New York, New York

 Joseph and I were lucky enough to take a kids-free vacation to New York last summer and it was awesome. I don't have many great pictures, but I sure loved this trip!

Here we are in the airport just before leaving. It was early in the morning and we were both pretty groggy.

We had left the kids to party with Grandma and the cousins. They had such a fun time! It makes me wish we lived closer.

My mom had booked us a super nice hotel room and had flowers and treats waiting for us when we arrived. It was awesome to come to a room that had been prepared just for us!

I had filled our schedule pretty tightly with different things to see. This is us on the High Line, which is a linear park built on an elevated section of an old railroad through Manhattan. It was a really fun walk on a beautiful day. I believe we did this just after leaving the Google campus, where we had breakfast that morning.

The New York Historical Society happened to have a Mo Willems exhibit going on, which we of course stopped in to see. Mo Willems is the author that got Caleb reading and holds a special place in all of our hearts.

We were able to see a Broadway show, which is always a treat. This was Finding Neverland, which quickly became a hit with the kids once we got back home and played the soundtrack of them. This is the show that "We're All Made of Stars" came from that the kids were singing in the parking lot last summer.

We also took a nighttime schooner "city lights" tour which was fun. I might prefer the Staten Island ferry, but it was cool to see the city lights and the Statue of Liberty all lit up.

This was in the Nintendo store, which was one of my favorite places that we visited. I've been trying to convince Joseph to use this as his Google or Linked-In profile picture. :)

We were able to eat tons of really good food, bike through Central Park, and stay out as late as we liked. It was such a fun vacation that it already has me thinking about the next one! I'm so grateful to our parents for helping out so much with this.

Elinor's surgery

Since she was a baby, Elinor has had a hard time breathing and sleeping. The ENT had told us a year or two ago that the size of her adenoids is 3++ on a scale from 1-4, so very enlarged, but we still dragged our feet in scheduling the surgery because it is, after all, surgery.

After being told that she would likely go another decade before growing into her adenoids, we finally bit the bullet and scheduled the adenoidectomy for January 3rd. We were lucky to get an early slot in the day, since Elinor had to be fasting when she went in. I took her to the surge center while Joseph got the other kids off to school and the registration process was very quick and easy. Within half an hour we were here, in a room with Elinor in a gown, socks, and hat.

This is my favorite picture from the day

This picture was taken after Elinor was given a medicine to make her "relax" about the whole process. The medicine made her absolutely, hilariously crazy. She spent the next 20 minutes asking me why I had three noses, singing songs about losing and finding her socks, and talking about that girl in the mirror who looked like she was about to hit her head on the bed, and then proceeding to bang her head on the side of the bed.  I remember trying so hard to understand what she was saying, then repeating it back to her as a question, only to have her look at me, bewildered, and say "Mom, you don't make any sense."

After that they took my little girly away and I tried to get some work done, but the doctor was back less than 20 minutes later to tell me everything had gone smoothly and I could see her in a few minutes.

When I got to the post-op room, poor Elinor was crying big humongous tears that were just so sad. She looked pretty beat up and miserable. She just kept saying, "I want to go home" and "Get me outta here!" over and over again while trying to pull out her IV and remove her pulse-ox. They let us leave early, and soon we were home.

 She gradually began to feel better, and then was almost back to normal later that day. She stayed home from school that week, and we did have one pretty scary middle-of-the-night major nosebleed, but besides that the recovery was pretty seamless.

Here she is on her first day back at school, one week later. She also happened to lose her very first tooth that day!

Our Elinor is completely back to normal now, with far less mouth-breathing throughout the day and with much more peaceful slumbering at night. I am glad we went through with the surgery, but also grateful to have it behind us.

Kinder buddies

We currently have 3 kids at one school, which is just down the street from us, and it's awesome. A few fun coincidences have worked out for us this year:

1) Emily and Elinor's classes are both piloting a new science curriculum, and are the only two classrooms in the entire district doing this.

2) Caleb and Elinor's classes have been matched up for 2nd grade - kinder buddies, so Caleb and Elinor are often paired up to work on projects together.

Today was the 100th day of school, so 2nd grade buddies came in to work on a craft with the kids. Elinor was thrilled to be able to work with Caleb.

From Caleb's teacher

From El's teacher

I love that the kids are so excited to work together, especially because I know it could go the other way too.

Family Picture

I've been updating the kids' photo albums and realized that I miss having a record of all the milestones and things we've been up to. I'm going to work on starting this up again in 2017. For now though, here's my favorite photo from a family photo session at Stanford in December:

Good old Jacob, always keeping things interesting for us.

We can be anything we want to be

After swimming lessons, the kids put on an impromptu clip from Finding Neverland in the parking lot.  Note the choreography and parts.

Making my move

We went to the park to get some shots for a whatsyourmove.com entry. Maybe we won't win, but it was good family time.

Light reading

We walked into the living room to see the kids all reading like this.  I've tried long and hard to discourage them from pulling the cushions off the couch, but it's hard to argue with this.

Vargas Carnival

Elinor's school held a carnival yesterday that was so much fun! A few good friends from the ward were in charge of big parts of the event, and several ward members pitched in to make things happen, so it was nice to see them and show our support. The kids had a great time deciding how to spend their allotment of tickets. We let Emily and Caleb run around on their own and I loved hearing Emily talk about how she felt so grown up being able to do that. It'll be happening more and more as time keeps speeding by, baby girl!

Jacob and El plus two cute girls from the ward that we see almost daily in the carpool.

One of the reasons we love California made clearly manifest in this pic: Beautiful, beautiful weather. Almost every day.

Doctored

We took a trip to the beach to take some family photos. We didn't have nearly as much success as we had hoped.  Next time, we'll bring a photographer instead of a tripod.

The sun was in the wrong place, but we really wanted the bridge in the background; so we were never not squinting. This is the best shot we got. Elinor's strangling Jacob and hiding behind me. I tried to fix it:

Sigh... that's why I'm a programmer instead of an artist. And why is it that this is the best shot of Jacob we have? He didn't smile the entire day.

Play with me, play with me, play with me please!

It has been play time at the Cooper household lately.  Emily and I had a special trip to see "Wicked".

Amanda and I had a fun date to see "Into the Woods".

But perhaps best of all was Family Home Evening's edition of "More Spaghetti I Say!"
It was advertised in advance with a handful of other shows.

When the big night came, we were so excited! Because we knew the director, we got really good seats. The curtain parted and out came the stars: