January pictures

I think I was a little camera happy with my cute babies, so you get to enjoy them too.Spencer and I played “King and Queen”  this week.  He even let me borrow one of the crowns he keeps in his special drawer and Abbie donated her cape and wand for the occasion.  Spencer made his crown in Sunbeams a long time ago, but he loves it…especially all the sparkles.Rachel tired a new recipe for me – Gingersnap cupcakes.  A birthday at Ken’s work was a great excuse to get some fun decorating in.  Here’s her baseball diamond.  And the cupcakes – YUMMY!Here’s some more pictures of Neil.I love this one even though the colors are a little off, but that’s what Photoshop is for right?!Spencer didn’t want to miss out on pictures either.Spencer loves to show us things in slow motion.  Like how he throws baseballs, runs through obstacles, or here, how he stalks his prey when he’s a tiger. We made little bird seed wreaths this winter out of birdseed and unflavored gelatin.  I forgot to poke a whole in one before the gelatin set, so I couldn’t string it up and hang it from a tree.  Instead, I set it on the ledge right outside the front window, and we have enjoyed many close up visitors.Jessie’s school choir got to sing the National Anthem at a Utah Flash game (Our NBA D-League team).  Her choir director had even taught the kids sign for it (that why all the arms are up by their ears).  Ken took Abbie, Mark and Spencer to watch the game.  Jessie told me right up front that she was not interested in the game and just wanted to be with her friends.  Mark was all about the game and loved it.  Abbie and Spencer were happy to be there, especially playing with some clapper-noisemakers that we got.  We enjoyed a special treat of sub-zero ice cream at halftime.  I thought the game might be boring – we took the lead early and kept it… until the very end.  Then the other team tied it up and we went into overtime, and then ended up with the win.  It was lots of fun to be together.

We enjoyed a nice Sunday with Steph and McKay and family for their baby blessing of little Harper.  She’s only 2 months old, but is the same size as Neil.  Abbie had so much fun trying to make Harper smile.The kids’ newest game craze is Monopoly.  Spencer even plays himself while the kids are at school.  He has all kinds of great rules like: if he doesn’t have enough money to buy a property the other players make donations, and he’s pretty much on the only one to build.  The bank is also quite generous when he needs a little cash.  He also finds all kinds of fun ways to take people to jail.  Here the car got a ride in a car pushed by the caterpillar toy.  He tells me all about his plays while I feed Neil.Rachel taught our FHE lesson on choice and accountability last week.  She told a fun story about a little boy who wanted to pick a rose for his mom, but decided to ask instead of taking.  She made a rose for each of the kids before she went to work.  Quite impressive.We had fresh pineapple for dinner one night and Neil got his first taste.  He loved it and got to suck the juice out of 3-4 pieces, that is until he managed to get one of the pieces all the way off the fork…that didn’t go over to well with his mom.Jessie and Abbie went to Bright Ideas a couple of Saturday’s ago over at the school.  Abbie came home with a paper cup duck that makes a honking noise when you pull a wet sponge down a string that’s attached.  She also brought home a great FHE treat idea: 30 Second Chocolate Cake.  So you spoon 2 Tbsp. of chocolate cake mix and 1 Tbsp. of water into a little plastic cup and stir it up – we used a chopstick to stir.  Then you microwave it for 30 seconds and –voila- instant dessert!  The kids LOVED IT!!!  But watch out; it’s pretty stinkin’ hot right at first.I made some more on Tuesday, but I doubled the recipe and put it in a regular bowl with some chopped pecans and cinnamon chocolate chips.  I also substituted milk for the water.  Now for something that took only 55 seconds to cook I was quite impressed.  I have a feeling more experiments may follow.

Here’s a few shots of the the kids right when they get home from school……sense a common theme?!

And our last picture of the post is the new decorations on the bathroom mirror.  Jessie did a great job matching the butterflies to the ones on our new shower curtain.  Whenever Spence draws people he forgets to put hair on them, and I love his hair once he’s reminded that we are not all bald – boy hair is a few straight scribbles across the top, and girls hair is a bit longer lines with the edges turned down.

uh-oh

The kids were helping dry dishes a couple of weeks ago and Mark decided to show Abbie his towel snapping abilities…..well, Abbie’s eye happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  She and I sat on the couch afterwards with ice for a long time.  Poor Mark, he felt really bad.  The next day she said her eye still hurt every time a light turned on and I’m thinking to myself….this is not good.

So we went down to the optometrist and found that a blood vessel in the front of her eye had been broken and she had blood pooling in the bottom of her iris.  He gave us some drops to help with the swelling and she had to wear sunglasses for two days straight to keep her eye from straining in the light so it would stop bleeding.  By that Friday the blood had drained and she only has to wear the sunglasses outside now.  We go back in a week or so to check for scar tissue that could cause problems with the pressure in her eye, but so far so good.  We feel so blessed that she has healed so quickly and that it wasn’t worse!  Abbie has been a great sport about it all; even when we had to put in the “scary” drops!  (Not scary like she was afraid, but scary in that it surprised her every time.)One night the kids put their hand warms I made them for Christmas in the freezer and Abbie got hers out to hold on her eyes.

The end of December

Jessie got some window/glass crayons for Christmas and all sorts of notes have been popping up at our house.  Spencer wanted to write the “mirror, mirror” and Jessie helped him spell out the first “mirror” then wrote the rest for him.  He finished it off with “me!” and the picture.Jessie created a “willow wiggy.” And she and Abbie spent a whole two days creating a town, math books, drawing books etc. displaying them.  It was very fun and Abbie got to use her new markers from Christmas that each have a different tip on them.The Monday after Christmas everyone was so excited to go play outside!!  Here are the boys sporting their new gloves…the girls and their new rollerblades…That night we had dinner and FHE with Steph and McKay and the kids stayed for a sleepover.  Our plan was to go to Boondocks the next day, but Neil was up almost every two hours that night and I was exhausted by the next morning…worried the kids would be disappointed Ken and I planned a bunch of fun activities to do at home instead.  First we had scones for lunch!  Then we played games everyone could participate in.  First was Toss Up.  Part way through, one of the kids started a drum roll if someone took a chance and rolled their very last die in hopes of more points.  We all joined in and it made for a memorable game.  On one turn I just wanted to see how many points I could get in one turn and I made it all the way to 59 (in increments of 10).  It was a lot of fun and included quite a few drumrolls.Next up was A to Z.  Abbie and I were the winners on the first round.  (If you have this game I made up a whole set of kid friendly categories that I’d be happy to share.)Then we headed to the living room for charades.  My favorite was Jessie trying to be a cactus.  When we couldn’t guess it at all I suggested she break the word apart and try try and help us that way and so she broke the word into “cat” and “tusk”…and we finally got it.

Watching a segment of our new Life movies was next.  Jessie picked out Hunters and Hunted and we watched 1 week old baby Ibex escape a fox, a pack of brother cheetahs catching prey, a killer whale and more.  We were going to to pop some corn to snack on while we watched, but we were all still full from lunch.  Whole wheat scones go a long way.

After the movie we played Monopoly Deal then had Nachos Supreme for dinner.  Ah… this is what vacation is made of.  (That night we found a little drawing on the bathroom mirrors with the following inscription…I love scones…I love scones…I love scones.)Jessie made up a game called Turtles.  Basically you get out a bunch of your junk that you’re willing to trade and set a price for each item.  Then you find a medium to trade with… in this case they used marbles… and you go around in a circle buying each other’s stuff for a certain number of rounds.  The kids really enjoy it…the only hard part for me is trying to remember who the junk belongs to afterwards in case I’m cleaning and need to put things away. :-)I made some birdseed wreaths (found here: http://www.bystephanielynn.com/2010/11/how-to-make-homemade-birdseed-wreath.html) with Knox gelatin and hung them in our trees for the birds.  I had been very disappointed that the birds hadn’t found them.  Finally I guess the birds decided they better look for something besides snow to eat and came to visit!  YEAH! (For the big one I put a cup in the middle of a big bowl and for the smaller ones I filled muffin tins and poked a straw into them before they gelled.)Mark, Ken and I played Settlers and Mark creamed us with his forest and ore refining facilities.And here is my newest favorite Neil picture.

Christmas

The kids had so much fun earning chains to buy things for each other.  Like last year, I helped the kids pick out gift ideas for each other at the beginning of the month and I think it made it really exciting to know what they were working toward buying.  It also made it really special when it came time for opening because they were so excited to watch the receiver open what they had worked for.

Our tradition is that the kids can look in their mitten (stocking) whenever they wake up, but they can’t wake each other up.  Mark was up several times during the night and was out sitting in the rocking chair looking up “why Christmas is on the 25th of December” when I came out to nurse Neil at 6-ish that morning.  But Spencer slept until almost 8:00 and we didn’t have to get up until then – Ken said that was the best Christmas gift ever!

Here’s us Christmas morning.  Unfortunately I had been playing with the settings on my camera and had the ISO way up to 1600 trying to take some pictures of the Christmas tree at night and forgot to change it back so all my Christmas pictures turned out grainy.  Silly me.I just love these hugging pictures.  Mark got Jessie a new Calvin and Hobbes collection and she loved it!  Our dinner meal lately has been half conversion half Calvin and Hobbes recitations.Mark was so excited to get Abbie her own watch.Neil thought everything needed a taste test.  All the kids got me new plates for my collection.  It was SO fun!!Jessie got Mark a set of Warriors books, but didn’t want him to guess what they were.  So she and I wrapped them in bubble wrap first and then wrapping paper and told him to be extra careful with his gift.  It was fun.  He’s also sporting his BYU hat from Abbie.  She and Ken made a couple of trips trying to find one and she was so excited to give it to him.Spencer loved his new mitt and his bike horn from Jessie.  Whenever he got really excited about someone opening a gift he would toot his horn.Neil got two books for Christmas and Spencer was right there to help with the unwrapping.Spencer worked so hard and earned 15 chains to get President Monson’s biography for Ken. This was the first gift under the tree a week or so before Christmas, but he was just so excited about it he couldn’t keep it to himself.   When Ken got home from work he ran up to him, “Have you been wanting a book about the prophet?  Well, I’m not telling if this is or not.”All in all we made a pretty good mess.We went and had lunch with Ken’s Grandma Jennie at the care facility.  It was really quite tasty and the nurses there are so good at what they do.  I was so impressed!  Ken’s mom made the most awesome quilt for Grandma Jennie.  It’s all patchworked together shades of bright happy blues and really made her room beautiful.We spent the rest of the day with Ken’s parents and just relaxed.  Here’s a cute pictures of Ken and Neil playing together in the recliner.

Christmas Eve

This year we had our gift exchange with Ken’s family on Christmas Eve in the afternoon and I quite liked it.  It just seemed like a fun way to kick off the holidays. (Do you love the Charlie Brown Tree in this first picture? It’s one of my new favorite decorations at Grandma house!)Neil loved all the paper. And I think Spencer helped almost every single person open their gift.  He was having so much fun.Spencer had to make sure that his money got in his picture too -  he cracks me up.  He has loved his spaceship puzzle and it’s pretty cool because the back of the puzzle is like a coloring page of the front. He and Abbie have started coloring some of it and had a blast.Abbie was our bow collector.  She now has a display on her dresser if anyone is interested.Neil thought his gift was for eating.  After Spencer helped him unwrap it we gave him some of the wrapping paper to play with.  I thought I was doing a really good job about getting him another piece to play with before they got too soggy to come apart, but later when we were home we discovered some paper stuck to the roof of his mouth – YUCK!Our family had the “biggest” gift and the kids were so excited to tear into it.…but all they found was a bunch of stuffing and some Almond Roca tins….huh…oh, and some gift certificates to Boondocks.  Thanks Steph and McKay!After all the fun we went back home and made rolls and a veggie tray for the Christmas Eve party at Scott and Steph’s home. It was a nice relaxing night.  Food, family and Christmas excitement building.