Promised pictures

I believe I told some of you I would just post pictures on my blog and well I never did. So a recap of the last two month. We went out on a beautiful saturday several weeks ago and tried ice blocking with the kids. They had a blast. I think they need to make ice blocks for adults because my behind didn't fit as well on the ice as the kids. McCall had a hard time staying on and Tanner tried several times to stand on his way down the hill. 

We had a lot of fun at halloween. We did our neighborhood trunk or treat and then went to a few houses. Since Mo and I had dressed up previously for a halloween party I just did a simple bathrobe, pjs and curlers for the trunk or treat. I got a lot of laughs but my favorite was from a kid who exclaimed, "I know what you are, you're a stay at home mom" Yes I guess that is what lots of people think moms look like.

I was just recently released from 8 year old scouts and put in a the 2nd counselor in YW. I think it will be a lot of fun especially since we have a large group of girls and they all get a long really well. I also started going to our elementary school one day a week to be their duty aid for a few hours. Basically I just watch kids at recess and help them if they need it. Today I had a little boy face plant it on the cement and he got a really good gash on his nose. He was bleeding everywhere. Mo also just agreed to become an Adjunct Faculty teacher for BYUI this next semester. He is going to teach just one class called Health Communications. He really enjoys teaching and since he was offered the opportunity to be a professor he decided to try it out for a semester. The school was really needing someone to teach and the day after Mo agreed to teach he already had students signed up for his class. Hopefully it will be something he enjoys.

I don't have a title.

So we have been trying to enjoy these last few days outside before it is blustering cold. We went out to one of my favorite places, Mesa Falls. The kids were kind enough to let me snag a few pics before they all ran off. I love all the fall colors.

Mo participated in this years Race for the Cure 5k. He also ran last year and came in 2nd place but this year he came in 1st! It was so stinkin' cold, like 29 degrees but he still did great! Kolby was all bundled up and just sat there the whole time! Kolby is also in to everything. He has been trying to get into this drawer in my kitchen for a long time and the other day I heard his little cry only to find he had made it into the drawer and couldn't get out!

Tanner has been wanting to start an ice cream club and he invited 17 kids! (That's a lot of ice cream.) Since it is getting cold I suggested doing a hot chocolate club. So he printed up some invitations and so kindly decided to break up all the kids into smaller groups to invite over. We baked up some chocolate chip cookies and made a batch of hot chocolate to serve his guest. Who would have thought it could get so loud with only a few people. They had a blast dancing and playing outside. They even made a haunted house in my food storage room. Since I didn't have any scary music they settled on playing an EFY CD for scary music!

Brayden has been playing soccer again this year and is quite the stud. He's made a lot of goals and with only one game left his team is undefeated so far. He definitely has some talent and the coaches wife has told me the coach wants to coach Brayden again because he loves the talent he has!!! If youre looking for an overly confindent, talented, fun loving cutie patootie I got one you can come visit. He is definitely fun to have in our family and never leaves us with a dull moment or a quite one!

We retrieved our photos!!!!

So a little while back Mo hooked up the camera to upload pictures onto the computer and all of a sudden all of the pictures disappeared. AAAAAA! We had our family vacation and McCalls birthday pictures on there. Long story short we gave our camera to our computer genius friend and he was able to get the pics back!!! So here it goes. We had a family vacation with all of my family at the Aspen Grove camp in Utah. All of my family members were able to make it which made the vacation all the more fun. This place is totally awesome. It's up in the mountains and you and your kids are entertained and fed the whole week. There were different age groups for the kids to go to. So in the morning we dropped them off (even kolby) and then we picked them up for lunch, returned them to their groups and then picked them up at 4:30. They were fully entertained with hikes and swimming, crafts, rock climbing etc. It was awesome to let someone else watch the kids and for us to get a break. They also had a full schedule for any adult who wanted to participate. We did the rock wall, ropes course, archery, paintball, hiking, rifle shooting, swimming, fishing, tomahak throwing and other fun games. I didn't even have to cook at all the whole week. They had a dining hall and feed you all 3 meals. It included a baby food bar as well. It was lots of fun and the cousins all had fun playing and running up and down the halls of our lodge.
McCall also celebrated the big 3! When I asked what she wanted for her birthday every time she would reply "cookies and cupcakes"! My kids are so easy to please. (Unless they get really really upset or tired) McCall has the same birthday as my brother in law so we had him and my sister over to celebrate.  I learned something about making cakes this time. I can do objects or animals alright but not people. His poor superman turned out with one arm seriously more buff than the other one. Ryan was nice enough to invite us to his family's farm. He let us all ride on the tractors and let Tanner drive it by himself. It totally made Tanner's day!
School also started this week. The boys were excited to start and they like their teachers. I do wonder about brayden's teacher a little. He says they color the whole time and that today they played duck duck goose with the teacher not during recess but just for fun. They also get out of class early. This is her first time teaching kindergarden so I hope they learn something and not just how to color!

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Summer in a nutshell

So the last month it seems we have been pretty busy with swimming lessons, summer movies, roasting dinner over the fire, watching the garden grow, playing with friends, going to the lake, the circus.

We celebrated Brayden's birthday and had snakes for our theme. The kids got a little excited about the snake idea. Our neighbors house is empty and so the weeds in back have gotten really tall. We had some friends over and they all heard a bug making a noise from the neighbors backyard. Convinced it was a snake they drug the trampoline ladder over and all 5 kids climbed on top and commenced throwing rocks into the weeds to get the snake to come out. They had a great time trying to coax it out and gratefully their rock throwing never produced any animals. I tried my hand at making a coiled snake. Definitely not my most favorite cake I've ever made but the 17 kids we had here could have cared less and they ate the whole thing. (It was 2 cake mixes to.)

 We also headed home to Houston for my brothers wedding. We are so excited they got married and the kids just love their new aunt. It's always a nice visit when you get to go home. All of the cousins were there and they had fun staying up late and waking up early, sleeping in my sister's big closet, making a HUGE mess out of baby powder, swimming, visiting the butterfly museum and riding bikes. Many thanks to my sister Kolby has finally started to eat solids while we were there. I had been trying for like a month and a half with no luck. She sat down and he just all of a sudden started eating!

We also got some family pictures taken. Our friend Spencer was so nice to take some for us a few days before he moved. I'm not sure what the problem was but McCall screamed the WHOLE time. Minus a few seconds here and there. She literally rolled around in the dirt. Considering she cried the whole time I was pleased with how our pictures turned out! I love this family picture to. It make me laugh. I think Brayden isn't quite sure about Kolby.

I'm not sure what Mo is doing here! Everyone else finished singing.

Most of the cousins at the Butterfly Museum

Have you ever seen mating sticks? Now you have.

My Dad with grandkids!

Our garden is growing strong we picked tons of peas and have a lot of food we are about to harvest. We planted strawberries this year and look at them everyday to see how close they are to being picked. We just picked our first one. Do you know how to share a strawberry with 5 people? We do. Everyone wanted a taste so we cut it 5 ways.

Tired of Nagging your children?!

I am sure that no one ever has trouble with nagging their children to do something or to stop doing something! Well as awesome as my kids are I ask them to stop doing something or to go do something over and over and over. So I'm trying something new. I read an article about a mom who put "stop" signs around her house to remind her kids to do things. She stopped reminding them to put their clothes in the dirty clothes box or clean their trash out of the car. If she had to go and pick up clothes on the floor etc she simply tore of an "oops!" strip from the bottom of the page. At the end of each week the kids were rewarded for each "oops!" strip still on the paper. For example each "oops!" strip was worth 10 minutes of TV time (which was a real treat at her house). When she saw keeping the room clean etc was becoming habit she moved her stop signs to another area that needed work. So I've decided to try it out. We have a problem with "potty" talk and name calling so I've hung a "stop" sign from the fan in the living room. (not attractive at all and kind of in the way but that's the point, everyone can see it) The kids have been told anytime I hear inappropriate language I will rip off an "oops!" sign. I also hung one in the doorway of the closet to remind them to make their beds and keep the room clean. Each of my "oops!" strips is worth 5 minutes of playing the WII. (They love doing this) They were excited to see how much time they could earn to play. So no playing during the week just on saturday after minutes have been totaled. In fact they started picking up their room before I even finished my explanation. So we will see how it goes! If you have any ideas for rewards let me know. I'm looking for rewards that each strip can be worth so for example. Each strip left over is one piece of candy (ie tootsie rolls) they can have when we go to the movies. If you try this at your house let me know. I'd be interested to see how it works!

Who can not love this face. It has been fun to see him developing his personality.

We went to the park and got our first snow cones of the season! The kids loved them. McCall got a cheesecake flavored one. I've never tried one of those but it definitely tasted like cheesecake!!

So here's another update on McCall for those who are wanting to know. We had a visit with the doctor at Primary Children's this week and he showed us pictures from her MRI done in April. Hopefully you can see/understand my picture. I have her 2 lungs and heart and then the yellow space is the lymphatic malformations. She has one VERY large mass and then some smaller ones around it. The largest one measures at 46.4mm. (YIKES) To give you an idea of how large that is (the doctors fist is 6cm) this one is about the size of a lemon. The smaller ones I'm guesstimating are maybe the size of cherry tomatoes. We are waiting to get preauthorization from insurance before they do surgery. So hopefully it will get taken care of this june. Then she will have to go for an ultrasound and most likely another surgery in 5-6 months. The doctor thinks he will most likely have to poke her at least twice for them to go away. Basically fluid is extracted from the mass with a large needle and then medicine is injected into them to help them to shrink and eventually go away! Let's hope the doctor has good aim so he doesn't poke any organs he's not supposed to. We really think we got the job where we are so that we would eventually meet up with this particular doctor. We've been passed around to several people but this guy works quite a bit with these malformations but has only been at this hospital a little over a year. He said only him and 2 other doctors in this region can do this surgery. The next closest doctor is in Denver and that doctor is $25 grand more expensive. So these malformations came about because when she was in the uterus something didn't connect right and because of that these started to grow. McCall has been a trooper but we have wondered how much of the conversations she understands/hears things like needles and doctors. She has started having bathroom trouble despite being potty trained and she cries out when she is sleeping, like she's scared or something. I don't know if it's related to what's going on but maybe. I would just really like to get all this taken care of quickly and not have it looming over my head to worry about! Here's to hoping all goes well and she will only have to be poked for one surgery!

update on the kiddos

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(Click on the white space to view slide show) So a little update on McCall! Some of you know she has had some funky nasty looking growths on her body called lymphatic malformations. We went in for her yearly xray and it showed that the growth in her chest has grown. So we got an MRI done to get some better pictures. We were put in the same room to start her IV as we were last time. I wonder if she remembered anything because she freaked out before the needles came out. Thankfully the nurses got the IV in on one poke. It has taken up to 8-10 pokes for others to get one in. I don't think I've ever seen medicine work so fast as when they gave her the meds to knock her out. She went from screaming to snoring in a few seconds. Well the Doc said if it continues to grow bigger it will probably get infected and start pushing on her heart. (it sits somewhere btwn her lungs and above her heart.) So she will be having surgery next month (schlerotherapy) to shrink the mass and hopefully the ones surrounding the large one. They say it might take more than one surgery for the mass to totally go away. I'm just hoping it works since some of the other medications they have given have done nothing at all. It's a fairly quick procedure where she will lie on her stomach and they will insert a larger needle into the mass and inject medication. Doesn't sound to fun to me. Kolby has been growing like CRAZY! I took him in for his 4 month appointment and she measured 26 1/4 inches and weighed 15 lbs 3.5 ounces. Which means he has grown 4 1/4 inches in 4 months. He has been so fun to have in the family. I don't think he knows what anything looks like except for the members of his family. It seems as though someone is always in his face giving him hugs and kisses. Brayden has been getting excited for kindergarden even though it doesn't start till august! He has been enjoying his preschool field trips to the Local Dairy and Fire station. The firemen let the kids hold the hose and spray water. Needless to say some of them ended up soaked! He is so excited that he is finally signed up for soccer. He constantly talks about how good he is at soccer and how he is in love with girls. In fact he lets it be known that he came down from heaven in love with girls. He is convinced he is in love with this friend Morgan and that they are getting married. Tanner is glad that school is almost over and he looks forward to not having anymore reading papers. He's lost 2 teeth with another one on it's way out. He's becoming a little fish and can't wait for swim lessons to start!

It's Birthday Time

Tanner and I celebrated our birthdays recently. He was born 5 days after my birthday and it worked out to our advantage! We are both signed up for the birthday clubs and IHOP and Red Robin. So we each get a free meal on our birthdays! I had also gone to a PTO meeting and won a gift card to IHOP the week before my birthday! So on my birthday the whole family went out to IHOP and ate for free!!! And then for Tanner's birthday we went to Red Robin and ate for free again because I also had a gift card to Red Robin! We have gone to Red Robin the past couple of years to celebrate and we always get the free birthday ice creams and balloon ears. Usually Tanner won't wear the balloon ears but this year he did.

McCall definitely enjoyed the ice cream too!

For Tanner's party we did a spy agent theme. We gave the kids "Top Secret" birthday invitations. One mom called to RSVP but had to ask when the party was because her boys wouldn't let her see the invitation because it was to Top Secret! We gave the kids access to the party only after they gave the secret password. Each was finger printed and given an ID badge. For games we had the kids diffuse bombs (balloons) They worked on target shooting with nerf guns and they also went on a scavenger hunt to find their treat bags that had been stolen by the bandit. We made tanner's cake in the shape of a bomb and even had some trick sparkling candles. We had like 15 or 16 kids there. YIKES! I don't know why we have that many each year. I did have a sibling of one of the friends show up and I didn't know they were coming. I was just glad I had a treat bag for them! Tanner got a new bike for his birthday and has been loving seeing how much faster he can ride on it.

We also got a fun visit from our friends the Jorgensens. It's always fun to hang out with them and our kids are the same age and they get along great! My kids call them their cousins. Even though we've tried to tell them they aren't really our cousins they don't seem to care. Cousins are fun so they must be our cousins! Here is a lovely picture of them doing the WII dance!

The other day McCall was standing on the back of a stool in the kitchen. She fell off hit her head on the floor and then the stool fell on top of her. She got a big goose egg! All I can say is OUCH! The picture really doesn't do it justice.