2015 in a nutshell.

Posted in Random by Kendra G.

January

We rang in the new year with my parents in town and had our annual dinner at Disney with our family friends. This year we went back to ‘Ohana at the Polynesian Resort.
Melissa was in town for work & our friends moved back from Nebraska!
Sally, Kristy, and I threw a surprise sprinkle for Lindsey and baby Kennedy.
I shared more about our cloth diapers.
We celebrated Kyler’s third birthday at the Orlando Science Center!
The world said goodbye to the Bravermans and one of my favorite shows: Parenthood.
I ran the Celebration Half Marathon & Lady Track Shack 5K.

February

We celebrated Caeyln’s third birthday at Teddy Mountain!
Sweet Kennedy was born!
Our largest house project to date started: construction on the pool!
I headed to Salt Lake City for a work conference.
I ran the East Orlando MRTT Virtual 10K and the Best Damn Race 10K.

March

We celebrated Caleb’s third birthday and Hudson’s first birthday!
Kenley started class at MyGym.
I took the kids to see Disney Live! at daddy’s work.
Maggi came to visit, and so did Meemaw and Grandpa for spring break.
I ran the Tomoka Half Marathon over on the coast.

April

We all celebrated our half-birthdays!
The Easter bunny came to visit and we had Easter dinner with our friends.
Kenley started soccer through the YMCA and also ran in the Healthy Kids Running Series.
We went to UCF Celebrates the Arts at the Dr. Phillips Performing Arts Center.
Kenley got three stitches in her forehead.
I ran the Riverside Dash 15K in Sanford.

May

Kenley’s classes at MyGym ended and Crosby’s began!
We spent Mother’s Day weekend in Indiana and got to see so many people!
We went to Sea World, the science center, and the Good Neighbor’s Farmers Market.
I ran the Operation Give Back 5K at UCF.

June

Our pool finished and we started swimming!
We celebrated Margot’s 3rd birthday.
The girls and I attended what would be our last Meet + Make.
I shared my favorite running gear.
We ventured over to Winter Garden to see our friends and explore the city!
Greg and I joined the wine club at Cooper’s Hawk.

July

We did lots of swimming in the summer heat.
Greg and I celebrated our anniversary and my parents were in town for the 4th of July!
I ran the Watermelon 5K on the 4th of July.
I headed up to Chicago to celebrate MBK at her bachelorette party and while I was there I ran the Rock ‘N’ Roll Half Marathon.
We went to the Crayola Experience for the first time and hit up Sea World again.
I taught my summer class from the end of June into the beginning of August.

August

We visited Sarasota and saw the Mets play the Rays in St. Pete.
Meemaw came to visit while the kids were out of school.
We celebrated Molly’s first birthday and Liam’s 4th birthday!
I ran the East Orlando MRTT Virtual 5K.
Fall soccer started back up for Kenley.
The kids started school – Kenley in preschool and Crosby in toddlers. I started my graduate class.

September

We saw Disney on Ice at the Amway Center.
Soccer Saturdays continued throughout the month.
Greg and I snuck away for a night to head up to Naperville for Jon and MB’s wedding!

October

We celebrated Gavin & Carson’s first birthdays.
We all celebrated our own birthdays! Kenley turned four and Crosby turned two.
Meemaw and Grandpa came to visit for their fall break.
We had a family vacation in Key West with Greg’s family.
We officially stopped using cloth diapers after four years.
I ran the Key West 10K, UCF Distance Dare, and Lake Nona 13.1
The kids had a Choo Choo and Tutu birthday party.
The Mets are in the World Series!
We saw the USA Women’s Soccer team play Brazil at the Citrus Bowl.
We went to Sea World and the kids were Jake and Izzy for Halloween.

November

Greg flew up to New York for Game 5 of the World Series, unfortunately the Royals won the series that game.
Meemaw and Grandpa were in town for work so we met Mickey and Minnie at Animal Kingdom!
We took the kids to Legoland and stayed at the hotel!
We beat the crowds and saw Santa early this year.
We celebrated Thanksgiving at home and saw The Good Dinosaur, the kids’ first movie in the theater.
I ran the Space Coast Half Marathon in Cocoa. <– Recap still to come.

December

We did lots of Christmas activities this month thanks to our advent calendar.
We went to Avalon Aglow with our friends, Sea World to see the Christmas shows, looked at Christmas lights, made s’mores, drank hot cocoa, read Christmas books, and watched Christmas movies.
I made cookies in a jar for teacher gifts this year.
We headed up to Indiana to celebrate Christmas and my parents came back to Florida with us to ring in the new year.

It was a great year and we are excited to see what 2016 has in store for us!

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A look back.
2014 // 2013 // 2012 // 2011

30Dec2015

Christmas in Indiana {2015}

Posted in Family, Travel by Kendra G.

Last Wednesday, we hopped on a plane and headed up to Indiana for Christmas. Our flight was at 6:30am, which made for a very early morning, and, of course, with it being two days before Christmas, the airport was insane. There were definitely moments that we thought we were going to miss our flight, but we actually made it just in time for family boarding. The kids did a good job on the flight and enjoyed the snacks and iPad time. Once we arrived at the house, Kenley and Meemaw got right to work baking cookies for Santa! We relaxed the rest of the day while it rained before heading to the Mexican restaurant for dinner.

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On Christmas Eve, we enjoyed some family time and brunch! Bonus: there were Alex Bakery cookies there, which brought back so many memories from my childhood. They were just as I remembered them! The kids had such a great time playing together at GG’s house, too. It is always good to get them together every chance we get.

Christmas morning started at 6:00am! We got to see what Santa brought and took our time opening gifts. We spent the rest of the day playing with our new toys and playing games. The weather was warmer than usual (though, we still thought it was cold), so my dad built a fire and we took Arie for a walk a couple times.

On Saturday we actually got out of our pajamas and headed out for another Christmas with extended family. As it approached nap time, the kids started to meltdown, so it was a short stay. Thankfully, they slept the whole way home!

Sunday morning we packed and packed and packed. We decided to spend the afternoon at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis before we had to go to the airport. Our flight wasn’t until 10:00pm, so we had a while to play. The museum was awesome! I was very impressed with each of the exhibits we saw and we didn’t even get through them all. We will definitely be back in the future. After the museum, we met my grandparents for dinner. We boarded our flight around 9:30pm and were pushed away from the gate before schedule. The kids slept the entire flight and were only a little whiny when we were waiting for all of our luggage to come off the carousal. We were home and in bed around 1:00am on Sunday night/Monday morning and the kids slept in very late on Monday morning. Surprisingly, it didn’t take long to get them back on schedule, and have even been sleeping in this week since we’ve been home.

Traveling with kids can definitely be stressful, but overall, they did a great job and we had such a good time celebrating Christmas in Indiana!

We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!

27Dec2015

26 Months

Posted in Family by Kendra G.

We had a wonderful Christmas with this little guy. He was really into opening gifts this year and got excited with every one of them. As soon as he started tearing the paper, he would shout “what is it?!” He also liked helping everyone else open their gifts too. He continues to talk at lightning speed, rambling on and on. He loves singing and has been singing Frosty the Snowman and Jingle Bells a lot this month. His go-to song is still “Wheels on the Bus”.

The transition to the toddler bed is still ongoing. We’ve definitely had our ups and downs. The first week was pretty funny considering he slept in several random positions, like the praying position on his bed and completely flat on the floor. He’s a much deeper sleeper than Kenley, we are finding. Since the first week, he has realized he has a little bit more freedom, which has led to challenging bedtime routines. However, I’m confident that once the holidays are over and we return to our normal schedule after the new year, that he will get the hang of it.

26 months notes:
Weight – Around 29 pounds
Hair – Light brown and in need of a haircut!
Teeth – 16, but working on his two year molars
Eyes – Brown
Clothes – 2T clothes, some 3T pajamas, and size 8 shoes
Diapers – Size 5 disposables
Likes – Choo choo trains, his train table, taking his train tracks apart to make his own, finding and naming construction vehicles, playing cars, stickers, playing with Play-Doh (sometimes eating it), playing with Aerie, climbing on everything, seeing pictures of himself, saying “that’s me!”, saying his name is “me”, throwing all of the pillows off the couch to make a “house”, terrorizing his sister, Mickey Mouse, Jake pirates, eating anything and everything!
Dislikes – Laying on the changing table, getting into trouble, not getting his way, taking a picture.

26 Months

20Dec2015

my weekend in photos

Posted in Random by Kendra G.

we were loving the short-lived cooler temps this weekend and jennifer and i got in a quick four miles on saturday morning when it was still in the 40s!

we ran a couple errands on saturday and ended up at tijuana flats for lunch. this boy loves his black beans!

i cannot even tell you how amazing my hot stone pedicure was on saturday. my feet were in desperate need of a little tlc and i didn’t want it to end.

after nap, kenley and i got to decorating our gingerbread house, which was our advent activity for the day. it was really comical, but we had fun doing it!

saturday night, greg and i went out for dinner and drinks with some friends.

by the end of the evening, we indulged in some table side s’mores.

the s’mores fun didn’t stop there. we headed to jeremy’s house tonight for his annual s’mores party.

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we had a great weekend and are so excited for the week ahead. i can’t even believe christmas is this week!

18Dec2015

Friday I’m in Love

Posted in Friday I'm in Love by Kendra G.

Happy Friday! It’s the last Friday before Christmas and our last link-up of the year. We’ll be back next year with more Friday love. Let’s get to it…

o n e

Victor Oladipo donated $35,000 to the UCF Listening Center this week to help serve families and children who have hearing loss. Just when you think you can’t love him anymore, he goes and does something awesome like this.

t w o

The Fuller House promo was released this week. I guess we’ll be getting Netflix in the new year… and I may have teared up a little bit watching it. Oh the memories of Full House.

t h r e e

Do you know what I love?
Amazon.
and I love coming home to this… ’tis the season!

f o u r

We are pretty much loving ALL things Christmas right now. Kenley had a small performance at school yesterday and today they are watching the Polar Express in their pajamas and drinking hot (warm) cocoa. Crosby had his pajama day last week and we’ve been moving right along through our advent calendar activities this month. It’s been so fun!

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Friday I'm in Love Linky Party

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Click on the blue “Add Your Link” button at the bottom of this post – it has a blue frog head on it
Add a link to your Friday I’m in Love blog post in the URL field (please do not link to your home page but the specific post page).
For “name” write a short descriptive name for your post.
If you would like to put the Friday I’m in Love button on the bottom of your post, we would love to see it there!
If you’d rather just link over to your post in the comment section, feel free to do that!

14Dec2015

Christmas at SeaWorld

Posted in Family by Kendra G.

We headed down to SeaWorld on Saturday to take part in the Christmas festivities. Our first stop was the dolphin nursery!

The one thing we really wanted to do was the Polar Express experience. We headed there first to see how long the wait was. The park was much busier than it had been all year long, so I was worried about the wait time, but we only waited about 15 minutes to get in. We have done this ride before, but never as the Polar Express and it was awesome! I was very impressed.

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Once we got to the North Pole, we saw Santa and his huge bag of toys from a distance, then moved on to see the animals.

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The walrus and the seals both swam right up to the glass where we were and were so close. It was a little frightening for the kids and the seal really snuck up on Kenley. I knew she didn’t see it so when she turned around it was right at eye level with her and really scared her. I saw the whole thing playing out and I will say it was pretty funny. They were also feeding the whales while we were underneath, which was pretty cool.

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Later in the evening, we caught the end of the live music on our way to see the sharks.

The dancing trees light show was short, but it was really cool. I didn’t mind it being short since Crosby had a little trouble sitting on the grass watching for that long. Afterwards we watched the model trains go round and round. I think the kids could have stayed there for hours. The trains were really cool and the whole set up was really big.

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We stopped for a quick bite to eat before heading back to the car. We were only there for a few hours, but it was so fun! I was really impressed with their displays and shows, and the kids loved the Polar Express and the trains. There were several other Christmas shows that we didn’t see, but that is okay. It was a great time!

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Hopefully, we’ll be back to see it again next year!

13Dec2015

my weekend in photos

Posted in Random by Kendra G.

after a very long week, we welcomed the weekend with open arms. heather and i got in 7 miles on saturday morning a little later than we normally run.

the park we were planning to go to on saturday was closed, so we ended up finding this little hidden gem for kids ages 2-5. it was awesome and we will be back next weekend, i’m sure!

shenanigans at lunch.

we headed down to sea world on saturday evening to check out their christmas displays. it was such a fun evening. i have more pictures to share tomorrow.

we ended up meeting some friends while we were there too, which made it even better.

after a slow start this morning, the kids stayed in their pjs all day and kenley and i made reindeer chow!

today was our holiday party for the running group and to top it off, it was a pj party! the best kind of party, in my opinion.

the jenks came over for taco night!

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we had a great weekend and are looking forward to more holiday fun coming up.

how was your weekend?

11Dec2015

Friday I’m in Love

Posted in Friday I'm in Love by Kendra G.

Happy Friday!

o n e

We had Greg’s company Christmas party on Monday night at our favorite place, Cooper’s Hawk. I submitted my final paper on Saturday, so I took this opportunity to celebrate that as well. It was a fun night!

t w o

The kids’ school pictures arrived yesterday! I am so happy with how they turned out, especially considering it took Crosby attempts on at least three different days to get him to even agree to have his picture taken. Thankfully, they got him when Kenley was getting her picture taken and they both turned out great.

t h r e e

Serial is back for season two!! Who is excited?!

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Friday I'm in Love Linky Party

10Dec2015

Pinterest Christmas: DIY Cookies in a Jar

Posted in Projects Around the House by Kendra G.

I am finally here to share my first Pinterest Christmas project with you!

This year, I made (actually, I am in the process of making) cookies in a jar for the teachers at the kids’ school. I went with the Cranberry White Chocolate Oatmeal Cookie because I asked Greg and our friend Ryan what cookie they would prefer to receive as a gift and the answer was “oatmeal”. I figured the cranberry white chocolate makes it a little more festive since this is a Christmas gift. I found the recipe through Pinterest (obviously) from Thrify Jinxy.

Here are all of the ingredients and supplies needed:

I got majority of my ingredients at Aldi (which is another blog post for another day) except for the brown sugar since they didn’t have any. The 32 ounce ball jars were purchased at Ace Hardware for $10 for a case of 12! Do not purchase these from your local craft store… they are way more expensive. Michael’s had them priced at $3 PER JAR!

My original game plan was to do one ingredient at a time over several jars, but after I made the first complete jar, I just continued to go one jar at a time. Here are a few things I learned from the process —

I do not own an 1/8 teaspoon measuring spoon, so I eyeballed the measurement using my 1/4 teaspoon measuring spoon.

You will make a mess in the process and if you have little ones, they will want to help, which means they will want to eat all of your white chocolate chips.

Once you start adding in the ingredients, you may think they aren’t all going to fit in the jar, but it really ends up fitting perfectly every single time.

The layers of your jars though will not be perfect. I know, this was a hard one for me to swallow, but some of my jars looked better than others. Live with it!

I really love how they turned out! I am planning to add a little ribbon with the instructions for baking tied on to them, but right now, I just like to admire my hard work. I definitely recommend these cookies in a jar if you are still thinking about giving some homemade gifts this year!

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Don’t forget to link up to the Pinterest Christmas 2015 linky party with your Christmas crafts the entire month of December. Click the link below to add your blog link!

Also, don’t forget to check out what Misha is crafting over at Emerald City Diaries!

6Dec2015

my weekend in photos

Posted in Random by Kendra G.

this kid.

after a low-key friday night of me writing my paper, heather and i met up for six miles on saturday morning. it was a rough six, but we got it done.

errands on saturday morning were just exhausting.

saturday night, we headed down to the block party in our community with some friends. the kids played in the bounce houses and then we ate Mexican food and had margaritas.

bouncing inside a snow globe!

crosby went to town on the salsa.

when we aren’t running, we’re drinking.

we had such a fun night!

we had a productive morning. kenley and i cleaned out some clothes and toys to donate, which prompted kenley to pull together her outfit for the day. greg headed into work and the kids and i hit up two different parks and the ymca today.