Happy Birthday Kent!

Today is Kent's 33rd b-day! Happy B-day SB! Thanks for being such a great dad and husband. I love ya!! (Kent no longer has the goatee but he was sportin' some facial hair for a couple of weeks. He finally shaved it off. The better to kiss you with my dear!)

Kent Saves the Day

Remember the other day when I deleted all my photos of our trip? Well, Kent had actually already put them on his computer so I can post them! YAY!

Picnic Dinner in Nephi

Demolition Derby

By the end of the day Elise was sportin' a "Polyg" do (minus the French braid)

Hiking at Bridal Veil Falls

Emilia and cousin Erica being ninjas (or something like that)

Another Self-Haircut

Three out of my 4 kids have now given themselves haircuts. And now that I think about it, it must be a 4 year old thing because I swear all of my kids who have taken the scissors to their own heads have been right around 4. Maybe Elise was 5.

On Sunday I gave Ian a haircut. It turned out pretty nice I thought. He kept asking me to buzz him like his friend Caleb. I told him we'd buzz him another time because I just finished his haircut and it looked good.

Later I saw him. He had big chunk of hair cut out of the front. I asked him what happened and he admitted to cutting his hair. So we ended up buzzing him anyway. I took pictures of the pre-buzz 'do' but unfortunatley they were accidentally deleted by Adele and me. (Doh! See post below for that story). Here's a pic of Ian's buzz. You can still see where he chopped it. I decided against going totally bald even though you can still see the line where he cut his hair.

(Gotta love THAT face!)

At least boys' self-haircuts are easier to fix and they grow out faster.

Quick Trip

We took the family went on a quick getaway trip last weekend. We were just trying to get a little trip in before school starts. We went to Utah County to visit my sister and parents and to do some of the fun Provo things like hiking and swimming at Seven Peaks. My sister Linda let us stay at their house for the weekend and she was a really good sport about it. I know we brought a lot of chaos with us, but we had a great time. Thanks Linda. Kent took the big girls to the demolition derby at the Utah County Fair. They had a lot of fun trying to catch the flying stuffed Dora toys (my kids hate Dora) and the footballs with money in them. They also got a kick out of the crashing cars and the car that was on fire.

I was just about to post a bunch of pictures from our trip. I was uploading them when I noticed Adele pushed some button on the computer. She must have canceled the upload of pictures. I just deleted them off the camera too. So, anyway, we had a fun trip last weekend and took lots of great pictures. I was GOING to also post pictures of Kent's goatee and Adele's cute pigtails. Darn. For the record though, we DID go on a trip this summer. I guess I'll have to double check things before I delete all the pictures off the camera.

New Blogging Record

I haven't blogged in over 2 weeks. That is a record. Not a good one, but a record. I keep thinking I need to write something but we have been busy and my IBV just hasn't really been giving me any inspiration.

It is hard to believe that school starts tomorrow. I always start the year with mixed feelings. I was telling Emilia about "mixed feelings" the other day and now when anyone asks her if she is excited for school to start she tells them she has mixed feelings. It is exciting to get some structure back and to give the kids something to do. They have been fighting so much and I think they are just together way too much. It is always weird at first when they are gone all day. We all get over that pretty fast though, and soon it is on to homework and projects and PTA stuff. Life just keeps rolling on.

Water

A few weeks ago we went "Down South" and let the kids play in the splash pad. They had such a fun time and we got come cute pictures. (See, we have done a FEW fun things this summer. I do feel guilty though that I haven't been able to do the things I would have liked to. I feel like I have been a bummer of a mom lately and my kids have missed out.)

Some Cruise Photos

The scuba divers.

Gotta love the origami towels they make for you every night.

Me and my honey.

Biking around Catalina

All my sisters and sister-in-laws. It was so fun to see all the "girls".

My family. Mom and Dad and 10 kids.


My bike was awesome. The kickstand broke off when I was parking.

The "Elation"

My dad wanted to take all his kids and their spouses on a cruise, kind of like a kid-free family reunion. We had a GREAT time! It was a nice break from life and the kids and cooking!!! Thanks dad for the memories! We had a wonderful time! Let's do it again sometime!

Today

I feel like I have had a pretty productive day today. More productive than many of the days in the last few months. Here are a couple of the things I did today:

My kids were playing "birds" this morning and they made feathers and tails out of paper. They wanted to stick them to their bodies with tape. I vetoed that idea and made them elastic tailfeather belt thingies out of felt. Elise was very sad because she wanted to be a bluebird (see the blue shirt?). She insisted that she could NOT be a bluebird with an orange tail. (I only had orange felt, so sorry.)

After we made bird tails I decided to organize some toys. Here's what I found in one of the boxes:

There were many more parts and bodies but once you have seen one headless Barbie, you have seen them all. I decided that it was time to throw away all the Barbies. My kids only decapitate and dismember them when they play with them so I decided to get rid of all of them. Bye Bye Barbies. I threw out a whole garbage bag of Barbies, carnival toys, old art projects, Happy Meal toys etc. It is good to purge sometimes.

Sock Puppets

Yoshi, Mimi and Bing0

Update

It has been a long time since I posted anything. We pretty much do the same things every day so life is not that exciting. I do have a few updates though just for the record.

• My GI doc's office still hasn't called me back. It has been 10 days since the procedure and they haven't called me. I can't believe it. Seems pretty unprofessional to me. I don't expect them to have any great wisdom about treatment for me except for pepto bismol or other drugs. I doubt they'll even mention the possibility of food intolerances, since they seem to be unwilling to keep up with the research and actually try to help their patients. I have been not eating gluten since the procedure to see if that helps. So far, I am not sure. It takes awhile, they say. "They" also say that you can have withdrawals from gluten when you stop eating it. I would have to agree with the withdrawal theory. I have felt more sleepy and anxious the last few days. I am just waiting for things to normalize and hopefully I'll feel good again.
  
• I am going to be doing some more diagnostic tests to find out whether I am intolerant to gluten and get some answers once and for all. You can have gluten sensitivity and not celiac (and sometimes they just don't FIND the celiac because it is patchy.)
  
• My kids are in their second week of swimming lessons. They have 3 days left. It is kind of a pain to go every day but they love it and it gives them something to do.
  
• Mr. Hops (our frog) croaked (ha ha ha). I took him back to Wal-mart and got my 4 dollars back. Right now all the fish seem healthy and we seem to have a good ecosystem going on in there.
  
• I really wish I had something more exciting to talk about but I really don't. I need to get my camera out and get some pics of my cute kiddos before the summer is over.

Elise is 7

Happy Birthday Elise! Here is a picture of Elise with her birthday muffin. We saved the big treats and cake for the party with the friends but we did want to have a candle to blow out on the big day!

Elise decided for her 7th birthday party that she wanted to take some of her good friends, Jonathan and Jeffrey swimming. Unfortunately they had to swim inside because it was too cold. Elise always wants a water or swimming party for her birthday and every year it is too cold to do it outside.

Elise and Jeff with their arm floaties

All the freezing, drowned rats

Came back for a little cake and ice cream and playing

Happy 7th Elise! I can't believe how big and grown up you are getting!

Garden

My garden is starting to look better and better. My plants all seem to be doing pretty well except for a few beans that are being eaten by bugs. I need my cool SIL Sally to come and take some cool pictures of my garden. She takes normal things and makes them look amazing. I was just thinking that as I was thinking how lame my garden pics look. Maybe I'll go take some close ups of the plants just to be artistic. (Or to try.)



I found these birds hiding in the irises in my yard. They let me get surprisingly close to them so I took a picture. Wow. I am so artistic.

Fine Dining

Yesterday the kids were begging me to go out to dinner. I said, "no" and then they asked if we could play "restaurant". Sometimes when Kent is out of town we play "restaurant" because we usually have leftovers I need to get rid of and it makes them more patient about waiting for me to help everyone.

So instead of going out to eat we played "restaurant" last night and counted it for FHE. I made menus and we even used a tablecloth. They had such a fun time. I think we need to do it more often.

Serving the food

The Menu

Fish

Our fish tank was so lively with all our new fish. They all seemed so happy. Even Lucky seemed to be doing better. But then last night suddenly he died. We were all shocked and saddened. I couldn't find the reciept for him so I had to give him the traditional fish burial.

The Latest

• We got some new fish last night. We also got a frog. Now we have 3 Danios ("Skinnies", "Zippy" and "Zeus"). We got an algae eater named "Hoover" and we named the frog "Mr. Hops". Lucky (one of the older ones) seems much happier now that Skinnies has some friends to play with. Skinnies used to chase him around and bug him but now that Skinnies has some other Danios to school around with everyone seems happier.

• This morning I went in to get Adele and she was completely naked in her crib. I think she took her diaper and pajamas off before she fell asleep because her diaper was totally dry. Her bedding, pillow, teddy bears etc. were unfortunately NOT DRY. Tonight we will have to pin her pajamas so she can't take them off. It's funny that even after having 4 kids we still have "firsts". That was definitely a first.
  
  
• Our toads have made an appearance in our window well. We only saw one in there at first but the other one came out the other day when it rained. I can't believe they are still alive in there. They have been in there for almost 2 years.
  
  
• All my tests came back normal. My Dr. referred me to an internal medicine doc. I hope we can get to the bottom of this soon because I am so queasy all the time. It is very unpleasant. (No, I am not pregnant, but thanks for wondering.) I am not sure what this new guy is going to do with me but hopefully he is good at figuring out what is wrong with people's innards, since that IS his spec-i-al-ity.
  

Dead Fish, No Eulogy

There has been a recent death in the aquarium. Flower the Fish died yesterday. She didn't get an proper flushing or eulogy-reading because I had to take her back to Wal-mart so I could get my money back. It's so gross that you have to bring your dead fish with you so they believe that it did in fact die. I guess people were taking their receipts and saying the fish were dead and getting free fish. So Flower's final destination is at the mercy of Wal-mart. Not a happy thought. I think that Skinnies drove her to her death because he was always bullying her. Lucky is probably going to prove to be unlucky and die soon too. Did I mention that I hate pets?

Garden

I haven't had much motivation for yard work lately but on Saturday I finally decided it was "now or never" to get my garden planted. The bushy thing in the front is parsley. I have 7 tomato plants, 2 zucchinis (I am going to probably take one out). I planted pumpkins, cucumbers some lettuce and a few beans. We'll see if anything grows. I'll post more pictures as things start to grow. I'm pretty darn proud of myself for gettin' the garden planted!

My zucchini babies that I raised in cups from wee seeds and transplanted in my garden.

Update

Holy cow I haven't posted for 10 days! Has it really been that long??? Here's a quick update in our crazy but boring lives:

I have to take Adele back to the ENT in a couple of weeks to find out for sure if she will have to get tubes. He put her on a steriod that was supposed to clear out the "effusion" that was in her ears (basically the built up fluid.) Let's hope she won't need tubes.

In other medical news, I took Emilia to the Instacare last night for what I thought was an ingrown toenail. Turns out that it was a paranicial infection, probably Staff. (Paranicial means outside the nail.)

Adele has been sick with the flu all weekend. She threw up on me today so we stayed home from church. I also let Emilia stay home because her toe was sick. (Actually I needed to drain the pus from it and have her soak it so I just let her stay home.)

Kent also had the flu last week.

The kids at Elise's school are always joking around and checking the other kids' heads for nits and now Elise has a lice paranoia. She has been waking up at night saying that there is something on her head or that her head itches. She finally told me that she is worried about getting lice. For this reason I am glad that school is almost out. Then she won't have to worry about lice anymore.

I taught a couponing class at Enrichment this week. I think it went ok and hopefully I inspired someone to save some money.

We got 3 new fish last week and they are all still alive. We got 2 Platies and 1 Danio. Their names are: Lucky (black tail), Flower (orange tail) and Skinnies (the Danio is the skinny one so its name is Skinnies. They all seem healthy and I don't think any of them have Ick. I hope they live a long time.

Slacker

I can't believe a whole week of May has gone by and I haven't blogged. I keep trying to think of things to blog about but there hasn't been anything exciting going on. We have been spending more and more time outside because the weather has been so warm. I am trying to get my garden ready. I have some parsley that survived the winter and I planted a few things in some cups. They haven't sprouted yet. I have some good turkey poo-fertilizer (aka mulch, don't worry, the bag says it is sterilized) that I need to spread out in the garden but the kids have been playing in the dirt in the garden a lot so I hate to make it off limits. I think I will do that next week.

Adele had another ear infection last week and so she will probably have to get tubes in her ears. She has an appointment with the ear doctor tomorrow. Poor thing.

My kids have 2 weeks of school left. I just can't believe it. May is such a fun month for them at school though because they just keep going on field trips and having parties. I don't think they learn anything in May. They are ready to be done though. I think they are really burned out. I am burned out too with all the homework and papers I have to help them keep track of.

The cute little ones

Weeds and Poo

Elise stayed home from school on Monday because her stomach hurt. She acted sick for a little while but then she seemed fine. To keep the kids busy, and to make our neighbors stop hating us for spreading seeds I decided I'd make the kids pick the dandelions in our yard. We haven't had a chance yet to spray weed killer on the grass yet so putting the kids to work seems like the next best thing. They weren't too interested in picking dandelions until I told them I'd give them a penny for each one they picked. By the time we were done they picked over 500. I probably picked 500 too. (Time to spray the grass huh?)

While we were out picking the dandelions I discovered not one but 2 presents that were left in our yard. (Curse the evil people who let their dogs run free and poop in MY YARD.)

If you think the pictures are gross you should have seen me retching and gagging while picking the poo up with my double-bagged hands. Blechhhhhh.

And of course it HAD to be on MONDAY right AFTER the garbage guys got our trash. Now the POO has to sit in the BLACK garbage can in the HOT SUN for a whole week.