The Quiet Book

Before Hayden was born I decided I wanted to make him a quiet book at some point. I didn't even start thinking about it until January of this year. Hayden is such an active little kid, I was hoping that having something to entertain him during church might help to make it more productive and not such a fight. 

I scoured Pinterest and the internet for every idea imaginable and narrowed it down to the ones I liked the best. I made list after list of everything I would need and headed to the craft store in late January - February. Since we were pretty much buried in snow until the end of March, I had plenty of time to get to work on it. 

I pretty much worked like crazy almost every day of February, and then got burnt out. I only had 6 pages left to finish, but I didn't touch the thing until just a few weeks ago. I figured it might be a good thing to have on our flight to California this coming week, so I had the motivation to do it. 

It definitely took way more time and energy than I ever could have anticipated, but I am in love with what I ended up with. Lets just hope that if we have another kid, it will be a boy. Then I won't have to do another one!

 

After it was all done I realized how darn HUGE the thing is. It took up our whole diaper bag. So, I decided to make a cute little bag to carry all of Hayden's church stuff in. So easy, and cheap. (The bag was less than $2 at Hobby Lobby). And I had the polka dot fabric leftover from another project!

Goodbye 20's

I hate goodbyes. I dread them. Think about them for days, have major anxiety sometimes, hate them. A big goodbye happened yesterday, when I had to say adios to my 20's. 

It actually was better than I thought it would be, but maybe that's because I had my meltdown Friday night, two days early. 

Darren did a great job planning fun things and great surprises. Since yesterday was a Sunday, we decided to go out to dinner on Saturday. We got a babysitter (hooray!), and went to Olive Garden. I thought we'd have to wait for at least 30 minutes, but we walked right in. We were in and out in less than an hour, and still had the babysitter for two more hours. 

We decided to go mini golfing! We hadn't done that in almost two years. It was really fun. There's a little course just 10 minutes from our house that Darren's been wanting to try, so it was a great excuse.

I started off really great, and then got too cocky and crashed miserably. The funniest part of the night was when Darren tried to bank a shot off a rock in the course and it ended up flying out of the course and across the parking lot. I was laughing so hard I was almost crying.

After golfing we headed home and went to bed. Sunday morning Darren got up with Hayden and we had homemade donuts for breakfast! He thought ahead and baked them the night before, so all he had to do was glaze them and they were ready to go.

We then headed off to church, then home for lunch. My family was able to come up and celebrate with us, so when they got here we relaxed and played some Scattergories until dinner time. 

We had a yummy lasagna dinner complete with garlic bread and green salad, followed by presents and then chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream. It was such a fun, relaxing day. 

Inside the duffle bag was a note from Darren surprising me with a trip in December to celebrate our 5 year anniversary!

Thank you to everyone who called, texted or told me Happy Birthday during the day. I felt incredibly loved and had a great start to another decade!