The Hill Family Saga: February has come and gone....fast!

February is always a fun filled month with Valentine’s Day as well as Alethea’s birthday. This year we added to the fun by throwing in our first race of the year and a surprise visit from the Smith’s!

This year for Valentine’s, we made a week of celebrating for Alethea. She made homemade valentines for a few buddies in SC as well as some family. We did lots of crafts, including plenty to decorate the walls for Valentine’s, and baking in the shapes of hearts. She is a big fan of stickers so there were plenty of those involved as well as yummy homemade muffins and graham crackers that were a big hit! Then, for Valnetine’s day itself, we had heart-shaped meals including heart-shaped pancakes and eggs for breakfast and heart-shaped burgers and fries for dinner. J We also got Alethea Valentine’s stickers and tattoos; the stickers were a hit, but not really the tattoos as much. Plus Ben brought home gorgeous flowers and some chocolate for me after work.

My Valentine's Cuties

Love her face when she got her stickers, lol

Pretty flowers

My little chef

Graham Cracker watching and goldilocks :-)

Heart muffins

and heart graham crackers

And heart shaped dinner. :-)

Then, as I mentioned in my special birthday post, we spent February 21^st celebrating Alethea’s 3^rd year of life. So much fun celebrating her special day with family and then my parents stayed overnight so that we could get up early and run the Anthem 5k. This was the first leg of the Triple Crown running series. With Ben helping to pace us, we ran at a pace of 8min 32sec which was pretty much the best pace for me yet. We were so thankful Ben was even able to run it at all because he has been struggling with heal pain due to plantar fasciitis. It was so much fun to have our first race as we are looking forward to the next two in the series as well as the Derby half-marathon in April!

So many runners!

The biggest surprise of the month was getting to see the Smiths. We had been talking about them coming sometime soon, but hadn’t really made official plans. Then, Ben was able to get cheap tickets to the UofL game and he invited Brian to join him. I am so thankful he accepted and brought Anna and the kiddos with him! It had been 6 months since we had seen them, but we just picked up right where we left off. One of the biggest treats was that we got to go out to dinner, without kiddos, for the first time EVER before the boys headed to the game. It was so nice to have completely uninterrupted conversation for a few hours! Though we only had a few days together, we made the best of that time. It was so wonderful to see Alethea with her BFF Molly playing together again and they picked right back up where they left off too. We loved seeing all 5 of the kiddos together; 6 months brings a ton of changes in such little ones! Looking forward to a great time again in the fall when we go down to SC!

The boys got the tub all to themselves

Just a little game of ping pong

Just like old times...Alethea pulling the Smith girls in the wagon

Mickey Mouse Clubhouse

Rocking the balance beam

Cute little boys!

Ben is continuing to enjoy his job and is loving taking on new projects and presenting ideas to his team. He is also finishing up a workout spreadsheet he created to track all of his muscle groups in hopes of revolutionizing his workout routine. For me, I have continued to focus on my running. Beyond cooking and daily routine, working on my training for running has been about all I have had time for. Life has been busy, but I am so thankful we have been able to take care of ourselves through working out and eating right!

Now for a brief update on Alethea. She is getting bigger, but surprisingly not as much taller as I thought she was. I think all her growing is focused on language skills right now and less on physical development. Her at home 3 year stats are 40.25inches tall (98th + percentile) and 36lbs (90^th percentile). She has grown almost 4 inches and gained about 7.5lbs in the past year. Though her weight is finally catching up to her height percentiles, she still has no booty so we still struggle with pants staying up, lol. She definitely has a longer torso, so her top half wears bigger sizes than her bottom. She is wearing 4T and 5T shirts (still 3T dresses as tunics) and 3T and 4T pants as well as some 5T leggings. Her feet haven’t changed much lately, but she is wearing size 9.5 Sauconys for now.

My little artist

She has changed so much over the past year. I was just reading over her 2 year update and she was saying things like “pahtee Lala” and this year for her birthday she was saying “I am going to have a birthday party with a strawberry ice cream cake and presents”. That is quite the development in language! One thing that hasn’t changed much in the past year is that she is a chatterbox, always talking. J She finally has all four of her two year molars in as of this past month.

Happy girl, messy hands!

Another fun thing to note in comparison to her a year ago is that she still loves music, lining things up and reading. She is also still a sporadic eater. Her favorite meals are breakfast and lunch and she tends to be a lighter eater at dinner. She continues to love any kind of fruit, cheese, and bread. She also continues to test her limits, but is getting more strong-willed at testing so we are having to implement more consequences than we used to. It is so fun to see how much she has grown over the past year. She is definitely not a baby anymore!