Brotherly love

Little B loves to walk as long as he can walk behind the fire truck. I think it's a case of the lazies because if you hold his hands to help him walk, he'll take a couple steps and then bend in half so he can crawl away. Pushing the fire truck has turned into something he loves to do. It's right up there with pulling all the books off the book shelf, climbing the stairs, and use B's laptop as a stool to reach things on the computer desk.

 I like this one except that K is sitting weird. I'm not sure why he's sitting like a robot, but whatever. I love that you can tell that the little one is walking as he pushes K around the kitchen.

I love this one because he's so happy to be pushing him! I know that it looks like he's going to fall, but he totally has everything under control. I thought that K must help by walking as Little B pushes him, but on Saturday afternoon, Little B was pushing M around the kitchen and she had her legs up over the teeny tiny handle bars so her feet weren't touching the floor. He was able to push her around the kitchen while she happily sang one Frozen song after another.

I couldn't just leave the image on him using the laptop as a stool to your imagination! He loves to climb up there and play with all the pens we have in our pen's mug and with the pencil sharpener. When he gets tired of those he bangs on the computer desk itself while he yells to the beat. I love my little fellas so much!  (Don't judge his outfit, it was laundry day and this was what was left in his drawers. :-))

Happy Friday!

Welp, another week is drawing to a close. Nothing major to report. No one's sick, or hurt or had their undies flushed down the toilet. As an added bonus, undies were worn to school every day this week! It is with a heavy heart that I say that there have been weeks in the past when I couldn't say that. As you can imagine when a certain young one of ours gets out of the shower these days the questions are asked," Are you out of the shower?" "Yes!" "Do you have jammies on?" "yes!" "Do you have undies on?" big sad sigh before we hear the response, "Yes."  I would say all in all it's been a calm week! Let's talk about Dr Seuss for a minute, or ten. Ok, as we all know it was his birthday a couple weeks ago. Wait, what's that you say, you didn't know that?! Your young one's school didn't send home a paper telling you that they were going to celebrate him for an entire week so your kids needed to dress up or do something crazy with their hair, clothes, socks or skin everyday for the upcoming week?! Odd! Ours did. As soon as I read the paper I thought to myself, "Self, do we really have to do all this? Maybe they didn't tell the students what was happening. Heaven knows that our young ones don't like to feel stupid and all the things on the paper have potential to make one feel very stupid. Maybe just maybe we won't have to do it." Wrong! It's like our kids can read my mind. As soon as I thought those thoughts K looked at me with a huge smile on his face and told me day by day what they were supposed to be doing to celebrate Dr Seuss. Some of you may be thinking that I'm truly a Grinch for not wanting to participate in a week long celebration. In my defense, I am so far from crafty that it's truly painful. The thought of coming up with things that will celebrate Dr Seuss and not have our off spring feel stupid is a real challenge and feels me with instant anxiety. The one I was most dreading was Friday. The second graders were supposed to dress up like a character from a book and have a parade around the school. I think the color actually drained from my face. M came spinning over and said,"On Friday I'm suppose to dress up like a character from a book. Hannah was Thing One before. I want to be Thing One or Two. They look the same you know." I told her thank you that I did know that. I asked what Hannah had worn. She said a red shirt with Thing 1 written on it and red pants. I told her that we didn't have a blue wig for the hair. She said,"Oh that's ok, Hannah didn't have blue hair either. She just had brown." Hannah must be the Thing 1 expert! I told M that I have a red shirt, but it has writing on the front. So we can turn it inside out and she could use that. She happily danced away and I sighed a big sigh of relief that we already knew what she was going to dress up as the following Friday. Fast forward to the next Friday. It's 5:55 in the morning and the phone rings. You would think that my first thought was that someone had died. Nope! I knew it was the school. How did I know and why were they calling so early? The weather! It had rained ice all night so I knew that they were going to tell us that school was either delayed for two hours or it was called off all together. It was just delayed. So, I went back to bed! The icy rain continued to fall, so at 7:00 the phone rang again. This time school was being cancelled. Hallelujah! That meant that we didn't have to send M to school as Thing 1! No such luck! On Monday they told us that due to school being cancelled, the activities for Friday had been moved to the next Friday. Big time bummer! Friday comes, I get food for the young ones. I ask them to go get dressed. I tell M I'll be up in a minute to get her the red shirt that she's going to wear to be Thing 1. She spins around and says,"Actually mommy, I decided that I want to be Sally." Sally is from The Cat in The Hat. I look at her and say,"Oh I'm sorry. Sally wears a black jumper, which you don't have. A white shirt with a ruffle, which you don't have and a big red bow in her hair, which you don't have." Now I know that some of you reading this would have no problem making that outfit out of whatever you had around your house. I am not like that. I would have had to go to Goodwill everyday of the previous week to try and find the needed items of clothing. I digress. She gave me the little attitude cough of annoyance and then said,"but I want to be Sally." I said once again,"Sorry Sweets, you don't have the stuff you need to be Sally. I can't magically make the outfit appear. You can't tell me the morning of that you want to be Sally when we've been planning on you being Thing 1 for two weeks. I can go get the red shirt and you can be Thing 1, or we could try to do Cindy Lou Who." Imagine M dorking around. What I mean by that is for the next 5-10 minutes, she rolled around on the floor playing with her hair, picking at the carpet or trying to pick the baby up and roll around with him. I asked her probably close to a million times to please go get dressed. She finally sighed a mighty sigh and said"Fine, I'll be Thing 1" I told her I would come get the shirt so she could turn it inside out. She turned around slowly and asked. "Wait! Will you be able to tell that it's turned inside out?" I said yes and she said whilst doing the attitude cough,"Well, I guess I'll just be Sally." Up to this point I had stayed calm even though she had been dorking around for close to a half an hour. I could feel my blood pressure rising as I not so calmly said,"Just go get dressed in normal clothes. I will send a note to your teacher telling her that you didn't want to wear an outfit." She started to whine and said, "But I HAVE to dress up!" I told her that her choices were Thing 1 or Cindy Lou Who. She stomped upstairs saying, "Fine! I'll be Cindy Lou Who." At this point we have 9 minutes before we are supposed to be leaving to take them to school. It takes me 9 minutes to do a pony tail. I am no hair doing guru. Now she wanted me to figure out  Cindy Lou Who hair in 9 minutes? Right! Yeah, that didn't happen. It took me quite a bit longer than 9 minutes.

  Here's the most annoying part. When she got in the car after school she said,"Guess what mommy? I didn't have to dress up as a Dr Seuss Character. It just had to be someone from a book." My mouth fell open and all I could do was shake my head. I may or may not have been cursing the school in my mind. She said there was a girl in her class dressed as a ballerina. Another boy was a football player. So, she could have worn normal clothes with a pony tail and said,"I'm Sara from the book, Best Friends." SO ANNOYING!!! There's so much wrong with the world these days and one of them is celebrating Dr Seuss for an entire week and at the end of said week dressing up as a character from any book!

Shall we try soccer?

K really wanted to try playing soccer. He hasn't really showed any real interest until the last few months. We looked around and found a team that doesn't play games on Sunday. When we took him to register he could hardly wait for the season to start. When we took him to his first practice, he was the only one on his team that had never played before. The coach told everyone to do 10 toe touches on the ball and K just stood there not knowing what to do. The coach took extra time to show him how to do not only toe touches, but everything else that they were working on that night. K caught on pretty quick. Thankfully we aren't trying to prepare him for the world cup or anything. The kid loves the game! His first game was pretty awesome to watch. I keep telling B that someday I would love a fancy camera so that we can zoom in really good. Our camera wasn't able to zoom in far enough to get his ear to ear happy smile, but we were able to get a few pictures. A few? Who are we kidding. We all know that I have a problem taking about a million pictures at any given event even if we've been there before. I'll spare you most of them, don't panic! His coach had said that they were still little enough that there wasn't going to be a goalie. During practice they would just do kicking drills and work on passing the ball to each other. On the first game the coach found out that there was supposed to be a goalie. K was picked as the first one in the goalie box. My first thought was, oh dear! Good thing they don't keep score because I'm pretty sure that the other team is going to get the ball past K! The coach had been telling them a lot that they can't touch the ball with their hands. K has had it drilled into his cute little head. To put him in as goalie at the last minute and tell him as you're running away that he can pick the ball up and kick it has chance to go very very badly.

 This was what he looked like most of the time. B would try to yell across the field that he needed to watch for the ball. But, he liked to look at the back of the net, or the sky to see if there were any planes he could look at. Or pick the dead grass off his socks. More than once he stood at the back of the net with his fingers holding onto the net leaning forward and just hanging out while the game went on in front of him. One time he stuck his hands inside the green jersey thing. When we asked him why he did that he said that he wanted to see if he could just kick the ball and not touch it with his hands. B told him that as the goalie he can pick up the ball as long as it's inside the red box. K said,"I know, but I just wanted to see if I could do it without my hands." Good thing there wasn't anything shiny to catch his eye or all hope would have been lost of him blocking the ball!

He heard B yell that the ball was coming. He was all business! I do love this one. The team they played was a tough team, But K rose to the challenge!

He did it! He blocked the ball! When he kicked the ball away he was so excited! He never did touch it with his hands. He would only kick it, but he got the job done so that's what's important right?! He loves to play and loves to practice. The only bummer is that the level he's at is the last level that plays all their games on Saturday. If he wants to play next year, his games would be on Sunday's. We are hoping that they will change that so that he can play again next year too.

In other K news, he really wanted his hair spiky for church yesterday. We put gel in it and used a blow dryer to solidify the gel. He saw it and got a huge smile on his face. He wanted us to take a picture so we could send it to his teacher at school. He loved it so much that he wouldn't let anyone touch his hair and every few minutes he would ask if his hair was still standing up. I wish this picture wasn't so bright, but I love that you can see his dimple so good. B touched the top of the spikes, this was after church mind you, and K said,"Daddy! Don't touch my hair! I want it to stay standing up!" Then he looked at me and asked,"Mommy, is my hair still standing up? I want it to stand up for school tomorrow too." I told him that it was still standing up but after he slept on it all night we would have to do it again in the morning. I have never seen a little kid care so much about his hair. Hopefully this is just a phase and not an ongoing hair obsession!

I wonder...

Have you ever ponder the mysteries of life and realized you might never find an answer? There are some common mysteries that we know the answers for like, where did I come from, where am I going and why am I here? On the other side there are three things that have been puzzling me as of late like, where in the world is that airplane? What happened to that shirt and why has our gas bill almost quadrupled since November? Let's talk about the first one, the airplane! So, it's flying from Malaysia to Beijing and just goes missing?! What in the world?! Now, I in no way profess to know what I'm talking about but with all the spy devices that are in the world and are surrounding us, you would think that we would be able to find this plane. If it had crashed into the ocean, wouldn't there be oil in the water? And another thing, one doesn't fly over water en-route to Beijing from Malaysia right? Truth be told I'm awful with geography, I honestly can't show you were we live on an unmarked map of the United States. No that's not a joke, that's a true story morning glory. I think that Malaysia and Beijing are over that way somewhere and that there's no water in between them. Anyway, if it had been the bad guys that took over, wouldn't they have already announced that they did it? They seem to like boasting about the awful things that they do. I heard, and who knows if it's true, but rumor has it that if you call the cell phones of the people on board that they just ring and ring and ring. Shouldn't the cell phones be dead by now? They should just go to voice mail. If they had crashed into the water, wouldn't the phones have been ruined? If they had crashed into the ground wouldn't the phones have died with the people? Well the only idea I have as to the whereabouts of the plane is maybe we have a modern day city of Enoch on our hands! Maybe the people in the plane were so awesome that they were taken up to heaven mid-flight! That would be an awesome story to tell in heaven. When someone asked you how you died to be able to say,"Oh I didn't! I was on a plane going to Beijing and came to heaven instead! That. Would. Be. Awesome!

Mystery number two, what happened to that shirt?

This here shirt went into the washer white. When I went to change the washer and dryer, this is what the shirt looked like. I've got nothing as to what happened. There was no red crayon, marker, paper, sticker, or food that was in the washer with this shirt. Nothing else in the load came out with pink on it, just this shirt. It has added to my not being able to sleep at night because I am just perplexed as to what happened. That is a true mystery folks!

Item number three- why has our gas bill almost quadrupled since November? Let me just start by saying that is not great! It does not fill me with warm fuzzies or happy thoughts. I heard a commercial on the radio the other day that said,"Tired of high gas bills? Here's a suggestion to make your monthly bill lower. Keep your house set at 60 degrees." I almost ran the car(with it's heater set at 80:)) off the road! 60 degrees?! The gas company must be trying to deal with the over population problem. I freeze in our house as it is. We did lower the heat once we saw that bill was going up by almost $100 every month. We keep it at 71. I walk around with sweats, long sleeves, a sweatshirt, slippers, blankets and a jacket on to try and stay warm. CEO's of utility companies suck! 

 

It's great to be 8!

Welp, it's true, this sweet little thing turned eight! How in the world did that happen so fast?

 When she was a wee little thing all she did was cry. I truly mean that, she cried all of the time. That means that I cried all of the time. I was totally pooped and had no clue what to do with this tiny person that cried around the clock. I felt like her tears were never going to stop. That there was no way that she was going to get bigger. I was going to have a baby that screamed her whole life and that was never going to get big enough to understand me as I walked in circles around the island in our kitchen, crying and asking her what was wrong and why she wouldn't stop crying. Well, as we all know, she stopped crying one night and actually learned to sleep through the night as the ripe old age of almost five months! She now loves to put on Pandora and dance around the living room. She loves all things that smell good. For her birthday she wanted the smelly things you plug into the wall so that her room can smell good. She also wanted lotions and smelly hand sanitizer from Bath and Body. Thankfully her birthday is so close after Christmas that all those things were on sale, so we scored some pretty sweet deals! She loves to do her own hair. She loves to paint her toenails and to my dismay, her fingernails. That's a battle I chose not to fight. I really don't like fingernails when they're painted. My parents had a really good friend that was a smoker. Her fingernails were always painted. So when I see painted fingernails I think of Rita's paint coverd smokers nails and I just don't like it. I digress, so sorry! Anyway she is all girl and sometimes I don't know what I am going to do with her because I don't feel like I'm girly enough to know what to do with a girly girl. Anyway, she's eight and beautiful and we love her! As we all know, when one turns eight, baptism follows close behind in our family! She said that she wasn't nervous, but we knew that that was a big fat lie! For some reason the poor thing was truly terrified. When we had the family home evening to talk about what being baptized means and to practice the big dunking moment, she wouldn't do it unless K did it first. Once she did do it, she felt like once was for sure enough and that she was a professional. 

As you can tell by the smile, she was feeling more nervous than excited. What's not to love about this picture? I got the defective gene from my mom that I seem to cry when I feel the spirit. It truly is awful and for me totally embarrassing. I feel stupid crying in front of B and we've been together for almost 15 years. So to cry in public is excruciating for me. Anyway, I was real nervous that I was going to turn into a big ball of blubberingness, thankfully I was able to hold it together for the most part. Grandma B, Grandma and Grandpa K, my younger brother, B and two of his kids, N and M and our A-mazing sister-in-law S and her little D were all here for this special day. We felt so loved that so many people were able to come. Wouldn't it have been so awesome if I had remembered to take a picture of all of those that were there? I think so too and I get so irritated with myself every time I think about how I totally suck that I forgot.I did remember to get a family picture of just us. That's something right?!

Anyway, Grandma B made me cry when she told M that she felt really prompted to tell M that she has a grandpa that was there and was really proud of her. Grandpa B passed away when M was 6 months old. So that was really neat to hear and to feel. The actual dunking went off without a hitch! No toes floated to the top or anything. I could tell that I had a cheesy mom smile on my face. You know the ones I'm talking about. The ones that cover your face when you are so proud of your kids and can't help but smile a big cheesy smile. When I was helping her change back into her clothes once she was done she told me that the water was really cold. That made me feel bad, but I still couldn't wipe the cheesy smile off my face. She probably thought I was so mean as I was saying I was sorry through this goofy smile. I really was sorry, it just didn't look like it. 
We took her picture in her baptism dress... yesterday. Talk about putting things off! Her baptism was almost a month ago. We went to the park by our house after church and snapped a couple pictures.

This one is her favorite. I honestly didn't think that we would get her a white dress. I thought it was so funny that people would get a white dress for their little girls when they got baptized. I remember that I wore a maroon velvet dress the day I was baptized and I still have a testimony. But as her baptism was getting closer I kept looking at white dresses and thinking about the poem, My Three White Dresses. Or whatever it's called. I got sucked in and got her a white dress! I just couldn't seem to help myself. Especially when we found this one on sale. I'm a sucker for a good clearance rack. She loves it, I love it, we all love it!

 K was feeling a little left out because we weren't taking his picture. 

We didn't want that to happen, so he found a nice log and with his trusty stick in his hand he sat down and said he was ready to have his picture taken. Let me explain the outfit. We took him to Lowe's on Saturday morning so that he could do their free little workshop thing. They gave him this apron and he has gone few places without wearing it. He loves being able to put a few cars in the front pockets and he really hopes that people will think that he is in fact an employee at Lowe's. The rain boots came from a friend in the ward. They are at least two sizes too big. He likes to tuck his pants into them. They remind me of my dad's milking boots and if K had a chance to milk a cow, I am sure that he would wear these boots! After we finished the photo shoot, M found a stick to drag behind her. When I say stick I mean a branch really. K didn't want to be shown up by her, so he found a trunk to drag along.

At least it makes for a pretty funny picture. I was a little worried that her dress would get totally ruined, but we had the pictures we needed so I just left it alone. We are all so happy that M is part of our family and that she made the decision to get baptized. Happy birthday baby girl! 

   

Here comes trouble!

I totally love when little ones become mobile. I love to watch as their little bums move side to side as they crawl around. Living in this here house has introduced new challenges. Stairs. With our other two kids we lived in either an apartment with no stairs or our condo that didn't have stairs either. So, this is a whole new ball game! Of course little B loves the stairs. Thankfully, he mostly just hangs out in our sunken living room where he has totally mastered the going up of the two steps. It's the coming down that gets him every time. I wish I could say that he's never taken a head dive to the bottom of the stairs, but folks, that just wouldn't be true. Just know that it has happened enough that when he did it yesterday, there were little to no tears shed. He loves to make it up the two stairs and crawl as fast as he can to the shoe cubby and pull out the shoes so that he can suck on them. The other day he made it over there while I was making dinner. I usually hear him pulling the shoes out, but this time I didn't hear anything. If he's not pulling the shoes out and inserting them into his mouth, nasty I know, then he is playing with the door stop things. I didn't hear those either, so I went to investigate.

No wonder I didn't hear him pulling shoes out or playing with the door stop thing. He has realized there are bigger and better stairs!

He was so pleased with himself! He has only tried the big stairs this one time, but let's fast forward a little bit and what do we find?

That we fit so nicely in the cupboard, especially if we pull the cans out first. He was so happy to pull out whatever was blocking his way and then climb on in. There's a shelf in there and he loved beating on it. I love when babies climb in things, it truly does make my heart so happy!

Martha Stewart I am not!

The other day I was thinking that I wish chicken would go on sale. I didn't realize we were almost out. Usually I get our chicken at Costco. I love Costco for so many reason's but to my chagrin, Costco is 45 minutes away from our house. So, there's no such thing as a quick Costco run. I went to Aldi, the grocery store that I love almost as much as Target and mini cadbury eggs, (which is a lot,) and what to my wondering eyes should appear?! A miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer!  Boneless, skinless chicken breasts on sale for $1.59 a pound! I truly almost hugged the lady standing next to me. I was so happy! I promptly put some in the bottom of the cart and went home. I usually put the chicken in a Ziploc and then put it in the freezer. Well, unbeknownst to me, we only had about five Ziploc's left. I got this brilliant idea to freeze the chicken breasts individually and then just add them to the Costco bag of chicken that was already in the freezer. I got out our oldest cookie sheet and placed a cooling rack on it. I thought that the chicken would freeze to the cookie sheet, so laying it on a cooling rack would prevent that. I put some chicken on said cooling rack, put another cooling rack on top of the chicken and then put more chicken on that cooling rack. I had two chicken breasts that wouldn't fit on the cooling racks. I didn't want the chicken too close together or they would become a frozen mass. I got out a plate, put waxed paper on top of the chicken that was on the cooling rack, put the two chicken breasts on the plate and then put the plate on the waxed paper. The reason for the waxed paper was so the plate wouldn't freeze to the chicken below it. I put it in the freezer and was so pleased with myself for thinking of this brilliant idea. I honestly couldn't wait to take the individually frozen chicken breasts off the plate and cooling racks, put them in the chicken bag and report to family and friends how awesome I am and that they can celebrate that they know someone as smart and frozen chicken savvy as I! Most of you are already shaking your head and thinking,"bless her heart!" I was right that the chicken would have frozen to the cookie sheet. It was a stroke of genius to put a cooling rack down first, but in case you don't know, cooling racks don't have magical non freezing powers. Chicken freezes to cooling racks and waxed paper and the bottom of plates. When I pulled the chicken out of the freezer I was whistling a little tune and in my head thinking I was so bright! Then I tried to take the first chicken breast off the plate. It didn't move. I was able to lift up the chicken, still frozen to the plate, attached to the waxed paper, frozen to more chicken, frozen to a cooling rack, frozen to more chicken, attached to yet another cooling rack, in one big lump of frozen chicken chaos. Oh dear! It was terrible! I had already worked out for the day, but it would be a lie to say that I didn't work up another sweat trying to chisel the chicken off of whatever it was frozen to. I was huffing and puffing and the chicken was content to stay stuck in place. I thought that maybe I could pick up the cookie sheet and drop it on the counter. Surely that would rattle the chicken loose. Nope. the only thing that rattled was the actual counter top as it was assaulted over and over by a frozen cookie sheet. I did manage to pry the plate off and pick off the waxed paper. Then I got out a butter knife to try and pry the chicken apart.

I wish that I would have taken a picture from the side so that you could see that the chicken was frozen together through the little slats in the cooling racks. I was pulling so hard on the stupid frozen chicken that I broke one of the cooling racks and bent the other one so now it won't sit flat. After much trial and tribulation, I was able to get all of the frozen poultry off of the cooling racks and into the Costco bag. Said bag was then thrown into the freezer and the door was slammed shut. Stupid frozen chicken!