Lucky Number SEVEN! - Jan 13

Where do I start? Um, CHLOE IS SEVEN YEARS OLD NOW. Yeah.

Until last Sunday, 7 was only an age that my friends kids had celebrated their birthdays and I was like wow, how the heck are they 7? Now, my kid is that kid and it is really weird. Thinking about all the things in the last 7 years that we have been through with Chloe and all of the ways she has changed really does blow my mind.

I'm sure I have said this before but, one of the greatest things we have invested the time into doing is making home movies. When Chloe was born I rushed out to best buy and purchased an actual video camera that recorded to SD memory cards. It's not technically "high definition" and most likely your cellphone will shoot better video in some circumstances BUT, it forces us to record things and it forces me to put it on DVD so we can watch it later. I understand that with a lot of families they have a kid and record a ton of stuff and then next thing you know kid #2 and #3 come along. Those kids(I'm told) have almost no pictures or videos of their stuff simply because there isn't time so in a weird way, we are afforded that time and I'm glad we have taken advantage of it. One of Chloe's favorite things to watch is old videos and I have to say, it's probably one of my favorite things, too.

So this year I would say has been completely different than any other year as far as Chloe's birthday is concerned. Last week we went to Disneyland essentially for Chloe's birthday. Leading up to that trip we talked it over with her and decided we wouldn't be having a big party on her birthday this year rather we would just do something low key with just our family and try to coordinate an outdoor party in the summer once the weather was better. This poor kid loves to swim and play outside and every year on her birthday we find ourselves locked inside somewhere. Last weekend on Chloe's actual birthday it turned out it was forecast to be the storm of the century so we decided to go bowling. We played a few games and went to Panera Bread (Chloe's choice) for lunch where we sang her happy birthday and had some cake. Custom ordered from Safeway, double chocolate per Chloe's request. lol.

The cake we basically had to order from Safeway and add the decorations ourselves. Chloe was set on having a "Secret Life of Pets" cake which of course doesn't exist. Lucky for us, Chloe has a bunch of perfect size toys we used to decorate the cake which she was totally fine with. Then after we were done with all that, we drove through the storm to the mall to return some stuff(or so that's what Chloe thought we were doing there). =)

Heather and I had planned on taking Chloe to get her ears pierced on her 7th birthday. Chloe has been asking for a while now but only recently(1st grade) has she expressed significant interest. We talked about it and it was never really said that she COULDN'T, but we never really said she could either so we figured no better time to surprise her than on her actual birthday. The last time we found ourselves at Claire's(at the mall) Chloe stood there and watched a girl get her ears pierced. This time, she would be that girl. She was nervous, but she immediately said she wanted to do it so we waited our turn and in just a few minutes, it was all over. No blood, no tears, just smiles and a happy to have her ears pierced Chloe.

Seven years. What an amazing and insane ride it has been so far. Looking forward to more crazy.

Have a great weekend, folks~

-B

A Very Disney New Year! - Jan 6

Hey, we have a great idea! DISNEYLAND! The last couple years we have made the trek down to Disneyland on or around Chloe's birthday so this year we were happy when they slid back the winter break schedule to include the first week of January. As it turns out, so were about 200,000 other people because the parks were absolutely jam packed. We have made a point over the last several years to visit the park in "off peak" times but apparently the off peak times are slowly starting not to exist. As they have steadily increased ticket prices and annual pass prices the idea was to decrease the number of visitors at any given time which seems counter intuitive but it has not worked. I have a feeling that as they have raised prices, it had the opposite effect which is that MORE people ended up buying the annual passes and then those people have justified the purchase price by visiting the park MORE often. I know we basically fell into that trap. We can go? Let's go! I have a feeling as time goes on, they will keep reducing the amount of days available for all but the most expensive passes, especially with the new Star Wars land opening(this year).

In just 2 days, Chloe will be turning *lucky number* Seven! I for one absolutely cannot believe how quickly it has flown by. I'm sure I have said that every year. We spend 2 full days in Disneyland and lucky for us we are pretty familiar with how to maximize our ride to wait time using well times "fast passes" otherwise we might not have been able to do anything considering the attendance. We have not been in the park when they have reached capacity(where they don't let more people in) but it really felt like they must have been pretty close. We had 2 days of nice weather and on the way out we drove through a lot of rain so we certainly lucked out at least with that. In a weird string of luck(I say it's because of Chloe's upcoming birthday) we literally rode in the front row of every roller coaster we got on. California Screamin, Big Thunder Mountain, Space Mountain. All of those Chloe rode in the first seat, first row. Fun!

Just sharing a random mix of photos taken, some with my camera and some with my phone. I wanted to experiment and just use my phone for 100% of the pictures I would take but in the end, I still don't think it's worth it for me. I like using my actual camera. =)

Have a great weekend~

-Brian