Ho Ho Ho Merry Christmas!

The other night me and some of the people I work with all went over to one of our managers house to put Christmas lights up. He is one of the best people I know, he is always doing something nice for other people, and I guess it was his turn to be the recipient. He mentioned the other day to us that he hadn't had enough time to get his Christmas lights up, so we all got our spare lights out and surprised him. It was a good time and as you can tell it was a very professional job!

Dance!

Maycee has to "fuel up" before the big recital. Heath bars are her favorite candy bar and it made her dance like a pro! All the girls had to wear their hair exactly the same...in a slicked back bun. I was very nervous that I would not be able to make a bun that had such beauty, but look at this thing. It turned out just right. Hooray! She danced in 2 dances. One was ballet, the other was hip hop. She loved hip hop best, and I even reccorded the dance so we could show it off, but as I went to view it on my camera before I posted it on the blog...I hit a wrong button and erased the whole thing. Trust me though it was very cute, and the purple outfits they wore were so cute. Also the very high pony tail I had to switch her hair to after her ballet number was very cute:) Here are some of Maycee's friends. They have had such a good time so far dancing. They are all great friends and "true girls"! The good news is...there will be another recital in the spring so I can highlight the hip hop dance then. I am very glad she wants to dance. I love to watch that kind of stuff and I think she does a great job. I love that girl!!

Well Hello There!

I wanted everyone to meet the little guy that now lives on our family room wall. Carson made him one day (out of bend-a-roo's) and stuck him up and he was very surprising to me. Carson just shrugged his little shoulders and giggled when I asked who it was. He is there to stay because he brings such joy into our hearts. It is funny to watch the reaction of those who visit us! We have gotten used to him now, but if anyone wants a good laugh...come on over.

Happy Thanksgiving

This year for Thanksgiving we went to Jeff's brothers house in Lehi, Utah. It was tricky to get there!! Super snowy, we took 2 hours to get to Pocatello and we saw tons of slide offs on the way. We luckily made it safe.

These guys all had so much fun together. They are building a HUGE fort. What could be better than that right! Hours of fun!

This was kinda funny, all the kids got up in the morning and were being very quiet... turns out they were watching The Smurfs, and they thought it was odd that there was only 1 smurf girl out of all those boys.



And then we went to Temple Square. It was so pretty. The day after Thanksgiving is the very first day they light everything up. It was very crouded but the kids were all so good that we got to have a good time. I haven't been to see the lights forever, it was very nice.

1st Snow

Oh my goodness, it started snowing first thing this morning and it has never stopped. The kids got home from school and went out to play in it. They started to make a snowman and the snow was too heavy to stack the balls on top of eachother so they just piled them next to eachother and called it a fort. The best thing about this picture is how I got them to look up for it. They were all hiding behind the fort and I kept asking them to show their faces so I could take a pic. They refused to look, so I said "Hey, who wants a dollar?" And their faces all popped up, Carson even raised his hand. The best part of the day is that I had the day off, in the snow and just hung out and worked on Lincoln's scrap book from when he was 1 year old. It was fabulous! I know I will get sick of this weather, but for now I quite like it.

1st Day of School take 2

Today was Carson's first day at his new school. There is a new Montesorri school in the district and it is a "hands on" school. They do a lot of activities instead of bookwork and they still learn all of what they need to. He is really excited and had a great time today. He gets P.E. everyday!! I hope it goes well for the little guy, he has A LOT of energy and we for sure want him to be able to use it in a good way!!

Creative

I thought this was so cute the other day. Me and Lincoln were coloring and we had used like 5 crayons and he stacked them up in a diagonal. Well our coloring quickly turned and he took every crayon out of the box and stacked them ALL in a diagonal. He is very creative.

Football

Carson is the one in the white shirt and the blue flags. He is much smaller than most of the boys but he doesn't let that stop him.

He would push everyone on the other team to get to the QB to try to "sack" him. And when he did pull their flags off, he would fly it up it the air a little to celebrate.

It is amazing that there is not a broken nose during every game... Look at all the feet around his head. Yikes!


Here is a "fake" pass. He had to run by the quarter back, his cousin Willie, and keep going while it was passed to someone else. Very confusing.

This was so cute! Before every game the team sends a couple players to go out and call the coin toss, well Carson got to be one of the guys this time and he thought it was SO awesome!!

It was really super fun to watch him play, he has some good moves and he is SUPER fast!!!! I think one of the funniest things that happened the whole time is when one of the kids on the other team saw one of our guys coming at him and he slightly yelled "OH NO" and ran the other way. We had a good laugh!

Beautiful Rainbow

This was the most amazing rainbow I have ever seen. It was so big that I had to take it in 2 shots and my very talented sister Jenny combined them together so that its awesomeness could be seen in full capacity. If you look closely you can actually see the end of the rainbow and I felt like a dream crusher when I told the kid-o's that we could not go find the pot of gold at the end. It was very beautiful though and even they appreciated that!

Toothy toothy

Oh my sweet little baby boy lost his first tooth a couple weeks ago(well the 2nd tooth but the 1st one got knocked out at age 2... so the 1st one that actually got loose and wiggled its way out). It was so cute! The tooth fairy gave him a crisp 1 dollar bill that still sits on the top of his dresser like a treasure. He is growing up.
The 2nd part of this post has nothing to do with Lincoln, but it does have to do with dinner time tonight...and Lincoln was at dinner. Follow along closely. Today when we got home Mack had pooped in his kennel, the 1st time ever doing that. So at dinner Carson was telling Jeff that Mack pooped right in the corner of his kennel today. Well at that same moment I was putting together my taco, plopping my sour cream on the top, and Lincoln watching me said "You do that mommy" -he spreads his all over his tortilla like butter, so the plops were very interesting to him- and I replied "yes" and before I could even get the whole 3 letter word out of my mouth Carson had sprung up in his chair and said "You pooped in the kennel??". Ha ha! He was still on the poop subject but we had moved on to sour cream. I love that kid!

Fair time...WORMS!

We love to go to the state fair every year...it is like a pathetic vacation to us but we love-love-love it! Well this year we wanted the kids to do something to help earn some extra $$ to spend, so Jeff thought it would be wise to "worm" the yard. Let me give ya a little background on how this goes...1st you head down to the bait and tackle store, 2nd you buy this sollution for $20.00, 3rd you go home and dump this sollution on your grass and the worms come up to say hello, 4th you grab the worms and put them in a "worm prison camp" until you can take them to the bait store and cash them in for lots of money.

Here is the outfit Jeff decided to put on to humor me. Lookin' good right! Everyone was pretty excited for this to happen. Jeff did the mixing and dumping and picking up the wormies...

Carson had no mercy and a certain skill that no one else could quite develope. He could yank a worm that was 1/2 out of the ground with out breaking it in 2.

Lincoln was also very brave. He started wearing his work gloves but quickly shed them so he could be more at 1 with the worms and he got pretty good at getting them out of the ground too. He would occasionally rip one in half, oopsie. Or squeeze the poop out of them.

Maycee did ok at first but as the night progressed so did her gross out factor for the worms and she would just hold the flashlight and point the worms out for the boys to grab. And I was in charge of the bucket, I would say "trick or treat" and the boys would throw worms right in. Here is the good news, we spent $20.00 on the sollution and after 2 1/2 nights of worming we had about 7 1/2 lbs. of worms, cashing in at $22.17 for a total of $2.17 profit! We made a killing huh!

Hair Color 101

Today I did something brilliant and amazing. I saved a bunch of $$ and colored my hair all by myself. I decided to get rid of the blond highlights and go back to plain brown. However, I neglected to follow the directions completely. Don't get me wrong, the color looks fine, but my hands are another story. If you can tell in the picture they are very "dirty". Well I decided not to wear the gloves provided in the kit. I hate those plastic gloves. In my head I was assuming the gloves were there to provide protection to those whose skin may be sensitive to the chemicals associated with the color. I was wrong. I think they are there to save your hands from permenant color! In the directions, step 1...Put gloves on. Oh shoot. Now if the directions had said...Step 1: Put your gloves on and if you don't you will have to wait 28 washes before they ever look clean again. Then I would have worn my gloves. I guess I learned the hard way to always follow the instructions. I am just glad it didn't make my hair turn blue or something.

First day of school

School started Monday and I forgot to take the kids picture before school, so here they are walking home that afternoon. Maycee is in 5th grade, her teacher seems really nice but he is not the one she wanted (the one that doesn't believe in assigning homework) and she has made me pay for not switching her into that class now for the past week. Carson in in 3rd grade. I think I went to high school with his teacher she looks really familiar...good luck to her:) And Lincoln is in afternoon kindergarten. His teacher seems really nice too,but she is due to have a baby in a week and 1/2, so we will see how that goes. Carson and Lincoln have some of their friends in their class, but somehow Maycee got ripped off in that area again. I hope they all do well this year!! School rocks!

Garage Sale

Here is a photo of our first ever garage sale and above is the weather of the first garage sale we ever had. We thought we were doomed because of the rain. I wanted to have a sale for a long time and stuff was slowly piling up in the garage to be sold and Jeff kept threatning to take it to the D.I. Well Maycee just joined dance and she needed all the clothes for dance so I told her if she would sell some of her stuff and help set up etc. then she could use what she needed of the prophets to buy her dancewear. She quickly loaded up all the toys in her room that she no longer wanted, and that girl worked all day Friday helping me set up tables and sticking price tags on everything!! Good helper.

Well here are a few things I learned from our sale...
1. People still come in the rain, and they verbalize their appreciation to you for setting up in the garage. (Not my original plan, but we couldn't drag the tables out when there was rain, right!)
2. People that come to garage sales drive nice cars. Most of them were shiny and new looking and the people that came out of them were nice and clean. Don't get me wrong, there was the lady that carried and oxygen tank, rode a motorized scooter and talked WAY louder than she needed to, but for the most part I was surprised at the "type" of people that came.
3. I am no good at making a fortune at the garage sale. People would come up to pay with a HUGE stack of clothes and say "How much for this?" and I would say "How about $2.00". And all the people that offered lower...I would take the offer. There were a couple people that I told the price to and they gave me more money than what I told them, and they would say "You are already giving us a good deal, you're ripping yourself off." Ha ha! I just knew that what I didn't sell I had to haul away to the D.I. so I wanted it out of there!!
Anyway, we made enough money to get Maycee all her dance stuff and take the kids out to Olive Garden for a back to school dinner. I think it went well!

Explosion

The other day Maycee asked if I would make them some playdough so they could make a volcano. We whipped up some green and red and they cut up some plastic cups and here is what they ended up with. I never even knew if you mixed baking soda and vinigar this would happen. This is the real reason I send my kids to school, so they can come home and educate me. They are brilliant!!

1...2...3...SIT!

These guys (Crew, Gage and the boys)have become inseperable this summer and they all had almost the same shorts on, except one, and like boys are they never want to wear a shirt! I thought they looked cute so I made them let me take their picture. They play almost all day, every day and they don't fight. It is dreamy!

Sidewalk Art!

The other day I came home from physical therapy to find this lovely art...I had to back the car up and read this one. In case it isn't clear enough it says "I love Pam, she's hot". That one was from Jeff.


Here is one of Lincoln's... very cute!


Carson made a Poky family, the big orange on is the dad and that little guy is his son.


And Maycee is of course true to her bees with a school spitited "GO BEES" on the front steps. It was very cute to come home to all this!! I love it.

Back to school time.

We went to get all the kids their school supplies the other day, and a few school clothes. Maycee laid it all in an organized fashion on the floor and gave me the school supply lists to hold. I had to call out the items ,if I called out something from their list they had to act excited and run up and get it and put it in their backpack...like a game show. After all the supplies were claimed they put on a fashion show for me. It was definately a fun way to get ready for school!!

Lets go fishing

Last Monday Jeffs work people all went to Lagoon. He was invited of course but due to my old lady knee it was not possible for us to take such a trip. Instead we took the day to go fishing. It was very pretty where we were although I can't remember what the place was called!!


However very unsuccessful! Not even one bite for anyone, except from mosqitoes...lots of those!


Carson was the only one that wore pants, he rolled them up so he could wade in the water without getting wet... him and Lincoln were drenched with in minutes!!


And Mack can swim. He went out in the water just a little too far and quickly had to swim back to shore. He is so chubby I thought he would just sink to the bottom. Even though it was not a "fish" productive trip it was still lots of fun to get a little bit out of town for the day.