Warning!

Do not leave baby unattended.

I'm just glad he didn't get the brown sugar opened. That would have been fun.

The Million Dollar Idea

On Friday night our family was very bored and couldn't think of anything fun to do that was practically free. Then I had a great idea. We would take a trip to the dollar store and all got to choose one item. So we headed off to the dollar store and started our shopping. Ainsley ended up with a cup shaped like an ice cream cone. We had to talk her out of a plastic decorative pumpkin. John got a piece of poster board to back one of his diplomas in a frame. John actually only spent 38 cents. And I found a lovely bead kit to make a necklace/bracelet, this was actually more for Ainsley than it was for me, although I think it turned out kind of cute.

The bead kid was for one of those necklaces that has magnets on it every so often so there aren't any clasps and you can wrap it to make different sizes and what not. The true fun of the night began when we were making the necklace. We were in the middle of stringing the beads when John and I got a little distracted talking to Kort who had dropped by to pick something up. I handed Ains a clear bead and told her to string it on as we sat talking. All of the sudden Ains said,"It's in my nose, it's stuck." She was quite panicked and as I looked into her nose I got panicked too because it was really in there, well beyond reach. We were trying to get her to try to blow it out and she was upset and saying she couldn't. We kept telling her that if she couldn't blow it out we would have to take her to the hospital to get it out. With in a couple of minutes I finally got her to blow hard enough that a little clear bead shot out of her nose and onto the floor. We were all very relieved, and we have since had several talks/reminders that we don't stick things in our nose...or our ears.

Magic Beans!

This morning I was out doing some work in the yard when I noticed a group of what I thought were weeds growing in front of our front porch. I walked closer and a memory flashed through my mind. At scouts 2 weeks ago we played a game that required them to each have a handful of beans in a can. Before going home one of the scouts came to ask me for more beans because his had spilled on the grass. I had thought nothing more of it until this moment. I guess I thought the beans would either get sucked up by the lawn mower or just go away. They didn't. They grew. Apparently I have the capability of growing beans in my yard by just dumping some from a bag onto the lawn and paying no attention to them. But if I try to grow grass and actually give it some effort the seed sits there and does nothing. My bean plants had grown about 6+ inches in 2 weeks. There were also a ton of beans still lying on the grass and as I started to pick them up I noticed that almost all of them had a little root growing out of them or had attached themselves to the ground. Simply amazing! I wish my pictures did it justice.

I picked the beans by the way, as amazing as it was I didn't want a small patch growing in my grass.

Fat lip = new freezer!

How I Got My New Freezer
By Jessica

Upon returning from my monthly trip to Costco I had lots of food to put away and no where to put it. I had extra loaves of bread that I was cramming into the freezer. Fruit snacks and crackers that I was cramming into the pantry (if you could call our pantry a pantry, more like and over sized cupboard). When all of a sudden a large box fell out of the said pantry and fell on my face. Leaving me with a bloody lip and a scratched up chin.

I had had it. I called John and informed him that I was sick of cramming food into our freezer and cupboards (this is a monthly call he receives after every Costco trip). But this time I was especially mad due to my severe injuries. He knew not to argue, he just said, "Let's go buy a freezer." Usually I calm down by this point and say, "No, that wouldn't be responsible of us, we should wait" but I had really had it. So we got a new freezer that is now taking up enough space in the garage that John was booted and now has to park in the driveway, there were a few tears shed by him about this. But I have a new freezer and now I can buy ice cream when we have a birthday because I'll have somewhere to put it. I can buy a frozen pizza if I want. I can buy more freezer foods because I don't have to reserve space for bread and meat! I can make freezer jam!

The End

By the way...next month after I get home from my Costco trip, and after I call John to complain, I'm going to purchase some large shelves to put in the garage next to the freezer. I already have one set of shelves but they are small....and I do have a nonexistent pantry. My kitchen is slowly extending to the garage, but I knew that would be the case when we bought the house. The following month when I get home from my Costco trip I just might not have anything to complain about. That will be nice!

Picky Eater

Owen has proven to be a very picky eater. He was all about food and would try anything, and then suddenly he refused chicken noodle soup (one of his favorites). After the first refusal came a flood of others. He is now to the point where he automatically fights against me putting anything new in his mouth. The foods he will eat are PB & J, yogurt, cream of wheat, sweet potatoes, bananas, apple sauce, and rice cereal. I still always make him try new foods and was pleasantly surprised when last night he ate pasta roni chopped up with chicken and broccoli. He spit it out at first but with a few more attempts at shoving it in his mouth he decided that it wasn't that bad and cleaned out his bowl. The top picture is of him eating his pasta roni mixture. The bottom picture is what Owen looks like after he finishes a go-gurt. They are his favorite and he cries and cries when the plastic tube is empty. I tried to get a picture of the disgusted,tongue sticking out look I get when I give him something he doesn't like but I was horribly unsuccessful.

Insomnia

I think I have insomnia. Lately I can't sleep. So here I am again, awake while my family sleeps. Thinking about how I was going to get up early to go running in the morning and how now, due to the insomnia, it's going to be really hard to drag my tired body out of bed in the morning.

On a side note for all you Harry Potter fans, John already finished the book. I don't know how he did it in 2 days without reading through the night but he did. So now he will be rejoining family activities. I on the other hand am finally getting around to going back and rereading 5 and 6, so he won't even have anyone to talk about it with for a while. So please call and talk to him if you finish.

All Tuckered Out

Ainsley had a very eventful weekend. On Friday Sydney and Ainsley came up with a plan for a sleep over. I think plans started evolving around watching Sleeping Beauty. Since John and I are always up for someone else looking after our children we thought this was a great idea. So Ainsley got to spend the night with Syd (I'm still waiting to see the pictures). From what I hear they played, dressed up, and got to sleep out on the lounge chairs by the pool. They took out sleeping bags, treats, and a portable DVD player and watched Incredibles. I'm not quite sure what happened to Sleeping Beauty. They didn't start the movie until after 10:00 at night (they were having fun looking at the stars and getting ready for sleeping out)and Syd thought that Ainsley would soon fall asleep. She didn't know that Ainsley has never fallen asleep during a movie in her entire life. So they finally turned off the movie and went to sleep at midnight.

It was at about 6:00 this morning that Ains got a little chilled and joined my parents in their bed. I'm sure they enjoyed that! Apparently Ainsley never went back to sleep and soon wanted breakfast. John and I had a relaxing morning only having to deal with one child. John especially liked this because he got up at 5:00 to go buy Harry Potter. Ainsley rejoined the family at about noon and her fun didn't end there.

Ainsley had completed her chart and thus earned a movie with mom. She had also earned a free kids meal at Red Robin so I thought we would make an afternoon of it. When I learned that she had been so sleep deprived I decided that we would only go if she remembered, and lo and behold, she remembered! So, as soon as she got home we went out to eat. Then we walked over to the mall and hung out at the Disney store (where my search for her a new swimming suit ended when we found a lovely Jasmine one for $3) until it was time for our movie to start. Then we headed over to the dollar movie, which is actually a $3 movie now, and watched Shrek 3. It was a lot of fun. My favorite moment of the day was when we were sitting in our seats waiting for the movie to start and I asked Ainsley what we should do while we waited and she said, "um, I don't know, tickle each other." I just had to laugh. She fell asleep about 2 minutes after we got in the car on the drive home and has been asleep ever since. That was at about 4:30 this afternoon, it's now 9:45. It might be a really early morning.

A few recent developments

This is a picture of Ainsley holding her baby tiger. Most kids have an imaginary friend, but the only imaginary member of our family is baby tiger. Sometimes there is more than one, sometimes they go with us to the store, sometimes they chase Ains around the house, and they always just appear out of nowhere. We go days without seeing the baby tigers and then they are suddenly back. My theory is that they appear when she is feeling left out due to having a baby brother.

In other news...Owen can stand! He can stand for 10-15 seconds on his own if he want to or if he's distracted enough that he doesn't realize he's standing. But when I try to get him to do it he is quick to squat down to the floor so that he can crawl.

I took this picture of Owen's leg hanging out of his crib a while ago. Lately, however, we find him in this position about 80% of the time when we go check on him at night before we go to bed. I occasionally find him like this when I give in and go check on him when he is crying instead of going to sleep and then I feel guilty. I don't know why he does it or how to get him to stop. The mark on his leg (above) is from him shoving his leg out of his crib. It looks so sad when he does is because he just lays there, stuck, and has to wait patiently while his leg is maneuvered out of the slats. I'm worried that one night he'll do that and get his circulation cut off and cause some damage. So basically I'm at a loss on this one.

The other thing that Owen can now do is cry from about 5:00 in the morning until about 7:00 when I finally give in and go get him. It's getting very annoying because he's not hungry, he's grumpy and tired, and thus so are the rest of us. He's amazingly pleasant once Ains wakes up though!

Move that Bus!

Extreme Makeover Home Edition is in town and we decided to go check it out today. I called my sister and mom this morning and we decided that it would be fun to go out for the last day and see the house and yell,"move that bus!" Unfortunately about 5,000 other people thought it would be fun as well. We drove about 20 minutes to Middleton High school where we knew we had to catch a bus that would take us to the home sight. When we got there we saw buses lined up and thought we would be able to just hop right on. As we approached we realized that there was a HUGE line. You'd have thought we were in line to ride Indiana Jones at Disney Land. We waited in 100 degree weather for an hour and a half. Every one there was in amazingly good spirits though. I had brought lots of water and a squirt bottle so the kids were entertained.

Right before it was our turn to get on a school bus and drive out we started talking to people that were returning from the house. They were saying that there were so many people you couldn't see anything and you just had to stand in a field. They only had 5 buses and therefore we knew we would have an even longer wait to get back. So we made an executive decision to ride the bus to the house, stay on the bus, and head right back. We sat by a girl on the bus that was in the family's stake. Yes, they were LDS. She decided to ride back with us as well because she had 4 little girls with her and the youngest couldn't have been more than a few months old. So we got some pictures from the bus, we didn't get to see Ty. We were very hot and sweaty but I still think it was kind of cool. I think we would have stuck it our if it weren't for the 4 children that were accompanying us. We were also told when we were dropped off that there weren't going to be any buses bringing people back to the high school for hours. So good decision on our part! Plus we came home and went straight to the water park so we were nice and refreshed in no time. FYI the show will be airing on October 14th...so watch it!

This jumble of people is a small portion of the line to get on the bus, doesn't really even look like a line does it?

Here we are looking at the house from the bus. We just had Ains yell "move that bus"right before our bus started moving, she'll never know the difference right?

Feet

Why the picture of my feet? I got a pedicure this evening! My parents gave one to Kort and I for our birthday's, then they also gave one to Syd for Valentine's day, and then my dad got one for my mom for mother's day. So tonight we all went together and got our pedicures...finally. This is only my second one ever and they are WONDERFUL!!!! It was an hour of getting my feet massaged, buffed, cleaned up, and nails painted. It's so great. I always thought I would feel weird getting one and having someone else rub my feet, maybe because I hate other people's feet, but I have to say that there is nothing better. I have never had a massage though, maybe that would be better.

I took a picture of my feet in the ridiculous shoes they send you home in. As I was taking a picture for the blog I realized that my feet aren't pretty. I don't think I ever thought my feet were gorgeous, but I thought they were okay looking. As I snapped pictures I realized that they are actually ugly. Maybe I have just gotten used to looking at them? My friend Karalenn always felt like she had long toes, and I have to agree she does (her middle toe is the size of an average person's pinkie finger), and I think that my toes are up the same alley as hers. Maybe not monkey toes but close. So while I realized tonight that my feet are a little on the funny looking side I don't care because they feel great!

Productive

Today we stayed home all day. While this makes Owen a little stir crazy it was good for the rest of us. I took time to do some things that I normally don't do. Call me little miss homemaker because I really went above and beyond my motherly duties. And the children were only mildly neglected in the process. I decided that my day of homemaking was blog worthy since I'm sure I will lose the title by 7:00 tomorrow morning.

I had homemade spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove that had been loaded with shredded veggies to sneak health food to my family.

I had all of my scouting supplies ready to go for scout tomorrow. Usually I spend a good chunk of Tuesdays planning but we were going swimming with some people in the ward tomorrow so I took advantage of today to get prepared. Aren't I a fine example of preparedness.
I had zucchini bread in the oven (you can only cram so much zucchini into spaghetti sauce and I had to do something with the leftovers), and sweet potatoes baking for Owen.

I even had a our family home evening lesson prepared (this hasn't happened for a while, we've been slacking). Tonight we will be learning about reverence due to Ainsley's behavior at church yesterday.
And the highlight of the day for Ainsley was the sprinkler under the trampoline. I have tried to get her to do this before but she wouldn't. I'm not sure why, maybe she thought it was to ghetto of a summer activity for her. But today she tried it and loved it. She stayed out there for a long time, which was what I wanted because I was busy baking and cleaning (I'm such a neat freak that as well as my "projects" today the house is also currently clean and there are no dishes in the sink...this is not unusual for me but required extra effort today...I'm not saying this to brag, it's an annoying thing I do) . The only problem with Ainsley's love of the trampoline was that I heard "MOM" every few minutes so that I could go outside and see her new trick. While this slowed down my cleaning and baking, I got these lovely pictures of her doing her "tricks" which were: putting her hair in the water and bouncing on her knees. A very talented little girl!

I just stuck this last picture of Owen on because I took it today after Ainsley dressed him up and I thought it was cute and didn't really have much to say about it, except AAARRRR!

For Good Reason

This picture is of a pile of clothes that are sitting in my sink right now with stain remover on them in an attempt to remove various stains. Unfortunately for me 2 of the shirts are mine. I now realize that it is for good reason that I have a $5 rule. I can't remember the last time I bought a shirt for the kids that was more than $5. It would be even more depressing to have an item of clothing ruined due to a stain if I spent more than that on it. And I usually don't spend much more than $5 on shirts for myself. I try to stay under $10 and it is extremely rare for me to go over that (like less than once every year or two). So I might be cheap but the pile that currently sits in my sink reminds me why. Too many clothes in this family get ruined so it's just not worth spending more on clothing than that.

The Prayer

Ainsley's prayer on dinner last night went something like this...

"Heavenly Father,
Thank you for this day,
Thank you bless the food.
Thank you for mom and dad.
Thankful for our bodies.
Thankful bless Owen.
The End."

John and I couldn't help but laugh. I guess prayers follow story format now. We seem to have lots of laughing moments over dinner time prayer ever since Ains joined the prayer rotation. For a while she had a weird high pitched voice she used and now we just get weird lists of things she is thankful for.

Daddy Daugher Date

Last night John took Ains to the Hawks game. It sounded like they had a lot of fun. They had a big inflatable obstacle course for the kids, food was a dollar, and they had all the kids come out onto the field to sing take me out to the ball game. I guess Ains was obsessed with getting some of the yellow drink that adults had in clear plastic cups. John kept telling her no and then finally explained that we don't drink that. She then explained that we did to drink apple juice. Wouldn't that be funny if the drink of choice at baseball games was apple juice!

What's Next???

This spring/summer we have had to replace/fix the following: the sprinklers, the water heater, the vacuum, the computer, and now the dryer. For quite a while now the dryer has been leaving brown streaks on our clothes. They wash out, for the most part. Lately it started ripping holes in clothes too. Poor Ainsley got hit the worst and has had 4 shirts ruined. So I guess it was high time I got someone out here to look at the dryer.

I hate having to do repairs. I keep saving up money for my extra projects around the house (like painting and decorating Owen's room), a chest freezer in the garage(so I can make freezer jam and buy in bulk at Costco), and a new kitchen table (for those of you who have sat at our table you know that we need a new one soon seeing as how it fits no more than 3 comfortably and we now have 4 in our family). Every time I get close to getting what I have saved up for the money I have saved gets cruelly taken away and I have to spend the money on something not so fun. Like new felt seals for the dryer. What a load of fun those new felt seals will be! Not that paint is fun but at least it makes my house look nice.

Happy Times

I shot this video of the kids yesterday, and while I wasn't able to record at the most hilarious moment, I still thought it was very funny. Once I started recording Ains became more concerned with entertaining me than Owen. We get small glimpses of Ainsley and Owen actually playing together and enjoying each other and I finally caught a bit of it on camera. Owen sat and laughed at Ainsley throwing that yogurt in the air and just letting it fall for a LONG time yesterday. What was really funny is that later last night Owen was crying in his highchair waiting for me to get his dinner ready and Ains went to the fridge and pulled out a yogurt and started throwing it up and letting it fall and the laughter started all over again.

Cereal

Every morning Ainsley requests either cream of wheat or oatmeal for breakfast. Not the easy microwavable stuff, the real full cook thing. I have never met a kid that asked for these things. Occasionally we'll get the request for waffles, but those are few and far between. A lot of times I give in because I can't argue with feeding her something good for her. Especially now that Owen is a lover of cream of wheat as well...he is on a very limited diet still. I try to only talk her out of it when we are in a hurry to get somewhere. This is difficult for me being a lover of cold cereal. Not only the taste but the ease of preparing and cleaning it up. Ainsley only asks for cold cereal for dinner, and how could I ever refuse a request for that (we have cold cereal for dinner on a decent number of occasions).

My morning...

This morning I woke up dealing with the throbbing headache I had been dealing with all night. I woke up sweating because it is so hot outside. 107 degrees is the high for today. A child, guess which one, decided to pee on me. I had to go to Walmart. I now have to sit around and wait for a dryer repair man to come and attemp to fix my dryer, eventhough I'm guessing after he takes a gouge at my wallet I'll get told that I need a new dryer. That just seems to be the trend for us lately. Pay to fix it, then replace it. I hope something turns my day around.

General Audiences

I was glad to discover that my blog is safe for all audiences. What's your blog rated??

Our Fourth!

I forgot to take my camera with us all day! My mom took some pictures but it would require way too much effort to go and get her pictures to post, so maybe another day. We had a typical fourth though...for the most part. Breakfast at my parents, followed by swimming, and John's annual trip to Circuit City??? When John got up yesterday and got on the computer the screen was fading. We knew this was one of the first things to go on a laptop but who would have thought that it would happen 2 days after getting it repaired for another problem. As soon as this happened and we knew we needed a new computer I was guessing that we would have a new computer by 5:00 that night. I was wrong. We had a new computer by 4:00 that night. That's right, I'm typing on our new computer. While we were home giving the kids naps and some down time before fire works John was off on his shopping trip. And he came home with our new laptop (there goes my new kitchen table I had been shopping for).

And to complete our holiday we headed down to the park for fireworks. They actually haven't done any community fireworks here for years. So last night we went to the park for the show. Ainsley got to do sparklers. Owen was fascinated with the sparklers. And then the real show began. It was a really good show. Music was blaring through the park to go along with the fireworks and I think that makes them look prettier somehow. Owen was fascinated with the show. His eyes were glued to the sky. Ainsley said it was the most beautiful show in the world, although she missed the finale due to her whining. Typical of Ains at this phase of her life. A fun night though!

Water Park

We were given season passes to the water park here and last night was the first chance that we had to go (we were on our way there when we picked up our repaired computer). We all had so much fun. We got there and got our passes made up, it was very cute because they even took pictures of Ainsley and Owen and they got their own cards. My parents and Sydney came as well seeing as how they are friends with one of the owners (the one who so graciously gave us our season passes, I guess he figured he owed us from the diet) and can get in any time they want for free as well. It made it nice having them there because this was John and I were able to go on some rides. John even got nervous on a couple of them. I wish I would have gotten a picture of his face when he was going down the Avalanche. The first picture is of Syd and John on the racing slides (John won). Owen loved the kiddie area. He would crawl around all over the place and then dunk his head in the water. He wouldn't cry or anything. And if we tried to take him out of the water he would just squirm and wiggle until we let him get back in. Ainsley loved the kiddie area as well. They have a bunch of slides and she went down most of them, although she was too chicken to do some of the smaller slides. I didn't get any good pictures of her on the slides though because she wasn't cooperating and going down when I had the camera. And it's just plain dangerous to carry around a camera in the water and so it didn't get brought out very much.



Does it look like Ainsley is enjoying her ice cream cone??
These last 2 pictures were taken when Ainsley went down the only "big" ride she was tall enough to ride. She kept saying that she wanted to go down a big slide and she just wasn't tall enough to go down any except this one (pipeline mines) in a certain kind of tube with an adult. We were a little hesitant because Ainsley is a bit of a wimp a lot of times. If she gets water in her eyes while swimming she will get out of the pool just to dry her eyes off. But she kept saying she wanted to go down the ride with Sydney and so we tried to get her excited about it. I told her that on rides like this you get to scream and you don't get in trouble. John and I were going to go down the ride first so that we could see Ains when she came out of the bottom. As soon as we took off and got drenched in the first wave of water we both thought, "Oh great, what have we done?" The entire ride is in a black tube and there are lights inside every now and then so that you know what way you will be turning. It's a little rough and kind of scary. John and I didn't enjoy the ride at all because the entire time we were worried that Ainsley would be traumatized and cry the whole time down. When we shot out the bottom our tube flipped over. Then I panicked again. The water was to my waist and I was sure that Ains and Syd would tip and Syd would have a hard time getting her bearings and grabbing Ains. So as you can tell by the picture below I waited in the water and was racing to their tube as the 2 of them shot out. Much to my surprise Ainsley was smiling and laughing, their tube didn't tip, and Ainsley said she loved it. She told me that she didn't even scream and that it was really dark in there. I think Syd was nervous to take her and so the whole way down she was trying to sound excited for Ainsley. What a brave girl. John took her down the same ride later and she claimed she didn't like it that time. She now says she will only go down that ride with Syd, Grandma, and Grandpa. I was quite proud of her, and now we'll just have to see if we can get her to do it again next time.

Trouble

Yesterday we had a moment of panic. I guess it was more of a full day of panic. When I got on the computer in the morning there was nothing on the desk top but the recycle bin. Nothing at all. When I clicked on the start button at the bottom of the page there were no programs listed. Nothing. I immediately tried to get to our pictures. Nothing. No programs, files, or anything else. I called John and when we were both clueless we decided to call a guy in our ward that does computer repair (Ainsley's nursery teacher...aka the boy Sister Galloway). I took the computer to their shop and when they started looking at things when I got there all they would say was that things didn't look good. I was devastated that we might lose all of our pictures. I couldn't remember the last time we had burned them all to CD. Finally at about 5:00 last night we found out that they had been able to recover everything. What a relief! So the moral of the story is...if you haven't backed everything on your computer up in a while go and get it done. I know we will!