Mother-Daughter Book Club: The Doll People

We were looking for an activity that we thought Claire might be interested in that would give her an opportunity to socialize with some of her friends outside of school.  Camie had mentioned that she was doing a mother daughter book club, and it sounded like a great idea.

The first book we read was The Doll People.  It was a cute book, and Claire seemed to like it.

We had a little "tea party," with lemonade, cookies, and watermelon licorice.

Most of the girls were pretty quite for the book discussion part, but they all were excited to decorate cookies.

Notice Claire's outfit - she chose her dress very specifically because she thought it helped her look like a doll.

Here's one of the cookies

Cincy Trip

The Cincy vacation officially began in the Dayton airport (along with our Sperry's).  After waiting almost an hour by the counter for a rental car and putting our stuff into one, just to get in the car and find it was smoky and trading it for another, we were on our way to a memorable weekend.

This was a parents only (plus cute Adele, below) weekend at Nana's Castle.

The 3 years we've lived in Portland, May has been cold and rainy.  We envisioned warm pool time, kind of like this:

 

Instead, we left warm, sunny Portland and found ourselves in upper 60's and rainy!  Fortunately, the pool was warm, so that didn't stop Jared and Taylor from spending a few hours in the pool making up random games.  One game was a 'duck hunt' type of game.  At one point, Jared had to pull a ladder up to the fence to climb it to retrieve the ball from the neighbor's yard . One of the other games was a mixture of a goalie / dodgeball game.

Fortunately, it cleared up long enough to have a couple times sitting in the hot tub.

Friday night, we went to a Reds game and sat through 2 innings of rain (enough to soak our pants for the rest of the game) and an almost 4-hour game, but the Reds won, so it was worth it.

The girls stopped for a photo during the game sporting their red and white.

Since it was Mother's Day, we celebrated Sunday.  Nana's present was official recognition of her March Madness bracketology prowess - a full-size basketball size trophy.

JDRF Gala - like a Wizard of Oz themed prom!

Last year, my parents were told that they were going to be honored as "Cincinnatians of the Year" at the annual JDRF fundraising gala.  It was an exciting announcement, so all the kids (Anderw included... more on that) made an effort to come to the event.

Since it is a black tie event, that meant that everyone needed to find a dress.  After many months of planning, many hours of shopping for dresses, shoes, and jewelry for the event, and hours of hair, nails, makeup, etc., everyone was ready!  Camie had a babysitter to watch Adele, so she got to take pictures, prom style!

 

We got pictures in all different combinations, of course.

The Girls

The Guys

Nana and her girls

Nana and her boys

 

The guests of honor

In front of the mantle

 

Sassy!

and one for Instagram, of course.

Once we got to the event, it was nothing like we've ever been to.  The event was at the Cincinnati Convention Center.  When we went up, we were greeted by the lion

 

and the scarecrow, and the tin man and the 10-foot tall ruby red slippers as well as golden bricks everywhere.

 

The first part was a silent auction and social mingling.  We talked with people from my parents' ward and work as we perused the silent auction items, BidPal in hand, thinking through bidding strategies.  We additionally got to snack on different h'orderves, all labeled with the number of carbs they had.  I quickly lost count of the number of carbs I ate.

We were invited into the main ballroom which was decorated like the Emerald City with poppy fields flowing out to the sides.  Each of the tables was decorated with a red ruby table cloth and different oz-themed decor.

 

Even dessert was Wizard of Oz themed - a melting Wicked Witch mousse and flourless cake!  

During dinner, we watched as the time counted down on our silent auctions and everyone discussed strategies of what to bid on and how much to bid so they could win.  We ended up winning both auctions we were interested in, winning  an American Doll that we plan on giving to Claire and a purse for Dani (Coach!).

They did a live auction, including a puppy, various vacations (including the Super Bowl), and other amazing experiences.  After the silent auction, it was time for Fund-A-Cure, the portion where people pledge certain amounts.  Before that started, we saw a video of Andrew speaking (he was filmed by a crew in Houston), talking about his diabetes and talking about the importance of finding a cure for it.  It was pretty emotional to everyone at the Jensen table and to many others who were there.

 My parents pledged the largest contribution (part of being the Cincinnatians of the Year, I guess).  After that, they asked for $25,000, at which point Taylor and I went out with cardboard cutout Andrew and held out our pledge card (the $25,000 ended up on Dani and my receipt that night - it wasn't charged to our credit card, fortunately!), which represented the contribution from so many friends and family from our entire family. People got a pretty good kick out of seeing cardboard cutout Andrew up in the front, and it was special to represent Andrew and those that contributed that weren't with us.

Camie and Amber later introduced us as we asked for the final contribution as we collected peoples' bid cards.  It was pretty fundraising intensive, but it was an incredible experience to see peoples' generosity.

Afterwards, we took lots more pictures.

It was neat to see so many people come up and congratulate my parents for this honor.  They have touched the lives of many people through work, church, kids' school, and community events they have been part of in their years in Cincinnati, and it was neat to see both of them recognized.

  

Then we joined the after party for some dancing and some more food and fun.  It was a long night, but in all, the evening raised over $800,000 for JDRF and was a memorable evening for our family.

Biking Wilsonville

Normally in April and May, it's cool and rains quite often, so when it's nice, everyone tries to take advantage of it by doing things outside.

This year, it's been amazing for the past few weeks.  For the 3rd straight day, we got to enjoy sunshine and 80 degree weather, so we decided to pack in as much as possible into one day.  After Jared played frisbee, we went to the baseball pancake breakfast.  After that, we decided to go for a bike ride to get lunch in Wilsonville.

It was such a nice sunny day that we all put on our sunglasses.  Babies looked really cute in theirs!  We rode to Jimmy John's in Wilsonville with kiddos and babies.  It is fun to be able to go for family bike rides with all the kids.

After lunch, we did yard work and washed cars.  It was an awesome day that we got to spend outside!

MORE POPSICLES!!!

One of the best things of having summer-like weather is popsicles!  Kate was REALLY enjoying her popsicle!!!

Liam was pretty excited to be having one, too.

32 years young

I woke up at the normal 6:50 am, but noticed Dani was already out of bed.  She met me in the hall and told me, it's your birthday, I'll get the kids to the bus.  What a great way to start out the day - getting to sleep in!

After work, I got to man the grill for dinner, cooking some yummy grilled shrimp skewers Dani had prepared, asparagus, and pineapple.  Dani made some cornbread (in the cast-iron skillet), too.  It was beautiful, so we ate outside.

I had lots of help opening presents

and blowing out candles on the birthday cake

and eating the birthday cake.

We went out Friday night with Jon and Ashley Lefrandt to a place I've been wanting to go for quite a while called Pok Pok.  It's a Thai place that is different than other Thai places around.  We went after Jacob's baseball game, then waited about 30 minutes, so it was quite a late start.  The food was great, and we had a fun time with the Lefrandts!