Sponge"Bub" Square Hat

Thanks to everyone who voted in our Dinner Campaign.  We were supposed to have our dinner on Monday night, but I had one of my "gallbladderless attacks" and wasn't feeling well.  I'll post pics when we have our Navajo Taco's, Grapes, Egg Nog, and Hot Fudge Cake.

This box, which came with a pendant light that I recently scored a fantastic deal on, has been the life of the party at our house this week.  Who knew that cardboard could be this much fun.

Justin calls Caleb, "Bub", so we have nicknamed him "SpongeBub Square Hat". 

Brayden came home from school today and got out everything I would need to make banana bars, right down to the measuring cups and frozen bananas.

I can take a hint...

Apparently, Justin likes the icing best.

Art Night

Earlier this week we attended art night at the school, where they boys performed songs with their classes, and displayed their artwork/stories.  

Dillon is well known as an "artist" among the first grade.

Caleb's class had to draw pictures of soil layers, and we have teased him a bit for his "cup of dirt" at the art fair.  :o)  Really, he did a good job.  I would have no idea how to draw different soils.

Brayden's ocean art is the one with the orange fish.

Awards

Last week I went to our school's final awards assembly for this school year.

Brayden got a Super Scholar award.  I wish I'd gotten it on video when they called his name, because it was a surprise to him and he was so cute when he realized they had just called his name.  His teacher is constantly amazed at the way Brayden can have his nose in a book and still know exactly what is being taught ;o).  He is reading at a 10th grade level and has to "turn in" his kindle every night before bed so we can make sure he's not staying up all night reading.

Caleb got his second award for the year.  In February he received a citizenship award, but I forgot my camera and therefore it never got "blogged". This time he received a "Hero Hunt Award" for being an all-around good kid.  The Hero Hunt award comes with two "bobcat bucks" to redeem at the school store, and a framed certificate in the trophy case.

Way to go, boys! We are proud of you.

I recorded Caleb getting his Hero Hunt award, because they read his certificate aloud to everyone.

 This isn't a very good picture, because it was taken from far away.  Brayden attended his first Boy Scout Court of Honor this week where he earned his Tenderfoot rank, as well as Citizenship in the Community, Communication, and Orienteering merit badges.

I didn't know I got a "mother's pin" when they earn badges.  It occurred to me that I could potentially have A LOT of pins someday.  Since this one left a hole in my shirt, I'll be more careful about what I wear to scout meetings in the future.

School Track Meet

A couple weeks ago, Brayden and Caleb participated in their school track meet.

While there, I shelled out $6 for two dinky cups of frozen yogurt (the school got half the proceeds you know) and sat in the hot sun for two hours to watch Brayden run the 50, and Caleb throw a softball.

I have a whole new appreciation for my mother.

As a reward for her years of dedicated attendance at all our piano recitals, track meets, ball games, dance competitions, and school programs, I have saved her some time and she can now watch my boys' track meet events in one minute or less from her air-conditioned house.

Thanks, Mom.  Enjoy.

(Caleb is in the background. You'll see him run and throw, but you can't really see the ball land.  I guess you had to be there for that.)

In the past two weeks...

In the past two weeks:

My oldest, greatest papa turned 80!

He brought Burger King crowns for all the kids to wear at the party :o)

Someone cut the butter with the apple slicer.  Someone also forgot to remove a foil-wrapped chocolate Easter egg from their pocket before their pants went through the wash.  Luckily, when it came out it was still in the foil and intact.  Thank you Hersheys.  

A bike fell on my foot on the dock at DI.  I had a bump the size of an egg on top of my left foot.  After icing it for a couple days, the bruising appeared. When I took Justin to the pediatrician later that week, I asked him if he thought I should have my foot "looked at" and he said that if it's broken, it's broken on top (since I can walk on it with no problem) and the treatment is a good lace-up shoe.  I think I can handle that.

Brayden learned to mow the lawn.

(it's kind of nice that our boys are getting old enough to be "useful")

While I was making dinner for a neighbor who just had a baby, Justin stole the measuring cup out of the flour bin, scooped water out of the toilet, and put it in his potty.  When I found him he was soaked so I put him in the tub and asked Caleb to sit with him while I hurried to get dinner in the oven.  While playing with "Bub-bub" Justin stood up, and then slipped and hit the faucet with his eyebrow.  It popped open.  I didn't think he needed a stitch, but wasn't sure so I called the urgent care clinic to ask their opinion.  They suggested I bring him in, but luckily as the swelling went down, the cut closed up on it's own and he didn't need any stitches. (Both Brayden and Dillon have the same injury, only they each needed 6 stitches in their eyebrows)

I've waited my whole life to trap my kids in a bottle of soap (or at least the past few weeks).  I took their pictures in crazy positions, used Photoshop to take the background out, and had their pictures printed on a transparency at a copy shop.  Then we rolled 'em up and stuck 'em in the soap. It makes me smile.

Todd's mom came to visit and took me and the boys shoe shopping.  Brayden's new shoes are 1 1/2 sizes bigger than his old ones, and they fit ME.

We also had our first school track meet, Brayden and Caleb got awards at school, Grandma came to visit a second time, our friends Travis and Cami stopped by on their way through, we finally planted our tomatoes after getting our sprinkling system fixed, and we took a day trip to Vegas to have my quilting machine serviced and visit a 120,000 gallon aquarium with a Mermaid show.  Whew!  It's been a busy couple of weeks!  I'll blog about this other stuff soon...

Easter weekend

We had a wonderful Easter weekend at our house.

It was filled with church, ham, Reeses PB cups, egg dying and hunting, naps (for the adults), 

and plenty of family time.

It took Justin a while to get into the egg hunting thing...until he realized there was candy inside!

Dillon chose to hunt for eggs in his pirate hat.

We color-coded the hunt to make it more fair.  Each child was assigned a color (or in Justin's case, a character).  They had to leave the yellow, green, blue, and Elmo eggs for the assigned person.

The pink, orange, and purple were free for all.

The golden egg had a coupon, "eggs"changeable for a Wii rental from Redbox.

Other "prizes" included coupons for extra computer time, ice cream, and getting out of dinner chores.

Todd took a spin on Caleb's bike

Our camera batteries died, so I didn't get any pictures of our egg dying activity.  A neighbor girl joined us on our patio, and after every egg had been dyed 2 or 3 times, it got dark so we turned on a light and set up cones for the kids to rollerblade/ripstik/ride scooters around.

Todd and I secretly wish we could ride the ripstik. 

We watched in awe as the kids wove through the cones.

We finished our celebration by watching Easter Bible Videos on Sunday night, 

with the air conditioning on, since it was at least 80 degrees in our house.

My baby

These pics of Brayden go from age 3 mos-8yrs

On her blog today, my sister posted about not being ready for her son to start kindergarten in 5 months.

Four hours later, Brayden brought me his paperwork to register for his 6th grade classes...due tomorrow.

I don't feel old enough for this. I don't feel like he's old enough for this. How on earth is he going to remember his locker combination? Or get to class on time, with the right book?

It's a whole new world since I was in sixth grade.  My parents had to "learn the ropes" with me, and because of it I always swore I would never have an oldest child.

Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to get around it.

So, ready or not, here we come. It's not the same as when I was in sixth grade.  I can't believe all the choices! They have a class period (or two?) set aside for all these extra-curricular type classes.  He had to pick a certain number of classes from each of four categories.  Here's a list of the classes Brayden chose to take (besides the usual Language Arts, Math, Science, etc.):

Orchestra (he is dead set on playing the violin)
Crazy Art (?)
Animation (cartooning and comic book making)
The Art of Science (something about 3-D and painting with light??)
Drawing
Lego Service (designing and making instructions for lego creations to be donated to children's hospitals)
Boy Stuff (the catalog mentioned cool cars, racing, sports, etc.)
Golf
Lawn Games (croquet, bocce, ladderball, etc.)
Soccer-Softball-Basketball
Chess
Crime Scene Investigation
Robotics
Lego Robots (applying Math and Science to Lego Creations)

And just for fun, here are a few of the classes he didn't have time for:

Mandarin Chinese, Totally Awesome Cupcakes, Babysitting (I tried to get him to do this one), Digital Photography, Zumba, Woodworking, Theater, Aviation, Computer Scrapbooking, Podcasts, Sign language, Debate, Rubiks cube & Blow your Mind (huh?), Science Experiments, Electronics, Engineering, Folk Dance, Rockets, Origami, Geography Challenge, Extreme Google, March Madness (seriously, that's a class?), Hip-hop, Indoor Hockey, and Jazzy Jewelry.

Char, if you twist my arm I might be willing to trade places with you...

a bunch of random stuff...

My friend Mindy came to visit me this morning.  I love Mindy.  We met when I was first married and we served as  beehive leaders together.  She is the kind of person who lifts you up and makes you want to be better.  I thought about digging up a picture of the two of us from girls camp 12 years ago, but I'm too lazy to go find it, and then scan it, since it was taken in the days before digital cameras.  That's how far back we go...

Anyway, Mindy was in town with some friends and she borrowed a car in order to drive for 20 minutes at 7:30 this morning to spend an hour with me.  It was short, but wonderful.  We talked, ate muffins, and drank green smoothies while my kiddos were getting ready for school.  It was the perfect start to my weekend.  Thanks Mindy, you made my day!

A couple weeks ago, I helped my Great Aunt Joan make a quilt for her newest grandbaby. Since my quilting machine isn't set up yet, we pinned and hand-basted the quilt before quilting it on my Bernina.  Sorry the picture isn't great, but at least I thought to take one!

 Speaking of quilting, we are making progress in the room that will be my studio.  The left part of this room was an office in the garage.  Todd knocked out the wall (where the beam is) and built a new wall to extend this room the entire width of our garage so it will fit my quilting machine.

 Our progress has been stalled until we figure out what to do with the floor.  The floor in the part of the room that used to be in the garage, is an inch higher than the floor in the old office.  We're not sure if we can use self-leveling cement, or if we should hire someone to do cement work, or if there's another solution.  I know I don't want to trip over it while quilting!

 We have a laundry situation right now.  I didn't do any laundry during Spring Break and I've been paying for it all week.  The good news is that everything you see is clean.  I'm supposed to be folding it right now--hence the reason you get a blog post about random stuff, so I can procrastinate the dreaded laundry pile a little longer.

The older boys had their first choir concert last night.  They will be performing again at "a well known local amphitheater" (with several other schools) on Caleb's birthday.  I love the fact that our school has a choir.  The boys have gone to school an hour early, two days a week this semester in order to participate.  They did a great job and I really enjoyed the performance. I'll add a short clip at the end of this post for the Grandmas.

My daffodils are blooming and it makes me smile every time I look at them.  I hope to plant the rest of our garden this weekend--tomatoes and all.

Happy Friday!

Caleb on the front row, third kid from the left.
Brayden is on the middle row, on the right hand side (he is behind the director for a second).

Merry Christmas from sunny Southern Utah!

(Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors weather...)

We are slowly getting settled, and so far we are loving our new house, neighbrhood, and ward.  

I managed to get the kitchen, living room, and dining room unpacked (and decorated), but in the bathrooms and bedrooms we are still living out of boxes.  Hopefully I'll be able to post pictures soon.

This picture makes me laugh. It may take awhile to "grow into" our new house.
(We have our projector downstairs for movies and Wii, but our only TV is a 17"-er)

We are enjoying our holiday (and break from unpacking) immensely.  This morning (before church) we went through our stockings and saw what Santa brought us, then we attended a wonderful sacrament meeting (I love Christmas on Sunday). Now we're relaxing and waiting to skype with Grandma before opening the rest of our gifts.

Dillon has mentioned over and over (and over) how badly he needed a red scooter now that we have such a scooter-friendly yard.  Taking turns with Caleb's blue scooter was such an inconvenience.  He was thrilled  (and very lucky) that Santa got the message on such late notice!

Caleb got a ripstick.  These pictures give the false impression that he actually knows how to ride it.

He doesn't...but I have a feeling that it won't be too long before he's "rippin'" it up out there.

Santa brought Brayden a new bike.  It has hand brakes and 21 speeds.  With this gift, his brothers each got a "new-to-them" bike handed down, and now they can all ride bikes together.  They haven't been able to do that ever since "nobody" rode Dillon's bike into the middle of the driveway and parked it behind Dad's truck...

Justin got new sand toys, and some sidewalk chalk.  We haven't tried the chalk yet, but the sandbox has been a raging success since the minute we arrived in the moving truck.

Christmas with a 16 mos. old has been one adventure after another.  We re-decorate the tree daily, and we are dilligently trying to teach Justin to take the candy OUT of the wrapper before he eats it.

After Brayden rode his bike for awhile, I caught him out on the lawn trying to figure out his new maze game, "Perplexus".  

Have I mentioned that I love the weather here?

This helicopter arrived from Amazon a few weeks ago (to Todd; from Todd) and I wrapped it up before he had a chance to see it.  After a mad search for batteries this morning, he was finally able to get it off the ground.

I don't have a picture of it, but Todd surprised me with an ipod touch!  Someone (who already had an iphone) won it at Todd's Christmas work party and gave him a deal.  Now if I can just figure out how to use it...

I can't even begin to name all the blessings we've had this year, especially in the last couple months, but I hope to somehow convey my gratitude in a future post.  It's just too hard to think right now with all the unpacking/Christmas chaos/kids out of school.

I didn't get Christmas cards out this year (again), but we've loved hearing from many of you, and wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a blessed new year.

just an update

We are closing on our house tomorrow!  We can't move until the seller leaves (probably the 16th-19th) so it's going to be an interesting Christmas for us.  

We've all had the stomach flu this week.  Yuck.  At least it's over now.  Dillon was the last to get it and he's up and running now.  Poor Todd drove through horrible weather to come home last Friday night, only to spend Saturday packing by himself and taking care of me and Brayden while we were sick. He returned home to the trailer on Sunday at 7:00, and was sick himself by 11:00.

Moving is a pain.  I've been throwing away, giving away, and selling things for weeks. We've made a dent, but there's still so much to do.  I'm waiting for the last of our Christmas stuff to come from Amazon so I can wrap everything up, and pack it to go.  

The other day, I asked Brayden to watch Justin in the tub while I ran to get his towel.  When I returned, he had been entertaining the baby with equations. Oh, how I love my Brayden :o)

I found 17 rolls of dental floss when I cleaned out my bathroom closet a couple weeks ago.  Then we had dentist appts. and brought home another 3 rolls.  It's funny the things you find when you move.  We also had around 25 shirts with the name of our town, county, or school on them.  Between the soccer, basketball, baseball, 4-H, and 5 years worth of "Falcon Friday" elementary school shirts that I'm not taking with us, I just took a huge chunk out of my future laundry pile!

Random happenings

Today is crazy hair day at school.  I had to run to the grocery store at 7:30 AM to get orange hairspray so Caleb could be a jack-o-lantern like Dillon (who had to be bribed to wear his jack-o-lantern hair).  Brayden was much too cool for crazy hair.

Caleb wore a spider in his orange hair

Last week I sent Brayden and Caleb to the store (alone) for the first time ever (we live a block and a half away).  Their assignment was to get a chocolate bar so we could make chocolate curls for the pie Brayden made.

They were gone for quite awhile and I was starting to get nervous when I finally saw them walking home.  It turns out that after their purchase, Brayden realized that the cashier had given them 6 cents too much change...so they turned around and went back to return the money. I was one proud mama!

Too cold for a popsicle?  No way.
Dillon just ate his otter-pop with gloves.
(I should have given him a bib)

I had a gallbladder attack last week, and I don't have a gallbladder.

When I took the kids to the clinic the next day for their flu shots, I asked the Dr. about it.  He said that sometimes there is a stone in the common bile duct between the gallbladder and liver.  He looked up my surgery info on the computer and said that the surgeon had tried to check the common bile duct, but the opening was too small and he couldn't get the instrument inside.

Lovely.

 If I continue to have problems, I'll have to have some kind of a scope done that will irritate my pancreas.  This is the first time anything like this has happened since my surgery, so I'm hoping it's just a weird fluke.

The sale of our house is final.  We made a whopping $3.28 on the deal, and I feel pretty darn lucky just to get out of it.  I told Todd we'd have to be sure to put the money in savings to go towards our next house, or we'll get heavily taxed on it  :o)

My friend suggested we go to the local restaurant and celebrate with baby ice cream cones.

I love a baby in new dinosaur jammies...

Justin is walking/running everywhere these days.  He took his first courageous walk across the living room on Conference Sunday, about 10 minutes before Todd left to go back to the trailer.  I can't even tell you how glad Todd was that he was here to see it.

Now, a couple weeks later, he's getting more brave and starting to climb to get wherever he "needs" to go.  He has four teeth and one more on the way and loves to eat off the floor. He'll throw his food down from his high chair and eat it off the floor as soon as we let him out.  Hopefully he's building immunity...


In other news, we found the perfect house and got all excited about it just in time for it to go into foreclosure and be sold on auction last Thursday.  Unfortunately, we can't compete with people who have cash to buy a house.

We made an offer on another one this weekend.  I don't care for the look of the outside (it was built in the 80's) but the inside meets our needs perfectly.  We will spend the next few days haggling over the price and I'll be sure to post pictures if it works out.

Brayden's surprise

Brayden had a hard time coming up with a birthday wish list this year,

and finally decided he'd like to be surprised.  

Todd and I tossed around several ideas for our resident "bookworm" before 

deciding to get him a kindle.  Now he can check out library books from home!

There was no way I was spending an extra $40 for a kindle case, so I came up with this one myself.

Since Grandma S. has a kindle too, they can send each other messages through their kindles.  She sent him a Happy Birthday message and it was waiting for him when he opened it.

I debated long and hard before giving my eleven year old a gift that can get online anywhere at any time.  It's just not my favorite idea....at all.  I finally decided, though, that a few of his friends already have their own ipod touches, and even if he didn't have access to the internet, his friends do.  I decided it was better to teach him how to use technology appropriately rather than try to hide from it.  I hope I don't regret it.

The rule for now is that he isn't allowed to get online with his kindle without a parent nearby. (There are no parental controls).  I have the ability to check the history, so hopefully this will end up being good "technology practice" before he ends up with a cell phone in a few years.

Does anyone have any advice or ideas for teaching kids about the dangers of some of the technology out there?  My biggest worry with having four boys is pornography addiction.  I believe that a lot of boys get addicted before they even realize what they're getting into.  I want to plan a RS activity where we learn about and discuss ways to protect our family and use technology appropriately, but I have no clue where to start.

Brayden's Harry Potter Party

 We celebrated Brayden's birthday a few days early this year, so that Todd could be with us.  I cannot believe that on Wednesday I'll have an ELEVEN year old.  It just doesn't seem possible.

I had fun planning this party, even though I've never read the books and I've only seen part of one movie.  There were tons of easy idea's online, and my mom and sister helped as well.

I set up the candy store on my hutch.  From left to right we had:  Exploding candy, chocolate licorice wands, lemon drops, acid pops (fizzy pops from the dollar store), Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, Blood Pops (pomegranate raspberry suckers), cockroach clusters (candy coated peanuts), salt water taffy, and crystallized pineapple (freeze dried).

I actually spent nearly $5 on a teeny tiny box of "Beanboozled" jelly bellys so we could have barf flavored beans.  I thought it was a bit ridiculous until Brayden got a rotten egg bean.  It was hilarious and I definitely got my money's worth!

The day before the party, I put a few drops of food coloring in the bottom of these paper cups, and let it dry overnight.  When it was time for dinner, I added ice to the cups so you couldn't see the food coloring.  The kids watched me pour my magic potion (sprite) into the cups and each one came out a different color!

I made a Quidditch cake using barbecue skewers, paper flags, and a Ferrero Rocher candy with gold ribbon "wings" for the snitch.

 I used my two least favorite cakes to get the Gryffindor colors: Yellow and Red Velvet.  Can I just take a minute to give you my opinion of Red Velvet cake?  Every single bite is just a reminder that you're not eating chocolate and you're wasting perfectly good calories on cake with no taste.
I did, however, make homemade frosting.  I'm not a frosting lover (more like a frosting hater) but it actually turned out pretty good....for frosting.

 My mom gave Brayden three Harry Potter robes (for his brothers) and some Harry Potter glasses.  Dillon wanted to try the glasses on, but instead of Harry Potter, he looked more like...

...Chicken Little!

 Here are my little wizards.  Harry Potter and two red-headed Weasley (sp?) boys...Fred and George, I think.  Now if I can talk my mom into making a snitch costume for Justin...