a budding author

This year I have been really focusing on writing with the boys and trying to make it really fun. I was gone on a date with Alex tonight, and when I came home, I saw that Nathan had made a book-- all by himself! Todd said he just saw him working on it but Nathan didn't ask for spelling or anything, and he did a pretty dang good job! Then he stapled it (and squished some of the words, so he put asteriks on the bottom to replace the hidden words:) --so smart!). He looked at another book to spell "written and illustrated by". I am so happy!!! He is writing for fun!!!

Here is his masterpiece:

 

"Once there was a pumpkin. I picked it up. It was big and heavy. I brought it home. I carved a scary face on it. It looked like this: (see picture above). I liked it. I put it on the porch and I went to sleep. The next day it was Halloween. I put a candle in it. Then it was Halloween night. I went trick or treating. I got a lot of candy. The End."

alex about his gum

"Did Katie get into the gum I hid really well, or did I hide it so well I hid it from myself?"

our goals

happy explorer day

Happy Columbus Day! Even though it's a dumb holiday (see last year's post), our theme this year is "courageous young explorers" so we had to do something cool for the explorer holiday! First, we painted pumpkins at a ward playgroup.

Katherine in her adorable outfit and her very first headband:

 Then, we went to the store and bought firewood and hot dogs (turkey hot dogs). We went up to Payson canyon and made a fire and roasted hotdogs for lunch and then went exploring. We had SO much fun!

 roasting hot dogs on sticks is fun (dictated by Nathan):

 Abbie is hanging out with us in her car seat:

 Do you see the boys exploring in the top right? Do you see Katherine's face? She really wants to go exploring with the boys. We found a safe route down and went exploring all together.

 Katherine kept pulling at the bows on her dress. I told her if she kept doing it, I would take off her dress and she would be cold. Well, she wanted to take her dress off, and ran around happily sans clothes. I shoulda known. So much for consequences! Good thing no one was around.

 Nathan found this and brought it to me. He wanted to take it home but I said, well, no. It is half of a chipmunk.

 gross! don't worry, I had him use hand sanitizer after this picture.

 Look at all the leaves on the ground! I love it! Fall is so magical!

 Happy girl:

 Beautiful mountains:

 Alex made a bed in the leaves and branches:

 Katherine wanted me to take a picture of her stick:

 In this wilderness we explored, we found a place where paintballers made some cool stuff. Here's a trench with a wall- the boys loved it. There were other little "forts" and we decided we needed to have a boys club here:

 Beautiful!!:

 2 cute boys in the wilderness:

 gorgeous:

 walking on a log:

 do you see my courageous young explorers at the top of this big hill? Nathan wanted to get some leaves off of a pretty tree and Alex said he was going to get Nathan:

 Then we drove up to the top of the mountains and it was a magnificent drive:

The End

My world right now

I haven't been blogging consistently and I want to start again. Right now Nathan is at 74,000 on counting, but doesn't count as much anymore. When he draws or colors he always has lots of colors. He won't color things the way they "should" be colored. He always does rainbow colors. He's still into stuffed animals but not as much. He still does, what we call, the "boom boom game", where he goes around pretending to fight bad guys.

Alex and Nathan are still best buds. Alex is starting to want to be more grown up. The Halloween song CD we always listen to and he LOVED, is now "too babyish" (but he does still listen to it). He is also doing "half smiles" like a cool guy. This afternoon he asked Nathan if he wanted to go outside and throw the football. They've never done anything like that before---nothing with a ball, except those big huge exercise balls at Nana and Papa's house:). Then all the neighborhood boys started a football game--very fun and cute to watch. They like the littler legos now and like to build space ships with them.

My dad is on Biggest Loser. It's airing right now. It's so cool to watch Papa on tv!

The boys love their Friday classes at Liberty Academy. They both take violin lessons, and Alex has piano, karate, art and other fun classes, and Nathan has an Orff music class, art, ancient history--which is his favorite because they always do fun projects, and other fun classes. Nathan was going to just do half day, but he likes the classes enough that he's going all day. The end of the first day he said, "that was a LONG day! But I want to go all day." It's nice to have one day to just be with the girls and to do cleaning (ha ha) and errands and stuff and the boys really love their fun classes.

Katherine is so girly and acts like the mommy. She helps me wake up the boys in the morning, loves to empty the dishwasher, and other things like today I was yelling outside for the boys to come home and she stood at the door yelling for the boys for a while after I left. Right now her favorite thing to do is get dressed, get undressed, get a new outfit and get dressed again, repeat. It's very cute seeing what "ensembles" she comes up with, usually inside out and backwards. She is talking a ton and is repeating everything we say. I need to take a lot of videos of her talking...it's so cute. She has to be doing everything the boys are doing. She still has a lot of tantrums, but now I tell her she has to stop screaming or she goes into her crib. Usually she stops, but sometimes she goes in her crib. She responds really well to the "crib time out", and also to this: If we want her to do something and she's not doing it, we say, "do you want to do it or do I have to do it for you?" She's very big into "I do it! Katherine do it!" So this works 99.99% of the time. She loves loves loves dollies. All day she has her dollies (and somtimes her purse), and loves to push her dolly stroller.

Abbie right now just learned to grab things and roll over. When I get her from her nap she's in a different spot! And tonight I put her on the blanket and she wiggled her way to the other side so she could get something. She giggles all the time and it's so cute! Ever since we put her on soy formula she has been a terrific, easy baby. Right now she also loves to grab her feet when she's laying on her back. Todd calls her Abbarino and Katherine sometimes calls her that now and it's adorable.

Park City condo timeshare

Every year since Alex was a baby we've gone to Todd's parents' timeshare in Park City. They have it for a week and the whole family comes and squeezes in this condo and we eat, play, swim, watch movies, and relax.

Here is Todd playing "Made for Trade" with the boys:

 Nathan's blue blue eyes, dark eyelashes and freckles are the cutest!! (click to enlarge the cuteness):

 We tried to do the same fun things but in a healthier way. We are decorating a healthier version of sugar cookies, and for the frosting I used strawberry non fat cream cheese and added food coloring to make it orange. We decorating with bananas and strawberries and the traditional sprinkles:

 A little too many sprinkles, Nathan:

 Spencer was "cleaning up" the sprinkles:).

 My pretty daughters:

 Katherine said, "Hugs Abbie! Take picture!"

 More "hugs":

 Good lookin' Todd cooking a healthy yummy dinner:

 Here is Alex watching tv. My boys will never just "sit":

 Doing art:

 Todd got a new suit for Alex's baptism (tag still on. Looks like a missionary tag:)):

 The boys carved pumpkins. They kept doing more and more through the week to add to their pumpkins. They now have lightning streaks on the side and scratch marks all over. The boys made a deal with me and for every 3 miles they run/walk, they get a pumpkin. They ran with Todd and Tawnya so we got them pumpkins:

 Alex started doing the "half smile". Where did he get that from??

 Katherine in her new Halloween outfit. There's a huge outlet mall close that we shop at every year we go there:

 Matching Halloween outfits for the girls (Tawnya's MacKenzie, Katherine and Abbie):

 Matching Halloween glow in the dark shirts for the boys: (Tawnya's Spencer, Nathan and Alex):

 Katherine is REALLY in to dressing herself lately. Here she got her shirt on upside down:

 Matching outfits for the girls again. $6 outfits at the Children's Place outlet! I love Abbie's face:):

 MacKenzie has her hand in Katherine's mouth:

 Nathan wanted me to take a picture of him splashing:

 The boys were fish, as usual, in the pool. They could have stayed there all day every day:

 I love it when Katherine scrunches up her nose like this:) :

 Alex playing chess with himself:) (I was playing ping pong with Nathan). Later he found a kid about his age he was playing with:

 Playing ping pong with Nathan. He said, "I think the object of this game is to chase the ball." We weren't so great...  He was talking to Alex and I overheard, "I wonder if Daddy is any good at ping pong. I bet he stinks."

 Todd trying to do his work at the condo:

 The boys zonked out. This picture was taken about 30 seconds after the boys were complaining, "I can't go to sleep!"

While we were at the condo, Abbie was a little fussy. I thought she was getting the ear infection that Katherine had, so I called the dr. and asked the nurse how much amoxicillin Abbie got, and I would just have her share medicine because I didn't want to pay $75 for an ER bill in Park City for an ear infection I knew she had. Well, she kept getting more fussy throughout the week, even with the amox. Then the night of Biggest Loser she cried and cried non stop for hours, so I took her to the ER in Park City. She was still crying when we got there, so they took some blood and gave her a fluid iv because she was dehydrated. The dr. came back and said that a normal white blood cell count is 10,000 and hers was at 20,000, so we were going to ride in an ambulance to Primary Children's in SLC. When the ambulance guys got there, she was really liking one of them, and kept staring and smiling at him the whole time. Then we got to SLC and the nurses came in to get her set up, and then a girl that looked about 12, maybe 13 years old came in. I thought "A little girl got lost from her mommy!" And she introduced herself as the dr. What?? Is this Doogie Howser or something?? (Tell me you remember that show). She said that maybe she had a virus/cold or a scratch on her eye. I'm thinking, ok, why did they just send us in the ambulance for a cold?? I guess a high white blood cell count could be caused by something serious like appendicitis or something like a cold. So the dr. gave her two doses of rocefin, a bazooka antibiotic as a "just in case" and had her stay the rest of that night, the next day and the next night just to make sure it was "just a cold". In the end, it was just a cold--the most expensive cold in history!! I'm glad it was nothing serious, though. It was sad being at Primary Children's Hospital and hear crying kids down the hall and passing the "conference room" (you know, the room where the dr. tells the parents their kid has died). I'm very very grateful for the health of my family! Especially when I read this-- an 18 month old drowned in a canal. The pictures from the hospital look like she was in the same room Abbie was in.