The Stevens Family

Yesterday Josh, my mom, Perry and Jayden started working on our front porch. If you've been to our house you probably know that our porch was a bit, um, rough...really, it's pretty embarrassing. Luckily for us, my mom has most of the materials we need to rebuild from her building downtown that we're able to get things started right away.
Here is what we started with. Lovely isn't it? I mean, really, who doesn't like exposed cinder blocks at the front of their home to welcome their guests? Not to mentions the birds and squirrels that liked to make their home in the corner, and the "rebuilt" porch post that looked like a scratching post thanks to the squirrels and that was pretty much rotted away.


Here is the other side. Not much better. The board you see laying there was a frugal attempt to keep neighbor cats out from under our porch.
And notice the lovely jagged floor boards edging the front of the porch. You may even notice a few boards that were remnants of a better time when lattice was used in place of random boards.Here they are, getting to work. My mom had all of the two by fours at her place, Jayden jumped right in to help unload.
I had to show houses that afternoon, so I missed out on the fun demolition, but when I came back, the demo was DONE! The porch is braced up, no floor, the posts are off, and Josh even built these LOVELY cinder block steps for us until we get everything rebuilt.
So far, so good!

We had Gavin's Birthday party on Sunday, February 22nd. I've discovered that it's much more difficult to plan a Birthday party in the winter, so we decided to keep it simple and intimate since our family is starting to get spread out a bit.
Our first order of business was assembling the slide that the Wilkins family got him. It will great for him to have his own appropriate sized slide when we get to play outside this summer!
From there, we had cake. I worked very hard on his cake, mostly because we kept his party so low key, I still wanted him to have pictures to look back on and know that we did something special. This was my first fondant cake....and last I'm sure...unless enough time goes by that I forget how much work this type of cake is.
The cupcake on top was meant for Gavin, but he didn't want a thing to do with it!
Rather than just having cake and ice cream, I thought we'd do an ice cream sundae buffet.


After not even touching his cupcake, we thought we'd give him a slice of cake. As you can see, he didn't want anything to do with this either. The weird part is, this kid has a HUGE sweet tooth. He'll scream and cry if he sees a cookie, piece of candy, or anything yummy looking. His brother did the same thing with his first Birthday cake.
He did, however, like the ice cream toppings.
From there, we opened presents. At this point it was past his naptime, so we had to be quick! Jayden was kind enough to help. He got lots of fun toys and great clothes!
Here he is modeling a new outfit from Nana:
During Gavin's nap, the older boys went outside to play. They had a BLAST playing in the snow.
Overall, we had a wonderful time. Thank you everyone for sharing this very special day with him!

A cute video of Gavin enjoying some Birthday Balloons:



I'll post a bit more info soon!

I wanted to wait until after his one year Birthday, but I got tired of constantly washing the dried in food that tangled up his hair. His hair was really pretty unruly, but I knew that once he had a haircut he would not look like a baby any more and it's hard to prepare yourself for that. So last night, we chopped the curls. We bribed him into sitting still with some Conversation Hearts, Jayden has apparently introduced these to him earlier in the day while I was on the phone. If you know Gavin, he has to constantly play with food that is in his mouth, so one heart kept him preoccupied for a couple of minutes at least.
Anyway, here is the before:

And here he is this morning:

Well, I'm slacking, and I'm sorry. I've been so busy lately working and I've had sick boys for the past week. I've had so much that I've wanted to blog about, because we've been doing some fun things (except for the sick week). This will simply be an abridged version of the last month of so.
Some of the fun things we've done:
Whew! That's it for now! Back to work :)