This week our sweet, smart, talkative boy James turned 1! We can hardly believe that it’s been a whole year since he came into our family. He has grown so much and has brought so much joy into our lives. He is always talking about something and loves to laugh and have a good time. He loves his big sister Eliza and always looks for her when he wakes up in the morning or from his naps. He loves his mommy and steals kisses from her when daddy isn’t looking. He loves daddy too. He and I are good friends and have been having good times lately playing.
James’s birthday was a fun day. The day itself was pretty normal but we did have a party that night with some friends. When I got home from work, Eliza and I wrapped James’s presents. We had shown Eliza most of the presents before James’s birthday and had told her that she needed to keep it a secret. She didn’t really understand what that meant and several times told James what he was getting. We had a good time wrapping presents. For dinner we had cheese tortellini. It was the perfect meal for James. He could totally eat the pasta by himself. Eliza loved it too. After dinner, our friends the Larsens came over to open presents. James didn’t really get what was going on but had fun opening the presents anyway. Eliza helped him with several of the presents. He had a pretty good set of presents. Thanks everyone that was so thoughtful.
After doing presents, we had cake and ice cream. Sarah had made a scratch cake and James had his own mini cake to eat. He was super excited about it. Before we even started singing “Happy Birthday” he had tried to grab the cake from Sarah’s hands and gotten frosting all over his fingers. He ate all the frosting first and then picked up the cake and dug in. He ate about half of his cake — pretty good considering this was his first chocolate ever. He was less thrilled about the ice cream. Sarah tried to give him some and he spat it right out. It was a great day!
James has started walking for reals this week. He is taking off on his own from anything he can pull himself up on. He can normally make it across the room pretty well. He even stood up on his own in the middle of the floor once today.
Eliza has been learning her letters. She is especially excited about “O” this week. She points it out to us on every sign we go by on the street. She finds it in her books, on her clothes, in the scriptures, and anywhere else “O” could possibly be.
Tuesday was election day. This one kind of sneaked up on us but we both made it to the polls to vote. Living outside city limits makes these elections interesting because we only get state wide things to vote on. This time we had some constitutional amendments to vote for and a bond for a huge new courthouse in Austin. We voted against the bond because it was way too expensive and was going to raise our taxes by over $100 a year. I was happy that that bond actually failed. People were making all kinds of excuses about turnout being low but actually turnout was almost record high for a non presidential election especially in the areas out of Austin proper where people actually own the property that would have to pay for this thing.
We had a minor miracle this week with our car. For the last few months, almost since we’ve owned it, it has been making this strange clicking, bumping sound when we turn at low speeds. We knew we needed to get it fixed before our Utah trip and so we took it in to get fixed this week. I was all prepared for a huge bill for power steering or something. Miraculously, it was just a few loose bolts. It ended up costing only $50. That was a miracle for us.
