A Day in the Stevens' Life

For many people the clouds are undesirable. For us however, we love it because it keeps us warm. For being very far up north, we spent a lot of days in the low 50s in January.
January is becoming one of my favorite months. Every January so far we've had visits from our families. We were fortunate to have my sister Thuyen come to visit for a week and then 3 days later my sister Thanh also came up for a visit. We have a common friend that got married to a girl from Seattle. The day Thanh came up we took her to one of our favorite museums: The Museum of Flight. She loved it and was so interested in learning about everything, especially the space exhibit. The kids excitement also helped out. She was so cute with them, constantly kissing and holding them. I love my sister. My kids are so lucky to have such great aunts!


The week before my sister came I also took the House of Hope's kids to see the flight museum. We really took it for granted that we are so fortunate to be able to see all these museums. We've gone to the museum of flight many times but for those HoH kids, that was their first time ever. My job at the House of Hope is to share with those kids opportunities they have not been able to have. It's so neat to see the excitement in their eyes.
DJ and Britney's Wedding (They were sealed to each other at the Seattle Temple)




2011 Day Trip #1
The weather was 57 and sunny so we decided that would be a great time to go discover some of the islands around here. Dan was our trip planner and he did a great job finding out all the fun places to see. It started out a bit cloudy but soon cleared up. We drove to Mukilteo, about 20 minutes from where we live and hopped on the ferry to Whidbey Island. We made a stop at Useless Bay merely for Dan because he wanted to stop there and then say "Well, that was useless" and he did and we all had a good laugh, even Reena who thinks everything her daddy says is funny.

A little historic light house by the pier in Mukilteo. We had a little time before the ferry came so we walked around this historic park.

Useless Bay. "Well, that was Useless"

Scenery we saw on our way to our destination. Off in the distance is the San Juan Islands and Victoria, BC. We have plans on going to both to go whale watching and exploring in the future because we never got around to it last summer.
We made a stop at Greenbank farm on Whidbey Island where they make cheese and yarn. We came here for cheese tasting and a stop for a lunch picnic and park. They had whine tasting, too. We skipped out on that part. We saw how sheep's wool is turned into yarn and that was cool. The guy that was working on the wool turned it into yarn and made all sorts of purses and cute little crafts.

Our third destination. Deception Pass and Deception Pass State Park Beach. As we were driving we thought wow our trip is shorter than we thought it would take. Until...we got there and saw how much there was to see and do. We could spend a whole day there easily but a week would be funner. We drove through the campsite and decided we would come back here and camp out. It was so beautiful. The history of Deception Pass is also very interesting if you have time to read it. Though I won't take up your time with it here.


Reena had a great time but for whatever reason she didn't want to smile for a family picture.
From this rock the view was breathtaking. Even Brie tried to climb it.







Our final destination. Coupeville Wharf. We saw the skeletons of a gray whale, a dalls's porpoise, and a northern sea lion.

We had so much fun roaming the coast and the best part happened the next day when at church our Bishop told us that while we were doing so, he was building igloos with the YM a half an hour east of where we live. That's what makes this area so neat is you have both the beaches and the mountains for snow activities such as skiing and snowboarding all within a half an hour of driving. We love it! It's only fair that we get the rain and clouds.

A little update on the house progress.
Dan has taken over our finances. I did the researching and the customizing of the plan but he is doing all the important stuff that I don't care for: Math. He's spending hours adding up charges, fees, and mortgage numbers. He keeps things going with the progress of permits and such. We're starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel, which is really exciting. It's been a really long process of learning and a lot of work and WAITING for everybody to approve everything we submitted. I can see now why people just buy existing homes or build a home already drawn out by the builder. Doing a custom home for us is fun though and in the end will save more money. We should have the foundation dug here in about 2 weeks. Fingers crossed.

Happy Binary!

My kids are in their room coloring. How in the world did that happen. Well here's to a few quiet moments to blog. Hopefully they don't color on the walls. X.

So lots of exciting things the last two weeks. The end of 2010 was exciting with Brie setting a few milestones. She started hinting to us that she's independent and ready to go on her own. Literally go on her own. She doesn't want you to help her go potty. She'll still say "potty" to you and runs to the bathroom but if you follow her she'll insist that you stop where you are and she'll go the rest of the way. It's really cute to see her tiny little body running to the potty with her cute little curls bouncing up and down as she rushes to the bathroom. She's a talker, too and will tell you stuff if you ask her a question. One of our favorite questions is "Brie, where are you?" in which she replies "I'm right here" If you ask her where Reena is she'll say "she's right there". Her vocabularies as we counted one day was about 100 words. Sentences are starting to form as well so we decided that she was ready to say her own prayers. We helped her and she did a fantastic job. For a 19 month old!
Kids are out of the room climbing on my laps now so...pause. Yay for 10 minutes of quiet.
Now back to blogging after 6 hours...
Nothing gets Reena more excited than to go see the cousins and play play play with them. We spent New Year's Eve with the cousins in Bothell and had Aunt Laurie, Dan's cousins Bethany, and Jackie there as well with Dave's family. We stuffed ourselves silly with pizza and I was the winner of the silent pizza eating contest with 6 slices of pizza. So it comes down to it again, the skinniest person eats the most.


New Year's day was fun day for us. I won 4 free tickets to the Tukwilla Family Fun Center along with a free large pizza and drinks. We did the math and it came out to be an $80 value. We got lucky. Needless to say we had a lot of fun in that 3 hours and it was mostly because it was free! Reena was so excited about the frog hopper. Then when it started to hop, anyway you can see the rest of the story here.
At the beginning of January we got a little bit of snow so nobody was really going anywhere. Dan worked from home for several days. You're probably thinking a lot of snow, but it was actually maybe about 3 inches. Seattle hills. Yep. Nobody dared driving to Seattle to work and roll down the hills into the water. That was a treat for us to have him work from home.

About 5 days after the New Year my sister Thuyen came and visited us from Philadelphia. She wanted to see Seattle's winter before deciding to move out here. While here she saw misty rain (which she also loved), sunshine, and even snow. She and I went shopping and when we got out it had snowed about an inch but because of our hills (which made this place beautiful but also scary when it comes to snow), we almost got stuck. Luckily with backing out and some momentum we got up the little hill and got home safely.


Cuddling up and playing video games with Aunt Thuyen.
Touring Bellevue to watch the sunset



The kids had so much fun with their aunt and they got new toys and clothes. We pretty much had a second Christmas with their toys from the $ they got. We decided to give Amazon Tote a try. It was amazing. Our stuff came in a tote bag unboxed as if the guy that delivered it just went to the store and shopped for us. It was free shipping/delivery also and we got it 3 days after ordering. It was awesome!

The biggest most memorable event that we had with my sister was taking her to the Harry Potter Exhibition. All I can say about the exhibition is it's AMAZING. The sorting hat, oh so fun. It's so neat to see all the props that they used to produce a Harry Potter world. The craftsmanship of over 200 props and these aren't tiny items either. Several of the rooms were just as they were in the movie and everything you can think of from Quiditch matches to iconic items like Harry's original wands, Hagrid's hut, clothes, Mandrakes, Buckbeak the hipogriff, the giant Acromantula spider and other memorabilia. We couldn't take pictures inside but did take some at the bookstore and even brought home several collector's items. So much fun.


The rest of our time when we're not up doing something, we just goof off.
And these are just cute precious pictures of the cute kids that are sound asleep right now. Time for mommy to play Warcraft with daddy and show him who the master of DOTA is!!