Thanksgiving break didn’t go exactly as planned at our house. We had a stomach bug make its way through each of our kids. Abby started the fun at 1:00 a.m. on Friday, Emily and Elise took their turns over the weekend, and Ben waited until Monday night to start throwing up. We were reminded that Emily should win a trophy for being the best sick kid ever. She doesn’t whine or complain and she pretty much takes care of herself. She is a dove. Her body definitely had the worst reaction to this little illness. I felt awful for her, but at the same time was glad it was her and not one of our higher maintenance kids. We kept pointing out to the other kids how good she was, hoping they would follow suit. We’ll keep working on that.
We did manage to have some fun before sickness struck and during the brief intermissions between the kids taking their turns with it. Here are some of the good parts of our weekend:
Cousin time. I took the kids with me Wednesday morning to get my hair cut and colored. Ben hung out with Jacob and played Transformers on the PS3 for a couple of hours (one of the highlights of his vacation) and the girls went with me so they could get their hair trimmed. Rachel and Bryton came along for the ride, making it loads more fun for my girls to hang out for an hour waiting for their mom.
Going to Surf-n-Swim. We had a gift certificate to Surf-n-Swim that was about to expire so we decided to make Wednesday a fun family day and use it up. Nate got off work early and we took the kids to lunch at Burger King and then hit the pool. We had a great time swimming and the kids watched a couple of racquetball matches while we ate nachos from the concession stand. They have never seen anyone play racquetball before and they thought it was super cool. As we were walking to the car, all of the lights came on in the park across the street from the pool. I think the city was just doing a trial run for their Christmas light show, but we took advantage of the good timing and made a couple of loops around the park to see the displays. It was an unexpected bonus for our trip.
Watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix with Ben. Ben finished the book months ago and has been begging to watch the movie ever since. We put the girls to bed early on Wednesday and watched with him. It was some good parent/son bonding time.
Winterizing the yard. The weather was warm enough (upper 40s) to head outside and do a few jobs that we had been putting off. We took down the trampoline, mowed the lawn, raked the leaves, and cleared the garden. Not so much fun, but it is good to finally have it done.
Thanksgiving dinner. We had a nice time visiting with Nate’s brothers and their wives and the kids had fun playing with their cousins. It was a good day.
Shopping. We got our year’s supply of free toothpaste and toothbrushes from Walgreens, braved the Black Friday madness at JoAnns, and scored a quality deal on a new TV on Amazon (which turned into a big customer service headache due to some technical issues with their website, but it all worked out in the end).
Decorating for Christmas. We took advantage of a six hour window of no one puking to get the house ready for the holidays. I love that the kids can do a majority of the work these days. In spite of my control freak issues in other areas, I am perfectly content to let them just have at it when it comes to Christmas decorations.
Movie marathons. Since we didn’t really leave the house for three days, we got in lots of movie time. We watched Back to the Future (edited for language) and 17 Miracles as a family and the kids got their fill of Curious George and Harry Potter.
Watching The Amazing Race. For the last couple of months Jody and Sarah have been joining us for Sunday dinner and then we watch The Amazing Race together. It has been a fun new tradition and we look forward to it every week. Sarah saved the day this week when she came walking through the door carrying a barf bucket about 30 seconds before Elise needed to use it. It was funny how perfect her timing was. We love that little girl (even more for saving us the effort of shampooing the movie room carpet).
Ever since Emily won a trophy for her reflections entry last year, Ben and Elise have wanted one of their own. The reflections program is supposed to be about getting in touch with your artistic side, and developing your talents, and blah, blah, blah, but really they were just in it for the trophies. Quite frankly, so was I. I know that kids need to learn that sometimes you win and sometimes you lose and life isn’t fair and all that jazz. However, one downside of having kids so close together in age is that a lot of the time they are competing against each other. We’ve had quite a bit of sibling rivalry in this house over the past few months, and I wasn’t looking forward hearing all about how “I never win” and “she wins everything.” Fortunately, I didn’t have to. The stars aligned and all three kids came home happy with their cool new trophies. Phew.
The theme this year was “Diversity Means . . .”. Ben spent all summer taking pictures of different kinds of clouds and made a collage of his favorites. He got some cool photos on our trip, and he even got a shot of a funnel cloud from our backyard. His collage turned out great and he was pretty sure it would win. It didn’t. Luckily, he decided to throw together a literature entry a couple of days before the projects were due. It did win. He wrote about diverse ecosystems. I’m glad he found a way to put some of his random Planet Earth knowledge to good use.
Emily entered for literature, photography, and for visual arts. Her drawing was by far her best project and the one that earned her a trophy. She went with a biodiversity theme. She spent lots of time getting it just right and the finished product was very nice. I loved how she patterned each of the letters after one of the animals/plants. I wasn’t so sure that she would win. There are always lots of entries for visual arts and now that she is in third grade, she is in the division with older kids. I was proud of her for holding her own with the big kids.
Elise really wanted to win a trophy, but she only wanted to do two projects. Nate helped her set up a tripod and she took a bunch of pictures of Abby making different faces. Her project turned out really cute, but it wasn’t a winner. I had heard that no one ever enters the music category, so I told her that maybe she should make up a song. She hasn’t taken piano lessons yet and doesn’t have any real skill, but she sat down at the piano and composed a little song on a 3x5 card (with her own unique musical notation). Going with the diversity theme, she played it through once slow and low and once high and fast. It wasn’t good. I was just banking on her being the only one to enter. I was a little worried when I found out that three kids entered the music category in her age division this year. She lucked out and scored a trophy anyway. Ironically, only one girl entered a literature project. She could have written anything and won. Live and learn.
We had our annual Thanksgiving family home evening on Monday night and made a new turkey with some of the things we are thankful for. All of the kids wrote on their own feathers this year. I love that Abby is getting so good at writing her letters. I also love that it is hard to tell the difference between Nate’s handwriting and Ben’s handwriting.
This year’s color code: Abby = Purple, Elise = Blue, Emily = Orange, Ben = Green, Malinda = Red, and Nate = Yellow.
Our three oldest kids are part of the elementary school choir. Usually the school only lets kids that are in fourth grade or older participate, but this year they made an exception for younger siblings. There are practices before school two days a week. Some mornings it is tricky to get everyone up and moving an hour early, but so far the kids have made it to every practice. The coolest part of their choir experience is that they got to be in the musical at the high school. It made for a super busy few weeks with extra morning practices, a few evening practices, a Saturday dress rehearsal , and five performances. It was a big time commitment, but so worth it. We bought tickets for Thursday night’s show. It was great to see them up there on the stage singing their hearts out. It was a rather impressive production for a high school play. There was even a live camel. Lots of kids and youth from our ward were in the play, so that made it even more fun to watch. The whole thing was such an awesome opportunity for our kids and they really loved it.
Here they are right before the show:
Grandpa and Grandma Nelson watched them on opening night. They couldn’t find Ben since they didn’t recognize him with his black hair. The kids thought that was hilarious.
Grandma Reatha, Aunt Jody, Taylor, Jacob, Rachel and Bryton came along with us on Thursday. It was fun to see the kids’ eyes light up when they saw their cousins in the audience. I’m sad this picture turned out blurry. I thought it was so cute that Holly’s kids snuggled up in a blanket during the play.
Elise got hit with a chair when the kids were cleaning up after the show. That’s why she was crying when we took this picture.
Our house has been immersed in Joseph for the last month. We watched the movie with the kids and have listened to the soundtrack over and over again. Abby learned all of the songs and insists that we listen to Joseph every time we get in the car. It is hilarious to listen to her belt out every song as we are driving around. She learned the choreography for Pharaoh’s Story and does the actions AND sings when it comes on. The best part is her “glimmer of light.” Wow!
After more than a year, I’m finally posting the before and after pictures of our laundry room remodel. Really, they are before, during, after, and after/full of stuff pictures. The first pictures I took last summer (2010). I sent them to Nate to say “we really need to do something about our laundry room.” It was such a disaster! My quality husband told me to make a plan and we would do it. We didn’t really get started until October (2010) since there were too many other things going on. Once we started, we kicked it out in a couple of weekends. Over a year later, I am still in love with the changes we made. It is still a tiny room, but it is tons more functional. And, I can actually see the floor.
Here are some of my favorite things about our “new” room:
The laundry basket shelves. I wanted to have two big shelves for laundry baskets so we would never have piles of laundry on the floor again. Nate came through for me and put in perfect shelves. He actually put them in twice. He had them up (with the screw holes puttied over and sanded) when I decided that they needed to be about an inch and a half higher. It is a good thing he loves me! It didn’t end up being quite as much work as we thought it would be to move them. He left them in one piece and just detached them from the wall. Then he raised them up using a couple of car jacks and some 2x4s. I’m sure he figured it would be less painful to redo the shelves than to listen to me complain about them for the next 30 years. They turned out great. They are a full eight inches deeper than the original shelves (except where Nate curved them back over the sink) and easily hold all seven of our laundry baskets.
The other shelves. We decided to take better advantage of the vaulted ceilings (that our builder put in by mistake) and build a few extra shelves around the room. It is nice to have that extra storage space.
The paint. I wanted something bright and bold. I love the color we picked (in real life, if not in all of the pictures). New appliances weren’t in our budget and our old washer and dryer still work, so we gave them a fresh coat of paint too. Ten bucks for some white appliance spray paint sure beats $1000 for a new washer and dryer.
The sink. When we were building our house, we told our builder that we wanted as big of a sink as would fit in the room. Instead, we ended up with a tiny, fairly useless sink. We looked around and found a much larger sink that would fit in the same cabinet (with some minor modifications). It is so nice to have a big, deep sink to rinse things out.
The closet rod. We moved the closet rod so it spans across the room between the shelves. I love being able to hang up clothes as soon as I take them out of the dryer. Plus, moving it freed up space for the kids to hang up their coats.
The bench. This was the part that made the project stretch out to almost a year. Nate finished building the bench a few months ago, but I took forever deciding how to finish it. I finally found a stain that I liked. Since Nate had done all of the other work, I decided to be brave and finish it myself. It took four coats to get the color I was going for, but I love how it turned out. It is so nice to have a place for the kids to put their backpacks and lunch bags. Plus, now the kids can reach the hooks to hang up their own jackets so I don’t have to.
Our Halloween celebrations started a few days early with Abby’s preschool party and trunk-or-treat on Thursday. I was in charge of a game, so I played Don’t Eat Pete with the kids. It was a big hit. All of the moms had planned fun activities. Abby had a great time and thought she was the queen of the world when she was the only one to win the ring toss game on her first try.
Cyd and Hil came for lunch on Friday. Cyd added to our Halloween fun by modeling her awesome Jabba the Hut costume for the kids. They loved it!
Friday night was our family party. We ate yummy soup and rolls and had Shane’s homemade root beer. We played the M&M’s/straw/dice game, did a candy walk, had a guess-how-many-candies-in-the-jar contest, and let the kids each take a couple of swings at the piñata (with Taylor striking the fatal blow). The highlight of the party was watching Jacob teach everyone the Thriller dance. It was hilarious. If the whole football plan doesn’t work out, that boy has a future as a choreographer.
We carved our pumpkins Sunday afternoon. Carving pumpkins is fun now that the kids can do most of the work themselves. Nate had to use toothpicks to make a couple of repairs, but they all turned out really well. Emily made hers double-sided with the Harry Potter logo on one side and Harry Potter’s face on the other. It was impossible to get a picture with both sides at once, but it looked pretty cool.
Monday morning we all headed over to the school for the costume parade. For the first time since we’ve had kids in school, we didn’t stay to help with class parties. Instead, Nate and I came home and trimmed and counted Box Tops all day. I learned my lesson to not have the collection drive end so close to the submission date and I was very grateful for my quality husband who didn’t complain about spending his day off helping me with PTA stuff.
We picked the kids up from school and headed down to Lee’s for their annual trick-or-treat event. Then it was home for a photo shoot. Our family decided to do a Harry Potter theme this year. I was lazy and bought the kids’ costumes instead of making them. Sometimes it is worth spending a little extra money to save some time (and sanity). I did make my robe and Nate’s hat. They were both pretty simple. Nate’s wig and beard were not so simple. We bought a Santa beard, but it was curly and bright white. I spent more time than I want to think about using the iron to straighten it out and then running a grey sharpie over it 4,000 times to give it a more weathered look. One of these days I will learn how to use my time wisely.
Here we are as Minerva McGonagall, Albus Dumbledore, Ginny Weasley, Hermione Granger, Harry Potter, and Hermione Granger (again). I wish I had an audio recording of everyone's British accents. They've gotten really good at it.
Abby made the perfect Ginny Weasley (or as she says "Zinny Weasley"). Her hair is just right for the part. She knows a few spells and even learned how speak a bit of parseltongue since Ginny does at the end of The Chamber of Secrets.
Elise and Emily both wanted to be Hermione. We used the timers they got from the dentist to make Time-Turners so Hermione could be in two places at once. Hooray for simple solutions that make everyone happy.
Ben was very concerned with being authentic. He's been growing out his hair for the last couple of months so it would be long enough for Harry Potter. Shaggy brown hair wasn't good enough, so we dyed it black. He even begged his orthodontist to take his braces off since "Harry Potter doesn't have braces." Luckily his teeth were ready anyway, so he got his wish.
I took the kids trick-or-treating this year while Nate stayed home to pass out candy. He made the most of it, using his best Dumbledore voice to greet the trick-or-treaters and letting wizards and witches have the first pick of the candy. I had fun with the kids. They were troopers! We covered lots of ground and none of them (even Abby) complained a bit. We met up with the Eckardts and Murdocks for the last half of the night. The kids had fun being with their friends and I had fun talking to Claudy and Wendy. It was a great night.
