Jaden turns 5!

For Jaden's 5th birthday we stayed one night at The Great Wolf Lodge in Grapevine. Talk about the perfect place for kids! They have a huge indoor water park and also an outdoor water park. We invited our cousin, Jackson, and Aunt Suzanne who are visiting from Illinois to join us. Aunt Jan, cousins Taylor & Austin, and Grandma Schmidt also joined us. We had so much fun. Jaden LOVED the wave pool. He wanted to be there more than any other place.

We were so busy enjoying our time in the water that we didn't have time to enjoy the other amenities of the hotel, but there is a lot more to enjoy. They have an indoor arcade, ice cream palor and a very cool wizard adventure game you can play by running all over the hotel and finding these kiosks that give you hints at the next kiosk to go to and you have to find it. I wish we could have done that, but we just ran out of time!

Bunk beds in the hotel rooms with a kids camping theme:

New Addition

So we have a new addition to our family... on May 27th I gave birth to a 7 lb 5 oz baby girl. Her name is Kiera Estrada Schmidt and she is adorable! She looks exactly like Jaden when he was born. Today she is 7 weeks old! Her delivery went so smoothly. She was the opposite of Jaden - my pregnancy with Jaden was easy and the delivery/recovery was tough! My pregnancy with Kiera was tough and very uncomfortable, but the delivery went so smoothly. The recovery has been quick and she and I have been up and around town quite a bit.

I am on maternity leave until August 17 and then I have to go back to work. At that time Jeremy is taking 3 weeks off from work to stay with her so she will be a little bit older/bigger before she has to go into daycare. I am excited for him to be a stay-at-home dad for a few weeks. Should be an experience for him!

Here are a few pictures of Kiera from last week:

WHERE DID THE YEAR GO?

Wow! It's been over a year since I last posted. How sad. It's one of those things where you get a way for a little bit and then before you know it, you feel like it will take forever to catch up so you just tend to avoid it. Hopefully I will do better about keeping up this time! More to come....

Adventure Race

So, those of you that know me know that I used to do a lot of adventure racing before Jaden was born. It's physically taxing, but lots of fun. My favorite part is the orienteering. I love the thought of find a small flag in the middle of the woods with only a compass and a map!

This past weekend I did a sprint adventure race and Jeremy was my partner. It's the first time we've ever raced together with no one else on our team. We were either going to have a blast or kill each other before the race was over. As it turns out, we didn't need a divorce lawyer. lol! We had so much fun and even though i was slow as heck from being out of shape, we still had a great time.

It started with a run around the park to collect three CPs. This was a good way to spread out the field. Then it was kayaking for 3 more CPs. We did awesome in kayaking. It's our strongest area. Since it is our own kayak and we are used to paddling together we kicked some bum. I think we passed about 8 teams on the kayak and 3 of them jokingly asked us for a tow! However, that thrill was very short lived. Next was biking, but on the hiking trial since there are no real bike trails there. And there were LOTs of ROCKs. I think I hiked-my-bike more than I rode it. Jeremy could have completed this part in probably HALF the time it took us but that's where me being out of shape really showed. It was too hard for me to move quickly over the rocks with my bike. I was so SLOW. We got passed by all the teams we passed kayaking and them some! It was a beating and I was hating it by the end. Poor Jeremy had to drag me around. :o) Then the last thing was hiking for the last 5 CPs back out on the hiking trail which was a lot more fun with my running shoes on. We hiked around and had fun finding the checkpoints on our own. We did really well finding them. Only one point we second guessed ourselves and wasted about 15 minutes, but as it turns out we were on the right track before we second guessed ourselves.

I think we finished around 16th out of 21 coed teams. Oh well, our biggest problem was speed and I need to be in shape to get better at that, but it was definitely fun being out there again!

Aggies in the making

Jeremy, Jaden, our nephew, Austin, and myself visited the campus of Texas A&M the weekend of March 29th. We took our dogs and Lisa Ward and I performed demos on behalf of the frisbee club for the College of Veterinary Medicine's Open House. After the demos' we toured the campus and did a little shopping for some Aggie t-shirts. Here is a picture of Jaden and his cousin, Austin. They look so cool!

Jaden's Remote Control Car

Jeremy's brother's family bought Jaden a remote control car for Christmas. Unfortunately it had a defect and had to be returned. He received a new one in the mail on March 20 and was immediately fascinated with the remote...not necessarily the actual car itself. The remote has two musical tunes on it and Jaden immediately danced to them over and over and over. You might enjoy some of his moves...

Jojo Sleeping Position #6