Jack Turns 3!!!

Jack got an early birthday present yesterday when Grandma Blanche came to town to celebrate with us. He woke up and after Max reminded him, he went around announcing to everyone, "Today is my birthday!" He was very excited that the much anticipated day was finally here.Jack celebrated his birthday with his first real birthday party with all the trimmings. After the kids went to school we had a playgroup party at our house and 7 of his friends came to play and have cake. They did bubbles, played Hullabaloo, and went "fishing" for prizes. I made him a "Lightning McQueen" cake, one of his favorite guys at the moment.
Thank you to all the little friends who came to help us celebrate. Jack had so much fun.
Grandma took him shopping for a much sought after pirate boat after the kids got home from school.
He had lots of phone calls from Grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins singing to him and wishing him Happy Birthday. Then we had Pizza and a family party when Doug came home from work.
A little boy couldn't have had a better birthday. Happy Birthday Jack!!!

A few things

Show and Tell...Okay I had to show off our newest wall decor. I brought this fabric home intending to make some folding chair covers but I fell in love with it and had to make it into something more permanent I could see all the time. I stretched it over some stretcher bar squares I had from IKEA and turned it into wall art. For those of you who've seen our sparsely decorated house you know this is a big step for me. I love the way it turned out. What Works for us...I got a picture this weekend of the kids doing their weekly floor washing chore. Doug started them washing the floor on Saturday's when Luke was born and it is one consistent chore has actually stuck. It took a little training to get them to be independent but I must say they do an excellent job.
Spontaneous creativity...I love when my children are spontaneously creative. Saturday evening Mer asked if we had a Halloween tablecloth. It just so happened that we do (thank's mom). She took it and told me she was going to have a party. I'm thinking it is a little early for Halloween deco. Anyway I came out of my room a little while later to a fully decorated table set for a Halloween feast. She and Max were mixing up a concoction of Monster's blood to drink (Green water). They had taken paper plates and drawn pumpkin faces on all of them and wrote BOO! on the napkins. They had a bowl of eyeballs (grapes) and Dead baby fish (goldfish crackers) ready to go. I helped them with a few more things like quesadillas in Halloween cookie cutter shapes and salad and we turned it into dinner. Doug made a few comments about how gross and disgusting everything was and Mer was a little hurt until she realized he was making ghoulish humored comments. The kids loved it.

Happy Birthday Doug!

Today we celebrated Doug's birthday. 33 years old! We, of course had an evening of yummy food, great dessert and fun presents. He brought sushi home for dinner after work. Max and Mer even tried the spider roll. Mer loved it but had a few second thoughts after she learned the red dots were fish eggs. Mer also tried wasabi and swears she likes it even though she coughed and sputtered when it was put directly onto her tongue. Max said he liked the seaweed edge but that's about as far as he got. I made another dessert out of the gourmet magazine that Doug ooh's and aah's over. Brown Sugar Ice Cream Roulade. A thin chocolate cake rolled up with home made brown sugar ice cream in the middle. I spent pretty much all day making it...ugh. But in the end it was worth the effort, Delicious! even without the caramel sauce that I ended up ruining. Oh well, not everything can come off perfectly, especially when using so many finicky gourmet techniques. Among doug's gifts were running socks, a new iron (since he does 98% of the ironing in the house and i ruined the last one), dark chocolate, sunvisor for car, a sifter (for those gourmet recipes), and gymnastics rings (to enhance his crossfit workouts). We finished dinner and presents early and took off to peruse the isles of Best Buy. In all it was a fun evening. We Love you Doug!

I couldn't help posting these pictures of Jack and Luke from last week. We learned Luke can sit up really wel in the laundry basket and Jack invented a hanger for his Raggedy Andy. Too Cute!

Another day flies by. ...

Life in a family of six literally flies by. It's amazing how packed our days get sometimes. Today we tried to fit way too much into one day. School, Beach, Gymnastics, school open house, church meetings...
This is how it all went down:
We woke up 7:30 am. Breakfasts done, clothes on, lunches packed, beach stuff packed and out the door by 8:40. Jack and Luke and I dropped off the kids to school and headed over to pick up our friends Abby and Peter to go to the beach. This is actually a picture from our trip to the beach last saturday, of course I didn't remember a camera on a busy day like today.We met friends, Kristin and Ryan,there and played until about 11:30. We headed home stopping to nurse a crying Luke at Abby's. Jack slept the whole way home. Luke finally fell asleep and we made it home at 12:45 or so. We took bath's and showers and got ready for the crazy evening. Changes of clothes, snacks and sandwiches for dinner packed, we headed out the door at 3:00 to pick up the kids from school and drive them straight to their 4:00 gymnastics class. At 5:10 we left gymnastics, ate our dinner in the car and went to meet Doug at Mer and Max's school Open House. We got home at about 7:30.The kids cranked there homework out and had snacks. Doug left to do visits for church at 7:45 and I actually managed to get the kids in bed and lights out only 20 min after their 8:00 bed time. Now it's 9:30 and even Luke's asleep. Phew! Luckily not every day is this jam packed. It's a good reminder to me why I don't have my kids in too many extra curricular activities. I don't think we'd survive. One thing that didn't get done today was the grocery shopping. Oh well you, can't fit it all in. Tomorrow will be a school lunch day.

Oh and one more thing Luke is finally scooting and moving forward. I tried to upload a video but I couldn't get it to work. So instead here's a picture of what Luke does at the beach.And one of the kids on Saturday (we mad a new little friend there too).

The Olympics live on

As some of you know we got cable this past month so we could watch the olympics. I thought it would be important for the kids to see some of it and I didn't want to miss them this year. Well, today I realized some of the impact watching the Olympics had on our little family. The car wouldn't start this morning and we figured out that we needed a new battery. After getting the car started finally, Jack and Luke and I went to Sam's club to get a new one. While we waited, we killed some time looking at the toys and watching a little "Rattatouille" on the leather couch display. As we were leaving we passed a large box with a black and white picture of a swimmer popping his head out of the water. Jack noticed it as we were walking by and said "Look mom, that's Michael Phelps." What? I didn't realize he was paying much attention to the olympics on at our house. The kids had fun cheering on Michael Phelps. I guess I didn't realize Jack was too. Then later the kids were watching a Clifford program where they were having a Silly Olympics. Jack announced that it was like the Olympics that were over now. I took Mer and Max to their gymnastics class today. They chose this over soccer this season and were really excited to practice doing real gymnastics like in the olympics. Here are some pictures of Mer's round off that she's working on.


As you can see the Olympics live on in our little home. Sadly our month of cable is now drawing to a close. It was fun to watch the Olympics but we have also been enjoying every last minute of HGTV, Project Runway, Food Network, etc.

I had to also add this picture of the kids showing off their ice cream cone dessert from Family Home Evening this week. They had sprinkles on top and were surprised by a hidden brownie chunk in the bottom
(thanks sneaky Dad)

First real week of School

So to catch you all up, after the storm hit us last Tuesday and Wednesday, it stuck around for the rest of the week keeping us home from school for FOUR days. On the Third canceled day of work, and since our cable was down for the morning, Doug decided to get busy and get something done around the house. He painted Max and Jack's room Blue (was purple, from Mer's era). A task that we have been promising Max for a year and a half. Mer even helped do some edging.
The kids were having a great time, of course, with an extra week of Summer but by Friday they really wanted to go back to school. So we played school. Complete with a cafeteria style lunch, which included the necessary cookie and chocolate milk.
School started up again on Monday and the kids have loved being back (even Max). Jack and I have done a lot of playing. I also spent the week gutting the children's closets. This is something that I always seem to be doing (mainly because my previous organization failed) Ugh... the endless chore of organizing children's toys. This time I put a whole lot more in the trash, giveaway box, and attic. I'm going for the goal of everything having a specific place and am even going see if extra labeling helps. I'll let you know.

Here's a cute pic. of Jack on his "motorcycle.
It appears that we live in pajamas all day at our house.

Luke and Jack at naptime

Here's photo of another little milestone. Luke tried rice cereal for the first time this week. He seemed interested at first, but after attempting it for a couple of days, he clearly is not interested. On our next attempt I try to get a movie and figure out how to post it for you grandmas.

I took Luke for his 6 month checkup yesterday. He weighed in at 17lbs, 1oz and was 27 1/4 inches long. (both 50th percentile) Way to go Luke. He also had a budding ear infection. So that's why he was up about 5 times Monday night. He is doing much better now and thankfully back to a much better sleep schedule.

Our Storm Update

We woke up today at 4 am to rain pounding loudly against our windows. Work was canceled again. It rained most of the day yesterday but nothing like it has today. The winds were really blowing throughout the morning but eventually they calmed down enough where we let the kids play in the rain in the back yard and make a mess of our porch sandbox that was full of rain water. They spent the afternoon baking Easy bake treats and then the adventures really began.
After learning that quite a few people in our ward had water seeping into their houses we decided to take a drive and see what the neighborhood looked like. We made it just past the play ground and then found a couple of roads we weren't sure we should drive through. This is the road just across the street from the neighborhood playground. Doug and the kids got out to wade and see how deep it really was.
As you can see..up to the kids knees. Behind them you can see a guy on a tube floating around. They walked around to the front of the neighborhood and found catfish swimming on the sidewalk. Mer also caught a rock in her shoe.

This is the road leading out of our neighborhood. You can see the water comes up to our neighbor Dave's bumper.

They made it back around the circle to where I was sitting in the car. Doug said max was pretty much swimming a lot of the time.

Since they were soaked through, and were having so much fun, they decided to walk the rest of the way home.

The trip proved to be exhausting for Jack who fell asleep watching a show afterward. It is still raining outside now but not as hard as it had been earlier. The news reported that the center of the storm parked over our area of the county for most of the day with out moving. Some areas near us reported over 2 feet of rain. After driving the neighborhood and seeing the flooding that can occur in less than 2 days of rain I can see how the earth could have been flooded in 40 days. School is canceled again for tomorrow. Were not sure about work yet. We've heard from others that you can't get to the main roads from our little streets and they said John Rodes (the street we take to get to the highway is waist deep in one place. We are pretty much locked in for the time being, thankfully still dry. We'll see what tomorrow brings.