Trip to California

We got back a week or so ago from California where my sisters and I threw a baby shower for my other sister, Amanda, whom is expecting her first baby in June. Wesley was able to make a business trip out of it, he had to be there anyway for part of the week so he extended his stay. We decided to just stay through Mother's Day so we were there for a week and a half and it was great to be there for that time. Lea and her kids came from St. Louis and Sam made it for the weekend and that was great! Aside from the baby shower which is posted below, we went to the park one night. Here's our little family at the park: Felecia and Logan on the way to the park:

Jacob can't get enough of the slide. Wesley pushes him up and lets go and Jake just slides down and gets the biggest kick out of that, as you can see below:

Jake and Daddy on the swings Lea and Taylor on the swings, isn't Taylor just the cutest?

Us four girls on the swings together
Mom and Dad Vick at the park
Us girls after church



Mason and Abby hugging, they are so sweetWe went to Claim Jumper for dinner one night. Can you believe that this is just 1/2 of the Vick family? This is only the girls, none of the Vick boys were there.
Mom Vick always has delicious desserts. Logan loves food. Here he is with strawberry shortcake - a loaded one at that, and this is his second helping!

Wesley and I love San Francisco. There are lots of fun memories there, and it's just so fun to be in the city. Denver isn't quite the same when it comes to going downtown, so we try to make a trip when we go to San Francisco to visit my family. Now that my parents are moving soon, we probably won't make it hardly at all, how sad! So, we've never walked across Golden Gate Bridge, I've lived in California for over 15 years and never done it. We went to San Francisco, ate lunch at Lori's 50's diner, then walked across the bridge, which was so much fun, I can't believe I've never done it. Then we drove over to Sausalito and browsed the shops there. It was a great day.
I just think this is the sweetest picture. My friend Becki was able to come for a visit while I was at my mom's house and brought her daughter that I've not seen for over a year now. She's (Maya) 18 months old and such a sweet, cute girl. I had to post this picture of the two of them.

Amanda's Shower

My sisters, mom and I threw a shower for Amanda (my sister, obviously) in California at my mom's clubhouse. Lea and I along with our families were able to go with and we all had a great time. I thought I would post some of the pictures of the decorations, we had a lot of fun putting it all together. Amanda loves Gerber daisies so we used that flower to decorate and wrapped ribbon around each bundle. In this picture, there are some block letters of Simon (the name of Amanda's baby-t0-be) that were made by Lea herself! She did an amazing job, if you can zoom in the picture, you should because the letters look great! This is a diaper cake that Felecia and I made. Amanda's colors are brown and green with a frog theme, thus the green and brown you see continuously.
Amanda wanted some mommy advice from her guests so we made a 'Penny for your Thoughts' table. There was a lot of great advice given.

This table has a bunch of prego pictures of Amanda. They turned out so adorable. The favors are also there on the table to the right that we made and put peanut m&m's in for people to take home.

We had a bunch of these scattered around the room. This is the food table. We had a brunch with donuts, crepes with chocolate, jam and/or powdered sugar, of course, and then there was a fruit basket. We had a really yummy punch of 7up and a passion fruit juice. YUM-O (like Rachael Ray would say)!!!

We had games, they were really fun and a bit different than what I've seen before but of course, we had to do "Guess her girth" and everyone used toilet paper to guess Amanda's girth. This was the only picture we got of her pregnant, and I'm so sad that I didn't get any other pictures of her cute belly.

Family Visit

Tanya (Wesley's sister) and her family came out to visit from New York a few weeks ago. They were checking out the area to see if this might be a place they would want to move to. We hope we sold them on it, because we would love having them live closer! Here are a couple of pictures of this visit. Here's Jason and Alana (Tanya and Dan's kids) while taking a walk. They just had another boy, Tyler who is in the cousin's picture below.

The kids all gathered around and decided to do some reading. Maddie really made herself comfortable. She's the best at making a 'nest' to get comfy.
Clint and Kara's kids, Tanya and Dan's kids, and Jake together, what happy little cousins! Oh,

Tanya and Dan, Kara and Clint and Wesley and I.

Jake loves Wesley's office and loves his electronics. As you can see, he loves to play with computers. We have a computer that is just about to die and Wesley let Jake play with it one night. He prefers to play ON it. It's funny the things kids can do. He was able to turn it on and get into all sorts of programs that I'm sure would take me a while to find.

Jake loves corn, well, he loves vegetables but loves it when I give him my corn on the cob. I will eat mine and let him suck on it afterward. He went to town with this one.

My latest favorite purchase!!!!

I love this set, just love it! I wish this is how my bedroom looked, but the picture I took didn't turn out very well so I found this one. I get so excited to just pass by my room so I can look at my new bedding set! I'm the kind of person who needs things changed around pretty often so now I can trade between this and my other comforter. And by the way, it was so cheap! I love a bargain and I love not spending full price on anything so this is doubly exciting! $69.00 at Linens 'n Things, can you find a cheaper deal that looks this cute?

MY BOYS

We went out to the backyard since the weather was gorgeous and Wes and Jake played together. It was so cute to watch them. They are quite the pair, Jacob can't stand to be away from him. Any time Wesley is around, Jacob HAS to be in his arms. He's definitely a daddy's boy right now.

It's the Big One!

Happy Birthday to my baby boy, Jacob! Born on Friday, the 13th of April at 5lbs 10oz, he was just the most precious. Every stage has been our favorite and I can't believe a year has gone by already! What a joy he is to us and I can't imagine life without him.

Doesn't he look so big? Here he is after church, what a handsome little guy!

We had planned a BBQ and invited a bunch of people over, but I thought since the weather was going to be nice and we'd be outside, we'd be fine in our backyard. Well, I'm finding that the forecast in Colorado is rotten. It said it would be in the 60's , well it wasn't. He was too cold for anyone to go outside so we had 14 adults and 17 children all inside my house. Thankfully, no one seemed to care that it was a little crammed and we had a fun time and yummy food. But, then I forgot to take a picture of Jake after he'd eaten the cake, I forgot about the HUGE macaroni salad I'd stayed up until 2am making and nearly forgot about the pinata. Some had already left and the rest stayed so we could do the pinata (and mostly so I wouldn't have a nervous breakdown). Are any of you like me where you want it all to go as planned and if it doesn't, then you get so bummed that it went otherwise? I never realized I was that way until just recently.

But, we got a cute little birthday cake that they give for free if it's the first bday. He didn't do as much damage as I thought he would.

He was a little nervous with the crowd of people staring at him but loosened up after a bit.

The kids were SO anxious for Jake to open his presents and enjoyed it thoroughly, as you can see them all crowded around him. They were all so cute trying to get him to open the gifts.

David (his cousin) missed Jake's party so on Sunday during dinner at Clint and Kara's, David pulled out their gift to Jake, a orange 'n cream popsicle, which was probably his favorite gift he received.

He couldn't get enough of this popsicle. He kept fussing b/c it was too cold on his fingers and when I took it away, he nearly flipped out, well actually there was a bit of a tantrum. It was pretty emotional for him... a bit dramatic for me.

Kara made a German chocolate cake and since Jake was familiar of all the faces in the room, he went to town! This picture was taken after I wiped his mouth a bit( I just kept forgetting about the picture taking...) but we enjoyed watching him eat it!

Max put a ball in Jake's jacket making him my little hunch back boy. I'm not sure when this was but I know that either Clint, David, Max or Maddie were around because Jake has a superb mohawk going on. You'll never see Jake without one when they are around. As much as I might protest the mohawk (mostly for church), I DO think it's really cute on him.

It was a great bday for Jake, he got lots of fun toys and LOTS of sugar to last him a whole year and I can't believe he's already 1! Happy Birthday to my big boy!

DISNEY WORLD

Well, we just got back from Disney World and of course, had a blast! We went with Wesley's parents as well as Clint and Kara (Wesley's brother) and family. We went to Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom (twice) MGM (Hollywood Studios) and Epcot from Tuesday thru Saturday. It was hot hot hot all week long with occasional thunder storms, which we were lucky to only get caught in one big storm and got poured on. It was very family-friendly, allowing us to use the stroller pass, letting your party ride the roller coaster and the ones that waited with the babies got to jump to the front of the line afterward. We took advantage of the fast pass so we never really waited long on any ride, even though it was super crowded, being spring break and all. The house we stayed in had a pool so there was lots of swimming when we weren't at the parks. Now that we are back, we are just exhausted! People say we need a vacation from our vacation. Here's some fun pictures from our trip (lots of pictures):
Here we are at MGM by Mickey's hat: We saw a few 3-D films, I think 3 or 4 and they were all so much fun. I think my favorite was Filharmagic at Magic Kingdom. Here we are sportin' our 3-D glasses, a pair of cuties, no?:

I think this was at Hollywood Studios... wait, I mean San Francisco. See the Golden Gate Bridge in the background? Our old stomping ground:

Our daily ice cream stop... so refreshing with that heat. Jake really enjoyed his Zazookie, if that's how you say it. No, we didn't give him the whole thing, just a taste and he loved it!

Enjoying our ice creams:

His first time at Disney World wouldn't be complete without a set of Mickey ears. Our little cutie!

Clint, Kara, David and Max riding the Whirl roller coaster, I don't remember very many names of the roller coasters but this was in DinoLand at Animal Kingdom and that was a fun one.

Okay, this ride... I went on it twice, this first time I closed my eyes during the majority of it. The second time I was feeling pretty confident and got through most of it without much screaming (okay that's a lie... that's all I did was scream and pull on Wesley's arm just like you see in the picture below) but when it got to the last part of the ride, boy did I scream - since my eyes were closed during that part the first time, I was in for it b/c it freaked me out! It was a fun ride though. I think Wes enjoyed my freaking out more than he enjoyed the ride.

My cute boys. We were on our way to see the gorillas and Jake was just loving being with Daddy. They are such a cute pair, Jake loves Wesley, but who wouldn't?

All of us together, right after riding Soarin' at Epcot - the best ride ever, we just loved it!

Our future astronaut:

Our little family in the Nemo ride, which was adorable! Jake fell asleep on a lot of the rides he could go on, including Winnie the Pooh. I think he may have fallen asleep on this ride as well.

Jake in Bruce's mouth from Nemo:

Mine and Jake's favorite ride. A cute dino ride that one morning we rode 3 times in a row. We loved it!

Jake tried pudding for the first time and it was a hit! He loved it, as you can see:
At the house we stayed at, Jake noticed that their cabinets were not baby proofed so he took full advantage of playing IN them.

Jake's new favorite thing is playing in the pool. He could have stayed in there all day! Notice the mohawk... you will never see him without one if Clint is around. He's mastered the mohawk on Jake, although it hardly stayed in Florida because of the humidity. This is one of my favorite pictures. Jake was pretty clingy all week but on the last night he decided to go to grandma and grandpa and they read to him and it was so cute!