Snow

We finally got some decent snow for sledding!  We had one big snow storm at the beginning of the winter but it got so cold afterward that it was too cold to even go outside to play in it.  After this storm the kids were so excited to finally get to go sledding.  It wasn't too bad but the wind was pretty cold. Adele was quite the daredevil and kept going off the jump that somebody had built.  Good thing her bones are still made of rubber so it didn't hurt her.  

SOLD!

Our house is finally under contract!  After being on the market for over 5 months we finally got a buyer!  Our buyer came to look at the house at the beginning of January and we heard through our realtors that they had an offer ready to go but were waiting for pre-approval from their lender.  That pre-approval took almost a month so we were waiting and waiting to hear from them.  The offer finally came in but it was way too low. It wasn't something we could really work with so we countered.  They came back, just a tad higher than the original offer but we just couldn't accept it.  So we let it die.  A few days later another offer came in and we negotiated some more.  We finally came to an agreement and now we are under contract.  During the first round of negotiating they told us we wouldn't close for 60 days. On the second go-round somehow they moved up the closing to 4 weeks.  We close on March 7.  Suddenly we are scrambling to find a place to live for a few months, fill out paperwork and see how long it will take to start building our new house.  We meet with our builder on Thursday to sign contracts and hopefully schedule a date to start building.  Can't wait for this first move to be over.

Fish Tricks

This is our 5 year old goldfish named Goldie.  He/She has been doing a new trick lately.  It's called, "vertical dead man's float".  We keep thinking He/She is preparing to die.  But Goldie is still swimming strong.  I never thought we would keep a fish alive for this long.  Maybe it is because He/She has gained lots of fishy strength from eating all his friends.

Ice Skating

This is the first year they have had an ice skating rink here.  The kids, especially Emilia have been begging and begging to go ice skating.   We took Elise's friend AraMae with us.

Walkers for ice skating!  Brilliant idea!  Elise would not give hers up.  She held onto it for dear life.

Rockin my black eye.

The Black Eye

This is super exciting.  Super exciting if you are into pain and suffering. And embarrassment.  Everyone is entitled to do stupid things every now and then right?  I took my turn the night before Christmas Eve.  Here's the story:  A friend invited our family to come along and go caroling in the neighborhood.  They were pulling a trailer along and they were stopping at people's houses and picking people up.  The trailer started to fill up so Kent and I decided to walk.  The trailer had stopped for someone and had just started up again.  And I had a brilliant idea:  I would run and catch up with the trailer and just hop right up onto the area over the tire. (See photo).  Not a big deal right? I am agile.  Apparently I am shorter than I remember, however, or the trailer was moving faster than I thought it was, because I missed.  I almost made it, but before I knew it I found myself falling to the street, hitting my knees, palms and lastly, my forehead on the pavement.  Ow.  I got up quickly, trying to pretend nothing happened, hoping all the people in the trailer were looking at something else when I went splat in the road.  After the incident, Kent and I continued to walk for awhile, following the trailer.  About 10 minutes later I reached up and felt my head and HOLY COW there was a ginormous goose egg on my head.   I had a headache for a couple of days after it happened, and on Christmas day my eyelid started turning purple.  The bruising continued to make its way downward until I had a big dark circle under my eye.  Let me tell you, I got pretty sick of explaining what happened over and over.  (Especially because it was my own stupid fault for doing something so idiotic).  And of course, the comments about Kent beating me up were pretty awesome too.

I am thankful that despite my stupidity there weren't worse consequences.  Like being run over by the trailer and squished in the road.  I made sure to point out to my kids what a dumb thing I did and that I could have really been seriously hurt.  Lesson learned:  Don't ever get on or off a moving vehicle.

Christmas Joy

After reading the Christmas story from the Bible the kiddos couldn't wait to get to the presents!

All the kids decided to open their present from Grandma V. New blankets for all!

Christmas morning

Happy about all the loot they scored

Busy December (Nutshell Version)

December is always pretty busy.  This year was no exception, in fact it was probably worse than usual since I was in charge of planning the ward Christmas party.  We got home from our Thanksgiving festivities, all had the flu and at the end of the week was the ward party.  Thanks to all my great peeps helping, it turned out really fun, but it was definitely stressful.  We had a Feliz Navidad theme and had a fun photo booth.

Ole!

Elise had her first band concert and did awesome

Emilia also had a band concert.  She got to do some marching since the band was supposed to march in the Storybook Cavalcade parade, but it got canceled TWICE because of bad weather.

Adele had her first dance recital.  What could possibly be cuter than a little girl in a fancy dance costume?

Ian had basketball games every week 

And last but not least, Kent spent some energy growing facial hair.

Accidents With Superglue

This post is dedicated to Emilia.  She was the victim of the first superglue accident.  She felt vindicated about a week later when I accidentally superglued my fingers together.

Part 1: Emilia has been "into" making and wearing friendship bracelets lately.  She had one that we were trying to tie on her wrist but it kept coming off.  I decided to superglue the knot to keep it from slipping off.  The glue got slightly out of control and dripped on her arm, which resulted in actually gluing the bracelet onto her arm.  It burned. It stuck.  I felt really bad.  She finally got it off, peeling some skin of with it.  (I'm up for the mom of the year award).

Part 2:  I have really dry skin especially on my feet.  I can thank my Vernon heritage for this.  I had a big crack on my heel that I decided to superglue shut.  So I did, and again, I got too much.  Without thinking I wiped some off with my finger.  And then tried to wipe that off with my thumb.  Bad idea.  Instead of wiping it off, I glued my fingers together.  Gotta be more careful with the superglue.

Decorating the Tree

We finally got around to decorating the tree.  With Thanksgiving being so late this year and with the stomach flue we had we got delayed quite a bit.  It's always so fun to decorate for Christmas and to go through our ornaments and remember when we got them.  We have a tradition of buying a special ornament every year that represents that year.  It's so fun to go through those and remember the events of our lives.

Taking time for silliness

Tidal Wave of Disgustingness

No photos for this one.  (You're welcome).  In the previous post I mentioned the tidal wave of disgustingness that Adele was hit with and shared with our whole family.  She caught a bug on our Thanksgiving trip and was kind enough to share it with the whole family.  Last week was pretty much as crazy as it gets. The whole family took turns riding the wave and I was in charge of the ward Christmas party.  (Yeah. Really).   Ain't nobody got time for any of that.

The big party is over. (RELIEF!)  Sickness has now moved on to the rest of our city (really, everyone has been getting it.  NOT from us, mind you.  We stayed home.)  Fortunately for me I was available to save the day at my favorite dental office when one of the assistants had to miss 2 days because her kid was sick.  (I WANNA WORK THERE!  I even got to borrow the embroidered scrubs and I ALMOST felt like a real employee. *sigh*).  And finally we were healthy again for the next wave of Christmas activities (which I will blog about after this).

Thanksgiving at Grandma's

The weather was good at the end of November so we were excited to be able to make the trek up North to Idaho for Thanksgiving.  It started to get really cold just before we left and secretly (or not so secretly) I was wishing we were going 7 hours south instead of north.  We were excited to get the chance to visit family though since we live far away from everyone.  I envy people who live close to family. I wish our kids could grow up near their cousins.  We missed a couple of Kent's siblings but we take what we can get.

Some of the bros

Cousins!  We love cousins!

Adele and cousin Kristen

Kent being a good helper

Carol and her silly kiddos

The trip was a lot of fun, the food was awesome, as usual.  We stayed with Mark and Carol for 3 days and spent time with Gma and Gpa too.  Unfortunately Adele came down with the stomach flu the night before we left which started a whole tidal wave of disgustingness but that is a post for a different day.

Reflections Winner!

 The theme this year was Believe, Hope, Dream (or something like that).  Ian made a sculpture at art class of what they want to be when they grow up.  He apparently wants to be a millionaire.  They made the sculptures out of wire and paper mache.  He won an award and is going to district.   Pretty awesome.

Lot Pix

Went out to the lot today with a friend to show it to her.  Actually remembered to snap a few pictures.

This is the view across the street and facing the south a bit. 

Curly

Adele is finally seeing the advantage of having long(er) hair.  Dare I say that she has passed the self-haircut phase?  Let's hope so.  Lately we have been trying all sorts of hair-dos and she is having so much fun getting her hair done! She's definitely my girliest girl.  Curlers have been on the top of the hair-do list and we have done them 3 times in the last 2 weeks.  I think she also likes the attention she is getting with all her new hair-dos.

A Lot

We bought a lot.  (A lot of what?  ha ha.)  A lot of land.  When all this crazy house business started we were looking at lots and homes that were in our ward.  There were a few things that didn't work out with that so we started looking at other options and found a place called Eagle Ridge.  There were several lots for sale and we were seriously considering buying one.  Then some investor (s?) came along and bought most of the lots that were for sale.  The lot that we liked the most was not officially for sale but our realtor knew the guys who owned.  He said they would sell it.  When the other lots were sold the price of the one we wanted went up.   We wanted to look around a little bit more so could be sure that was what we really wanted, especially with the price increase.  After a lot of driving around and looking at neighborhoods we decided that we really did like Eagle Ridge the best.   We made an offer on the lot we wanted, did some negotiating and finally agreed on a price.  We closed on the lot yesterday, and we are so excited! (We need to sell our house now!)

Here is the view from some spot in Eagle ridge.  This must have been taken in the evening because the lighting is good.  The view is beautiful but I must admit that it looks drier than this.  This is a photo that I found online.  I keep forgetting to take pix when I am there.

We have also been working with a builder and we have our house plans ready.  We are going to "make selections" (choose all our colors etc.) after Thanksgiving.  Then we pretty much just have to wait and wait and wait until we sell our house.  Hopefully after the holidays things will start moving and we can start on our new house!

This is a picture of the house we based our house plans on.  Ours will look a bit different on the outside but this is a general idea.

Ian's 9th!

The birthday boy and his birthday boiled eggs.
With candles.

We celebrated Ian's 9th birthday last week with the typical, traditional birthday activities:  candles in the breakfast, getting picked up from school and taken out to lunch, and getting to pick the birthday dinner and dessert.  Ian's birthday was on a Tuesday, and on Tuesdays I help in Adele's kindergarten class.  Her teacher has a son (Bryce) who has the same birthday as Ian. I had forgotten this and she mentioned something about it when I was there. I then got the idea that it would be fun to invite Bryce to go out to lunch with us since it was his birthday too.   His mom said that was ok and I asked Ian if he wanted to go by himself or invite Bryce to come with us.  He thought it would be fun to have Bryce to come.  Ian wanted to go to the hospital to get lunch with Kent for his birthday lunch so we went there.  He had chicken strips and Bryce had pizza.  They felt pretty cool, being out to lunch on their birthday.  I also got a great idea from Bryce's mom when we were talking.  She said that she always gives her kids the option of having a birthday party or taking the money she would have spent on a party.  I thought this was a brilliant idea and decided to start doing that.  I offered that to Ian and he was ALL over it.  So, he decided to take the cash and skip the party.  (Good choice buddy!)

He kept doing this funny mouth thing and wanted us to get a pic of him looking like he was blowing out the candles.

Remote control 4 - wheeler.

Halloween -

So I'm pretty much a Halloween-photo slacker this year.  Elise and Kent were gone the night we carved pumpkins (daddy-daughter bowling the night before Halloween).  So they did their pumpkins after the rest of us.  Did I take pictures?  No.  Sorry guys, but I did steal a pic from Facebook of you at the bowling alley so you are represented.

And on Halloween night... Yes we did go trick or treating.  Elise and Emilia went with some friends this year (for the first time! What fun!).  We were in such a rush to get everyone ready that we completely forgot to take pictures.  Slackers.  Ian was a gangster again.  Elise was a chef (and I made her a super cute apron to wear).  Emilia was  a zombie or something.  Adele was... she was... I can hardly remember (this is why we take photos, duh.)  She changed her mind so many times, and tried on a bunch of different costumes.  I will have to get back to you on that!  (Mom of the year here.)  

Annual Fall Donut Fest

One of our favorite fall traditions is our annual donut party.  For the last 3 years including this year we have had our fall donut party with our good friends the Enas.  The donuts were super yummy as usual and it was fun to hang out with our friends!