Waits Family Annals

On December 10, Connor turned two. What was originally planned as a repeat of his first birthday (a nice dinner and chatting with friends), quickly became more. It was actually the most stressful and time consuming party I have done. Lessons I have learned are: never throw a birthday party on the same day I work; I don’t have to do EVERY home made craft created on the planet that fits a birthday theme.

Besides those things, I really had so much fun and it was great to see my son love everything so much and be old enough to get excited.

Understatement of the year: Connor Loves Angry Birds. He loves the music. He loves searching them on YouTube. He loves making angry pig noises. And, of course, he loves to play the game. He couldn’t care less about his score, even when it’s better than his parents. He just loves to fling those birds off the slingshot ASAP.

The trouble for me began when I started doing some research online for Angry Bird themed parties. Thank goodness for Etsy to help me along the way. We actually only invited five families, but that totaled 14 kids.

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We left Wednesday morning to fly to Tampa, FL to visit the Machins. We were nervous about the flight because of the nearly two-year old bundle of raw emotions we were travelling with. When we fly to Vegas or Salt Lake, it is a longer flight and Connor usually decides to freak out for a period of time. We scheduled our flights so he would be flying during nap time. Then we figured we could distract him with Curious George on the iPad and what not. It worked! We made the trip without incident, and Liz and I were able to spend a lot of time playing Mario Kart on the DS.

I have given the flight more space on this blog than it deserves. So, on to the festivities!

We snapped a picture of where we parked. Last time we took a trip, I ended up running back and forth clicking the panic button on the keys. In the rain. In order to avoid that, we made sure to tag the picture with GPS coordinates so we could easily find it when we got back. Ha! It worked flawlessly. (Is this a good time to tell you how much I love my iPhone?) I guess that’s not really a festivity.

First things first. When we landed, Liz made the important  trip to go and get the necessary ingredient for a great week. Ice cream! But not just any Ice Cream, Blue Bell Ice Cream. Liz’s favorite Ice Cream on the planet! I’m not going to tell you how much Ice Cream we ate that week, suffice to say, we are all lactose intolerant now. We did have other meals that were not solely Ice Cream, but every meal had some kind of Ice Cream side. And so the feast began!

And of course, the kids had to bathe together.

That, my friends, was day one.

Tuesday brought with it Connor’s new awareness of crawling. No longer does he stumble through his crawling– He is a full-fledged army crawler. Whenever he looks at Mr. Chips, the Machin’s dog, he laughs hysterically.

When we went to the beach that afternoon, there were high winds and red flags up. Dangerous conditions. So we set up camp, and enjoyed the gentle exfoliation of the wind-blown sand. The waves were a ride, and we put up with the adverse conditions for as long as possible before giving up and heading home.

How could I forget about the Island Creamery?! Best… Ice-Cream… EVAR!!! They serve homemade waffle cones with homemade Ice-Cream. Delicious. Their scoops were about as large as my fist. Fantastic. That’s where Liz’s Friday birthday cake came from. If you are within driving distance of Chincoteague, I highly recommend coming out here to experience it.

On Monday, we made it to the beach. We buried each other, ate sand, and enjoyed the ocean. I turned into a 14 year-old infatuated with my boogie-board and riding the waves. Unfortunately, I am a pasty-white near-30 year-old who is no where near 14. But, hey, I still had fun.

More pics after the jump:

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With all the babies being born in what we call the “baby boom” at our church, there is so far only one other boy. And he really wants to be Connor’s friend. Connor seems to like him as well. To protect his friend’s identity, we will call him Dahveed. These pictures are from his first play date, and then also the Sunday Dahveed was blessed in church. Dahveed’s dad served his mission in Liz’s home town for 10 months. 10 months is a long time to be in any area while on a mission, and spending it in Barstow made it even better. It’s cool being first-time parents at the same time as friends and have someone else to commiserate with. In the words of Dahveed’s dad, “It’s much easier when you see people being parents on TV.” Read More