Catch up

I don’t even want to call this post by that title, because it’s going to be far from caught up when I’m done with it. Oh well. I almost didn’t remember how to blog! lol. I have no idea how to change the pic at the top, so just ignore the super outdated pictures you see there. I’ll just load this up with pics and narrate a little, shall I?

Baby 4, another girl, will be making her entrance to the world in 4-5 weeks. Hopefully more like 4. We aren’t for sure decided on a name. But we are decided on which car seat to buy. Priorities, people.

Back in October, we took a family trip to Albuquerque to visit Mark’s sister Aubri and husband Bryan. It happened to be the same weekend as the Balloon Fiesta so we took part in those festivities as well. It was a VERY fun trip, and our last as a family of five. This pic is of the kids in a small town in AZ on the way to NM that had this cute little wigwam hotel complete with old restored cars parked outside each “room.”

We stayed with Bryan’s parents in their beautiful home, and can I just tell you that their yard was the highlight of the trip for everyone? My favorite was this raspberry patch. We went out every day and picked big bowls of sweet, juicy, ripe raspberries. It was SUCH a treat.

The huge swings were the kids’ favorite. They could go REALLY high on those things.

We visited the ABQ zoo, which was delightful. The animals were more interesting to look at than in PHX, probably because they were moving, and not just laying in shade escaping the heat. We saw a 9 day old baby elephant which was oh so adorable. The polar bear feeding was really fun to watch; the zookeeper guy would throw a fish into their enclosure far away from where they were, and they had to dive and splash and slide to get to it. Super cool.

So the balloon fiesta. Friday night was the balloon glow, which is where all the balloons are tethered to the ground, but the balloon handlers would light up the fire thingy to fill the balloon with light. You are supposed to walk around and look at all the different shapes and designs, all the while marveling at their ginormity and ponder on your own smallness.  Well, by the time we got there, parked, walked down the massive staircase to the field, the balloons were all deflating and were being put away. So…we saw like 2 balloons up close.

Next morning we woke up like at 4:30 or something unholy like that and made it to the field before the balloons started. Well, it was FREEZING and we AZ peeps were not huge fans of the cold. We were very bundled but the kids were so whiny and complaining so much that we ended up leaving before we saw many balloons. We did eat donuts though. The kids were like, what’s a donut? haha. Now they know.

Here’s the view of the balloons from the Blackers’ house. Apparently the wind speed was at a borderline level, so many of the balloons did not lift off. Normally there are around 250, this day there were less than 100. Still impressive though.

Up close with Natalie and Aubri. Did I mention it was cold?