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.

Ten years

My K-bubbers is ten years old today.  

(He's probably too old to be called K-bubbers) 

Caleb Trivia:

*He is the most responsible of our kids
*He has a great singing voice
*He had seizures, at least weekly, from the time he was 9 mos.-18mos. and hasn't had one since.
*He's the only child I've ever called an ambulance for.
*He likes to bake.
*He's never had a broken bone or stitches (unlike his brothers).
*He likes salad, shrimp, salsa, and other "grown-up" foods.
*He doesn't care for cold cereal.
*He is a whole head shorter than the other kids in his grade.
*He loves to rollerblade and ride his ripstik.
*His favorite animal is a clownfish.
*He loves cub scouts.
*His latest catch phrase is "I know, right?"
*He likes to get up early.
*Did I mention he's my most responsible kid?  By a landslide.
*He makes friends easily.
*He always takes his dishes to the sink, and usually thanks me for making dinner.

Happy Birthday Caleb!

Hopefully we'll get to have his "bakery party" this weekend.

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).

Spring Break comes to an end

On Saturday, Caleb, Justin, and I attended the Pinewood Derby while Todd, Brayden, and Dillon went to the air show.  Caleb won all but one race with his car this year.  Our ward had a fancy-dancy computerized set-up that timed all the cars and averaged their times.  The times were posted on a giant screen after each race.

 Caleb wanted his car "the color of the sky".  He drew the design himself, and did did a great job sanding, painting, and adding the decals.

Mom, you may want to sit down for this next picture.

My boys helped themselves to the brownies tonight.

(sorry if it makes your eye twitch)

Justin found a marker after church and had so much fun coloring his legs.  

I'm glad he wiggled out of his pants first...

This picture is also for my mom. 

I wanted you to see that I do cut my boys' hair at least quarterly 

whether they need it or not...

Someone told Dillon the other day that he must have been sun-tanning from behind the screen door :o)

Well, I survived Spring Break, and actually enjoyed it.  I'm kind of sad to send my kids back to school tomorrow.  (Did I just say that??)

I'm sure I'll get over it pretty quick.  Tomorrow starts MY spring break.  Stay tuned...

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.

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.

First day of school

I'm not sure how it happened, but somehow I drove to school today with a 5th grader, a 4th grader, and a 1st grader in tow.  I walked Dillon into his classroom, but the older boys took off on their own.  Apparently they didn't need want my assistance.

Don't worry, Mom.
The spots on Brayden and Caleb's shirts are just water from brushing their teeth.

After taking a 45 minute walk with my cousin, Erin, I went to Walmart. It was nice to go with just one child, who sits in the cart and doesn't touch anything.  He didn't need to go to the bathroom while we were in the middle of the store.  He didn't ask for a toy. He didn't complain about his feet hurting.  He didn't whine that he was hungry. He just grinned and babbled.  And on the way to and from the store?  He slept.

But, even as pleasant as my shopping trip turned out, I have to admit I missed my boys. I was excited to hear about their first day of school. Dillon had the only homework, but when he was talking to Todd on the phone, he said, "It was so easy, it was like kindergarten work!".

I've got one with brown eyes, one with blue/gray eyes, and one with green eyes!
Looking at these pictures, I'm feeling the need to start saving for braces.  Sigh...they grow too fast.

A bunch of random stuff

Grandma G. gave Justin this cool tunnel for his birthday.  So fun! 

We'll have to make it the entrance to a fort soon...

A couple weeks ago I made the mistake of taking four boys to Tai Pan, and Caleb knocked this caterpillar lawn ornament over and it broke.  After $12 (ouch) and some super glue, we were able to use it for Justin's party.

I almost forgot, but I stuck him in the ground at the last minute.  So glad we could get our $12 worth.  (Grr).

About a week before Justin's party I made these "caterpillar in cacoons" with hot dogs and refrigerated breadsticks.  I served them over ketchup and mustard butterfly wings, but they were not a hit, so we didn't make them again.

This little black collared lizard has been hanging around our trailer and entertaining the boys.  If he gets really scared, he'll walk on his hind legs.

This was Brayden's first helping of cereal this morning. In some places it was nearly 1 1/2" higher than the bowl.  We've had to limit him to no more than three servings.  How am I going to feed four boys for the next 20 years?

A few weeks ago, I was tired and lazy and didn't prepare a family home evening lesson.  Todd was out of town and I decided to ignore the fact that it was Monday.  At 9:00 PM Caleb asked me if I had a lesson ready, and I sheepishly told him no.

He told me he would give a lesson.  Fifteen minutes later, I was treated to a unique portrayal of the story of Helaman and the stripling warriors.

This is the Lamanite army:

And the younger and smaller Nephite army:

The war raged on for a little longer than was probably necessary, but none of the stripling warriors were killed.

I'm glad that Caleb made sure we had family home evening that night.