New Life, New Skills

 It was another busy week (will it ever not be?!?!).  The major highlight of the week was that on Thursday we welcomed two new family members.  Jeremy's brother, Garret, and his wife, Breanna, had twin baby girls.  They are absolutely perfect.  Audrey Carolyn and Monroe (Rori) Carrie were both well over 6 lbs and didn't require any time in the NICU.  We are already obsessed and can't wait to meet them in person.

Back at home, this weekend was all about baseball.  Merrick's team had a rough weekend and got knocked around pretty good.  They ended up getting knocked out of the tournament fairly early this morning.  The only bright spot is that Merrick had a great weekend at the plate.  He even laid down his first successful bunt, something that has alluded him this far in the season.

While Merrick's weekend didn't go the way he wanted, Elsie had a banner weekend.  While Merrick warmed up for his first game, we took advantage of an empty field and taught her how to ride her bike without training wheels.  She has been a pro at her balance bike for a while so it shouldn't have surprised me how quickly she picked it up, but it did.  It took about 5 minutes and she was off and riding on her own.  She still needs just a little help when starting, but she's even getting close on that.  I feel like these big milestones with her are just flying by.

Updates

 It has been a long, busy day to end a long, busy week.  We had a tournament in Vancouver this weekend and after church, headed up there.  As I still have loads of laundry waiting for me to fold before I get to go to bed tonight, I will keep this short and sweet and thankfully Jeremy is getting the laundry party started.

The week started with a choir concert for Carrigan.  She was a little nervous since this was really her first concert post covid.  We assured her that nobody would be looking at her as they would all be looking at their own children.  Also, lucky for her, she is tall so she could hide in the back.  She did great and bonus, the concert was only 15 minutes long.  

The middle of the week was extremely busy with work, school, practices, enrichment activities, church activities, and meetings.  I tried all week to make it over to help my parent with some yard work as they are trying to prep their yard for a new fence next week.  I finally made it over on Friday and Elsie came along to be my big helper.  She actually was a big helper, pulling weeds and moving dirt.  Eventually though she decided she was over it and just wanted to supervise while wearing my sweatshirt and eating peanuts.

Also on Friday, I had my first enrichment class I am teaching at CC's school.  It's a running club and I am teaching it with one other mom.  We have 26 kids we are responsible for from k-5 and it's a fun, but busy and stressful time.  The class will last for the next 6 weeks.

Finally, the week ended with our tournament in Vancouver.  Yesterday we went 1-1 which kicked us into the silver bracket, but today we won both our games to win the silver bracket.  Merrick had a pretty good day.  In the first game he hit an in the park home run.  He was the first person on his team to do that this season.  In the second game he pitched two innings and had two successful plays at the plate to hold the runs to just 1 over the two innings.  Unfortunately, at one of the plays at

 the plate, he reinjured the ankle he had hurt earlier in the week and was mostly out the rest of the game.  He tried to come back out the third inning to pitch but it wasn't going well so he only faced two batters.  With the exception of his at bats, which he had some great hits at, he sat the rest of the game.  Like I said, we eeked out at win to win the tournament.

CC kept herself busy drawing pictures on my phone during the games.  She is quite the little iPhone artist.  She will have a lot of time this season to perfect her skills.

Rain, Rain Go Away!

Living in the PNW I am sure I have used this title a time or two before, but boys is it fitting!  I am getting real sick of all this rain and, judging by the comments of those around me, I don't think I am alone in this.  I feels like Spring is never going to arrive and I have given up.  This week I found myself rearranging my schedule for the kids to play at the park if there was any chance for decent weather.  We did manage to make it to the park a couple times (despite getting rained out almost every time we tried) and were able to couple one of those park days with a trip to the bookfair that was happening this week.

As for Merrick, we have had two weekends off of baseball.  We were scheduled for three weekday scrimmages, but two of the three were cancelled due to rain.  This weekend we finally made it back out to the diamond, with a tournament in Salem.  We played two games yesterday and won them both.  Merrick pitched the second game, the tougher of the two.  He was disappointed with his performance as he walked more batters than he typically does and just wasn't finding his usual zone, but we pulled off a 6-5 win over a really good team.

Today we were excited to get out there and finish off the tournament, but unfortunately the rain had different plans.  We drove all the way to Salem just to have the games called as we were pulling into the parking lot.  So, I tried to make the best of the situation and drove Merrick (and my nephew, Jason) down the road to church in our full baseball getup.  Hopefully we will be able to make the tournament up at another time down the road.  We are anxious to finish what we started.

These pictures came from yesterday, when we had good weather.  I leave you to see in you can spot Merrick.  It might be tricky, he really blends in.

Happy Easter + Extras

 Today is Easter and it has been a great Easter season.  Yesterday we had a church Easter egg hunt for the girls.  Merrick, who is now too old for the egg hunt, went to work and earned about $80 hauling a new shipment of wood shavings for use in the horse stalls.  After a day of egg dying (I neglected to get a picture of the eggs, but you can see Carrigan's artistic rendition of her favorite one below), running errands and prepping for today, we had the missionaries over for dinner.  It was so nice to have them come and bring us an Easter message and realign our focus going into today.

This morning we discovered that the Easter bunny had come over night.  He definitely went overboard on the candy this year, but he also brought something small for each kid.  Merrick got sunflower seeds for baseball (Taki and dill pickle flavored), Carrigan got embroidery floss for making friendship bracelets, and Elsie got a new Barbie.  After baskets, we went to church.  It was a wonderful service, full of beautiful music.  Since it was Easter, Jeremy didn't have any meetings and we were able to go to and home from church together as a family.  This also meant that we could have a nice family brunch after church.

That bring us to now, but there are still more festivities ahead.  This afternoon we will have a family Easter egg hunt and then all the extended family is coming over for dinner.  It will be a busy day.

A couple other things from this week.  Carrigan started a volleyball clinic that runs for the next several weeks.  We'll see if she is more into it this year than she was last year.

Also this week, I had another modeling job for a national tire chain.  I got to model both as a customer and as a mechanic.  It was a little out of my wheelhouse but it was a blast. I don't have any official pictures back, but I snuck this one on my phone of me in my mechanic attire.

Last, but certainly not least, Jeremy has some big news once again.  He was lured back by into a law firm.  He started this week with a large personal injury firm called The Advocates.  While he has really enjoyed his time on his own, we are very excited about the support this firm is going to offer him to grow his personal injury skills in a way that was very difficult to do on his own.  He spent last week in Seattle getting some training and had a great time adventuring around Seattle and even taking in a Mariner's game.  He is excited to hit the ground running here tomorrow.

Spring Break 2023

 Today is the last day of Spring Break.  I didn't get a chance to post last week because we started Spring Break with a baseball trip to Kennewick, Washington, but I will get back to that in a minute.  Over the last 6 weeks we have traveled 3 weekends.  Couple that with the fact that our washing machine decided to die on us and the part we need is back ordered and so we have been begging and borrowing machines from family and running clothes back and forth to pack and repack, it has been exhausting!  Thankfully, we are done traveling for sports for a while and we broke down and bought a new washing machine, which will be delivered next week.

Back to baseball, it was a rough weekend for Merrick's team.  Our games were rife with errors in the field, and we apparently left our bats in West Linn.  Our only win for the weekend came in the game Merrick pitched.  He pitched like a beast with 97 pitches, 67 of which were strikes.  In his 5 innings, 11 of 15 outs were strike outs.  Unfortunately, the errors in the field continued, and while he had an ERA of 0, they still let in 6 runs on errors.  We squeaked out a 7-6 win.  Even more impressive, it turns out that Merrick had food poisoning.  He came off the field and immediately went to the bathroom.  He had to sit out the entire next game and was vomiting in the dugout.  Luckily, he got it out of his system before our drive home and it was uneventful.  Oh, we also forgot to bring our air mattress and had to get creative on a bed for Elsie with a chair and ottoman.  She liked it though and called it her "princess bed".  The girls also liked the carousel at the field, I think they preferred that over the games.

Once back in West Linn, our week started with camps for all the kids.  Merrick had a pitching camp Monday-Wednesday.  Carrigan had a soccer camp Monday-Thursday.  Elsie had a gymnastics camp on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday.  It meant that I had a one and one day with both Elsie and Merrick.  For C.C., she mostly enjoyed her camp, but it was raining and freezing for Tuesday's camp and I almost didn't get her to go back.

On Elsie's one on one day, she chose to start at the library.  She colored and played with the light board.  She then wanted to go to McDonald's to play at the Playplace and get a happy meal.  As for her camp, she said she really liked it but I also know she cried everyday.  This was her first time really being away from me and it was tough for her.

On Merrick's one on one day, he wanted to go thrifting.  We went to three different thrift stores and didn't end up with a lot to show for it, but Merrick did find a baseball book he is excited to read and a long-sleeved West Linn Baseball jacket.  His camp was uneventful.

Jeremy all so took some time this week to do somethings with the family.  We ended up going to two different arcades over the week.  On Tuesday, we went to Dave & Buster's and came home with such treasures as a new stuffy, a toilet light (that turns the bowl various colors), and a mini disco ball.  On Friday, we went to an arcade that we have never been to.  It's called Next Level and it's an arcade/museum.  It has over 500 pinball and other arcade games.  You pay a daily admission fee and then all the games are on free play mode.  The thing that cracks me up is that Elsie loves the shooting games, but she doesn't care to aim, she just wants to swing the gun and shoot with abandon while singing Disney princess songs at the top of her lungs.  My favorite was her rendition of "Colors of the Wind" while shooting dinosaurs.  Jeremy was able to accomplish an apparent life-long dream of beating all Time-Crisis games.  I personally loved the Jumanji game and C.C. developed a love for classic pinball.

It was a fun week! Next week will be back to the grind, but only ten more weeks until summer!