Little Things

I wanted to catch up on some of the little things that have been going on...

First of all, Elijah learned to climb out of his crib so we decided to take it down and put him in a big boy bed!

His siblings were probably more excited about it than he was.

He really has done great with it,  Some nights he harasses Nate and tries to get into his bed (which Nate doesn't appreciate much) but mostly he goes right to sleep, even for naps.

Speaking of Elijah, he sure can be a troublemaker these days!  I was so excited to be done with our carpeted dining area in our last house, but I didn't realize the ramifications this change would have.  Eli can now push our dining chairs around the kitchen and climb up to get whatever he wants.  It drives me crazy!  I feel like I'm constantly putting him down and putting chairs back.

His whining has also been driving me crazy.  I've never really done this whiny, almost 2 year-old stage with a mostly non-verbal child and I feel like it's a whole new level of craziness.  I'm trying not to respond to the whining, and constant "Ma!"'s, and make him say please (he signs it) but it's not making much of a difference yet.  He's slowly starting to say more words, though, so there is hope.

Here are some of his new words:

-"Zi-zee": Lizzy

-"Kee": blankie

-"ice": ice water (he's his mother's child :)

-"bye"

-"no": his favorite word

-"uh, Mama": this is how he says thank you to me for something.

-"buh-ball": football, or basketball, or baseball, etc...

He still does a lot of motioning for what he wants and he still says "uh" for yes.  One thing that we all love is when he says prayers.  This is how it goes:

Joe or I: Dear Heavenly Father...

Eli: uh

Joe or I: Thank you...

Eli: uh

Joe or I: for this day...

Eli: uh

You get the idea.  It cracks us all up.  At least it's a start.

All of this toddler craziness prompted me to take this picture one day:

There's something about a sleeping child that makes you forgive everything they do when they're awake.

We took the older three kids and drove out to Boise for the BYU/Boise State game.  The game was seriously depressing but we still managed to have fun.  

Nate was having fun hanging out on these rails:

We stayed until the bitter end of the game and it paid off since we got a chance to meet Cosmo:

Hopefully the next game we go to turns out a little better.

I've still been loving the sunsets here:

And sunrises, too:

That one was from a morning run.  Those have been so good for my soul.  Sadly, the weather has changed and it's much colder now.  Hopefully I can still fit some of those in if I get bundled up.

The kids were so excited when we got our first snow:

It turned into quite the snowstorm and after super-low temperatures over the night, there was a lot of ice.  We got a message in the morning that school was canceled!

Snow day!

We had a fun day at home all day.  We made these cute turkeys for our Thanksgiving jar:

Elizabeth and Natalie had their very first lesson with their new piano teacher.  She mentioned that she was having a recital and asked if they wanted to play some of the songs they already knew.  They agreed and they did a great job!

They both even let me curl their hair for once:

It made me so happy. :)  I don't like how beautiful these two are.  Not one bit... :)
 Eli wanted his picture taken, too, and was hamming it up:

We went out for frozen yogurt after (even though it was freezing outside!)...

Elizabeth got the sweetest package from her teacher and her old class one day:

I was just blown away by his thoughtfulness and generosity.  It was such a boost to her during this difficult time of being the new kid and trying to make new friends.

Speaking of Elizabeth, she joined a swim team.  It's pretty relaxed--they don't really race each other during the meets, just try to improve their times.

 Here's some shots from her first meet (she's in the closest lane in each of these):

 

I wanted to record how we do our cleaning these days.  I've never been very good at getting cleaning done throughout the week.  It's hard enough just staying on top of the kitchen mess every day.  I do better when I have a time set aside to really hit it hard.  So, awhile back we instituted Saturday jobs.  Our kids have come to expect them now and generally do pretty well.  They are getting better and better at actually cleaning well, too, especially Elizabeth.  She mopped the whole kitchen/dining/entry area one day and it was the first time I thought it was as good as I could have done.

Here's an example:

I post it and the kids pick what they want.  Joe was gone that Saturday and the kids actually did really well.  It always feels good to have a clean house, at least for a couple of hours.... :)

Here's another mom victory I wanted to post:

My kids LOVE kale chips!  It's pretty funny watching them scarf them down straight from the pan.  Here's the recipe we use.  At least it's one way that I can make sure we all eat some veggies.

House Projects

We've been working hard since we moved in to get some projects done, a lot of which have been many years coming.  There's nothing like moving into a new house to motivate us to get stuff done!  

One big priority was a garden space.  Joe and I have both had the dream of having a big garden and lots of fruit trees for awhile now.  We've made some attempts, and have benefited from some mature fruit trees at different houses, but what with moving every year and renting often it hasn't happened yet.  So, we decided now was the time to make it happen.  We moved in a little late to do much but we decided to build and fill garden boxes so we'd be all ready for spring.  Thanks to some instruction and inspiration from my favorite cooking blog here, we got to work.

It took us a few hours on a Saturday to build the boxes.  Then, we had the soil and compost delivered and spent a good 5 hours filling the boxes another day.  That was some back-breaking work!  We also had to fill in a big dip in our yard with soil so we could put the boxes there in the corner (I don't know if you can see where the fence goes down).  It was fun working together with Joe, though.  I spent a few more hours spread out over a couple days staining the boxes, too, and they were finally done.

We can't wait to plant!

I spent pretty much a whole day finally checking something off my to-do list that I'd had on there for years.  We had a bunch of canvas prints that we'd gotten from Africa on different trips.  I decided to finally build some wood frames so I could mount them and hang them up.  It was kind of exhausting cutting the wood with a hand saw but super fun using a staple gun.  Now I need to come up with some more reasons to use that thing. :)

I finally got around to painting our little book shelf that we got from DI years ago.  It was pretty beat-up.  

Notice the decorations our children added:

I was actually kind of sad to sand out that heart with "E" and "N" in it.  At least the culprit was defacing property with a love of her sister in mind while doing it. :)

I love how it turned out:

Eli enjoying the bookshelf:

Here's a shot of our loft, which is mostly put together:

Finally, it was time to do the same to Elizabeth's dresser.  It is actually my dresser from my room growing up (and my sister's before that) and we gave it to Elizabeth way back on her 7th birthday when she requested her own dresser as a gift.  I told her she could pick out a color and we would paint it.  About a year after that we finally picked out a paint color and about two years later here we are getting it done.

Before:

After:

We had fun sanding it and painting it together (along with some help from Natalie and some neighbor girls).  Joe helped with putting on the new drawer handles.  I really like how it turned out, too.  We still have a little bit of that red paint left.  We'll see if anything else gets a makeover!

Halloween

We had a pretty good Halloween around these parts.  Here's a recap:

First up was the Trunk or Treat at the church.  Sadly, Natalie got the flu bug that was going around that morning so even though she was feeling better by the evening, she had to stay home.  Joe took her out for popsicles instead so I think that helped a little.

Here were the three that came along with me to the party:

We had fun getting to know more people in our ward and getting some candy.

Next came carving pumpkins for FHE.  We had Tom and Shari and kids over and had a blast carving and listening to Halloween music.  Here are all of our creations:

The kids and I took a trip to a local pumpkin patch one day after school.  It was a family farm run by some really nice people with some fun attractions.  The kids especially loved these slides:

I love these ones of the girls with Eli:

He looks scared in these, but he LOVED the slides.  We entered the corn maze where they had an even bigger slide:

Eli accidentally got sent down by himself one time and he still went back for more.

The straw maze is another story.  It started out pleasantly enough:

The older kids ditched us but I thought they'd be fine.  Eli and I ended up wandering around for a long time.  We finally ran into Elizabeth who wandered around with us.  I hadn't seen Natalie and Nate and I started to get worried about them.  We finally ended up crawling out through a hole in the hay, along with another poor mom who'd also been wandering around and who had 5-month old twin babies (along with 4 other kids) with her.  I helped her get her babies and toddler through the hole.  It was a nightmare!  At least we made it out alive. :)

Here's a happier moment from the pumpkin patch:

Next up was a Halloween party we got invited to by our bishop's wife.  I had no idea what to expect and it was unreal!  It was basically an authentic old-fashioned carnival, except with skeletons posed everywhere for a spooky effect.  Their barn was decked out with different activities in every stall, and they had a huge bonfire outside.  It was awesome and the kids all had a blast.  

Here's our photo booth pictures:

I dug out my old karate uniform for my costume.  I'm so creative. :)

I sneakily took some more pictures of the craziness that was this party.

The barn:

Elizabeth at the face painting station:

A couple of the posed skeletons..

This one was on a unicycle on a high wire with a spotlight on him:

The put an actual old piano in front of their barn:

Finally, the big day arrived.  They were excited to be out of school on Halloween because of parent-teacher conferences.  We hit the library and did a few other things to keep busy.  We had our traditional mummy dogs for dinner (I never remember to take pictures of those). Finally it was time to get in costumes:

That's Hermione, Ginny, Harry and a monkey.

We had our first experiment with hair dye.  We used some KoolAid to dye Natalie's hair.  We were so worried that it wouldn't come out, though, that we didn't leave it in very long.  I think it turned out alright--it gave a nice effect--and thankfully we got it all out the next day.

It was hard to capture the cuteness that was Eli trick-or-treating.  It was just so fun to watch him waddle from house to house.  I tried to get him to say thank you but he never would.  Instead he would wave at the people giving him candy.  They thought that was pretty cute so I guess it worked alright.

After taking Eli around our neighborhood, Marsha was nice enough to get him to bed while I took the older three to trick-or-treat with their cousins.  They loved that and got way too much candy, of course.  

Another Halloween is in the books!