We had an early snow storm last week. It corresponded perfectly with an early out
day for the kids. Abby and her friends
wanted to play in the snow and recruited me to help them build a snowman. Being the lazy mom that I am, I delegated
that honor to Emily. She wasn't thrilled
about it, but she had fun once she got out there with them. I got a picture of their finished snowman just in the
nick of time since Abby's friends knocked it over four seconds later.
Despite her initial reluctance, Emily apparently didn't get
her fill of snowman building with just one.
She made her own mini snowman on the front porch.
The cold weather kept the kids inside for most of the
weekend. Nate was a cool dad and helped
the girls build a blanket fort to play in.
They even suckered him into letting them sleep in it on Saturday
night. He moved the piano benches in for
extra support and made them a bed out of some foam pads. They thought it was the coolest thing
ever. Abby moved into Grandma's bed
before she fell asleep and ended up on the couch. Probably a good thing since it was pretty
tight quarters for all three girls and she is infamous for being a sleep
kicker.
We took a fun camping trip to Willard Bay over UEA
weekend. It was our first experience
with cold weather camping. Our kids
(especially Ben) weren’t exactly thrilled with leaving electronics behind to go
camping, but it took all of two minutes once we got there for them to be in
love with the idea. Nate was worried
that all of the good campsites would be taken, so we left our house at 9:00
Thursday morning and laughed out loud when we got there and saw that the
campground was almost entirely empty.
Being early birds paid off and we got an awesome campsite. It was huge and provided lots of
opportunities for the kids to explore.
We spent our days playing games, riding bikes, and walking
out to the lake. We had early campfires
and then headed into the trailer to watch movies (Spiderman 1 & 2) and keep warm.
Our quality little electric heater did its job well and we slept
comfortably even with overnight lows in the upper 30s. We saw lots of different kinds of birds and
found two snakes (one of which had to suffer through each kid taking a turn
holding it). We spent a bit of time
skipping rocks. Our favorite spot was a
little pond that was separated from the rest of the lake. On the way there, Nate found the perfect
skipping stone. He had Elise go stand on
one bank and he skipped the rock all the way across the water so she could pick
it up on the other side. The rock made
it across eight times. It was such a fun
game that when the rock didn’t make it on the ninth time, Nate had Ben take his
shoes off and wade into the water to try (unsuccessfully) to find it. All of the kids got lots of practice skipping
rocks too and their skill level increased quite a bit over the three days we
were there.
The quote of the trip comes from Abby: We rode our bikes down to Pelican Beach on the
first day and when we got back I realized I hadn’t taken any pictures of the
kids skipping rocks.I said, “Maybe we
should go back and do it again so I can get a picture.”Abby looked right at me and said, “Mom, are
you insane?!?!?”Yeah, mostly.
Elise had a fieldtrip to the zoo a couple of weeks ago. I signed up to be a parent chaperone and Jody
and Sarah decided to come along for the ride.
The weather was beautiful and we had a really fun day. The two girls that were in Elise’s group are
both in our ward. It was funny to see
their different reactions. One of them
would get super excited about every animal we saw (scream and giggle kind of
excited) and the other one only wanted to spend about 12 seconds at any one
exhibit before she was bored. It was
interesting. The highlights were seeing
the wolves up close, watching two tigers fighting, the baby giraffe, and the
polar bear.
I decided to buy a membership to the zoo so I could take all
of the kids a couple of times this year.
They got out of school early on Tuesday because of parent teacher
conferences, so we headed down. It was a
perfect day to be at the zoo. By the
time we got there all of the fieldtrips had left for the day and we had the
place pretty much to ourselves. It was
awesome! We lucked out with our timing
and saw lots of cool animal behaviors.
Emily made a list on the way home of all of the fun things we saw:
Between nagging the kids about homework and cleaning their
rooms and practicing piano, lots of days I feel like I am just a bossy, grumpy
mom. It was really quite lovely to just
hang out with them and have fun together.
We should do it more often.
Elise got baptized on Saturday. It has been a LONG wait for her. The baptisms in September were on the 1st, so
she missed it by 5 days. She was a
little bitter for a while that I didn’t have her on my birthday. She thought it would have been so cool to
have her birthday on the same day as mine and my mom’s (30 and 70 years apart
respectively). Plus, she could have
gotten baptized on her birthday (like Emily was). She came to terms with it after I explained
that moms don’t just get to pick the day their babies are born, but she still
had a hard time waiting a month and seven days after her birthday to get
baptized. I didn’t mind the wait since
it gave us more time to get everything ready, but I wasn’t in love with the
idea of her getting baptized on the 13th. I got over it when I realized it was the
mirror image of Ben’s baptism date . . . 10-13 and 01-31. Phew.
The day of her baptism was pretty busy. We went to Abby’s last soccer game in the
morning and then headed home to get the house and food ready for company. With Ben and Emily, we just had everyone come
over for some treats after the baptism. A couple of my
friends said that we should really feed people dinner if they were coming over
afterwards and I foolishly gave into peer pressure. The dinner turned out fine and Elise liked
having everyone stick around longer, but it was sure a lot more work than baking a few batches of cookies and making rice krispy treats.
The baptism itself was great. Elise had lots of family and friends there to
support her and she loved every minute of it.
Nothing ruins a perfectly good Saturday for Ben like getting in church
clothes and going to a baptism, but even he did fine when he saw that his
friend Korbin was at the church. We were
the host ward again, so we were the last ones to the font. The water was warm and it only took one dunk. Elise was lots faster getting dried off and
ready than the little boy in our ward who got baptized right after her. She was so happy that she finally got to wear
her baptism dress. Grandma Reatha took her shopping for it in August and it was
the longest two months of her life to have to wait to wear it.
We kept up the tradition of making a slideshow. It takes a ton of time to pick the pictures
and put it all together, but I always love the final product. It is fun to have eight years of life wrapped
up in a nice little 11 minute DVD.
We sure love Elise!
She is a happy, funny, spontaneous girl.
She has a big heart and is the most naturally generous kid I have ever
met. We feel blessed that she is part of
our family.
Thursday night was the Mom Miss party for Activity
Days. Elise was excited that she was old
enough to go with me and Emily this year.
It was a costume party and we were supposed to wear opposite costumes. The old standbys of salt and pepper wouldn’t
work since there were three of us, so we decided to go as cops and robber. The girls looked so cute in their policewomen
outfits. At the party we each made our
own English muffin pizzas, put on a little skit to show off our costumes, and
then played board games (our group played Apples
to Apples). I’m glad that I get to be
a mom to girls and I sure have fun hanging out with them.
We were pretty worn out from the previous 3 days, so we
slept in a bit late and were really slow getting ready to go to the beach. Malinda was a little grumpy about how slow
everyone was by the time we actually left, but she eventually got over it. We made our way there through California
traffic and got to the beach a little after 1:00. We decided to go to Huntington Beach, and it
turned out to be a great place. After
playing in the cold September ocean water for a short while, we were very glad
to don our wetsuits that we brought along.
We enjoyed hours of boogie boarding, collecting sea shells and sand
dollars, and sliding down the little sand cliffs (Abby). We attracted a few seagulls when we were
eating lunch, and one of them decided to use Elise’s head for target practice.
After playing for about four hours at the beach, we headed
back to the hotel to get cleaned up and to get some dinner. I made a quick trip to El Pollo Loco while
the kids and Malinda showered and got in PJs, and we had some yummy Mexican
fast food for dinner while relaxing to some cable TV.
Quote of the day: “The worst thing of the trip and the
funniest thing of the trip is that a seagull pooped on my head!” – Elise
