Happy Valentine's Day!!

Here at the Manwaring house we had a fun Valentine's Day. We woke up to this, left by various members of the family to other various members:)

Nathan's gift is still coming, should be here tomorrow. Nathan wrote me an amazing letter titled "Because you..." and then listed three pages of things that he loves about me. I loved it. James and Jack-Jack got treats and cars. Of course there were the chocolates too. I tried to make heart shaped pancakes for dinner, but that didn't work out entirely. They were good though. Our Bishop decided that since it was Valentine's Day, all the members of the bishopric should go home to their families, so it was a nice treat to have Nathan home that night!

As a family we played with the new cars (a Ferrari set of five) on the blocks that used to be my mom's and uncle's when they were growing up. The blocks have turned into one of James' favorite toys! He plays with them daily. We made ramps and roads for the cars to travel on. I loved spending the time with my three favorite boys.

Saturday night we went to Cheesecake Factory in Salt Lake for "our" Valentine's. We got a sitter too, and the food was excellent as usual! We met Aubreigh and Matt there, and walked around the Fashion Place mall while we waited for our table. From the time that they put their name down to the time we were actually seated was 2.25 hours!!
That gave us time to shop without all our kids for the first time in a long time, and I always buy things when I shop with Aubreigh. She is a great fashion consultant:)
Good thing the Cheesecake Factory is so yummy, we have never had a dish there that we didn't like. Too bad we didn't get any pictures of the night.

Happy Valentine's Day to all! We hope you had a good day!
Sorry our Valentine's were late to our family, but we are trying :)

Awesome Aunts

James and Jack-Jack have awesome aunts, what can I say?

We went and visited Aunt Kirstin in Provo a little bit ago.
The weather was gorgeous, so we got a pizza and went to the park...
yep, pizza and a park in February!!
Kirst and James were having a spitting water contest, then he saw some kids at recess playing with a soccer ball. He loves to kick balls, and when he puts a soccer ball down, he'll say
"Let's play...SOCCER!" (shouting the word soccer and simultaneously putting both arms in the air and pointing his fingers.)


Afterwards we had ice cream at the BYU Creamery on 9th.
James got his own little scoop of vanilla, and Kirstin and I should have shared the sundaes we each got, the girl behind the counter made them huge.
James was so cute, he was talking to the couple who looked like they were on a date in the booth behind us. He told them he got ice cream, then even offered them some.
They thought it was cute, which is good, because hey, he's cute, so don't worry!
Jack-Jack got his first taste of whipped cream.


After that we found some cute puppies for sale in a parking lot (I would later find a different lady selling different kinds of puppies later this trip to Provo), so we gave them all big pets and hugs. The second lady I found I seriously was thinking of getting a puppy.
But impulse buying a puppy...not that good of an idea.

Anyway, thank you awesome Aunt Kirstin for spending the day with us!
James asks for you all the time.
Jack-Jack will get there:)
Now we need to see some more awesome family members!

Brother Buddies

No better buddies than brothers. And when you share the same birthday, of course you'll be buddies :) Best buddies in fact. James just loves Jack-Jack, and many a morning I'll find James in Jack-Jack's crib (though then he'll have woken him up, but we are working on that). In fact this morning he was laying next to him just talking and I could here him say:
"Jack-Jack you are happy? I'm happy, you are happy".
I love how they are so cute together.
And Jackman is quickly learning to be okay with wrestling. James is soft, but will still wrestle with his brother, and Jack likes it too! Jackman will watch James with adoring eyes, and you can just tell that he already looks up to his big brother so much. I love the picture of James feeding Jackman his bottle, while simultaneously feeding himself a bottle and reading them a book. That is multi-tasking!

Bestest buddies James and Jack-Jack

I'm Two!

James knows he is two...he's just working on getting that last little finger to stay down when he shows people:)
In James' words "Oh, two, yep!"
(though he may be holding more than two fingers, so cute!)

The Horsey Sled

Grammies and Bompa gave the kids (well, Jackman will enjoy it next year) a "horsey sled".

They described it as a horse on a sled.
Honestly we really could not picture it.
It truly is a horse bolted onto a radio flyer sled.
Then we picked it up and we thought about the physics of this thing,
and thought: This cannot be safe! The kids will fall off for sure!

Then we tried it out...Kristie, Tom, and Lilah came up to see us (which we loved!), and we decided that this would be a good activity to do with the kids.

Pulling it up the hill

Let's see if this works (for safety note: we did send down adults first, and all was a-okay)


James and Daddy going down
Success!!!

They love it!

Lilah and James, they love it!
Okay, so this gift is awesome, way to hit that one out of the park!
There was only once that I worried when James was going down, but we learned that kids should not ride down a hill in front of the horse. No one got hurt, we just were being safety conscious parents.
Thanks Grammies and Bompa!!

Manwaring Family Pictures

I may be the only one,
but I honestly really like having family pictures taken.
I love the coordinating outfits, and the chaos of it all to get a smile from everyone.
And I really like the end results.
Family pictures in AZ turned out pretty well. We needed an updated one as Bryan, Kayla, Emma, and Jackman have all been added to the family since the last picture two years ago. Last minute, old family friends of mine Rich and Sue Darby, who now live outside of Phoenix, were able to came an hour to Gilbert and take the pictures. Here are some favorites:

The Whole Group


Individual Family Shots


The Originals

The Additions


The Seed

And one last candid that Nathan was able to snag with his smartphone:

An awesome picture of cousins to melt the heart...
Ryan, James, and Kaylee holding hands and walking

Buddies

We got to see Aubreigh and Matt and Quinn a couple of weeks ago. It was fun catching up with them again. These two had fun playing with toys, watching a movie together, and of course bathtime.

Quinn will be two in March, so all our boys are pretty close in age, and hopefully will grow up to be friends.

After putting the kids to bed we tried out the new fire pit. A lesson learned...if it is really cold out, the cement under the fire pit might crack, and sounds very loud when that happens. Love you guys, see you again soon :)

Cute buddies James and Quinn in the bath:)