Our Little Honey Buns: How We Wrapped Up 2024

October 2024

Dear Kiddos,

The last post left off right before Halloween. I pushed the easy button this year and ordered our costumes but we did end up making Hailey's Vocabulary Parade Costume. You absolutely love Ketchup so we couldn't think of a better "fancy" word for you to represent.

We also managed to decorate pumpkins. Since we were following tradition and doing a family theme, we purchased pumpkins with the intention of decorating them like the character that we were going to be. However, we were quickly reminded how thick and hard pumpkins were, so we mostly aborted and did different things instead.

Daddy's Fear

Nathan's Unknown

Hailey's Star Pumpkin Face

My Anxiety

Hannah's Jack-o-lantern with star cheeks.

And now for some behind the scenes photos.

Grandma and Grandpa visited the week before Halloween and we ended up going to pumpkin nights as a family.

Unfortunately, they left before it was Halloween night. It was the perfect night to go trick-or-treating. The weather was beautiful.

Nathan, your voice is starting to change and get deeper. At this point, you are almost as tall as I am.

November 2024

In November, Hailey, you earned your blue belt in martial arts. Your dedication and committed facial expressions are always so fun to watch. You are a great leader in the class and you are getting to be so strong. Usually at the end of class, there is a game of battle ball. You are proud to be a "good dodger" and you hardly ever pick up balls to throw at other kids. I don't know how to encourage you to throw the ball more, but hopefully you will see soon how running around doesn't really help your team much.

Hannah performed with the all-city choir on the same weekend Nathan and I went to a church retreat. This was Nathan's first sleep away camp experience and for Hannah, only 10 kids from the school were invited to sing at the all-city choir.

The highlight of your retreat was archery and smores. You claim to be afraid of heights so you did a few things on the ropes course and then called it a day, but I was proud of you for trying.

The week before Thanksgiving, we flew to San Francisco to celebrate Daddy's cousin's wedding. We landed just before the clouds brought heavy rains, but we ended up having to stay in California an extra day because of icy conditions.

We made the most of our San Francisco trip. We went to prison. (Alcatraz)

We checked out the cable car museum and got to see how the cable cars system worked throughout the city,

We visited a pretty cool science museum,

We did a lot of walking around downtown. I was very disappointed with how dirty downtown was. We really had to watch where we were going because there were "landmines" everywhere we walked. The city has a pretty large unhoused population and when public restrooms are closed, they have nowhere to go. On the trip, we didn't mention what type of landmines these were, so I think you all just assumed that they belonged to dogs.

We got to see everyone that night at a welcome reception. You kids kept yourselves entertained.

Oh, this is when we went to jail. The headset tour was super interesting and made the place just come alive. Everyone really enjoyed this tour.

We did all the touristy things and stopped at various landmarks like this is the mosaic stairway.

We partied it up at the wedding and the girls showed off their dance moves!

We visited Chinatown and went to the fortune cookie factory. It was a small place with overpriced cookies, but we bought a small bag to support their business. The bag had different flavors of fortune cookies that we've never had before too!

We spent one afternoon at fisherman's wharf. We visited different landmarks, bought some chocolates.

Spent a couple hours at the penny arcade,

Walked into a candy store and managed to NOT spend any money!

And checked out the seals at Pier 61, but somebody ended up throwing a tantrum, so they missed out on seeing their favorite animal up close.

It was cute to watch the sea lions sunbathing on the little docks. There were a few sea lions that would try to jump onto the platform with all the other ones and they would be knocked back into the water. They are just like kids...there were all those other empty docks, but they just had to go on the one that everyone else was on.

We also drove across the golden gate bridge to try to get some ice cream in Sausalito, but we couldn't find parking anywhere, so we ended up not getting any ice cream.

One of the bucket list meals that I wanted to have was good sushi. I found this place on-line that had great reviews. I guess it being Thanksgiving week, it was not busy and we were able to get a reservation day of. It was the best sushi that I've ever had in my life. It was probably the most expensive meal that we have had as a family (usually we are Chipotle, Chick-fil-a and Tarka type folks), but everyone enjoyed it.

The aquarium at the science museum was pretty amazing. We got to see a lot of salt water life forms that we don't get to see in Texas.

We stayed at a historic hotel. I had to google the contraption to the right of the toilet.

It's a bidet.

Because we had to stay an extra day in the area, we drove to San Clara to go get some soup dumplings.

Afterwards, we went to a park with large sequoias. Hailey wanted to take our picture and told us how to pose.

The trees were ginormous!

And so were the leaves. It was a bit chilly that day, but it was a perfect day to go on a short hike.

And at that park, we met the world's luckiest banana slug. For the 3 minutes that it took for us to walk by, 10's of people walked over it, pushed strollers over it, but never stepped or rolled onto the slug. We became a little obsessed with the banana slug for the rest of the trip.

We also drove to the mystery spot and experienced the "supernatural anti-gravity" phenomenon of the mystery spot.

We got back in time for Auntie Momo and Justin to come down to celebrate Thanksgiving with us!

December 2024

I checked off another bucket list item of being a part of a church nativity scene. Hailey, you. Daddy and I told the story of the birth of baby Jesus. Nathan and Hannah got to work in the petting zoo. I don't know how Nathan, you always ends up with poop duty when you work with animals, but it was not as good an experience for you as it was for Hannah.

Nathan, you also had your very first band concert. I was so impressed with how good the beginning band sounded.

We added an additional llama to the family this year.

And Hailey, you let us know that you know the truth about Santa, and the elves, and the tooth fairy. But for some reason, you were very excited to help set up Bubby's mischief eventhough you know everyone in the family now knows.

As a mom, it was a very disappointing Christmas. The excitement and magic was gone. I am going to have to think about how to bring back the magic next year.

We did do our traditional gingerbread houses this year, but this year, I made you big kids create your own templates and I would just make the cookies using your templates.

We drove around the neighborhood to look at the lights and this year, they were a bit more disappointing than usual. We did, however finally go check out the Hogwarts display because this was going to be the last year that they were doing it.

Oh, and I finally remember why Christmas wasn't as magical... I was sick with the flu during the week leading up to it. I finally got better right as we were going to fly to Chicago.