Valentines Day

We had a great Valentines DayS this year.  We decided to go out the day before V-day to avoid the crowds plus it's easier to find a babysitter, so I planned a nice night-in for the day of.  Then we realized that Cody's brother was coming to stay with us on Valentines Day so we did our night-in Thurs night, and before you knew it we had two Valentine's Day Dates before the actual day, but it was fun cause it sort of extended the holiday.

So for my date, I borrowed some patio furniture from the ward (can't wait til Spring to get our own!), strung up some xmas lights on the patio, and rented a space heater so we could create a sort of cafe atmosphere and I made a fancy dinner followed by a viewing of "Return to Me" (one of my favorites).  I couldn't get a good angle where you could see the whole of our patio so I just took a lot from different angles:

Ambiance is half the battle.

I made the pioneer woman's steak oscar with a terrigan (sp?) hollandaise sauce topped with sautéed shrimp and roasted asparagus.  It was my first time cooking shrimp or making the sauce but I think it came out pretty good and Code loved it. 

For dessert we had chocolate fondue in our new fondue pot, it was super easy/fast to make and of course VERY yummy with strawberries, raspberries, bananas, shortbread cookies, and rice krispies to dip, ok, ok, DUNK.

On the night before Vday we went out to eat at Spicy Corea and then saw a play at BYU and got some DELICIOUS Belgium Waffles on center street at a new place right across from the new temple.  I see many date nights in our future that include temple and yummy waffles!  Code also got me some beautiful flowers (I don't really like roses so he always gets me bright colorful flowers).

The day of we did a lil tradition that I grew up with.  My dad would always leave our Valentines treats/presents whatever on the doorstep and ring and run around to the back of the house.  This year we got Jake a pink tie and a lightening mcqueen stuffed pillow-thing.

couldn't really get him to hold still or smile with his goodies but he was excited!

That night we played games with PJ (or Peejee as Jake called him) and Megan.

Andy and PJ!

It was a fun couple of days and I love Cody and my boys so much!  I'm surrounded by studs ;)

Life is so dramatic

Let's just say that living with a 2 year old is never boring.  Most days are fine with only minor breakdowns over things like eating dinner or me saying no to watching a movie.  Every now and then tho, I wonder what it'd be like to be his teacher or his nursery leader where he's generally well-behaved for them, and always happy to see them, whereas he seems to save all of his not-so-charming moods for me.  Why am I so lucky?  I know I know, I just happen to spend the most time with him.  I guess I just have to hold on to those sweet little moments like when I pick him up from his weekly play group/school and he shouts Mommy! with the biggest grin, rather than focusing on 30 min later when he's screaming and crying because he asked for something and I gave it to him.  I know, the nerve.

And yet, when it's time to go down for a nap-something you'd think he'd hate and fight, he's happy as a clam and goes quietly.  I guess I should get used to not trying to understand/predict what he's going to do.

In other news, I'm trying to get back in the swing of keeping up my house a bit.  When I have a kid I kinda give myself a lot of slack for the first month or so until we settle down into our new routine.  Well, we are def in the swing of things and I've let our bathrooms go a ridiculous amount of time without a good cleaning....TMI I know.

I'm not necessarily OCD/crazy neat freak, but I grew up in a very clean/minimalistic environment so I definitely notice when things aren't that way. At the same time just because I notice, doesn't bother me enough to jump right on it cause I'm a bit lazy when it comes to things like that.  I do want to get better at just picking 1 or 2 things to do a day that way our house is always pretty clean.  I have to admit, I kind of like it, tho I don't want to be one of those wives/moms who is going crazy cause their kids/husbands mess things up-I don't mind it being lived-in and want to be relaxed.  Clean, not sterile is what I'm going for.

In other news, last night Cody and I went to see the Count of Monte Cristo (the musical) put on at BYU.  Apparently it's the first run of the show in America so that's pretty cool.  The cast was really talented, tho the sound mixing was a lil off-or at least we were sitting way forward so it was hard to hear what they were saying over the music, plus I usually like to generally know a musical before I see it-enjoy it more.  Still, it was really cool and now we're going to watch the movie tonight cause it put us in the mood.  Love that movie.

Andrew's Blessing

I just realized that I never blogged about Andrew's blessing day-whoops!
We had my parents and Cody's dad in town which was special-Jake was naturally on cloud 9 going back and forth between his grandpas every 5 minutes :)
We had some family from Provo, Salt Lake, and Ogden come down for some breakfast before sacrament meeting and it was fun to chat and catch up.  We felt very loved and supported.  Cody gave Andrew a beautiful blessing and the name: Andrew Gary Nolden, and thankfully he was good and quiet the whole time-you always worry that they're going to cry in the mic. :)
 It was hard to take pictures with everyone cause we taught second hour and had to run off to our class, so not much time for loitering, but we managed a few-but took them mostly at home after church:

 Aunt Rosie & Uncle Steve- Andy is sort of smiling here!

 Gpa & Gma Richards and Andrew:

Gpa Frank and Andrew:

Andrew was obsessed with the fan so that's where he's looking in all of these haha

I realized only after the fact that we hadn't gotten a picture of andrew and his lil outfit so we snapped a few real quick (of course he had a huge scratch on his face from his sharp lil newborn nails- I HATE trimming nails/so scared I'm going to cut them too short/make him bleed):

 He's really good at staring with wide eyes:

Yeah...we tried to get him to smile but he wasn't having it

Our Family of Four, we love our boys! And I love how sweet and interested Jake has been in Andy from the get-go.  During the day if I pull out a blanket Jake's all: "tummy time!" and always asks where Andy is when I go to get Jake up in the morning/or if he's down for a nap.  Such a sweet older brother, and I can tell these two will have too much fun when Andy is old enough to join in :)

We had so much fun seeing so much of our family!  Every now and then Jake still asks where "papa" is and we remind him 1 papa is in texas and 1 papa is in Georgia.

It was a great day and I'm grateful for the power of the priesthood and all of the priesthood holders in our family.

Life has been pretty good here at the Nolden household.  Andy is getting better and better at nap time and is now sleeping in his crib in his room which makes his parents very happy :)  He's been sleeping through the night for awhile now, but his naps range from 45 min long to hours long so you just never know what to expect come naptime.  He's a very happy, chill kid though and only cries when he's hungry or is putting himself down to sleep.

Jake is doing great-we've been practicing and learning our ABCs.  Thanks to a leap frog letter factory DVD and some ABC puzzles and rug in his room he gets lots of repetition.  He's got most of his letters and their sounds down.  It's fun to see him grow up.

Cody recently got called to be the priest quorum advisor in our ward and is loving it so far.  His job is going well and I'm so proud of how hard he's working/all he's accomplishing.

Riley (our trouble-making havanese) turned one yesterday.  His favorite activities include: fishing trash out of the trashcan and tearing it up in little pieces and spreading it around our front room, playing tug of war, and pulling the socks off of Jake's feet.  We were going to take him to Petco yesterday for a lil field trip to pick out a new toy but Jake's come down with a cold so we'll have to do that next week.

I'm excited for 2015 and having fun with my boys and watching them grow up, not to mention, come Aug, it'll be our 5th Anniversary and to celebrate we'll be taking a trip to London!  Traveling is one of the things we want to do with each other over the years.
(we like to go somewhere for our anniversaries even if it's a lil local 2 day trip etc, and then every 5 years we'll try to take a big trip-have a list of places we want to see over the years that we've been saving up for for the past 5 years).  I can't wait!  We'll have to start planning and seeing what we want to do/what we want to see :)

It'll be a great year!

Sledding!

Well, the day after christmas is even funner than christmas in my book cause things have calmed back down but our new toys/things are still new and exciting and we have all day to play with them :)

Also, we decided to go out and explore/have fun in the fresh snow.  In the park across from our house there's a VERY slight hill perfect for timid two year olds that we tested out.  Grandpa gave Jake a sled for xmas and after we forced him to go down on daddy's lap he was hooked :)

All bundled up!

Gpa, Daddy, and Mommy showing how it's done:

this was him smiling (I know he looks sad)

helping to push grandpa

sliding with daddy!

he was hooked!

He even went by himself once and liked it until the landing:

Walking home

It was a fun day!