Lately in Windom: April 2015

It has been too long since an update, but truthfully, we've just had a lot going on, and it has been too nice to sit down at the computer in the evenings when the weather is so nice!

Trampling the plants around the tree has become a favorite pasttime.

The boys have decided that they really enjoy swinging...backwards. Cashel likes it when we push him so high that his feet touch the upper deck.

Cashel was kinda obsessed with Easter eggs for a while. He had no issue taking control of the ones Kendrick found lol

Two sickies at the doctor. Kendrick for a bad ear infection and Mama for apparently nothing.

We had a fabulous lunch date with Mark's Grandma a week before her big party. While we all enjoyed the party, I think we ALL preferred catching up in this fashion more :)

Sometimes lunch is just too hard ;)

Helping Daddy wash the car

Love this man :)

Time to create!

This smile!!!!

"ME!!!"

We decided to fly kites one afternoon, but the boys were disinterested fairly quickly.

He only looks about twelve here. ::sigh::

Cashel and I met my college roommie Mandy and her daugther Claire for supper, then came back to our house for some jumpy house time. So fun to see these two :)

This is about how it goes getting all 3 of them to look at the camera lol

Love this lady! I cannot wait until the end of August to meet their new little one!!



OMgosh, these two!

I may look completely ridiculous, but this little boy and his sweet little face just melts me :)

The day these cheeks disappear, I might just die :(

The day lilies are coming alive even if we've had VERY little rain around these parts.

They were so completely worn out the day after Great Grandma Vi's party that they barely even made it to the table for lunch that day.

Long, early naps for the boys meant a nice, long walk for Mama and a long day of NASCAR for Daddy.

Big boy!

Usually their hugs look like this :)

This little dude can move FAST on this "bike".

Our favorite thing lately has been to take a walk (or ride in the stroller) down to check out "Moo" (as Kendrick says), the horsies down at Reinbows. Both boys go NUTS!

While Daddy is away, this is how we roll!

My 2 month changes at the gym!

Cashel thinks his knuckles are his muscles. Lately, the easiest way to get him to eat his food is to tell him that we need to see his muscles, and then point to each knuckle and say, "those carrots will make that one bigger", to which he gets excited and will eat more carrots. Hey, whatever it takes, right?

They're so cute playing together these days :)

Granted, the adorable above picture usually ends up like this:

If I keep posting pictures, I may never stop, so I'd better let this be it :)

April Recap

I don't know how it is possible that April has already come and gone. I feel most days like life is just flying right by and I'm hanging on and being pulled along. I try to remember to just take tons of pictures so that when I look back and realize where we've been, we can remember. (Thank goodness I'm good at remembering to take them!)

April has been so all over the board for us. We started the month with a fun weekend in Humboldt with almost all of the Ropte family at the farm. You can find a full recap here.

We followed the weekend of fun celebrating Easter with church and then lunch and an Easter egg hunt in Worthington with Mark's Dad and Pam and family. You can find a full recap here.

Mark and I kept with our visits to the gym, grudgingly, which kept us busy in the evenings once the boys went to bed. I'm beginning to think that I'm going to have to be very okay with the house being in shambles if we keep up the gym thing, because it feels like we never have any downtime these days.

Kendrick had a rough month starting with teething, leading into a nasty ear infection that was treated with an antibiotic that ended up causing a bad candida rash. Finally by the middle of the month he was starting to feel more himself, but that was a pretty rough few weeks.

We enjoyed some fun family walks and lots of time outside together. One night we walked the 2 miles to Dairy Queen together: The boys love those Dilly bars!

We also thoroughly enjoyed celebrating Mark's Grandma Vi this month, as she celebrated her 90th birthday on the 27th!

We took her to lunch at Perkin's as part of a date afternoon in Worthington, and then enjoyed her big party on the 25th with a good chunk of the Johnson family. You can check out a full recap here
.

On a totally vain note, I finally got my front tooth fixed up this month, and although I'm sure no one else ever even noticed it, it seems like a huge difference to me! It had been gradually discoloring for years, and with a quick 20 minute dentist visit, it was all better!

Cashel and I also enjoyed visiting with Mandy and Claire, joining them for supper at Margarita's Ville in town here and then hanging out back at the house. I am so excited for their second little one to arrive in August!

Mostly, we just spent a lot of time outside, whether riding bikes, visiting the horses, swinging, visiting local parks, and just running around all over the place.

Looking Ahead...

Something tells me this coming summer is going to be a busy one! We already have all but one weekend booked through the first weekend in JULY, and it's only mid-May! We have zero actual vacation plans at this point, but we're hoping to start taking some half days off work to get out on the jet ski if the weather gets warm enough. Mark will be 36 and Kendrick will be 2 in August, so we'll definitely have some celebrating to do! Other than that, we're just taking it each day at a time!

Happy Birthday, Grandma Vi!

Mark's grandma turns 90 years old today. NINETY! It has been such a privilege to get to know her over the past 10 years that I have known Mark and his family. Grandma Vi is such an inspiration to me, and if I could grow into a perfect combination of her and my own mother, I'd die a happy woman :)

It will likely be a while before I get a chance to sit down and recap the big party this past weekend, but I thought in honor of this special woman, I'd share the video scrapbook I put together containing the digital scrapbook pages from the bound book I designed for her. 92 pages somehow doesn't seem like enough to recap her incredible life, but here is my attempt :)

Grandma Vi's 90th Birthday Party (April 25)

Oh man is this post a LONG time in the coming. I had every intention of getting all my digital scrap booking completed and being able to do this justice, but truthfully, that is just not going to happen. I'll be lucky if I finished these pages by the time the snow is falling.

But what I DO have complete is all my photo editing, which I somehow managed to complete even with my little boys feeling that 9:30pm is an appropriate bedtime, since, you know, "It's not bed time, Mama - it's not dark yet!"

Three weeks ago, a large chunk of the Johnson clan gathered together at Lakeside Church (formerly "First Baptist") in Worthington to celebrate one particularly incredible woman: Mark's Grandma Vi. I feel so incredibly blessed to have married into a family full of such a wonderful legacy, and this woman is the matriarch that started it all.

Vi turned ninety years old, and I'm going to be honest and say that if I can even look as awesome as she does when I'm 70, I'll be happy. And if I can be half as incredible as she is in my lifetime, I'd consider that a HUGE win.

Photo credit: Drew Johnson

It's hard to believe that this is only about half of Mark's immediate family, as his brother and sister and their families weren't able to make it.

Photo credit: Drew Johnson

It's also hard to believe that our tiny little family has grown so much! Our boys adore Grandma Vi!

It was so fun to see these ladies (cousins and cousins' wives), even if we hardly get the chance to visit at family events these days. It was also SO FUN to meet the newest Johnson boys (the youngest pictured below), born just a couple months apart. We missed Kirsten in this one since she hadn't arrived yet - boo!

We also missed Mark's Aunt, who had put SO MUCH work into this party (seriously - hours upon hours upon hours), and then had an unfortunate injury the night before the party :( I think it's safe to say that all her work certainly paid off, as it was a beautiful party, but we were so sad for her that she didn't get to enjoy it :( I mean, any party with party hats is a success, right?

One of the things I love about Vi is that she's all about breaking the rules. She wrote in a letter to us last week that she got such a kick out of seeing Cashel's eyes when she dipped her finger into the cake. We had been telling him that he wasn't to touch the cake, and oh.my.goodness! haha :)

What was really my favorite part, though, was to see Grandma's reaction to the book.

Photo credit: Drew Johnson

I felt so incredibly humbled to be able to give her this book of memories. She is such an incredible woman, and I feel like somehow I know her more deeply than before after having this opportunity to put a small piece of her history in her hands. (Not that it helped me at ALL with the quiz we took on her haha)

Here's the whole group of 30 of us who made it for the big party! It is crazy to think that we were still missing 13 (and a half - come on, baby Jase!!) and to realize just how much this family has grown since I joined it in 2006. My oh my does life ever grow and change and evolve over time: Grandma Vi is a testament to that!

Photo credit: Drew Johnson