11/27/2011

I'm falling behind with the blog again!  Here's what's been going on with us:

FALL BREAK

This year for fall break we decided to have a stay-cation.  We had plans to do three things in as many days.  Our first day was to go to the Treehouse Museum in Ogden with the Abbotts.  We hadn't been to the Treehouse for a really long time and the kids had a blast.  I think we were there for over three hours and they didn't want to leave.  They dressed up, played giant chess, rode pretend horses and had tea parties. 

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The second day we headed up Nine Mile Canyon to see the Indian petroglyphs that are there.  It was quite a long drive to get up to the first site and the roads were awful!  After driving on the extremely bumpy dirt roads most of the afternoon, one of our tires decided it had had enough and went flat.  James and my dad changed the tire quite quickly, but the drive home was even longer because we were had to drive slowly with the spare on.  We still were able to see most of the sites.  They are quite remarkable and you can get right up close to them.  The kids had fun climbing all over the rocks and hiking the trails.  Jacob sat in a plant that he is allergic to and had a pretty bad rash on his bum for the next few days.

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The tire situation kind of put a damper on our third day of fun, so while everyone else went up to Crystal Hot Springs we stayed home and had two new tires put on the van. I guess this is the year of tire adventures for our van. 

HALLOWEEN

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Halloween lasted forever this year by falling on a Monday.  We had parties every night except Sunday that weekend and then on Monday we had James' work party and regular trick-or-treating.  The first party was our ward chili dinner and trunk-or-treat.  The second was Tante Jo's pumpkin carving party.  Lia's pumpkin had the evil queen from Snow White, Jacob had Harry Potter's initials on his and Seth had the Fire Lion symbol from his Ninjago legos.  The third party was James' work party.  They kids filled two bags each with candy and James' won 100.00 for the "Sir Robin" costume that I made for him several years ago.  He finally works with people geeky enough to get the Monty Python reference.  He even had the coconuts halves tied to his belt and the Sir Robin music playing on his iphone.  It was pretty funny.  That night James and John took the kids out trick-or-treating while Courtenay and I passed out candy here at the house and chatted.  I made all of the kids' costumes this year.  Lia was Mulan and I even made up my own pattern for her dress.  She was super cute, but a lot of people still didn't know who she was, which was kind of disappointing.  Jacob was Harry Potter and everyone knew who he was.  He was the cutest Harry Potter I've ever seen!  Seth was Kai, the red ninja from his Lego Ninjago sets.  His costume was a bit of a thorn in my side because I made the shirt too short and was too lazy to make another one.  They all looked great though and loved their costumes.

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SETH IS A WOLF

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Seth worked really hard over the last two months and earned his Wolf rank in the cub scout program.  He had to drink "wolf's blood" to show that he could be a true wolf.  It was just a fruit drink, but he looked a little unsure about the whole thing.  He also earned his chess belt loop and his bicycling belt loop and his first gold arrow point.  It was a pretty good night for him!

LIA'S BIRTHDAY

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Lia turned three this year.  She had been waffling back and forth over whether to have a princess cake or a Tinker Bell cake.  At the last minute she scraped everything and asked for a purple, pink and white, My Little Pony cake and that's what she got.  Her birthday fell on a Sunday this year and we had a dinner planned up in Logan with Grandma Baerwaldt, so we packed up the cake and the presents and had a little party for Lia up in Wellsville.  We gave her a Little Mermaid dress-up dress and she got a new church dress from Grandma Debbie, a princess from Jana and a My Little Pony set from John and Court.  We also celebrated with my family the next Sunday with a joint party for Lia and Caleb.  At that party she got Tinker Bell shoes from Amy, a Tinker Bell doll and lunchbox from Grandma Henderson and a big pack of gum and lip gloss from the Abbotts.  The gum and the lip gloss were a total hit!  The gum was gone in less than three hours the next day and the lip stuff was smeared liberally all over her face and the kitchen counters.

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Lia is getting to be such a big girl.  She had a potty training relapse and I ended up taking away one of the prizes she had earned when she first started training.  She finally started listening to her body again was able to earn the doll back.  She is getting a little sassy and has been in time out quite a few times in the last little while.  She is also learning and watching her brothers and being curious about the world.  She can't say her "L"s or the "th" sound so her name is Yia and Seth is Seff.  She is getting slightly better at pronouncing the real sounds though.  I think I'm going to miss her asking me if she can sit on my "yap".  She loves her grandmas and prefers them to just about any one else including me sometimes.  She loves to snuggle when she's tired.  And she is so good and beautiful.  I love her!!  Happy Birthday Lia Bia! 

FIRST SNOW

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Last week we had our first snow of the year.  I tried to make the boys finish their school work before they could go out and play, but the sun was melting the snow too fast and I didn't want them to miss it.  They ended up playing outside for over an hour.  They even made a snowman without any help from me except at the end when they needed to put the accessories on.  They also made snow angels, threw snowballs, and ate a fair amount of the snow.  It was a glorious day for playing in the snow.  It wasn't too cold and the snow was wet enough to pack.  Just an hour or so after they came in the snow was all melted so I'm glad I let them go out. 

THANKSGIVING

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We had kind of a progressive Thanksgiving dinner this year.  We started at noon with hors d'oevures at John and Courtenay's.  Dinner was at our house and it was so fun to have our table extended to the max and everyone gathered around it.  We had a meat smorgasbord, John made salmon for the hors d'oevures, and for dinner James made smoked pulled pork and Debbie made a turkey.  We each got three candy corn and had to tell something we were grateful for for each one.  Lia's grateful list was pretty awesome.  She is thankful for princesses, necklaces and crowns this year.  Do you think she's obsessed?  :)  Jacob was grateful for our new house and Seth was grateful that he was able to be baptized.  We ended the day by having desserts at my parent's house in Draper.  I provided an apple pie and pumpkin bars, but I think we were all a little too full to really enjoy them. 

My mom and I checked over the Black Friday ads to make our plan of attack for the next day.  We boycotted going to any store on Thanksgiving day and decided to head out at 5:30 Friday morning.  It turned out to be the best Black Friday shopping ever.  Because so many stores opened the night before, most of the cutthroat people were already done shopping and were in bed.  We had very few checkout lines to deal with and our usual breakfast place was nearly empty.  Plus, we still found everything we set out to get!  It was awesome!

DECORATING FOR CHRISTMAS

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I started decorating for Christmas yesterday.  James went out and put lights on our house.  We haven't had lights on the outside of our house since the first year we were married so it was a pretty big deal that we got them up this year.  I pulled out our tree and found that it still won't light up at the top, my dad came and looked at it and can't figure out what's wrong with it either.  We might be getting a new tree during the after Christmas sales this year.  Our old tree looks itty-bitty in our new house anyway so I suppose it's ok that we'll probably get a new one.  Another thing that was kind of disheartening was that in my effort to get everything into boxes when we moved, I donated a lot of our Christmas decorations.  Now I have a huge house to decorate and nothing to decorate with.  Oh well, we still have a few key decorations and James' mom might have another tree we can use until we can get a bigger one.  I'll just have to get creative and make do with what I have!  We are hosting the Saris family Sinterklaas party at our house this year and I'd love to have most everything decorated by next Sunday.  We'll see how it goes. 










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This page contains a single entry by Miekka published on November 27, 2011 9:57 PM.

10/09/2011 was the previous entry in this blog.

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