave us some pretty interesting facts about how the bridge was built and some of the tragedies that came from the building of it. After our walk we went out to dinner. I think it was about 10pm at this point. Only when I am on a childless vacation can I go out to dinner at 10pm. We went to a popular pizza place and had some of the best pizza any of us had ever tasted. MMmmm MMmmm! What a way to start the trip.

The next day we started out with a stroll through Columbia University campus. I loved the older feel of this school. You could tell the buildings were much older with a lot of history.
Then we walked through Central Park. This is one of the places that I didn't make it to last time I was in NYC when I turned 30. It was such an amazing park. Right there in the middle of the city of skyscraper after skyscraper you have this huge area where you get to enjoy nature. It was a brilliant plan from the city planners.
For dinner we went to Chinatown to one of Jessica's favorite restaurants and had real Chinese food. It was actually very good. I loved it and was happy we went. For dessert we went to a place called Rice to Riches. It was just like an ice cream shop but it had a bunch of flavors of rice pudding instead of ice cream. It was interesting. I didn't love the taste of it, but it seemed to be a very popular place. I shared a rocky road rice pudding with Jessica and just kept thinking that if I am going to eat this it might as well be ice cream. :-)

Saturday morning was Jess's birthday! And we started it off perfectly at the temple. She works at the temple every Saturday morning and decided to go even on her birthday. She left about 6am and we caught up with her for a 9am session. I love going to the temple, and loved being there with my sisters and Mom. It was wonderful. After that we headed to an Owl City concert that Jessica's good friend Christy had gotten her tickets for. Christy coming to town was a surprise for Jessica and I am so happy she decided to come for Jessica's birthday. The concert was strange, but it went by quickly. I just cleaned out my pictures on my camera while I waited for them to be done. And then for one of the highlights of the trip. We got to go see "Lion King" on Broadway! I love seeing shows on Broadway and this one was amazing. The scenery and costumes were awesome. I loved it and was so happy to be there. After the show we went out for dessert to Chocolate By the Bald Man. Wow! this was definitely my kind of restaurant. They had so many chocolate choices it was amazing. And I was hungry for real food so I got tacos, but my sisters let me have a bite of their chocolate. So I got the best of both worlds. I will definitely be repeating that experience next time I get the chance.

Sunday was our last day in NYC. We of course started it at church. It was fun to be in a singles ward for the day. Even if Jessica couldn't be with us. She had Stake assignments and had to go to the spanish ward that day. On our way home from church we got to ride in a yellow cab. Yahoo! and then went home for a short nap before we all went our separate ways to catch our flights back home. What an amazingly awesome trip that I can't wait to do again.

On my way home I missed my connecting flight from Atlanta to Augusta cause the plane from NYC took off late. So, I got one more day of vacation and spent the night in a hotel in Atlanta by myself. Then flew into Augusta wide awake instead of late at night and had to hit Target before heading back to Brooklet. :) Perfect ending.