First Comes Love...

Kevin is in Europe for two weeks and while I've got a whole lotta EVERYTHING going on right now, I thought a new kitten might be the perfect addition to the madness..

The Lauckner kids are back to school and I'm back to being officially over-scheduled. 'Tis the season! Abigail went back the day after Labor Day and the boys went back earlier this week.  Below are pictures of everyone's first days, if you'd like to see.

It appears I'm getting cheesier with blog titles in my old age. Every few years my birthday falls on Schwingfest.  Since I can remember Schwingfest has always been an annual highlight for me and this year was especially great, celebrating The Tacoma Swiss Club's 90th Anniversary!

The kids celebrated my birthday this morning with breakfast in bed, and I'm off to Leavenworth with Steph and Kristin this weekend to celebrate. Thank you all for the kind Instagram messages and texts / calls so far today!

As most of you know, my birthday follows Abigail's by 5 days (and Kevin's 6 days after mine!), so this past weekend was spent celebrating my special day ( wahoo! ) We spent Friday on the boat with Steph and Reid; playing around in the water and going to Kid Valley for dinner.  Abigail had a great time counting to three as the guys jumped off the boat and even got a bit overconfident at times, leaning off the back. She loves playing with the prop lever Saturday was Schwingfest (an annual Swiss festival / family reunion) where we spent a fun afternoon at the park, and an evening full of family time at Aunt Lucy's. It's one of my favorite days of the year! watching the boys wrestle at the park Telling secrets with Daddy (while gagging herself?...) Then came Sunday- my birthday! Kevin and Kirk were asked by the Nature Consortium to play at their annual festival, so we spent the morning there.  Highlights include a fairy parade, watching K...

Kevin's a pretty romantic guy.  Not Romeo, but far from Al Bundy. His rankings sky rocketed, however, when he came home with these for our anniversary last night: A re-creation of my wedding bouquet! You're a keeper, Kevin Lauckner! Update: we watched our wedding video with Abigail tonight.  She loved listening to her Auntie sing the processional, swinging her arms in time with the music  :)  What a sweetheart.

While going about my daily life, it dawned on me how many Mommy truths I was so sure of pre-baby, yet so wrong about in reality. Just for fun, here are a few of mine: "I'll wean my babies by a year." -Abigail self weaned at 20 months.  I never dreamed I'd be the Mom who nursed while pregnant with my next, and little did I know how much I'd miss it. "co-sleeping is for hippies" -If getting a good night's sleep is for hippies, then a hippie I am!  We co-slept with Abigail until she was 6 months old, and I still love family nights when she's sick (although she's quite the bed hog). "There's nothing more annoying than a screaming child" -True, but that doesn't stop them from being yours... "I want a natural birth" -After laboring 6 hours with little progress, what a really wanted was an epidural! "My kids will have limited TV time" -TV is my sanity, but I limit it ...

Early last Saturday morning, after jotting  a few notes  to Kevin, my Mom and I took off for our annual girls weekend in San Francisco! The weather was perfect and the shopping was ( as always! ) spectacular. Every year we do pretty much the same thing: walk all around town, ride the cable cars to and from the wharf, shop, eat, and fall asleep to pay-per-view movies each night. We have some favorite traditions (like lunch at The Rotunda , seafood at the Wharf, and Ghirardelli's for a sundae), but every year we also try some new things (this year we went all-out-tourist mode and rode a double-decker bus around the city!) Here are some pictures from our trip this year: Lunch at Neiman Marcus (next year we'll get reservations for a Saturday afternoon...) A beautiful afternoon in the Square Maternity wear galore at Old Navy! Saturday night at Tadich Grill Sunday morning we had breakfast at the Terminal Pier, then walked along t...

My Dad loves sports cars. As a young adult in the Service, he raced stock cars, and in the mid-nineties, my Mom surprised him with a Porsche 911.  It was love at first sight (for both of us), and so began my love for all things fast, loud, and beautiful too. Through the years we've shared a mutual joy: sunny days on roller coaster road, talking shop (chips, shocks, tires, exhaust), and getting on the highway to open it up; nothing beats the feeling of being sucked to your seat! And like any good Dad / Teen relationship, there were moment I'm sure he'd rather forget: when they left for Rome and I took the car out to test the 0-60.  Just shy of 4 seconds (around 3.9).  Not bad for a kid, but the blown piston gave me away... Getting permission to take the car to the store.  He figured I meant to the bottom of the hill.  I should have clarified; I meant the downtown Bellevue QFC  (about 8 miles away)  ;) More speeding tickets than I ca...

Last Thursday's Valentine's Day celebration went down in history as my favorite to date! Kevin and I are funny about this little Hallmark holiday.  Every year we play it cool and make the same casual comments: "Yeah, Valentine's Day is stupid..." "Let's save some money and not celebrate this year" "It's such a cheesy holiday..." Then, as the date approaches, the conversation evolves: "Well, I just got you a little something..." "Flowers would be nice.  Just flowers." "Did you see that HUGE box of chocolates at the store?!" And so, by the time February 14th rolls around, we've invariable spent a few casual bucks on a not-so-casual gesture. This year we farmed Abigail off for the evening and enjoyed a night on the town: shopping, dinner at Benihana, then to see a movie (Argo). I figured the date night was our unspoken "not-so-casual" gesture, but Kevin one-upped me ...

I knew this would be a hard post to write, so I've been putting it off. On Monday morning, we said goodbye to Minnie. After months of weight loss I brought her into the vet early this week.    I had been noticing the weight loss, but it wasn't until a few weeks ago that I started to see how skinny and malnourished she was getting. The vet determined she was suffering from late-stage hyperthyroidism and her kidneys were shutting down.  It was a painful assessment; why I didn't notice it earlier and help her?  That thought still haunts me. But at 11am on Monday morning, through a mountain of tears, regret, and sorrow, I bid farewell to the most loyal friend I've ever known. Minnie,  You were the first piece to my "own" family.  I remember vividly the day I got you.  It was my 21st birthday and Rebecca and Steph came over bearing a gift (more specifically, a brown grocery bag).  I opened it and looked inside; there you were,...