Something old, something new…

Still recapping this last summer… 

Our big vacation this year was to Yellowstone.  We started out by driving out to Billings, MT to see some of our favorite people – our Montana cousins (I believe I mentioned our mad naming skills previously).    We went out on to the rims and did a little hiking.  It was a fabulous view and we didn’t get bitten by any rattle snakes, so that was a plus.  The kids loved hanging out with their cousins.  I mean really loved hanging out with their cousins.  Mike and I enjoyed not having to do any parenting all week because the cousins were keeping them so busy. 

 

And then on to Yellowstone!  Speaking of views, that place is a.maz.ing.  I wish I could put a cabin there.  I could give up a lot of modern conveniences to wake up to this every morning.  As you might guess, we saw a lot of wild life – tons of buffalo, an elk, moose, osprey, bald eagles, and probably more that I don’t remember now.  The highlight was the wolf that passed right by us as we were on a bridge taking pictures.  Apparently they are very rare and this one was probably the alpha male of the pack, according to the nice park ranger.  It was pretty awesome.  My personal favorite were the bears.  Ok, this one too.  We actually saw two bears, on the last day we were there.  This was the closer one of the two.  A bunch of our Utah family met us up there too.  My parents – Grandma and Paca, as Ben now affectionately refers to him.  My cute sisters – Turtle, Sarah and Michelle.  It was so fun to spend time with them!  Our Montana cousins had their bikes with them and Aunt Holly tried to teach Carter how to ride without training wheels.  He rode for 30 seconds or in all his tasseled glory until he ate it, narrowly missing a tree.  Since then, he has refused to try again.  Carter learned the art of roasting marshmallows to blackened perfection.  And got in touch with his outdoorsy side.  Ben fell in love with his “Paca”.  This kid loves finding pictures of Paca around the house, calling him, and he’s super excited for him to come out for Thanksgiving.  Here’s the man himself…All in all, it was a great time!  We’ll definitely be back. 

June in October

That’s right.  I’m going down memory lane here.  It’s been a while, but I feel like I haven’t had a lot of free time lately.  I’m not going to lie, teaching seminary is a lot more time intensive than I thought it would be.  It’s so good for me, but it’s a lot of work to prepare a lesson every day.  With that and catching up on the last 6 seasons of Friday Night Lights, blogging has fallen to the bottom of the list.  But there are things that I want included in my blog book at the end of the year, so I’m going to recap. 

 

First, the start of the summer. Carter and Samantha had such great teachers.  It was hard to say goodbye.  I teared up a little when I said goodbye to Ms. Jones.  She was Carter’s teacher for 2 years, and then Samantha’s for k3.  After seeing her everyday for 3 years, I was sad to say goodbye.  I’m just hoping she’s still around when it’s Ben’s turn to go to school.  Carter’s teacher was so good for him.  He had a great kindergarten year and he still talks about her.  Mrs. Stuppan pushed him to work harder and be better, and he did so well in her class.  They had a little graduation program for the class at the end of the year.  I didn’t realize what a big deal it was (flowers, balloons, gifts, the whole 9 yards) and forgot my camera, so I ended up with nothing but a few iPhone pictures.  I’ll do better for the real thing.  Here he is with his best friend Isaiah and another girl I had never met before that day.  Look how proud they are of their “diplomas”.  So cute.  

Apparently not much else picture-worthy happened in June.  Stay tuned for July and our Yellowstone trip.  And I promise, there will be some more entertaining posts in the near future. 

Look Who’s Two!

Actually, he’s been 2 for a while now. He turned 2 on the 6th.  And believe me, we had lofty plans for his big day!  Unfortunately, all the fun places we had planned to go were closed on Labor Day when we had planned on going.  Then, on his actual birthday, Samantha threw up on the bus ride to school and we ended up staying home.  We did have some good friends over for a small celebration though.  In spite of our foiled attempts to get out and have fun he got to eat lots of good food and play with some toys.  All in all, a good day in Ben’s book. 

Here are some of my favorite things about Ben.

He is hilarious.  About 6 months ago, he looked and me and said “I funny Mommy”.  And he really is.  He loves making people laugh.  He loves to tease, tickle, and make faces.  Whatever it takes.   Lately, it’s the faces.  As you can see he has quite the arsenal of them.  Lately, he’s started saying “just kidding”. 

He is a tank.  This kid is 30 lbs. and 35 inches of chunk.  He eats constantly.  He knows how to open the fridge and does so on at least an hourly basis.  He loves milk, string cheese, yogurt, fruit leather, goldfish, and really anything else he can swallow.  At this rate, I’m going to have to find a couple of jobs to feed this one as a teenager.  He loves his babies.  This one in particular.  We are really clever about naming our dolls in this house and refer to this one as naked baby.  We also have pink baby and orange baby, named after the color of clothes they are wearing.  Really unique, I know.  Anyways, he has really latched on to naked baby and sleeps with him/her, changes it’s diaper and gives it baths.  It’s really quite cute.  He is very particular about his sleeping situation.  He is my pickiest in that area by far.  He likes to sit on the closed toilet to have his teeth brushed.  He likes to read How does a dinosaur love his cat after brushing his teeth.  He has to be the one to shut the door, turn off the light, and turn on his sound machine (in that order).  Then he needs his blanket (luckily, it just has to be one of the 5 or 6 flannel ones I made when he was born) and a few minutes in the rocking chair with some songs.  Then he needs two blankets on him and you must say good night as you are leaving.  He then shouts “Good night Mommy/Daddy!” after you close the door at which point you have to open the door and say good night once again.  Um, high maintenance much?  I hold Mike responsible.  I spent the first 18 months of his life putting him in bed with one blanket and singing twinkle twinkle little star as I walked out of the room.  He is incredibly energetic.  I guess he needs to burn off all that food he eats.  This kid doesn’t walk anywhere.  He runs, hops, jumps, shuffles or stomps everywhere he goes.  Most likely he is just a normal little boy, but Carter and Samantha are pretty lazy, so he wears me right out.  He loves to sing.  I was listening to a song the other day in the car and by the end of the song, he was singing along with it.  I have to watch what I’m listening to! My all-time favorite is when he belts out “MOTHER KNOWS BEST!” or “I’ve got a dream!” (both from the Tangled soundtrack).  He sings along to You are my Sunshine at bedtime and I’ll frequently catch him singing “Baby, oh! Baby, no!”.  That’s right, he’s got a bit of the Beiber fever.  He hates messes.  I love this about him.  Although this doesn’t mean that he never makes them, he is all about helping clean them up.  He asks for napkins at meals and says “that’s gross” at least 3 times a day.  Here he’s showing me his sticky hands.  He’s discovered how to get up on the toilet and wash his own hands now.  I’m hoping that his dislike for being messy will help us out in the potty training department (a girl can dream, right?).He is obsessed with busses, trains, cars, airplanes, and trucks.  Every time he sees a bus – city or school, he shouts “a point for me!” and he’s always the first one to spot them.  It’s a random game that the kids play in the car.  Ben is always the one that Carter and Samantha want on their team.  I attempted to decorate his cake with a school bus.  I decorated it the night before though, and the frosting started to run by the time we served it.  Rookie mistake.  And yes, there is a bite taken out of the 2.  I’ll let you guess who did it.  Ok, it was him.  I am absolutely loving spending all day with this little boy.  He is so much fun to be around.  He is an awesome little buddy to hang out with!  We’re so glad that he came to our family! 

And for your viewing enjoyment, here are a few more from his collection of funny faces. 

Oops.

So I was cleaning up my Google pictures account after our trip to Yellowstone, making room for my family’s web album.   I came across an album with all of my blog’s pictures in it.  Mistakenly thinking that this must just be where the blog gets them from initially I tested out a picture, deleting it.  Nothing happened to the blog, so I went ahead and deleted it.  Big mistake.  I should have listened to my gut and left it.  It deleted pretty much all the pictures from my blog posts from the last 3 years.  I’m not even trying to fix the older posts, but as I try to fix the newer posts they might come up again on your readers.  Just FYI.  And as a side note, if you feel like you shouldn’t delete something, you probably shouldn’t.

Video

If you are using Google Reader, I don’t think the video from the last post shows up. You can view it here. 

So Blessed.

I was making dinner tonight and noticed that someone had turned on the TV. I went in to turn it off and saw this on the news(warning, it’s a little bit graphic and it might make you cry).

I cried through the whole story and then for a few minutes afterwards.  All of a sudden I felt so blessed for all that I have and so petty for worrying about all of the little things that I worry about on a daily basis.  Things like not having the right ingredients for a recipe.  Things like not having the house that I want right now.  Things like wishing I was skinnier. 

I have never had to leave my home to find food.  I have never had to see my kids go without.  My biggest fear in the world is having to tell my kids that there is no food left.  This is the main driving force behind my compulsive need to store extra food for times of need.  My heart breaks when I think of these mothers – hungry and suffering in their own right trying to comfort their dying children.  I pray that I never know the sorrow that they must feel every day.  I pray that my family and I never have to know that pain. 

The hardest part of seeing this suffering is knowing that there is very little I can do to help.  If I could, I would invite them into my home.  I would package meals and send them over.  However,  I know that my good intentions and sympathy won’t fill bellies.  My sympathy pains are hollow without action.  So, here is what I’m doing about it.  I’m planning on skipping the grocery shopping for this week and donating our grocery money for the week to UNICEF.  The kids are having a rummage sale, selling some of their toys and donating the proceeds (they may or may not know about this yet).  Here is my challenge to you:  Do something.  Anything.  Look through your pantry and see if you can skip grocery shopping this week.  Have a bake sale.  Have a rummage sale.  Look at your budget and see if there is any way you can squeeze out a few dollars.  Then donate it to UNICEF.  Or the U.N.’s World Food Programme.  Or Save the Children.  Or the LDS Humanitarian Fund. You can learn more about these programs and others here and here.  It may be just a drop in the bucket, but a drop is better than nothing.  Then spread the word and ask your friends to do the same.  Then hug and kiss your little ones and thank God that you were born where you were. 

The great outdoors

Typically, me and my kids are homebodies.  We love hanging out around the house.  While this is pretty low maintenance, it leads to pretty boring lives.  So, in an attempt to get the kids going in the mornings, and to get us out of the house more often, we sit down on Sundays and plan out fun things to do each morning.  Today’s plan was feeding the ducks.  We were all a bit disappointed when we woke up this morning to thunderstorms.  By the time we were ready to go, the serious rain had stopped and so we decided to gear up and head out.  I’m so glad we did!  We only found one duck, but she had some babies tagging along.  Super cute.   Since there wasn’t much duck action, we went for a little walk down the river.  It was really shallow, so I let the kids walk in it a little bit.  They had a blast playing in the water.  We found another Momma duck with her baby and a crawfish (which we thought was dead, but turned out to be alive – freaked.me.out.).  Then on our way back, we found a huge snapping turtle in a puddle!  I don’t know what people are talking about when they say turtles are slow, because this turtle was quick!  It stuck around for a few minutes of shell-petting and us trying to lift it up with an umbrella and then he was out of there.  He hightailed it back to the river. 

Did you know that snapping turtles have freakishly long tails?

Oh yeah, and all these pictures were taken with my new favorite app, camera+.  Love it.