Happy Birthday, again!

January is jam packed with birthday's around these here parts. M's birthday comes first followed just three days later by little miss A.

This tiny human turned one. We can't believe that the year went by so quickly. She is small but so so loud. Truly. We thought K and little B were loud, which they are. They pale in comparison to her. She is the loudest when she's tired. Her sounds change from happy loud sounds to mad loud sounds. If  I am on the phone when she's awake, it's not uncommon for people to ask if I need to go because they can hear her in the background. She loves to play peek-a-boo and will do it as often as anyone will respond to her.

Sometimes, she doesn't cover her eyes all the way

But the end result is the same. She also likes to do this

She'll laugh and laugh with whoever is doing it with her.

 She loves books and yogurt melts.Her one year check revealed that she's still tiny. She only weighs 14 pounds and is in fact allergic to almost everything under the sun. The list includes but is not limited to, peanuts, eggs, wheat, milk, chicken, apples and soy. Just in case you were wondering, every gluten free recipe calls for milk and eggs. Most food products have milk, wheat, soy and eggs in them. Not. Great. The pediatrician told us we can feed her everything she's allergic to except for peanuts and eggs. Those two are her anaphylactic  allergies. It seems weird to us that her Dr said we could feed her foods she's allergic to. We are taking her to an allergist but they can't get us in until the end of March. No rush, it's not like we live in constant fear that whatever we feed her is going to kill her or anything.The Dr also said that taking her off all those foods would help her grow. That has proven false. Here we are five weeks past her check up and she hasn't gained any weight. Annnyway, she had a birthday and we shouted hooray!

The thing about turning one is that your day isn't different from any other day. She still wanted a nap and wanted to be in bed by 7. We hadn't found out about her long list of allergies, so we gave her a cupcake.  We thought that she would like it, she didn't. She wouldn't even try it.

She picked up and then put it back down. We thought it was because it was so big so we broke it up for her.

That wasn't it. She didn't want anything to do with it. Who can blame her? Cupcakes are nasty. To say that we love this little thing is a huge understatement. She makes us laugh and sometimes we can't help but squeeze her even though she squawks and pushes you away. She has never been one to cuddle and so a tight squeeze is not something she loves.  We didn't take too many pictures on her birthday but we did take some cute birthday pictures a couple days later. Without further ado, the little ladies photos.

We are totally enamored with our feisty and loud little A!

Happy Birthday!

Would you look at that. January has already come and gone. Crazy! The first week of January is kind of a big deal around these parts. Why you ask? Because someone has a birthday!

This little lass turned 12. Twelve! Not great. Well, it is great and exciting and sad at the same time. I remember when she was a baby and was screaming her head off, because that's all she did. I would look at her and think, I can't wait to be a grandparent. Then I get to send the screaming baby away. Thankfully, her screaming stopped and my days for longing for grandparent status have decreased significantly. Now M, is in YW. She really likes it and comes home from church and the weekly activities talking about how funny the girls are. She lived through her first bishop's interview. She is truly terrified of..... humans mostly. Fact- she won't knock on anyone's door unless someone is standing next to her. She blinks back tears if someone wants to talk to her on the phone rather than just texting. Even when her friends wants to facetime her, she'll answer but put the phone on the counter so all her friend sees is the ceiling. So the thought of talking to the bishop was enough to make the color drain out of her face and the tears to almost spill out. But, She was so brave and came out conqueror! They forgot to call her up in sacrament meeting to say she graduated from primary. When they did it for the girl that turned 12 a few weeks after her she looked at me with huge eyes and said,"They better not do that to me!" I don't know why she is so shy but she's better than she used to be and hopefully can accept the fact that humans probably aren't going anywhere for a while and talk to them from time to time. 

Oh how we love our M! She is working so hard on mastering her backhand spring. She can do it on the trampoline but doing it on the ground is really scary. She loves all things smelly and has bottles and bottles of lotions and body sprays and perfume and hand sanitizer. She wanted those smelly plug in things for her birthday so that her room can smell amazing without her having to spray half a bottle of body spray. Her favorite color is hot pink and she is quite the fashionista. She told me two days before her birthday that she wanted a CC beanie. I asked her what that was and she very patiently explained to me that it is, in fact, a beanie. What makes is so cool is the small piece of leather on the side that has two c's on it. I still don't really get why that's cool but she was so happy that she got one. She loves sparkly things and curling her hair. She is amazing with little A and loves to take care of her. She is very mild mannered and it takes a lot to ruffle her feathers. She's a smarty farty pants and although she says she doesn't like school, she does amazing and has shy little smiles as her teachers sing her praises. Sometimes I miss when she was little and would sing with me, loved buses and called a motorcycle a motaseeka. Sometimes I cry when I think of how fast time goes and how soon she's going to be done with high school and moving on. It makes me want to make good on my threat of putting heavy books on her head so she'll stop growing and just skip her birthday every year so she doesn't get any older. But then I look at how amazing she is and get so excited to see what she does with her life. Then my heart almost bursts with happiness and pride that she's ours forever. Now, for your viewing pleasure, her birthday pictures.

We love her and feel so thankful that she's our smelly fashionista forever!

It's time

It's time to bite the bullet and update the blog. Updating this is like dusting. I put it off until I can see, from a distance, that it really needs to be done. The thing is, folks, that I don't feel like I have anything to say. I could talk about my love of cookie dough, sweatshirts and jackets but all I have to say about those is that I love them. I could talk about my dislike of holes and dusting and cleaning bathtubs but, why? So, what can I talk about? I can say that I am truly shocked that it's been since November 28 since I did anything with this. That's crazy. Let me look at our December pictures and see what I can come up with.

It snowed. Before we moved here people told us that one of the great things about living in this stinky, boring place is that it doesn't snow. Ever. The first year we were here, winter happened just like they said it would. No heavy coats, no closed school for bad weather and no snow. Then last year it snowed. A ton. It was terrible. So far this year it has snowed more here than in the mountains of Utah. One lady at B's work was so excited to spend Christmas in a ski in, ski out cabin in Park City. When they got there, zero snow. Not great. I don't love the snow. I don't love that it's cold and wet and makes the house a mess what with melting snow all over the floor to plague one's sock's. I do however love the hot chocolate that follows being in the snow. Now when I say I was in the snow I mean that I was standing on the little slab of cement outside the garage door so that I could take the pictures. I didn't actually touch the white stuff.

As soon as B set her down in the snow, she toppled over. She laid there with a really confused look on her face. We don't have any snow stuff her size. Her snow pants are a 2T. So we folded them over and secured them with rubber bands. It made her look like a double amputee but, we wanted her to stay warm. Her hands hit at about the elbow of the coat. She would try to touch the snow and couldn't figure out where her hands were. 

Dark pictures are the worst! She loved it for about one minute and then she wanted to be picked up. 

M was very pro,  take A outside. She thought it was adorable that her snow gear didn't fit and she about died laughing when A toppled over. She was quick to remind everyone not to throw snowballs in their direction. She wanted her to stay outside with them the whole time the big kids were out there. Unfortunately A only lasted a few minutes. Then I was very pro, take A inside. It was a fun day if playing in the snow is your kind of a thing. In other non related news, doesn't the shed back there in the background look amazing? Yeah, Costco built it and B painted it. I would like to say that I helped paint it. If you call spilling paint on my jacket and dropping great drops of paint on the cement due to too much on the brush a help, then I was. But when B told me in a very nice voice that I could go get little B lunch and he would finish, I knew I hadn't been as much help as I had wanted to. Rats! Thankfully he was able to fix my blunders and the shed looks great! I will try to be better about making updates but, I make no promises. 

Meridian Temple open house and family pictures

Yep, we went. We drove the five hours to be able to go inside. Being in the temple is so awesome and I love being in there with our littles. I always pray that they will be able to feel the spirit while we are in there. We try so hard to teach these little humans the gospel. We try to help them know that the only way to find true, lasting happiness is through living the gospel. We talk about getting married in the temple and being sealed together forever. We talk about the basics of the gospel a lot. The only wrench in this little plan is that dang agency. We hope and pray that what we are teaching and what we are doing, like reading scriptures and praying and going to the temple, will be enough. We hope that all four of these strong, amazing little ones will choose to live the gospel and have strong foundations in our Savior. We also pray that if they choose another path that they will still know that we love them. They all loved being in the temple and thought that the chandeliers were beautiful, which they are. It was really hot inside and so in an effort to not pass out, we kind of hustled through. The heat and the fact that there were a ton of people in there. The temple was exquisite and there weren't too many protesters on the corners of the parking lot either. The ones that were there were kind of weird anyway, like the guy dressed up as the devil waving to people. He wasn't even standing up, he was sitting on a lawn chair. Weird. Or the guy holding the sign that said, Jesus created Satan too.  Things that make ya go, huh. Anyhow, my grandma Kent used to live in Meridian and when we would drive to her house when I was a wee lass, I always knew we were close when we saw the yellow water tower. Meridian is huge now and I don't recognize anything, except for the water tower. When I saw it I couldn't help myself and I shouted,"We're almost there!" It's still Yellow, it still has the word, Meridian, painted on the side but everything around it has changed. I miss grandma Kent a lot. I miss her red house and her giant bunk beds and her container of Kix that she kept in the red room. I am so thankful for temples and the sealing power and that although grandma wasn't in Meridian for us to go visit, I know that we will see her again. Next item of business, family pictures. We do family pictures every year. Let's be honest, I'm anal about a lot of things. Family pictures once a year is one of those things. We love to do it in the fall because of the colors and sometimes we get really great colors like this one from a few years ago.

Or this one from last year

This year I was hoping that we would get good colors. I waited until the leaves started to turn. Now, bear in mind that we don't live in a beautiful place. Far from it actually. There are hardly any trees so when I say the leaves were changing I mean that the tree in the church parking lot was yellow so we were on the hunt for more trees to stand in front of. The lady taking our pictures told us that she found the perfect spot. We drove and drove and drove. We passed some beautiful spots so I was thinking that we had hit the ugly valley jackpot. Nope. instead we pulled up to a cement bridge. Now, I do love taking pictures on a bridge too. The lady had just misunderstood me. She thought that I only wanted the bridge as the background. She knew we have a baby so she said she would be fast. She was right. She took two family pictures, one of the kids and one of B and I and we were done. It took us waaaaaay longer to get ready, and we aren't fancy folk so getting ready included putting on clean clothes and brushing through our hair, and drive out there than it did for the actual picture taking. 

There you have it folks. These are the ones that we have. I am still happy that we got them. I do wish that we had more to choose from, but At least no one's picking their nose or crying or making a pooping face so it's a win! I love my family so much and love having family pictures taken every year.

I think I'll run a half marathon..... in two weeks

Once upon a time, B and I ran a half marathon. The idea was exciting and we trained hard for it. Looking back on the experience, I'm pretty sure I peaked a few weeks before the actual race. It was the day I did my ten mile run. I felt like I could have run all day. I felt so good that I was sure that the half wouldn't be a problem at all. Wrong. It. was. awful! I did fine until mile nine and then I wanted to die. I did make it across the finish line, dry heaving and vowing that I would never do that again. I have stuck to my guns and the longest I have run since that fateful day in 2012, is 7 miles. 13.1 is just too much for me. However, my amazing boyfriend views the running world differently than I. He loved the half that we did and was talking about doing another one on the car ride home from the race. Well, time passes and two babies later, he hears about a half that's here in this stinky city we live in. He was kind of wishy-washy about doing it until two weeks before the race. He has been running pretty consistently for a really long time. His normal run is at least four miles. Two weeks before the race, he decided to do a long run to see if doing the half was an option. He ran a measly 11 miles that morning. When he told me that, my mouth fell open, literally. He had run 4 miles everyday for a while but to go from 4 miles to 11 is no small task. The most annoying part is that he was totally fine with the mileage upgrade. Not that I wanted it to be hard for him, but come on! He's some kind of super human to not be effected at all by almost tripling his distance. Maybe I just truly suck as a runner, but there's no way I would be able to go from 4 miles to even 6 miles and be fine, let alone 4 to 11. Anyway, he got done with his long run, got home and registered for the half that was taking place in seven days. He took most of the week off of running so that he would be well rested for his short little jaunt the following Saturday. I happily volunteered to be on kid duty so that he could go run his race. He went, he ran, he kicked fanny. He finished 39 overall and felt amazing the entire time.

 This was after the race was over. The cheeseballer in the blue shirt over yonder is a guy in our ward. He's the one that told B about the race.

His goal was to do it under two hours. Not too shabby for a fella that only trained for two weeks.

I'm bursting with pride! There's a guy that ran the same race that saw B at the school, picking up M and K, one afternoon and stopped to talk to him about the race and tell him there's another one in March. He told B that he should do it. B doesn't know if he will but, thankfully he only needs two weeks to train, so he doesn't have to decide until the middle of February😉.  I am so happy to stay on kid duty so that he can run his little heart out. I have no desire to ever run that long ever again in my whole life. Being the cheerleader is an amazing spot to be in. 

October brings with it, a lot

Boys and using tools are like me and chocolate. They just need to be together. Well, B put a cement slab in our backyard for a shed. The next night after work, he went out there to take the cement forms off the cement. K and little B were out there helping. I'm not sure what happened really. I just know that he came in the house crying because he had taken a hammer to the face. I don't know what he was hammering, I just know that the hammer bounced off and hit him in the face. Thankfully he didn't hit his teeth. Poor kid.

Of course we made our tootsie sucker ghost's. This is one of our favorite traditions. They love to make their ghosts and hang them on the light above the table. 

We made our graveyards too but this year instead of putting the gravestones in no bake cookies, we put them in dirt and worms. A didn't care that she didn't construct a ghost or a graveyard but, she loved that M had her try some of the pudding. We think that this little one has a nut allergy.

This picture doesn't do justice. This was taken one night after we had made poppy seed muffins. They have almond extract in them. We gave her some and within minutes her eyelids started to get hives on them. Her ears swelled up really bad and she started getting a rash all over her stomach and back. She got hives on her back, legs and stomach. We said no more of anything with almonds or other tree nuts. B said maybe she was allergic to the poppy seeds. We gave her some Benadryl and once the swelling started to go down, we put her to bed for the night but checked on her every hour or so throughout the night. 

These ones were taken last night. At her nine month check, the dr had said that they have now changed food recommendations and anything goes. So, I had given her a peanut butter and jam sandwich for lunch. I didn't feed her the whole thing because as she was eating it, she would take a bite, swallow and then cough and cough. She seemed ok after her bottle so I laid her down for a nap. She didn't sleep well and when she woke up, she was totally swollen. Her face is puffy, her left ear is so swollen that it's sticking out. You can see she has a rash on her neck.

She's a moving target so you can't tell that these bumps were really big and she had hives on her stomach again. It's so scary! Thankfully Benadryl has taken care of the swelling but it takes several hours for it to go all the way away. No nuts at all for this little lady until we know for sure what the allergy is.  Anyway,

We tried to put our ghost's in the dirt, but they kept falling over and the tissue was turning brown. No one liked the idea of it looking like they had poopy ghost's so, we took the ghost's out of the pudding. We had done this as a FHE activity. They next day as little B was eating lunch, he started to chuckle and shake his head. I asked what he was laughing at and he said,"that really was a great activity last night." 

Next on the tradition schedule was pumpkin decorating. We truly hate carving pumpkins. We don't like the mess or the smell. Not to mention it seems like as soon as you carve them, they go schlumpy. So, we paint ours instead. 

I must say, that I love all of our pumpkins. However, whoever did that minion takes the cake! I think that's one of the best pumpkins I've ever seen.

We think this picture is funny! We were trying to get her to smile from behind the camera and she was trying to find us. We love our start of October traditions and that it's the start of the holiday season!

Ho hum

I feel like our life has been pretty dull lately. I have thought about throwing some pictures on here and rambling on like I do but, I just haven't wanted to. Really what I want to do with all of my heart is take a nap. Maybe someday. Anyway, lets see here..... Nope. Nothing. There is a funny joke that I heard. What's brown and squishes through an elephant's toes? Slow natives! I know, it's terrible but so funny! Go ahead, laugh. What else what else?

K get's his fashion sense from me. It was cold one day and by cold I mean like 55. I know that in some parts of the country that's balmy but around these parts that's down right cold! To be fair it had been 102 two days before so 55 really did feel cold. Anyway, he didn't want to wear long pants so he wore his soccer socks and shorts. Genius!

Little B learned how to ride a bike with no training wheels! He had a knock off brand of a Strider bike and that helped so much. The day B took the training wheels off, I thought it would take a little bit to teach little B how to ride a bike. So, I kept making dinner. Little B came running in literally two minutes after the training wheels were removed and he yelled,"I can ride a bike with two wheels!" I went out to watch and sure enough he got on his tiny bike and off he went. His little legs pump so fast and sometimes he yells,"I think I'm going about like 50 miles an hour!" 

She loves gymnastics. She has been working on and has mastered a back flip on the trampoline. That's pretty awesome to watch. 

Yep, still cute, still tiny. That's a 0-3 month outfit. She still has pretty bad eczema on her face. We walk to get M and K from school every day and a little girl came up to me and asked why her cheeks were so red. I told her she has really dry skin. The little girl looked at me and said,"maybe you should put lotion on it."I wanted to say,"duh! what do you think we do? Run along you impossible child." But, I didn't. I told her that was a great idea and thanked her for her great idea. 

Date night at it's finest! The only store around here that's open later than 8 is Wal-Mart. If anyone knows me, they know I hate Wal-Mart. I'm more of a Target kind of a girl. However, walking around Wal-Mart is an experience that's for sure. Not to mention they sell weird giant animal heads that you can put on and die laughing while you take a picture. Oh man, that's funny, or it's late. Maybe next time I'll have something interesting to say. Until then, laugh at the funny elephant joke and wish you could put an animal head on for date night.