Mario Madness

Sometimes there are moments in life when a person feels a sense of pride. I (Nathan) recently had one of these moments when my wife beat Super Mario Brothers for the first time. It was just a beautiful thing.

Sarah bought me an Original Nintendo for my birthday last September. I played it quite a bit through last Christmas, but then didn't play it much until a few weeks ago (work got busy, and Molly came along, and I kinda forgot about it, so the Nintendo got neglected). Having recently been reunited with the NES (due to a recent visit from family), I've come to reappreciate it's goodness.

As I mentioned earlier, Sarah beat Super Mario Brothers all by her self for the first time just last night. I was so proud. She's learned the tricks necessary to warp through to level 8, and then get through Koopa's last castle. After continuing once, she got to Koopa with one life left and sailed under Koopa for the win. Here's a picture of Sarah celebrating the victory:

We went out to dinner the next night in celebration of Sarah's victory.

I've also been re-honing my Mario skills. As some of you may know, during my last year of college my roommate (Jeremy) and I played quite a bit of the original Super Mario Brothers game. We learned many of the time-saving tricks and had a bit of a competition going on to determine who could beat the game the fastest. While we never got our elapsed-times down to World Record status (if I remember correctly the World Record time for beating the game is around 5 minutes 15 seconds) we did get kinda close. Jeremy and I called it a "draw" when we both got down to 5 minutes 45 seconds. It was just taking too much time to get any quicker--it usually took us several attempts to get a time even close to this low, and if you messed up even a little bit (slowing you down by a second or two) the entire attempt was rendered useless.

In honor of those Super Mario "time-attack" days, tonight I recorded a run through the game that took 5 minutes 56 seconds to complete (from the time I hit start to the time Koopa is beaten on the final level). You can definitely see some of my sloppiness in this run which cost me precious seconds, but oh well.

(Unfortunatley there's an annoying black stripe moving down the screen as a result of recording a TV screen with a camcorder. However, if you're so nerdy as to actually want to watch the attached video, you probably know what the black stripe is covering anyway and so it won't matter too much) :-)

Here it is:

Molly's Blessing

So Clark called Nathan at work last thursday and told him they were going to come up for Molly's blessing, but not to tell Sarah. Nathan just said he wanted to go out to dinner and when we got to Red Robin, Grace came walking up to me. I was so surprised! I just started crying. I couldn't believe they came all the way up to see us.

Hannah and Grace are seasoned big sisters so holding Molly proved to be easy for them.

Grammie Pammie flew in that night and didn't know that Clark and Christie and the kids were here, so we pulled a prank on her too. Clark sent Peter in the back door and he just wandered in to the front room. Pam didn't recognize Peter and thought we were babysitting untill she saw Hannah and Grace walk in. The fun kept on going when Ben called our house and Clark answered. Ben thought his phone had misdialed and apologized to Clark and hung up. He called again and Ben was even more upset with his phone because he thought it wasn't working. Again he apologized and hung up. The third time he called Sarah's cell phone and when Clark answered he was so angry with his cell phone for always messing up when all of the sudden it dawned on him that maybe Clark was at our house. Clark said he could hear Rachel laughing hysterically in the back ground.

We dressed Molly in her outfit from uncle Everitt and aunt Belinda and headed off to pick up tibu and Grana.

Like we said, Multnomah falls is the default activity here. I don't know what we will do if someone visits twice!
Here is Grammie, Clark, Christie, Hannah, Grace, Peter and Tibu up on the bridge.

Why walk when you can go on shoulders. Nathan has Grace and Clark has Hannah.

Tibu ended up carrying Peter down the trail and forming a bond. Peter had no problem cuddling up with he and Molly later on in the day!

The next day Molly was blessed by her daddy. The gown she was blessed in has been passed down on Sarah's side dating back to the 1800's. Sarah was blessed in this gown as well as many other family members.

Here we all are after her blessing.

Here is a picture of everyone who was there that was blessed in the gown.

Clark, Sarah, Hannah, Grace, Peter, and now Molly!

I Love this Baby!!!

One happy family!

It was an awesome time and we are so grateful for our baby and for all of our family.

Family, Family, Family!!!

We have been a little slow with the postings, because we have been lucky enough to have a lot of visits from family.

Deric was on a business trip in Canada but flew in and out of Seattle airport so we drove up there so Molly could meet her uncle. We all went to dinner and had a great time with Deric.

Ben, Rachel, Benjamin, Evan, and Noah came in and were with us for a few days and we all had a great time.

The boys loved Molly, but Evan particularly took a liking to her. This surprised us all because he generally does not like anything having to do with girls.

Here he is holding Molly for the first time with his mom and Noah looking on.

Not surprisingly, Benjamin was great with her. He has always been such a sweetheart with babies.

Noah really liked Molly as well, but he liked her pacifiers, bottles and anything that was hers even better.

Here is Ben throwing Noah up in the air. If you could see Noah's face you would realize that he is completely relaxed and loving it!

We all went on a trip to Multnomah falls. If you come to visit us, we will take you there too... because thats all we know to do around here!

We should probably get out more!

It was really cold there so we had to get creative to keep Molly warm. Yep those are pajamas wrapped around her head. Mother of the year right here!

I think next time I will be smarter and bring more blankets!

We LOVED having Ben and Rachel and the kids here.

Molly Smiling

Here's another video of Molly. In this one, she smiles.

We know, we're obsessed :-)

Molly at 5 weeks

We've recently learned how to import videos from our camcorder to the computer. We thought that this clip was cute...so here it is!