5 Down, 15 To Go

Monumental News.... Lillie lost a tooth without losing it!!! As many of you know Lillie lost two teeth over Christmas break both of which were lost before she even got to hold them. The first was extremely loose and Maggie (the dog) bumped her mouth and knocked it out. It flew somewhere onto the carpet and we have never been able to find it. Maggie probably ate it as that creature will ingest anything. The second we think she accidentally swallowed when it came out with a piece of Harry's birthday cake she was eating. Well since then her other top middle tooth has been loose and she has been so nervously careful it's been almost humorous. For the last 3 days I've had to cut her sandwiches into bite-sized squares or she wouldn't eat. She never told me she wouldn't eat, she just kept coming home with a lunch box full of food. Anyway, she lost it this morning during breakfast and was able to keep a hold on this one! Woo Hoo! Here are some pics of our toothless wonder:

She is currently 5 down, 15 to go. She also wrote a letter to the tooth fairy tonight explaining the lost lost teeth so she is ca$hing in on 3 teeth tonight! Richie girl!

Samuel and Maggie

Samuel gave the prayer today in primary. I had forgotten that I had assigned it to him and I was out of the room for it. Too bad because apparently it was the best prayer in primary since any of us can remember. Samuel is a prayer storyteller and generally goes on and on though it is very cute. Well I guess he did just that today in opening exercises. Thanking Heavenly Father that he was in CTR 4 because it was so cool, and that his teachers brought gumballs, and when the gumball jar was all full they would get to have popcorn party. Too cute! I guess all the leaders were trying to contain their laughter but Samuel never noticed. He did his job then climbed down from the podium and very proudly walked back to the super coolness that is the CTR 4 class row.

Samuel has also been really developing lately. He is learning tons of numbers and is getting all of the letters and their matching sounds down. All day you can hear him either counting to 100 or saying something like "ball starts with B - buh, buh, buh, B". It's amazing how quickly these kids pick stuff up from such a small amount of time spent teaching them.

In other Sunday evening news, we had a close call with Maggie tonight. We were on a family walk when she starting barking at a dog across the street. Lillie was holding on to the leash and before an adult could grab her Maggie broke free from Lillie and darted in to the street. Of course there was a huge TX size truck barreling down the road. Maggie shot straight in to the street heading right for the truck's front wheels. I just turned and closed my eyes and was like "no,no,no,no,no!" I thought for sure she was dead. There was just no way for it to turn out OK. When I didn't hear a thump I turned around and I guess Maggie had put the brakes on just in time and the truck swerved in to the opposite side of the street's front yard. Oh, it was so terrible! I still feel all knotted up in my stomach. I'm glad she's OK. I'm not sure what the kids would have done but they would have been devastated.

L and S

So, GREAT kid stories today:

Samuel: He is such a sweetie. A really thoughtful boy. Today in primary he walked right up and introduced himself to a girl in class. Including last year she has never been able to come in to primary. She sets outside in the hall with her mom and cries. So S walks right up to her today with out any prompting and says "Hi, my name is Samuel, what's your name?" Then he sets by her and makes sure to be her friend for all of sharing time and class. When I dropped the roll off to his teacher he was like "mom, this is my new friend Kayla!" Then after church he talked about her. It was too sweet.

Samuel: This week S has been talking all about gum balls. In his CTR 4 class his teachers (Krista Adams and Birdy Evans) told them they would bring gum balls for them this week if they were good. All this morning he was like "do you think they'll bring the gum balls? What if they forget the gum balls?" I just kept telling him that we would have to see. Well when we got to primary he spied the gum balls in his teacher's bag and he was stoked. When I picked him up from class he very proudly showed me his red gum ball. I reminded him to go back and pick up his papers to bring home so he goes back in to the classroom. Meanwhile Lillie is like, I want a gum ball too! I tell her that she has gotten things from her teachers for the previous two weeks and you can't get something every week. Well S comes back out of the classroom and is holding a pink gum ball for L! He didn't even know she was asking for one...he asked his teacher politely if she could have one too and he even made the effort to pick out her favorite color! He is doing things like that all the time now. What a sweetheart!

Lillie: So L has been super helpful lately which has been very nice but it's also just cute and cool to watch her grow up. Today while T and I were taking a nap G woke up, had a poopy diaper and she changed it! Dude, he's almost 2 years old! I was a little nervous when I heard about it but when I went to check the bedroom there was no poop anywhere... phew! She even put his diaper on correctly. Way to go!

Lillie: So I go through L's homework folder each weekend and sign off that I saw it all. In it she had a snowman story where she filled in the blanks. This is how it went:

One winter day I went outside and built a person made of snow. It became a magic snowperson when I placed a hat on it. This is what happened. It followed me inside. I did not like it.

Hilarious Lillie! I totally loved it. T and I (and I'm sure Mrs. Chasteen too) got a big kick out of it. Because seriously, frosty the snowman seems cool but when you really think about it, if a snowman came to life and followed you around it'd be pretty freaky.

Monster Truck Jam 2011

We found out the Monster Truck Jam was in town and we just knew that Samuel would have a total cow over this stuff. So Tim and Samuel went out last night for some good quality father/son bonding time. I thought it would mostly be fun for Samuel, but halfway through Tim texted me and said "a wheel just fell off, this is totally awesome!" Suffice it to say, they both had a blast. They didn't get home until 11:30pm and I thought Samuel would be conked out but he came home full of life so excited to tell me all about it. And at church today he brought his monster trucks and was doing all the tricks that he just saw last night (as reverently as he could manage!).

The Holidays in Utah

So we put ourselves in a packing frenzy on the night of the 25th and headed out early the next morning for Utah. The kids did extremely well on the drive and we had high hopes for our journey. Things went well for the first half and then steadily moved southward on from Thursday to Monday when we arrived at home. Both S and G became sick. S handled it better though and all he did was continue to say "I just can't handle this anymore!" Cute and annoying all at the same time. G was a different story. He didn't want to go to anyone and he slept progressively less each night. By the time we got to the hotel in Albequerque on the way back he literally did not go to sleep at all. At 3 am I called it quits and we packed up and left for the final stretch home. We vowed that we will do no more traveling with our children until G is old enough to reason and use words.

All complaining aside, the rest was a very nice trip! Tim, G, and I, along with Harry, Dianne, and Brian all stayed with the Busath's who were wonderful hosts. It was great to visit and catch up with each other! L and S mostly stayed with the Barnes' and had a fabulous time with their cousins! The highlight of the trip was our sledding day where L proclaimed, "this is the BEST day of my life!!!!!" That girl was born for snow. We could barely drag her in from it!

So here are lots of pics. Sorry for all the snow pics, it was a big thing for us Southerners!

G loved the snow but he was so mad at me for putting him in all of his snow gear that it took him awhile to "warm up" to it.
L making snow angels.
Sledding day!
L is in the light green jacket. She had a "thing" with the boy in front of her in the dark green jacket. They didn't know each other but the kept accidentally taking turns taking each other out when one was sledding and one was walking back up. On one of L's last times down she took the kid out and then took his sled with her!

Samuel loved to go fast on the big hill with me, Tim, or Uncle Wendell but only went by himself on the little hill. It's sooooo faaaaaaast Moooooom!!!!
BFF's - these girls totally bonded.


This face.... ya gotta love this face. This is why I married him. And I love that you can see Harry in the background trying to capture it as well!
G made quite the buddy in his cousin Camille.
We went out to dinner to celebrate Harry's 67th birthday. When we secretly told the waitress that it was his b-day she said, "Do you want us to bring out the bull?" We said, "we don't know what that is, but if someone asks you if you want the bull it just seems like the answer should always be YES!" So, here's Harry riding his b-day bull... What a fabulous sport!

We had a great time everyone! Thank you so much for all of the wonderful hospitality! Can't wait until we see you again.

Side Note: One the way home we saw a really cool rainbow that made a complete circle around the sun. It was pretty vibrant but this was the best pic I could get.

Christmas 2010

We had a fabulous Christmas season this year. I wanted to be stress free and able to enjoy the holidays with my family so I did almost all of my Christmas shopping and prep in October and November... it worked! We had lots of fun and were able to do things like deliver goodies to our friends and enjoy it instead of mark it off the check list. So, here are some pics:

L and S in their Christmas clothes for the Sunday before the 25th. G could not be coaxed in to the picture and that kid already screams enough so we didn't want to invite more ear drum bleeding.

Here are the kids tossing out the reindeer food to call the creatures to our house on Christmas Eve. The kids also spent all day checking Santa's progress on Google Earth. They were amazed by how fast he goes!
Pointing to our homemade advent calendar that we actually remembered to fill out each and every night... it's a Christmas miracle!
Goin' after the Santa presents on the morning of... these are the only presents their allowed to open all at once without having to wait their turn.
Lillie was super ecstatic about her EZ Bake oven and made two cakes immediately. They were good too!

Grant loves this 4x4 and he's learning to steer it now too. He flies down the hall in our house grinning the entire way.
The famous criss-cross-applesauce-crash car set (that's what Samuel calls it at least). He'd been really wanting this for months and he loves it. Played with it all day and cried for it the entire time we were in Utah.
And here's the Trampoline. We wanted to buy this, but struggled over the size of our backyard. Tim searched all day Black Friday for a good deal and finally got one in the late afternoon. We painstakingly hid it in our garage for a month. Then it rained all Christmas Eve but we persevered. I gave the kids Melatonin so they'd fall asleep right away and Tim and his friend Kris stood in the dark, cold, and misty rain for 2 hours and put this thing together. Was it worth it?, you ask.... Heck Yes!!!!!
About and hour after the presents had been opened and breakfast had been enjoyed I meandered in and told the kids there was a present in the backyard that we had forgotten about. They creeped around and when they turned the corner, they were floored! They have bounced on that thing so many hours already we've already gotten our $'s worth out of it. It may take up our whole backyard, but out backyard wasn't much to look at anyway, at least there's something to do back there now!
We had Christmas dinner at the Burwell's along with some family friends the Chatlands. It was nice because they had Brayden a little boy who fell between L and S so S had someone to play Criss Cross Crash with him all afternoon.
Opening presents in the evening.
Merry Christmas to all, we can't wait to get to Utah to see the rest of our family!

Samuel's Christmas Pageant

So, Samuel had quite an interesting pageant this year. He told us he was a shepherd and he didn't come home with a line to learn so we assumed his part was pretty small.

We......were......so.......wrong.

He was basically on stage for the entire rendition of the Nativity story and he certainly added some of his own unique Samuel flair. He enters the stage with the cue words "and the shepherds watched lovingly over their sheep" as this was said he walked up and kicked the stuffed sheep in the head and sent it sailing clear across the stage. Then he looked out at the audience like "yeah, I'm awesome". He stood nicely behind the angels and I thought the performance might have been over but he was part of the nativity scene also. Description with pictures below:

So you can see him in the background here on the left as he begins to start a play fight with a wise man. He was totally the instigator.
And here after much fighting he has pushed over "Joseph". On the video you can hear both me and Ms. Jennifer the school's director trying to get his attention to stop. He finally noticed us and settled down... and then the program was over 30 seconds later.
He did sing "Behold That Star" very nicely and remembered all the motions.
In the end I'm glad it happened because it makes for such a funny story. At the time though... I just couldn't believe I was the parent of "that" child. Now I know how it feels.
Merry Christmas buddy! You always know how to liven things up!