A Surprise Visit, Finally a Date, and a Blessing

This last week had a few good days of enjoyable weather and the other days consisted of a cold north wind that made it pretty miserable for getting anything outside of the indoors done. One highlight of the week was having my dear friends (practically family), Ty, Kaly, Raleigh, and Kysa Shippen blow in on Thursday night and stay over during their spring break California return trip. The kids enjoyed playing together and I enjoyed Ty and Kaly's visit as well as them getting to meet and know Adam more. Kaly had made it to our wedding and when I visited them two summers ago Adam was unable to come with me due to work, so it was good to finally have Adam and Ty meet. Ty gifted a Skyline Grizzlies basketball shirt to Adam as we found out that to be the name of Ty's b-ball team name in Idaho where he coaches and Adam's company name for roofing. All in all it was great to meet up even though it was short. Saturday Adam and I were finally able to get away for a few hours on a date since our last lousy excuse for a date was to Stake conference and then who knows before that time. Yes, we don't make time enough to spend just the two of us together. We tried to go to a friend's basketball game over in St. George, but showed up at the time he told us only to find out that it was all over having started two hours earlier than informed. I told Adam I wanted to see what this new store 'Shoe Carnival' had to offer the area and so we went there and it just so happened that they were having their Grand Opening so we splurged and purchased a new pair of basketball shoes for Adam as he has had his current ones for three years and they are pretty worn (these new ones have a little higher support for his ankles as he managed to sprang them both last month). He has also worn holes in his work shoes and so he can now switch the old basketball shoes to semi new work ones. We then took advantage of the buy one get one half off and purchased a pair of running shoes for me. They didn't really have women's basketball shoes in and so I'm just going to keep my current shoes for the court and use these new ones for outside since the current ones I have can't be worn very long when just walking since the heels are worn to the plastic frame and give my heels blisters. So it was a productive date. Sunday I went to choir practice in the morning and then we headed to Enterprise for Canon's blessing (Adam's niece Anna is holding him in the pic). There was a good family turnout as Adam had a few siblings in town with their families for butchering their pigs. (The third pic is of Emily, Erika, Tyson, and Samuel sitting on this cute little furniture that Monterrey has and the fourth pic is of Savannah with Sophia as she had bought the Jordan outfit for Soph on sale and it was too cute especially when Soph gives you the peace sign whenever you say, "Say Cheese". That's the connection she has made with taking pictures).

The Projects & Linoln's 11 months

I decided to show some of the projects that I helped my sister-in-law Heidi accomplish at her house. This first one has Emily, Erika, Lizzy, & Tyson posing on the bed where Heidi made the quilt and we made the time to put up a wallpaper mural that Stuart had wanted/purchased 2 1/2 yrs ago. I had never wall papered before, so this was a first for me. It had 8 panels that we strategically put together and in my opinion we did pretty good. It was an added bonus that Heidi knew how wallpapering was suppose to be done too. This is also the room that Adam and I stayed in when we lived with them (a very different room now). This next one is of the kids in front of the World Atlas mural that we put up this last Wednesday. We liked this one quite a bit more because it only had 3 long panels and seemed to be a better quality which made it easier and did not take us nearly as long to put up. It was a little tricky trying to get letters and lines to match up, but it worked out pretty good in my opinion. Heidi had purchased this one for Stuart a little over 3 years ago and it felt good to be able to help her get these two projects done. She told me how my mother-in-law, Phyllis, had one in each of her homes so that her children could learn where states and countries were located. The kids would spend hours in front of the wall mural pointing out places. I appreciated learning this bit of information from Heidi because it explained why Adam and his brothers have such an infatuation with maps. If you ever want to provide some kind of entertainment for them just pull out a map and you are good to go (don't do it if you want any attention though :) So this last picture is of Lincoln sitting on the pool table, which is mostly why I took out the camera because he is in his 11th month of life and doing great. He has his bottom two teeth in and the two side top incisors working their way out along with the front ones. He continues to pull himself up and stand anywhere he can, so we know he'll be venturing towards the walking soon. He greatly dislikes it when his dad leaves for work early in the morning (yes, he is up then), and cries his eyes out until I get up and distract him with breakfast. Adam is greatly loved by his boys as a few days ago Adam was playing in a church b-ball game and as we arrived early he went to take Tyson out to the hall so they could bounce the ball around and when Lincoln saw that he started crawling after Adam and yelping at him. Adam has his hands full with excited, loving boys. Linky also loves his brother Tyson. Earlier this week he was up before Tyson and decided after playing with mom for a while that it was time for Tyson to get up and he crawled down the hall to my bedroom door and started banging on the door while yelling who knows what. He got what he wanted. We sure do love this boy.

Accident Prone

So last week ended with quite the accidents. Adam has been helping a friend of the family frame his house and earlier in the week he managed to pull the trigger on a nail gun only to find it having shot through the side of the board straight down to have stopped at the bone on the top of his foot (no picture) and then on Thursday he was framing again and will tell the story as "WE" forgetting to nail down a board and I will politely interrupt to make sure that he truthfully tells the story as "HIM" forgetting and the board falling down and hitting him on the head inflicting a nice gash that exposed alot of blood to which that night he begged me to pick off the mound of scabbed blood so that he could go shower without having to worry about it opening up again...not an enjoyable chore for me (shown in picture). He finished off Saturday night spraining his other ankle and almost staying home for church, however managing to get some movement after some help to the bathroom and getting a shower. Then there is Tyson, who while we were helping my sister-in-law Shelley clean and unpack in their new house he decided to try climbing up their shelving in their closet and we think that one of the shelves slipped out and wacked him in the nose splitting open a couple of gashes. And then there is Lincoln who while trying to crawl to me from our bathroom to the closet he lost his grip and wacked his forehead on the tile floor (shown in the duo walker picture which I turned around today and found Tyson having invaded Lincoln's space- love my boys). I came away from the week without a nail, sprain, cut, bruise, or scratch. Feeling pretty lucky!

Babysitting

So today I found myself with 3 children age 1 and 9 months and a kindergartener. Susie needed someone to watch Addy and my neighbor had class so within a 30 minute time frame I had changed 3 diapers and then by the end of the day I had my plastic bag hanging on the door knob in the garage full of them. I didn't know how the 1 year old would treat Addy and Lincoln, but he pretty much acted like they did not exist. He is a very big kid for his age and is not much shorter than Tyson(2 1/2), but Tyson felt like he had to always be trying to pick him up, so in the days time I managed to wrap up breakfast sometime around mid morning (which started out with just Adam and myself), change diapers, shell pecan nuts during the in between times, try putting children down for naps multiple times in three different rooms/beds, feed Tyson and Scierra lunch, and get Scierra off to kindergarten on time by 12:40 and then keep Tate entertained until 3:30 when his mom came home. It was a great day outside even though I didn't realize that until the early evening. I snapped the shot of Addy trying to pull herself up to Linky's walker and then all of the children in the same vacinity.

De Ja Vue

The legos that I got the boys for Christmas have been a big hit and the best thing is that I don't have to worry about Lincoln swallowing them. The two love to play with them together and Tyson is always wanting Lincoln to join him. We have enjoyed them for a FHE activity making some homemade guns (Adam's invention), so it was a good buy. Lincoln turned 9 months on the 12th and I have noticed a couple things that remind me of when Tyson was around this age. 1. He doesn't care to master the crawling thing and 2. He is more interested in trying to stand and pull himself up to things. I took this picture to illustrate what I am talking about. Although I can say that a few days after this he did start crawling. He doesn't do the army crawl but does the actual all fours and it is pretty cute. I also noticed that he has some pretty long eyelashes, not as close as Tyson's but they did stick out during this shut eye picture. I attempted some ties on the boys for church today and it was a hit. I had to use the "don't you want to be like dad" phrase to get Tyson to try it. He saw his tie in the closet yesterday and pointed it out to me and then said, "I want to go to church." It was cute.

Family Pictures

Plans were made before Christmas to try and take a big family picture as everyone would be together at least before George left on a mission. We were originally going to take it outside in the snow, however a snow storm started sometime in the night and wasn't about to let up when we had planned for the pictures to be taken, so we improvised and went to the high school gym. We didn't have any great cameras there, but I brought mine and had a few snapped with it. At least the picture was taken right? I had someone get one of just us as that isn't always easy to coordinate with Adam's schedule and then of course the boys wanted us to hurry as a gym should be used for basketball and not pictures :) They played for quite some time and had a great time of it as well. My cousin Aaron ventured over from Middleton through the storm to play as well so it was a party.

Christmas Day in Oregon

On Saturday Adam decided that we needed to head to Oregon on Sunday as a storm was going to be coming through our travel path and we would have left sooner, however I was giving a talk in sacrament meeting and could not leave until after it. That is probably the quickest I have ever packed for a long trip, as Susie had packed the boys' bags and I had to try and think of everything we needed to bring to be prepared for a week of vacation (with the boys it is their breathing machine and medicines for their asthma, just in case). We ended up taking the truck and then Daniel and Susie in the 4-runner as the excursion we took before to Oregon looked like it might have a problem on the way and we didn't want to take a chance. We made good time and did well until we got to Burley and found the storm doing what storms do best and the road conditions causing slow traveling. We decided to go all the way through as the possibility of being snowed in for a couple days was haunting us. We picked up Sheldon and Sara Ann in our caravan as they had left earlier, but had slid off the road on the way. The 30-40 mph was fine with me so that our lives were not threatened than what they already were. We were glad to stay for a week and enjoy the time we had with family. My parents had a house full of people as usual, but it always makes for there never being a dull moment. Adam was on top of making sure that we played basketball every day at the school and we took advantage of the opportunity to take Tyson sledding which he was a little skeptical of at first, but after we forced him down with Adam he was hooked after that. He would get to the bottom and roll off the sled and start marching back up to the top of the hill, knowing that his dad was right behind him with his sled to do it again. Family is what life is all about. Lincoln didn't go sledding with us, but him and Addy found Tyson's presents of "tractor backhoes" to be very entertaining.