Josh and Lisa Moore

Peach Jelly... yum yum

2011-11-13T10:49:00.001-07:00

What to do with a whole bunch of peaches? I didn't feel like just canning them this year. Especially since I don't own a pressure canner, nor do I remember how to use one. I decided peach jelly sounded good. I prefer jelly over jam. I guess the difference is that there are no fruit chunks? I think I went 29 years of my life getting that one mixed up. Anyways, I like whatever is spread on my toast to be nice and smooth. So jelly it was! I scoured the web looking for a good easy recipe. I also don't like how so many recipes just ask for the juice of a fruit. All that straining didn't sound any fun. So here's the recipe I found on Cooks.com.

3 lbs. peaches

1 box powdered fruit pectin

2 T. lemon juice

5 1/2 c. sugar

Weigh your peaches.

Blanching your peaches is the easiest way to get those skins off.

Boil for about one minute.

I bought this nifty little contraption in an attempt to get me to do more canning but using my own pots as a water bath. It was totally worth the $10. I use it for several things in this recipe.

After one minute pull those babies out and toss them in an ice bath. See how handy that green thing basket is?

Now you can slice around the peach and the peach skin should pull off easily.

Slice up your peaches and put them in the blender. Cling peaches, which are what I have, are more difficult to remove the pits. But since these are just going to get blended up they don't need to look pretty!

After your peaches are blended mix 4 cups of the blended fruit with the fruit pectin and the lemon juice. Put the mixture in an 8 quart saucepan and bring to a full boil. Stir constantly.

Immediately add the sugar. Yeah. Jelly is not a "health food."

Bring to a full rolling boil and boil for one minute, stirring constantly.

Remove from heat and let sit for a few minutes. Skim off the foam and ladle into jars.

Sterilize the jar lids by boiling. Dry them off and make sure that the mouths of your jars are clean before putting the lids on. If there is jelly on them it will make it more difficult to open them later!

This recipe made 3 pint size jars of jelly for me. Boil your jars in your water bath for the appropriate time. We live at a high altitude so mine needed about 10 minutes. You'll know you processed them long enough if the lids pop down. I love hearing those little pop sounds once they start cooling.

And there they are! Aren't they so pretty? I always feel so accomplished when I have new little jars of food to put down in our food storage.

This is why I didn't blog all summer...

2011-10-09T21:43:00.011-06:00

We were just too darn busy. Here's a quick run-down of Summer 2011.

The girls discovered that wet sidewalk chalk makes great face paint.

Marshmallow war at the Ruben family reunion.

Plenty of time running through the sprinklers.

Awesome trip to Washington D.C. with no kids!

Complete with an awesome car rental during the trip.

Attended the wedding of my brother Nate to this little cutie, Sarah, in the Washington DC temple.

Camped in the backyard. Still haven't made it all the way through the night without going inside.

Zoo trips with friends!

Company party with a Harry Potter theme to celebrate the final Harry Potter movie. Sigh.

Enjoyed zucchini from the garden.

Also enjoyed peaches from our peach tree. By far the biggest crop we've had yet!

This one learned how to climb up almost anything and developed an obsession with water.

Some fun friday nights with our babysitting co-op kids.

First lemonade stand. One full afternoon of work earned them approximately $3 total. It wasn't really about the money.

Celebrated our country's birth.

Also glad nobody died from the crazy, and now legal, fireworks we set off this year.

A few newborn photo shoots. I just love those squishy, little babies.

A trip to This is the Place Heritage Park.

A little bit of hiking. Not nearly as much as there should have been.

Muir family reunion at Bear Lake.

Plenty of trampoline time at Grandma and Grandpa Ruben's.

Went boating with the Reids. Someday maybe I'll get up on those skiis or a wakeboard. Someday. Maybe.

Swimming lessons for the three older kids.

A visit to the Ogden Dinosaur Park.

Made lots of trips to the park.

Well there you have it! Whew! Now I'm only a month and a half behind on my blog instead of four months!

I Heart Faces

2011-08-28T22:33:00.003-06:00

I just discovered the website iheartfaces.com. So I'm entering a photo into their photography contest this week with the theme "white." This was the first picture I thought of! My little sweetie Camryn in her blessing dress when she was a couple months old. It's always been one of my favorites.

Utah Valley Half Marathon

2011-06-28T21:18:00.004-06:00

I did it! My first half marathon! I can not imagine doing that twice. Hats off to you full marathon runners out there! You're a little crazy in my book.

Anyways, 1-800 Contacts paid for Josh to run the race. I planned to run it too, but kept procrastinating on the registration. When I finally went to register it was full! So I kind of halfheartedly trained thinking I might run part of the race with Josh and our friends, Mindy and Tyson. Then about a month before the race a spot opened up for me to take. So my training was not fantastic and I had terrible shin splints for a good chunk of our training. However, I did run the whole thing, walking only to drink water at the aid stations. It was such an awesome experience and we're planning to run another one in October. I was hoping for about a 10 minute mile average pace and finished in 2:15 so I was pretty much right on with that pace. It was what I expected. Next time I hope to beat it though. Josh finished in 2:04. He ran with me for the first 1 1/2 miles but my pace was a little slower than his and we had agreed beforehand that we would rather stick with the pace we were comfortable with than stick with each other. Isn't that sweet? :) So I had no problem with him leaving me in the dust!

I was pretty nervous before starting the race. We had to leave at about 3:30 am for Provo and then took buses up to the race start. I got nervous when the buses just kept driving and driving and I kept thinking about how I was going to have to run the whole way back. The farthest we had run before this was 11 miles. Fortunately, this race had a bit of downhill (though I could have gone for a little more of that) and it was nice and cool in the early morning and we had a pleasant breeze at our backs. It was a pretty ideal morning for running.

I discovered two products of which I am now a big fan. KT tape saved my shins during this race. I saw a guy taping a girl's knee with this stuff at the expo when we picked up our race packets. So I asked him to tape my left shin where I've been getting terrible pain. It didn't completely cure the pain during the race but it helped significantly. The night after the run I took it off and almost immediately regretted it. I didn't realize how much it was helping even hours after running! I bought new running shoes a week after the race and a bunch of that tape and my shins have felt much much better.

The second thing is Sport Beans made my Jelly Belly. Way yummier than GU and they didn't make me too thirsty. I just took a couple at each aid station and they helped quite a bit I think. I still got very hungry while running. Right around mile 8 I started feeling hungry and by mile 11 my stomach was growling. Those half bananas they handed out at the last couple aid stations seemed to make my stomach more angry because it just wasn't enough. I guess I'll try to eat more breakfast next time.

Well, it feels awesome to accomplished this!

Sunday photos

2011-06-06T10:44:00.008-06:00

I have a picture frame that needs to be updated in our living room. And several other frames that still need to be filled! So we headed to Gardner Village on Sunday so I could have a little fun with my camera. Some days the kids just don't cooperate. Oh well we'll try again another day. This is another reason why I don't think I'll ever become professional. It would be stressful to have a one hour set time and be expected to get great pictures when kids just might not want their picture taken that day. You just can't force them to smile or look at the camera. And the weather is always to be determined as well!

Well the weather was beautiful on Sunday but I just didn't quite capture what I was hoping for. This one is my favorite I think.

And this one is a pretty cute father's day shot.

And then there are these...

No matter how many tears or how many times the baby wanders off I will always love these shots. And soon I'll get the perfect picture to fill that frame. But it doesn't really matter because they grow up so fast it will just need to be updated again soon.

First Day of Summer!

2011-06-05T10:49:00.003-06:00

A couple weeks ago we had an relief society night about fun cheap things to do in the summer. One of the best things we got out of that meeting was a schedule for the whole summer with something special about each day like "fly a kite day" or "national frozen yogurt day". Well the first day of summer break happened to be the anniversary of the first US spacewalk. So my sister and I took our kids down to the Gateway mall to the planetarium. The kids had a lot of fun walking around and learning space things. But the highlight of the afternoon was definitely playing in the fountains afterwards. We will have to do that a few more times this summer.

Even Camryn got really into it. She wasn't scared at all and even wandered off while I was helping the other kids, which put me into a panic for the whole 10 seconds that I didn't know where she was.

It will be nice having Sydney around for a few months. She takes good care of her little sister.

The boys were really excited that we let them take their shirts off. They were just dying to impress the ladies with their big muscles and farmer tans.

What a fun afternoon! Great way to start off the summer. This summer will be filled with fun things. A few weeks ago my brother Nate and his girlfriend Sarah decided it would be a good summer for a wedding.

So we will be heading to DC next month! We're really excited about that. Now we have a half marathon, birthdays, bridal showers, new babies, family reunions, some great sightseeing and wedding to look forward to!

Sunny Days

2011-05-24T21:45:00.003-06:00

Hello Sunshine.

Nice to see you.

Even if you've been a bit shy lately.

I usually don't mind overcast skies when taking pictures.

It diffuses the light and keeps me from getting those harsh shadows.

But the sun can give a nice sparkle to the eyes which I love.

And I love how the sun gets my flowers to show off.

According the weather forecast we should be seeing more of you Sunshine!

Rainy Days

2011-05-22T09:49:00.003-06:00

It's been raining like crazy lately. It actually snowed for a few minutes on Tanner and Natalie's birthday. Normally at this time of year we are spending all our time outside, so grateful for winter to be over. So what do we do?

We have tea parties. We got Natalie the cutest little tea set for her birthday and we've been using it almost every day. We drink hot chocolate though. And we try to remember to keep our pinkies up and say things like "more tea si'l vous plait." She also got the Fancy Nancy tea party book so we've been learning how to have a proper tea party.

Camryn loves this new daily activity too. The cups are just the right size for her and she loves hot chocolate that is not hot.

By the way, holding a baby and helping her drink hot chocolate from a cup while also trying to take a self portrait is a real trick.

It's party central here

2011-05-17T23:08:00.003-06:00

Tanner and Natalie turned 4 today! We had their first friend birthday party for them. It's a little tricky finding a good gender neutral party theme for boy/girl twins. Tanner has been really big into Super Mario lately though and Natalie is not too picky about her princesses. So Super Mario and Princess Peach is was! I had to get a bit creative with this theme since party stores don't sell Super Mario themed stuff. But it turned out cute I think!

The decorations were really fun to come up with. The backdrop was a last minute thing for just if I had time on my hands the night before. I'm glad I did because I think it really made the room look fun. I made the little gold question boxes using my silhouette. The cupcakes were super easy. Just plain old cupcakes with colored frosting and 3 upside-down vanilla candy melts stuck in each one.

After making Camryn's cake I offered Kristin a trade. If she would make Tanner and Natalie's birthday cakes I would sew her girls cute dresses. And we would each just pay for our own supplies. I'm looking forward to paying her back with those dresses because these cakes were SO adorable! She really went all out and the kids just loved them.

This party involved quite a bit of sewing actually. Since the party was tailored more towards Tanner's interests, I made Natalie a Princess Peach dress to get her extra excited. This is a simple t-shirt dress pattern that my friend Shayla came up with. I had to make a few alterations because apparently I can't follow directions. But it still turned out cute and Natalie loves that it's so twirly.

I also made 9 princess crowns and 9 mario hats. This was done quite a bit ahead of time. It was so cute to see all the kids wearing them though. Tanner has loved wearing his while he plays Super Mario on the wii.

This picture was taken right before another little princess arrived. So all in all we had 12 kids at the party. It was way fun despite the rain ruining a good chunk of my plans. I only had a couple of structured games planned. I know the attention span of a 4-year-old when it comes to structured things. Then I planned we would play with the bubbles wands and sidewalk chalk I got for the kids. That was a no-go with the weather though.

So after all the kids arrived and lost interest the the coloring pages I had printed for them, we started off playing a kind of cake walk game with different pictures from the mario games. The kids would win a gold coin when their card was picked. Josh even found the mp3's of the mario music for me to play during this which was so fun.

Instead of doing a pinata we did a Yoshi's egg hunt, which was basically an easter egg hunt. The kids loved this and it gave them some little prizes to play with while Tanner and Natalie opened presents.

Wow that was a lot of presents. They got some very fun stuff. I feel a little guilty that people had to bring two presents to this party. In the future we may do some dividing and have a girl party and a boy party or something. That's a tricky thing with twins.

Next we had cake and ice cream. Natalie was funny about blowing out her candles. She did for separate blows, one for each candle. I guess nobody has told her you're supposed to try to blow them all out with one breath.

After the sugar, the kids went downstairs to watch a Super Mario dvd that Tanner got for his birthday. It was so cute seeing them all lined up on the couch.

Well that was fun! I'm going to take a couple days off and then I'll start planning Sydney's birthday party for June.

My baby is one!

2011-05-17T22:42:00.004-06:00

Well I guess it had to happen. I still call her my baby and will probably call her a baby for way longer than I should. I'm trying to squeeze in some of those things I always thought would be fun to do with one of my kids, like cake smash pictures. I wanted to use these pictures for her party invitations. So I made the cake and then Camryn went and got a cold and an ear infection and was pretty unpleasant for a couple days. The cake wasn't gonna last forever in the fridge and I only get good lighting in my kitchen for a few hours a day so we were limited on when to do this photo shoot. She was pretty somber and not as excited about the idea of having an entire cake all to herself as I thought she would be. My kids just don't always catch my vision. But we did get some cute shots.

So that was the fake cake. Another thing I've wanted to do is learn how to make cool looking cakes. I always buy cakes at Sam's Club for our birthday parties. But many episodes of Cake Boss have motivated me to learn some cake decorating skills. My friend Kristin kindly offered to teach me. I'm thinking maybe this is not a good hobby for me. The cake turned out super cute but in the process I probably ate an entire week's worth of calories in cake batter and frosting.

Camryn definitely enjoyed eating it...

We had as much of our family over as could make it for some cake and ice cream the Saturday after her birthday. It was fun to have everyone over since we are not typically the party hosts. Camryn loved being the center of attention and opening her presents.

She's growing up so fast. She's even starting walking! My earliest walker by far. She just wants so much to be like her older siblings. She's only 17 lbs. though so she's trying really hard to stay small for me forever. I don't think it's going to work though. She's going to grow up anyways. We're sure happy this little stinker came into our family!

Happy Birthday to me

2011-04-25T23:33:00.002-06:00

Apparently there is a limit to how many candles I can blow out...

And that limit is 29.

Oh so close! Josh threw me a surprise party for my birthday. It was a small party with some of our closest neighborhood friends. He completely surprised me which is amazing. Josh is not known for his secret keeping abilities and he kept this a secret for a long time. I'm very impressed! And I'm once again grateful I got the best husband there is. It was a very fun night and such a great way to celebrate.

Turning 30 was not as big of deal as I thought it would be. The 20s were great and full of changes and new things in life. The 30s will bring a lot of changes too, and the end to many things that I would mind ending - like changing diapers. Hopefully I got that "youth gene" that both my parents seem to have. I don't mind getting older as long as you can't tell I am!

Easter frills

2011-04-25T23:05:00.005-06:00

One of my favorite things about Easter is the dresses. I love that we can officially dress in spring colors even though the weather forecast keeps threatening snow. This year I made my girls' dresses. Never done that before! It was a good project to keep me busy, awake, and listening to general conference. I was a little worried about my fabric choice after I made Sydney's, but once I got them all made they worked together. I love them. I'm really digging the teal, yellow, and pink color scheme these days.

I have yet to get a good picture of all of them together, but I did manage to get one decent individual shot of each of them Easter morning. We had a lot of meltdowns that morning. I think they've consumed a bit too much sugar lately.

I'm sure grateful to have such cute kids to dress up. Even if they are sick and tired of me taking their pictures. And I know Easter is about much more than bunnies, candy, and pretty dresses. I am so grateful for the sacrifice our Savior made and for His love. Hope you all had a beautiful Easter!

Tea Party

2011-04-11T22:20:00.006-06:00

Last week the girls had a just-for-fun tea party. They had gone to one of these by two of their friends back in February and immediately decided they wanted to host one of their own. And of course they presented this idea to me when I was busy and I said something like yeah , yeah, that would be fun, but not today. So Sydney took a look at the calendar and decided that Friday April 8th would be a good day, would that be a good day mom?

Yeah sure sweetie. (While thinking: you'll never actually remember 7 weeks from now...)

Fast forward 6 weeks on a Monday:

Mom, remember how we are having a tea party tomorrow?

What?! That's uh, not tomorrow is it? I thought that was on a Friday.

Oh yeah mom, it's on Friday, you're right.

Whew! At least I had a few days left. Well if she's got the memory to remember something for 6 weeks I'd better do it!

She remembered because she had made invitations (on post-it notes) for all the friends she wanted to invite. There were 15 of them! And that was just Sydney's friends and none of Natalie's. I told her she had to narrow it down, there was no way we could fit that many girls around our table. This of course resulted in disappointment which resulted in tears which resulted in an ornery mommy. Must we cry over everything?? We finally narrowed it down and added a few friends for Natalie, but still ended up with a pretty full house for the afternoon - 11 girls (12 if you count Camryn, which I do). It was a lot of fun and I had a good time making cute little tea party goodies and getting out my tablecloth (which has never been used in all 8 years of our marriage).

Sorry for the slightly blurry picture. Sometimes I guess I need to just bite the bullet and turn my flash on.

I'm glad it was a cold day. Perfect for hot chocolate, since we weren't going to have real tea. This was a good little warm-up party. Birthday season is nearly upon us! All of our kids have birthdays within a 6 week span. It's going to be party central around here!

Camryn really enjoyed the party too. And the other girls loved giving her more treats and taking turns holding her and carrying her around. This girl gets plenty of attention!

Guess she was ready for a nap...

2011-03-24T13:55:00.003-06:00

Camryn has been such an easy going baby. With Sydney I had a nice consistent nap schedule that I could easily work around. She was my only baby and nearly my entire day revolved around her. With the twins I sort of had to get them on a schedule to avoid going crazy. They shared a room so it was always a mistake if I let one fall asleep for their nap without putting the other one down. Then I'd either have to put one down while the other was still napping (and the awake one would usually wake up the napping one at that point) or I'd have to wait until the napping one woke up and they would have an alternating schedule and I would be stuck at home all day. Being my fourth child, I really don't have the option of putting Camryn on a nap schedule. We can't work around her, she has to work around the rest of us. And she's handled it like a little angel! If she's tired she just falls asleep. She takes a nap at the gym almost every time I take her. She fell asleep in her booster chair today while I was writing my grocery list. And later when I actually went grocery shopping she fell asleep there too. It's awesome. None of my other kids did that so well (due to their being used to a schedule and their beds.) I suppose this could be a problem later on in life though. Now that I look at this picture it looks kinda like a teenager falling asleep on their desk at school. Hhhhmmm...

Newport

2011-03-24T10:06:00.004-06:00

We ended up extending our vacation a couple extra days. We originally planned to head home Saturday, but just before leaving on our trip we found out Josh's brother Nate had a week in his condo in Newport that he would not be able to use any longer and it started the Friday we were going to be leaving. So we stayed there Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night and made the whole journey home in one day on Monday. Our kids did surprising well on the drive home. We've never done the whole drive in one day and I'm so pleased to find out that we can! So on Friday we headed we checked out of our hotel in Anaheim and went to the Aquarium of the Pacific for something a little different from the Disney scene. It was a lot of fun. We got to see a shark feeding, a seal show, a scuba dive, and pet the sting rays.

They also had this lorikeet forest where you could buy a teeny little cup of nectar for $3 and feed the lorikeets. I think feeding the birds was our favorite part of the whole aquarium!

Maybe not Tanner's favorite part. We couldn't get him to touch a stingray either.

Camryn really wanted to hold one!

This is my brother Nate in his classic picture pose. We thought was funny that the birds were doing a similar pose.

After we'd have our fill of the aquarium we headed to the Newport condo but it wasn't really for us yet. My parents and brother decided to go do a session at the Newport temple so we headed over there to walk around the temple grounds a bit. It was fun visiting a couple different temples on this trip!

My parents and Nate took off Saturday morning to head home. So we just spent the rest of the weekend relaxing and swimming and hanging out at the beach a couple times. I highly recommend this way of vacationing. A couple days of relaxing in Vegas, a few busy days in Anaheim, and end it with a few more days of relaxing by the ocean. It makes for a long vacation but we got so much in, but didn't feel so tired that we needed another vacation after our vacation.

I have to brag a little. I took this picture at the beach and the next day I submitted it in a Pioneer Woman assignment. Out of 177,000 pictures submitted it was one of the 96 that were featured on her blog! I didn't win or make it as a finalist but it made me pretty darn happy anyways. :)

Disneyland

2011-03-18T12:53:00.006-06:00

Ah, we felt much more at home here! Somehow we didn't quite fit in at Las Vegas. Here we stayed at the Desert Inn and Suites which I would also highly recommend. It's a no-frill hotel but the rooms are a good size and it's as close as you can get to Disneyland. It was so nice being able to just walk across the street to the parks. We were able to come back to our room for breaks a couple of times and grab jackets for the evening. The location was fabulous. My parents and brother Nate were able to join us on this trip and we got a suite that had 2 bedrooms and a small living room and slept all of us comfortably. We got to our hotel Monday at about 2:00 but couldn't get into our room until 3:00 so we headed over to Downtown Disney for a bit.

One of the best-value souvenirs we found was at the lego store. You can fill a large cup with whatever legos you want for $15. We filled up a cup and tried to be strategic, filling in gaps with the teeny tiny legos. I was worried about those with a baby who puts everything in her mouth, but my dad said not to worry "they'll go right through her then you can wash them off and play with them again!" It gave the kids something fun to play with in the hotel.

Tanner loved this Woody made out of legos.

While on the subject of souvenirs, another good value toy is the Build Your Own Mr. Potato Head package at Enginears in California Adventure. You can fill a box with all the Mr. Potato Head parts you want for $20 or a large plastic Potato Head container for $50. My mom and I split one and got almost 2 of every part the had available. We only got one head so the kids could play with it in the hotel. You can get heads for cheap at wal-mart. They had really cute parts that were Disneyland themed.

The crowds and weather couldn't have been more perfect. We didn't wait for than 30 minutes in line for anything (except Toy Story Mania when it broke down) and most rides didn't have more than a 5 minute wait. We met tons of characters. The only ones we wanted to see and didn't get to were Jasmine and Aladdin.

My very favorite part of the whole trip was when Tanner met Buzz. On our 2nd day we headed to Tomorrowland around 10 because we'd heard he appears there around that time. We hung out around that area for about an hour Josh waited for him while we went on autopia quickly and we missed him!! He came out for a few minutes, didn't really attract a crowd, and left. We were so disappointed. So we waited some more. Josh told us all to go on and he'd wait with Tanner. He asked an employee if she knew when he might be out again. She pulled some strings and worked with a few other employees to arrange Buzz to come out again just for Tanner. Buzz knew right where Tanner would be and walked straight to him and pointed at him. I've never seen Tanner so happy. Buzz took his hand and walked with him the photo spot while a huge parade of people formed behind us. I went and thanked the employees who arranged it afterwards and they were all teared up. This is what make Disneyland magical.

After that Josh and Tanner rode Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters 13 times in a row.

While Josh and Tanner fought the Evil Emperor Zurg, my mom and I took the girls to Ariel's Grotto for their lunch with the princesses.

Last time we went we took Sydney and she was pretty much like Tanner when he met Buzz. I was a little disappointed with my girls' reactions this time around. They didn't seem to care that much. Maybe it was because we'd already met a few princesses the day. Camryn, however, was quite taken with Princess Aurora. She just got so excited about her for some reason.

There were no parades at either park this time, which was sad because I love the parades. They are being re-choreographed. We did see the World of Color show though which was amazing. We bought the picnics that came with fastpasses which was nice and I'm glad we did that. Even with priority seating though it can still be difficult to see the show. We had just one family in front of us and it was a bit hard to see and it's a long time to stand, but it's totally worth it. The next night we were in California Adventure during the time of the show and realized you can see it great from the sides as well. You can't see the images projected onto the water so well but we got a better view of the fountains than we had the previous night.

No I did not take this picture.

Another one of my favorite things that we did was the Talking with Crush in the Hollywood Backlot. I'd never even heard of this before but it was so fun! Crush would be on a screen and the audience would ask questions and he would answer and be funny and make up nicknames for people. I'm still not sure how they did it! I can't imagine they have preprogrammed responses for every possibly question or comment. We spent quite a bit of time in that area in the Animation Academy and Sorcerer's Workshop. It's a great place to have a little downtime and get inside for a bit.

I just love Disneyland. I'm so happy my parents and brother could come. At least one adult per kid is the best way to do Disney I think!

Camryn was a little angel, by the way. I call her my portable baby. She's even travel-size for added convenience. She fell asleep whenever and wherever she felt like it and was just happy as could be the whole time.

You know it's been a good day when they fall asleep in the stroller before you even get home.

Vegas Baby

2011-03-18T12:30:00.003-06:00

We just got back from a nice long family vacation. This has been the best vacation as a family so far. The kids were great on the drive to Disneyland and back and we really didn't have any major meltdowns the whole time. I'm breaking up the trip into a few separate posts so it's not so gigantic. We decided to spend a couple nights in Vegas on the way down so we could get in lots of sun and swimming and relax a bit before Disney. While planning the trip I decided I wanted a kid-friendly hotel with a separate bedroom, a full kitchen so we didn't have to eat out on Sunday, an awesome pool, no casino, and for it to be off the strip. This may seem like a tall order to fill but I found one! The Tahiti Village Resort. We highly recommend it. We stayed there Saturday and Sunday night.

We had hoped to make it to Vegas early in the afternoon so we could take the kids to walk around the strip and to M&M World before the night crowds got there. We didn't quite make it and ended up on the strip around 6. It was super crowded and people gave us weird looks with our double stroller and kids holding both hands.

We made it to M&M World though! We let the kids pick out their own little bags of super over-priced m&m's in whatever color they wanted. I wished we'd been able to head over to the Bellagio to watch the fountains but we were tired and frustrated after our short little excursion to see the m&m's. So we headed back the hotel.

Here is a picture of me with some guy that's apparently on Halo. I've never played Halo.

On Sunday we went to church and then went to see the Las Vegas temple. That was fun and it was nice to see people just like us at church.

We spent the rest of the day at the hotel and the pool. The hotel had a really nice pool and lazy river that the kids loved. It was a little colder than we thought it would be so Camryn didn't last in the pool for very long. It was a fun weekend and great way to start off our trip.

Lots of pictures in this post!

2011-03-17T21:23:00.006-06:00

I had so much fun today. I've really been working hard to get good at shooting in manual mode. I am getting better and I basically know how to shoot in manual now, I just need to get faster at adjusting my settings. So...practice, practice, practice. I decided to do a mentoring session photographer Emilie Decker. She was very good and gave me some great info for improving my photos. We spent an hour in her home going over equipment, manual settings, and lighting. Then we went over the Wheeler Farm with my kiddos to use as my little subjects. It was fun to try out some new poses with my kids. I definitely need to branch out in that department. They had fun with that.

I got a lot of shots with the 3 older kids. Camryn wasn't really cooperating so well. She's completely off on any kind of nap schedule she might have had before our trip so she was very sleepy and ornery.

My mom held her for a bit and she was out.

Oh well, I did get this little gem before she got too tired.

Here are the rest. I know I love them, but I may be a little partial. :)

My new baby

2011-02-18T21:51:00.002-07:00

Ooh la la. I am loving my new toy. I still love my D40 and it has served me well but it was time for a little upgrade. After much, much, much deliberation and research in cameras I settled on the D90. It has quite a few more bells and whistles than the D40 and it was in the right price range. I went back and forth between staying with Nikon or switching to Canon. Seems I know quite a lot of people with Canon brand DSLRs which made me think Canon must be better. After some research I learned that's not the case and since I'm familiar with Nikon it just made sense to stick with what I know. The lens it came with is pretty nifty too and my first lens with vibration reduction. Plus the lens is also huge which makes me feel really cool when I'm using it. I think I'll likely continue using my favorite 35 mm most of the time though. Anyways, I am bound and determined to learn how to shoot better in full manual. It takes pretty nice shots in auto like this one.

But I just know it is capable of more! So I've been playing around with all my settings and staying up way too late and I think I'm finally starting to get it a little bit. My biggest challenge has always been indoor shots and, while I still can't get great ones in my basement, they do seem to be improving and they are definitely looking better than the shots I take in full auto. My kids are getting so sick of me. Even Camryn is learning how ignore mommy's constant "hey look over here!" .

One of the things I am most pleased with is being able to take a shot where the kids are moving a lot without all the blur. (Yeah I am totally letting on to how much of an amateur I am. I am just now learning how to take indoor shots that aren't blurry or overexposed.) Tanner rarely ever sits completely still for the 2 seconds I need him to. So I told him to jump up and down on the couch for me to take a picture, which he was happy to do. Usually the hands get the most blurry, but after some fiddling around with the aperture, ISO, and shutter speed I got a pretty decent picture! I can actually see all of his fingers! He's pulling a weird face and the composition could use some work but that wasn't my focus.

Anyways, once again I'm an amateur who is wanting to learn how to take really good pictures. I've always loved taking pictures ever since my parents got me my first little red 35 mm camera when I was 8. I walked around our whole house that Christmas and took pictures of everything I saw. And my dear supportive parents actually paid to have my rolls of film developed. I don't imagine I'll be striving to turn this hobby into a paying job. I don't know that I'll ever have the skills or confidence to do that. There are so many photographers out there and I'm not much for competition. I'm just doing this for me and because I enjoy it. So feel free to give me input on any photos I post!

Happy Valentine's Day!

2011-02-14T15:55:00.000-07:00

I just love these little people.

Look who's crawling!

2011-02-03T14:59:00.002-07:00

I love this age. I wish I could make it last longer. Camryn is crawling now. She's not very fast yet so I haven't had to put the gate in front of the stairs, but she's absolutely thrilled with her new found freedom. It was literally a race last week between me (baby-proofing the toy room and hiding all the small choke-able toys) and her (crawling towards those small, forbidden toys). She's been so happy lately because she can entertain herself better. It requires a bit more cleaning on my part. She doesn't take a binky so there's nothing to block all those crumbs on the kitchen floor from going into her mouth. She will probably consume the most germs out of all the kids. It's much harder to keep the floor clean when there are 3 other kids un-cleaning it during every meal. So hopefully it just boosts her immune system!

End of year

2011-01-29T09:14:00.006-07:00

I'm really behind on blogging about Christmas. I've been trying to catch up on our family "year books" a lot lately. I took up digital scrapbooking a while back and started back at the beginning of our marriage and I'm doing a book for each year. Right now I'm on 2006 so almost half way there!

Anyways, we had a fabulous Christmas. I love the online shopping world and all the great deals I can find. The UPS guys become very familiar with our house and visit us most days in December it seems. The kids loved all their gifts and we were lucky enough to have Josh's parents sleep over at our house Christmas Eve and be there for when the kids opened presents in the morning. We booked them about a year ago to do this. :) Camryn and all of us adults got up around 6 and waited until 7 to wake up the kids Christmas morning. Isn't that a little backwards? We had to wake them up because Camryn was starting to do this.

And we didn't want her going back to bed before her siblings even woke up. Josh spoiled me this year. I got a new lens for our anniversary the week before Christmas, Lightroom 3, and a GPS. The GPS has been a necessity for a while now, pretty much ever since I turned 16 actually. I get lost every time I go anywhere new. So it's been great to have! And Lightroom 3 and the new lens have really made a difference in my little photography hobby.

We actually made plans for New Years Eve which is something we usually forget. Our wonderful friends the Okelberry's came over for some games and food and it was a very fun night. We always love hanging out with their family. We celebrated the New Year about an hour early so they could drive back up to Bountiful before all the crazy drunk people got on the road. Josh and I were in bed when we heard the midnight fireworks going off. Yeah we know how to party hard.

So far 2011 has been a great year so far and I can't believe we're already through the first month!

Homecoming

2011-01-02T10:34:00.003-07:00

Josh's parents made it home from their mission in Hawaii on December 23rd, just in time for Christmas. This was their 4th mission and for some reason this is the first time we've gone to the airport to see them. Don't know why we haven't done it before! Their flight got in at 7:22 so it was an early morning but totally worth it.

They brought us girls all fresh flower leis from Hawaii which were beautiful and smelled so good. The guys got kukui nut necklaces and Eileen knitted furry leis for the kids.

I must say I love skype. It was great to be able to talk with them every few weeks and our kids could see their grandparents. We're so happy to have them home again!

6 and 7 months

2010-12-21T13:26:00.003-07:00

Here are a few pictures from our 6 and 7 month photo shoots. I recently downloaded the 30-day trial of Lightroom 3 and it was such a fun program to play around with. I'm crossing my fingers that I get that for Christmas since the price dropped to irresistibly low levels around Black Friday. Anyways, I took these in our backyard and I'm glad I caught the fall leaves when I did because winter hit before fall was over this year. I don't think we ever got a chance to rake our leaves before they were covered in snow. That will be fun to deal with in the spring.

I was contemplating a camera upgrade a couple months ago. I was considering switching from the Nikon family to the Canon family. I asked everyone I knew who was into photography what their opinions were on cameras. Everyone had something different to say. In fact two people even owned the same camera and one loved it and one hated it. I think choosing a camera is like a choosing a wand in Harry Potter. You hold it and you just know it's yours - the camera chooses you. Okay, maybe it's not that magical. Anyways, so I just ended up getting confused and I decided not to upgrade at all for now. I did decide to stick with the Nikon brand because it's what I know now. So Josh got me a new lens for our anniversary and I've been having a lot of fun with it. It's a great lens for portraits but has no zoom so that's been a bit of an adjustment. I'm constantly twisting it out of habit. So far I've really loved it. Here's our little baby cutie.

It's a winter wonderland!

2010-12-14T10:00:00.005-07:00

Wow where does the time go? I have been completely ignoring my blog so hopefully someone out there is still checking up on it! I guess I mostly write on this for myself though. We had some pretty big snow storms a few weeks ago which made the world so lovely. It snowed just the way I like it to - a whole bunch all at once so you only have to shovel the driveway once or twice and you're done. Not that I ever shovel the driveway. Usually Josh does it and quite often our neighbor does it for us with his snow plow attached to his 4-wheeler. We have the best neighbors. Anyways I really like the snow as long as I don't have to go anywhere in it and it's not April when snow season should be DONE. It's just so pretty though.

It's nice that this year they can put their snow suits on mostly by themselves. It's still a lot of work but doesn't take nearly as long as last year! However, now that the twins are potty trained, inevitably somebody has to go potty 2 minutes after we've gone through the whole process of getting the suits on.

We're running on a tight schedule this December. Almost every day until Christmas has something. I love to go downtown and see the lights at temple square as a family. It just puts me in the Christmas mood. It's generally a bit of a pain to Josh but since it's important to me he does it and tries not to get stressed out. We picked the best night to go! It was hardly even cold and the kids were great and we got the best parking spot right on main street. We lasted almost twice as long as last year! We also got all the kids a new hat and pair of gloves since last year I was unprepared for the cold so that helped a lot.

We think maybe Tanner was yawning in this picture. He's pulling quite a face.

Camryn was wearing her warm, little duck suit so she pulled her duck face. She does this face all the time. It's so funny.

So fashionable

2010-11-04T15:10:00.003-06:00

We had our first snow storm of the season the other day. Natalie and Tanner wanted to go out to play right away but Natalie was dressed like it was still 100 degrees outside so I told her to go change. This is what I got.

She's ready to go! Tank top, biking shorts, tights, snow boots and her snow coat. I was actually just impressed that she was wearing something other than a princess dress. She wears her princesses dresses every minute except for at preschool and church when I make her pretend NOT to be a princess.

Happy Halloween

2010-11-04T14:26:00.003-06:00

We were so busy partying this Halloween that I didn't get very many pictures. Lame! Since we had a cute frog costume that fit Tanner and the girls always love being princesses, we went with The Princesses and the Frog theme. My mom got Natalie this awesome red and gold very regal, almost queenly looking costume that even had a hoop skirt. She was so excited about it and begged to wear it everywhere. But while we were getting in the car to go to our first Halloween party she had a potty accident. I was already stressed out about getting everyone ready in the first place so I didn't handle that well. Especially since I had no idea how to wash a dress with a hoop in it. I told her many times how unhappy I was about this while I made her change into one of her old princess dress-ups. She kept asking "Are you happy with me now mommy?" while we got her dressed and I kept saying no, but finally I told her "I'm not happy right now but I still love you." And she said "You still love me?!" like she was sure that was out of the question. So I felt a little bad about that and learned my lesson that I need to chill out about the potty accidents. I got her dress cleaned the next day but after that she was too worried to wear it so we don't have any pictures of her in it.

So we had six parties the week of Halloween. It was a fun crazy week. Here are a few pictures.

This is the best picture I got of my kids. The little guy on the left is my nephew Noah who definitely looks like he could be one of mine too. Tanner and Sydney look so bored in this picture. I vow to do better at getting more pictures next year!

Sydney loved getting all dolled up every day and I've gotten a lot faster at doing my girls' hair from all the up-dos lately.

We go to my parents' ward party every year. Our ward doesn't do a Halloween party so we have to crash theirs. :)

We went to "trunk or treat" for Josh's work. There were no trunks involved and it was all indoors so that was nice.

Camryn was a fairy princess. We lost her little tiara in the parking lot at our first party so she's mostly just a fairy, but still super cute.

We carved pumpkins too. The kids took out a few seeds and then put their orders in for how they would like me to carve their pumpkin. I don't really mind because I really like carving pumpkins. Someday it will be fun to have them participate a bit more.

Like I said, the kids picked what the pumpkins would look like. We had the scariest pumpkins on the block. :)

Well that was fast...

2010-10-11T10:21:00.007-06:00

My baby is 5 months old! Crazy how fast that went. I don't remember the other kids growing up this fast. I've been doing our own little photo shoot with Camryn every month. This is something I didn't really do with the other kids, but I didn't have as much of an interest in photography back then either. I think it's good though. At least she won't be the last child who never has any pictures taken of her!

One day old...

I didn't take her first pictures. This one was done by Baby Bella at the hospital.

Ten days...

This picture was taken by my awesome photographer sister-in-law Wende.

One month...

I love naked baby pictures. We had a hard time getting one at her newborn photoshoot so this was the best I could do at her one month!

Two months...

Three months...

Four months...

Five months...

Oh how we love fall

2010-10-11T10:01:00.005-06:00

Have I mentioned how much I love taking pictures of my kids? I think they are quite photogenic! But, for some reason when I tell them to smile they can't seem to make eye contact with the camera. Oh well, it's still cute. We went to Gardner Village last night to see the witches. If you haven't been you really should go. It seems to be especially well decorated this year. And Sunday evening are great for taking pictures because the shops are closed so there are a few less people wandering around. And Natalie dressed up so we had our very own witch with us!

I made the best little discovery last night! This adorable little pink bench. So cute for pictures! And luckily Camryn was dressed to match so we just did her 5-month photo shoot right there! She not quite sitting up on her own yet so Josh sat right next to her to keep her upright until right before I was going to take the picture. This ended up being one of my favorites.

Bear Lake

2010-09-19T09:39:00.004-06:00

Over Labor Day weekend we decided to go to Bear Lake. This was our only vacation all summer. That's what happens when you have a baby right before summer starts! We had considered going down to Lake Powell with the Muir family that weekend but Bear Lake is much easier with a baby and we really love it up there. It's the perfect kind of trip for our kids right now. Short drive, beach, plenty of things to do. We stayed at Ideal Beach which was great because we could walk right down on the beach and it had a pool and plenty of lawn area. It also has a mini golf course and kids craft area which we didn't even get around to visiting.

Here's the view from our condo. We were right by the pool and the playground which was very convenient for us.

When we got there I was bummed to realize we'd forgotten the frisbee and bocce ball set I was planning to bring. But then in the closet of our condo... ta da! Bocce ball set and frisbee and also a croquette set. We made the kids play a game of bocce ball but they seemed a little confused as to how this is fun. I guess it is kind of a weird game that somehow becomes fun when you get older.
These condo units are all individually owned. I would love to meet the people who owned ours. I imagine they are a little elderly couple who just love collecting things and have a lot of grandkids. That would explain the plethera of stuffed animals and beanie babies all over the condo. They also had birdhouses and fish hanging off the ceilings and light fixtures and a whole wall of Bear Lake Monster wood artwork. But the best surprise was when Josh and pulled down the murphy bed we were going to sleep on and found this.

The picture does not do it justice. The wood art in the middle says "sleep in the forest." It was like sleeping in one of those themed rooms at Anniversary Inn! So romantic...
We decided to start the weekend off right and get our raspberry shakes on Friday night. Last year we got them when we were leaving and had to deal with meltdowns. The kids were much happier this time around.

We also spent plenty of time at the beach. It was nice and warm on Saturday but a little cooler and very windy on Sunday so we played at the pool on that day.

My parents also joined us on this trip which was so fun. It's always great to have a little extra company, especially company that loves to hold our baby!

Camryn really bonded with her grandpa on this trip. He held her quite a lot and bounce her on his knee to her little heart's content. My parents decided to join us on this trip because that way my brother Nate could come along as well. He just got home from his mission and started school up at Utah State so he's basically just around the corner from Bear Lake. He earned lots of "favorite uncle" points over the weekend with our kids.

I've always thought these bike/cart things looked fun. 4 people can pedal on these things with 2 kids sitting in the front. Our little family did not all sit in this one. I couldn't pedal since I was holding Camryn so Nate and Josh pedaled ours and my parents took Sydney riding in theirs. They were really fun and once again I'm glad we had my parents along because we couldn't have done that on our own!

First day of school! First day of school!

2010-09-09T19:18:00.002-06:00

Well as much as I didn't want summer to end, I have also been looking forward to this day. Twice a week for 2 hours and 15 minutes I have 3 kids in school. The quietness is blissful... Okay I really do love my children. But it is a nice little break. Camryn is sometimes even sleeping.
Sydney has been so excited for 1st grade because she gets to eat lunch at school. I've packed her a lunch a couple times, but she prefers school lunch and that's easier for me anyways. If Tanner and Natalie see me making a sandwich in the morning they get all confused and decide they want sandwiches for breakfast instead of cereal.

Here is our cute little 1st grader. She is a vision in pink. She loves her teacher and loves having TWO recesses.

Tanner and Natalie started preschool last week. I can't believe they are getting so big. I hope their teacher understands them when they talk. Sometimes I can't even understand them. They loved their first day. They learned about the letter A, the number 1, and the color red. While they were eating lunch later, Tanner was studying his Capri Sun really hard and pointed to it and said "A." He already knew that letter before preschool but it was cute to see that he was excited about what they'd talked about that day!

I always tell them to hold hands when they're walking somewhere. It's just too adorable. And I might as well take advantage of that while they are at the age that they will actually do what I say.

Petting zoo

2010-09-09T15:31:00.003-06:00

All summer I've been meaning to take meaning to take the kids to the petting zoo at Gardner Village. We used to take Sydney when she was little and she loved it. I called my mom and my sister Rachel to see if they wanted to come. Rachel had to work but my mom came and brought Noah along. None of the other kids enjoyed it quite like Sydney. Tanner and Natalie seemed to think I was a little crazy for wanting them to pet the animals. Especially the ones that were bigger than them. The little goats were also having kind of any off day and kept head butting each other.

Here are Natalie, Noah, and Tanner up on "high ground." They are trying to find a safe place away from all the animals.

If we do this again I will be letting them go on the pony ride FIRST. The whole time we were in the petting zoo all I heard was "can we ride the ponies?", "when do we get to ride the ponies?", "can we leave now and go ride the ponies?" Pony rides are one thing I don't like spending my money on. $9 for 2 minutes of entertainment. Oh well, they love it and we don't do it very often.

After our visit to the animals we went to Pine Needles quilt shop just to be a little crazy. It was a short visit with 5 little kids. And then we headed to Sweet Aftons candy shop. I let the kids pick out a bunch of saltwater taffy and my mom let the kids each choose one candy for themselves.

Is it just me or did this summer go super fast? It seems like it just started and now it's over. It's probably because I had a baby at the beginning of summer and so we didn't get out as much as usual. I love fall, but I'm really not ready for cold weather. Hopefully it will just be a long and mild fall and winter will go as fast as summer did.

Blessed

2010-08-22T19:22:00.004-06:00

A few weeks ago we had a fun packed weekend. 1-800 Contacts has a fun company party every year at Thanksgiving Point. It's like the Scarecrow Festival which I've blogged about before. Lots of bouncy houses and slides, rock climbing, swimming, laser tag, food, treats, crafts and all that. Unfortunately, it poured on us and Tanner was such a pill we were ready to leave him there by the end of the evening. But, we are grateful for the awesome party the company put on and we're looking forward to it again next year! I think as far as going out in public with our kids things are just going to get easier from this point.

We had Camryn's blessing on Sunday which is always a fun event. She cried for the first minute of her blessing and I was wondering whose baby was crying so loudly. It took me a few seconds to realize it was mine. And then she suddenly stopped for no reason at all. Josh gave her a beautiful blessing. And she looked beautiful and I have to brag for a minute because I MADE her dress!

I've always thought it would be fun to make a blessing dress for one of my girls and this is probably my last chance. I don't know if I'd actually describe it as fun. My mom had to hold my hand through the difficult part and it involved a LOT of unpicking, but in the end I think it turned out beautiful and I'm glad I did it. I didn't take any pictures on big day, but thankfully my mom did. We're not usually the party hosts in the family, but we really loved having everyone over.

It was such a beautiful day and the weather was perfect, so that evening we went on a walk around the lake at Daybreak. I love where we live. We are close to so many pretty places.

The jungle

2010-07-25T23:04:00.002-06:00

Seriously, our garden is getting a little out of control this year. This picture was taken about 2 weeks ago and it's gotten even crazier since then. I'm happy it's producing so well but I'm a little worried it's going to strangle itself. The cantaloupe are being especially aggressive towards the raspberries, and if I have to pick between the two fruit I'll choose raspberries. I decided to try growing melons this year and every time I mentioned it to a fellow gardener I kind of got a "good luck" look. So I decided to start some seeds indoors and transplant them outside when it got warm enough. Just for good measure I also planted a hill of seeds next to each transplant. And for extra good measure I planted the hills and transplants less than half the recommended space apart. I figured I could thin them out later. I'd rather have too many successful plants than not enough and end up wasting all that precious garden space. But the thing is I have a really hard time thinning because that seems like such a waste a perfectly healthy plant. Well all the seeds and transplants have thrived except 2 of the watermelons, and I haven't really done any thinning. At this point I have watermelon and cantaloupe vines all clinging to each other and thinning is a real mess. And how do I choose which plants should live and which plants should die anyways? So I guess we'll just see what we get. I think next year I might build something the vines can climb up so we can utilize our space a little better.
It still never ceases to amaze me when I see some of these...

and these.

It's like magic the way we can grow food in our very own backyard. And this year we installed a drip system so I feel like I've done so little work to help them grow that I really can't take much credit. Besides we also have tons of these little ladies helping out.

They don't call them worker bees for nothing. These girls have been super busy in our garden! By the way, did you know all worker bees are female? Yeah the male bee's only job is to fertilize the queen bee so she can make more worker bees. I'm glad our species doesn't operate that way. Worker bees literally work themselves to death. So I will give them most of the credit for my thriving garden.

Haircuts

2010-07-17T23:23:00.002-06:00

Haircuts for my kids are usually done at home in the bathroom or on the kitchen counter. I figure I can cut in a straight line and use a set of clippers and I'm a do-it-yourself kind of girl. Since we had family pictures coming up though I thought we'd splurge and go get "real" haircuts. Well now I've gone and spoiled them and they'll probably never want me cutting their hair again. We went to Cookie Cutters and it was a lot of fun. The kids each got to pick a movie and sit in a little car while they got their cut. Then they got a style which was especially awesome for the girls since it involved gold glitter hairspray.

It's hard to tell but Tanner had a good time too. He was done first and got to play video games and on the slide while he waited for the girls.

I've tried to copy what they did with Sydney's hair but I can't seem to get it to look quite the same way. I'll have to practice some more.

I made a short attempt at copying Natalie's hairdo until she was almost in tears and screaming "that hurts!" Ah, the fun of having girls. Boys hair is so much easier. Most days the kids look like little rugrats but sometimes I like to play with their hair.

Happy Birthday America!

2010-07-17T22:53:00.003-06:00

We did most of our celebrating for the 4th of July on the 5th of July. It was kind of fun having the 4th land on a Sunday. There were celebrations on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th. Josh had work off on the 5th so we went hiking with our friends the Tuckers. We went up to Solitude Lake which is a 3 mile round trip hike. The kids did great considering the length of the hike. They were all pretty tired at the end though and at times Josh was carrying two of our at a time. Camryn slept through the entire experience.

Here are the kiddos up at the top (minus Camryn).

We went to my parents house for a barbecue that night. My aunt and uncle invited us over for fireworks that night too. They even started early so our kids could make before they turned into pumpkins. Sydney stayed up late Saturday night to watch the fireworks at the park by our house. I didn't think Tanner and Natalie would be that excited about fireworks but I was so wrong. After every firework Tanner yelled "IT WORKED!" and clapped. And Natalie was sitting with Grandma and Grandpa and apparently she told them over and over how much she loved this.

6!

2010-07-08T22:51:00.002-06:00

To extend the fun of our weekend, Sydney had her birthday on Monday. We skipped friend parties this year and just did family stuff instead. I can't believe I have a 6-year-old already.
Sydney really gets into birthdays and tries to do whatever she can to make the birthday person feel special. On my last birthday she cut up a whole bunch of paper to make confetti and threw it at me. Then she cleaned it all up too since she knew I wouldn't want the mess. For her own birthday she worked hard on making this banner.

It says "Happy Birthday Sydney" and has a picture of her with a rainbow. I feel a little guilty that she felt she had to make her own banner but she's loves doing that sort of thing and I think she did feel special on her big day. We opened presents first thing in the morning.

I took a picture of the presents because I just love this wrapping paper. Grandma and Grandpa Ruben came and took Sydney to lunch before school and she got to take her class treats to school as well. Ring Pops! After school Sydney wanted to paint the piggy bank my mom gave her. Tanner and Natalie were feeling a bit neglected and were tired of being told they couldn't play with Sydney's stuff so I got them piggy banks too. My kids are fascinated with money lately. Tanner and Natalie don't have a clue what it's for but they love to play with it. Sydney will sometimes do extra jobs to earn some money and then the twins like to steal it. So hopefully this will help keep it all separated.

For dinner we went to Chuck E. Cheese's. Somehow I've made it this far in life without ever going there. The pizza was less than yummy but the kids had a blast and it was a really fun night. Somehow I forgot to take pictures though. Oh well!

Fun weekend

2010-07-08T22:19:00.003-06:00

Well I'm very behind on the blogging. I know if I don't keep up on this I'm going to be at a complete loss about what to write about for our Christmas letter at the end of the year. So here goes! We had a very fun weekend a few weekends back. Sydney had her first dance recital. She decided to take tap dance this last spring and it was very fun. I'm not sure if we'll go back to it in the fall though. She seems to want to try a different kind of dance. But the outfits were sure cute and it was fun to watch her perform in something. I think her favorite part about the recital was that she got to wear make up.

On Saturday, Josh's work sent us to see Toy Story 3.

For those of you who don't know Josh got a new job back in March and he now works for 1-800 Contacts. This means he no longer works from home which has been a bit of an adjustment for me but overall it's been a very good thing and he loves what he's doing now. It's been fun partaking in the perks of belonging to a company, such as company parties! We all loved the movie although I wish it hadn't been such a tear-jerker at the end. It was a little more intense than the previous two movies, but luckily none of my kids cried. Well Camryn might have a little bit, but she has other reasons.
Sunday was Father's Day. Hopefully it was a great day for Josh. Here he is with all his loot.

And lucky me, I got to speak in church that day! It's nice that I have a great dad and husband to give me some good material to work with. I enjoyed the day much more after church was over. I'm not such a big fan of public speaking. We went out to my parent's house for a barbecue that evening and I brought cupcakes to celebrate both Father's Day and Sydney's birthday which was the next day. She picked out raspberry trifle cupcakes from my cupcake book. They were delish! Definitely worth all the work and almost worth all the calories.

Our 3-year-olds

2010-05-27T14:24:00.005-06:00

It was birthday week here at our house recently. Half of our family now have birthdays in the same week! That's going to be a lot of cake. I got Tanner and Natalie their own individual birthday cakes because I want them to feel like individuals and not a set, blah, blah, blah. Too much cake! Next year I'm doing cupcakes or smaller cakes. I didn't know they were going to be so big.
Anyways, they loved their Dora and Lightening McQueen birthday cakes and, despite the fact that we were just barely home from the hospital with Camryn, they had a great birthday. We just had my parents and my sister's family over for pizza, cake, and ice cream. So it was nice and simple. My mom picked up the cakes and balloons on the way over. I think if we'd given Tanner and Natalie nothing but balloons they would have been happy. They got plenty of other things too though.
I can't believe they are 3 already. That went so fast. More and more lately I am so grateful to have had twins. They play so well together most of the time. It's nice when I am busy with the new baby that they can keep each other entertained. Twins are hard as babies but there are definitely benefits when they get older.

Natalie has got such a fun personality. She's so spunky and determined that, even though she's been the smallest in the family (until recently), she will be heard. She's also very strong willed and only wants to do something if she thinks it's a good idea. I think that's why she was such a late walker at 20 months. She just didn't care for it and all the praise and encouragement she got from us didn't even matter. This is also proving true in potty training. But I know once she puts her mind to it she'll do great. Natalie also loves to get out of the house. It doesn't really matter to her where we go. She asked me today if we could go to Home Depot. I usually can't run an errand without taking her with me or causing a fit.

Tanner is such a sweetheart. He doesn't demand attention but he absolutely loves to be praised. If anyone is hurt or crying he is usually the first to show concern. He's surrounded by girls all day so he's learned that it's fun to get dressed up and pink is a pretty color. He's quite the fashion conosur as you can see by the outfit he wore on his birthday. Baseball hat, sunglasses, polo, plaid shorts, and winter boots. I've tried to convince him it's time to stash the winter boots but he won't listen. He's got plenty of boy in him too though. He loves to play with his cousin, Noah, and he always comes home plenty sweaty and dirty. Anyone who has ever tried to pick Tanner up knows he is a very strong and solid little boy.
This is one of my favorite ages. There are the tantrums and the potty training, but it's so much fun to see how much they learn at this age and watch them figure out how to interact with other kids. We are so grateful to have these two cuties in our family!

Introducing Camryn Elena!

2010-05-18T09:01:00.010-06:00

Well she's finally here! I have to say that pregnancy went fast! I have fairly easy pregnancies so maybe that's why. So we had a repeat c-section scheduled for Thursday the 13th, but Monday night I started getting some regular contractions. They would be regular for a while and then slow down and they weren't really strong so I didn't think I was really in labor. They tapered off around midnight enough that I could sleep and kicked back in around 1:30 am. After about an hour of harder contractions I decided I must really be in labor. We had no plan for this. My parents were still on vacation in Italy and wouldn't be home until Wednesday night. I thought I would hold out until Thursday for the c-section, so we didn't really know who to call if I went into labor in the middle of the night. I was so worried that as soon as I called someone my contractions would stop. I decided to try calling my friend Shayla, and luckily she was awake doing laundry at 3 am! Silly Shayla. So she came over and stayed at our house with the kids until morning when Josh's sister Andrea came over. I can't thank those two enough for being willing to help us out that morning!
So we got to the hospital at about 3:30 and I was already dilated to a 5. I had kind of toyed with the idea of doing a vbac if I went into labor on my own. I was really nervous about it though since Sydney's delivery was so traumatic. (I tore a lot and my epidural ran out at the end so I felt EVERYTHING.) But my nurse reassured me that this time would be better, I was already halfway there, and they were always ready to do an emergency c-section. I felt good about trying for a vbac. I got my epidural pretty soon after and was able to get a little more sleep. At about 7:00 I was dilated to a 10 and they got me ready to push. I pushed for 4 contractions, maybe 15 minutes at the most, and out she came! It was SO much easier this time around. I was totally surprised when they plopped this messy little human baby on my stomach. It's so amazing that she grew inside me and came out so perfect. One of the biggest benefits of doing to vbac was that I got to hold her right after. The c-section delivery with the twins was nice too, but I did miss getting to hold my babies. It took us a day or so, but we finally settled on the name Camryn Elena Moore. She was born on May 11th at 7:36 am. She weighed 7 lbs. 8 oz. and was 22 inches long. Here are some more pictures.

The girls are very excited to have another sister. Tanner will occasionally pay some attention to her. He does a good job informing us that "baby's sad" whenever she cries.

Sydney loves to read to Camryn. This is a win, win, win situation. Sydney gets her reading practice, Camryn gets read to, and I get a shower.

These next pictures are from the hospital photographer. Gone are the days of those blotchy, unprofessional photos they used to take in hospitals! They do much more awesome ones now and it's fun to get a beautiful picture of your baby when they're just one day old.

We are all thrilled to have Camryn in our family now. Ever since the twins were born I've always felt like someone was missing. She's been such a joy and I am so grateful to be a mother to four beautiful children now.

Happy Mother's Day to me!

2010-05-07T14:16:00.002-06:00

Sydney noticed yesterday that we still had our "Happy Easter" sign hanging on our front door. It's one of those things that's been there so long I don't see it anymore. She took it down today and replaced it with her hand-made sign for the next upcoming holiday - Mother's Day. If you can't read this, it says "this Sunday is Mother's day if you do not nowe (know) what you want to give your Mother then give her a dunch (bunch) of roses for Mother's Day." Excellent advice.

In all fairness

2010-05-03T15:37:00.002-06:00

Well since Josh posted my most flattering pictures yesterday, I thought it was only fair to post the picture I got of him last night.

This is the look Josh gives me when one of the kids (or myself) are being difficult. It's the "what the heck am I supposed to do with this child" face. Yes, sometimes I act like a child too.

So now you can see why we have tons of pictures of the kids and very few pictures of ourselves! We went to Wheeler Farm last night. It was a little chilly and there were a lot of animals missing. I don't know where they went. But we still had fun and we always get some cute pictures there. I've been finally learning how to use Photoshop Elements 8. Someday I would like to get the full version or Lightroom but I've found that Elements has quite a lot to offer and I have plenty to learn for now. So I've been playing around with editing pictures today. Here are a few we got last night.

Oh Lisa...

2010-05-02T20:52:00.005-06:00

So my favorite thing lately has been noticing the many faces of Lisa. Here are just a few (with thoughts below):

Seriously honey...

Oh my goodness (this is catching her rolling her eyes at me)

Ok...I do remember why I married you

We are ready

2010-04-27T09:52:00.005-06:00

Baby #4 is going to be making an appearance any time now! She still has no name but she has a cute room to come home to. I discussed my little dillema a while ago on how to decorate a room for a 3-year-old boy and a new baby girl. I found you can actually make blue and green pretty girly. I'm a little tired of pink anyways since this is our third girl.

This quilt was one of the projects I got down at our St. George Girl's Weekend. All our kids now have their own minkee quilts, but I think this one might be my favorite. I hope the new baby doesn't mind sharing with her mommy!

I never really know what to put above a crib. I worry about putting anything heavy above sleeping areas. I made this litte craft by taking 1" foam core, cutting it into 10" squares and stapling batting and fabric around them. Easy peasy. They are stuck to the wall with velcro and if they fall off they will not hurt the baby because they hardly weigh anything.

I had the same issue above Tanner's bed since I don't want anything heavy falling on him while he sleeps either. I was so excited to find this tree wall sticker that matched his bedding perfectly. I do most of my shopping online, but occasionally I go into a real store. I found it at Babies R Us.

I've really enjoyed NOT moving during this pregnancy. It's given me more time to do some of the fun things to get ready for this baby. It's been fun to do some little sewing crafts while I don't have the energy to do much else.

It seems like every time I have a baby some new baby care invention has been created. Like these car seat cover blanket things! I can't believe how much people pay for these and they're so easy to make.

And my last little creation is this new "diaper" bag. It's not technically a diaper bag but it has pockets that fit a baby bottle or sippy perfectly and a large pocket inside to fit diapers and wipes.

Okay so there are a few more little things to take care of before the big day, which is scheduled to be May 13th. But for the most part the nest is ready!

Decisions, decisions

2010-04-12T15:14:00.003-06:00

I don't know if this is just a pregnancy thing or nesting thing or what. Lately, I've found that there are a lot of things that bug me in my living space. But I can't seem to make a decision about how to change any of them. I think one of the problems is that I know once I change something I'm going to have to live with it for a very long time so I have to get it right the first time.

My first thing is this landscape edging. I want something because I'm tired of having to get the shovel out to re-edge the whole thing. I bought one box of this faux brick stuff so see how I liked it before I buy a whole bunch more of it to put in the front yard. From a distance I like the way it looks, but up close it definitely looks faux and not real. So I keep going back and forth between liking it and not liking it. Josh has made it clear he doesn't love it. There are more expensive options as far as landscape edging goes, but then what if I don't like those either?

Now around to the back of the house we have this lovely deck which the previous owners so obviously did themselves or hired someone who didn't know what they were doing. It's not very well supported and never had any railing so after the kids kept jumping and falling off we built the flower boxes along the sides as a band-aid solution. And it's just a weird size - too small to put any patio furniture on. So do we make it bigger? Can't really go much bigger since there are window wells in the way off to the left. And we can't just do steps down from the door because we have to have at least a 3 ft. landing to be up to code.

I like our kitchen, dining, and family room area because it's so nice and open but then we have this awkward little space in the corner. What do I do with this? The kids love having a desk to color on and someday we would like to have a family computer there. So far I haven't found the perfect solution unless I want to have something built custom. It's not like we're made of money. Obviously I can't tackle all these projects at once so I also can't decide which one is the highest priority.
One more thing we can't seem to make a decision on is what to name this baby girl who is going to make an appearance in the near future. We've changed our minds multiple times so if you've ever asked us what the name is going to be and we told you a name, it's probably something different now. Hopefully we'll meet her and just know what her name is supposed to be. For some reason it's stressful this time around. We don't anything too popular, but we do want something practical. We want it to sound good for a baby as well as mature enough for an adult. Wish she could just tell us what she wants to be named!

Easter

2010-04-06T20:04:00.005-06:00

Happy Easter! We had fun doing all the traditional Easter things. I let the kids dye eggs this year. We skipped that last year for some reason. The kids did well with only minor spills and just one egg casualty (which was actually dropped by me).

Easter fell on conference weekend this year which was nice since we didn't have to rush and get ready for church and I also love conference weekend. But on the other hand I like going to church on Easter so I can show off my kids cute matching outfits. Yes, I am that vain. Getting their Easter clothes is one of my favorite things. So, I dressed them up to go out to my parents' house that evening.

One of these years I am going to get myself a new dress too. The girls love getting their new dresses, but Tanner gets every bit as excited about his new digs. He loves when I get him dressed up nice on Sundays and tell him how handsome he looks. I hope he doesn't outgrow that.

Due to the coldness outside we had an indoor Easter egg hunt. This was the kids 3rd egg hunt this week so they knew the drill. Usually I follow the twins around encouraging them to pick up more eggs. But, they'd already had so much candy that day that the less eggs they found the better.

Spring break? Really?

2010-04-01T12:40:00.003-06:00

Mother Nature is so funny. Let's dump a bunch of snow on the first day of spring break which also happens to be April Fool's Day! Ha ha ha ha!

Girls' weekend

2010-03-20T21:57:00.006-06:00

Typically we call it "Girl's Week" but it was only a Thursday through Sunday so I'm calling it "Girl's Weekend." It would have been awesome if it could have lasted a whole week. About once a year all the girls on the Muir side of my family get together for some girly fun. I haven't really been able to go to one of these in a several years. It was a super nice break and I'm so glad Josh could take off work to watch the kids while I was gone. We stayed down in St. George and there were about 13 of us girls in all, but unfortunately we never got a group picture while we were there.

Here's a picture of us Ruben girls.

We had the luxury of staying at my cousin Jeremy and Sharla's house. When I say luxury I mean it. It's basically like staying at a 5 star hotel only better because you don't have to share it with a bunch of strangers. I didn't get a good picture of the front of the house because it was hard to fit it all into the view on my camera. Here are some pictures of the backyard though. My kids would have been in heaven with this treehouse.

Here is our lovely hostess, Sharla. Thanks so much for having us Sharla! You're the best!

It was a very relaxing weekend. We had 2 showers. One for my sister, Kim who is due to have a baby boy in July.

How cute is that diaper cake? The ladies in my family know how to throw a party fit for a magazine cover.

Here is my sister Kimmy. I'm so excited we are due so close together! Except that she is moving right after having the baby. That's a bummer.

We also had a shower for my soon-to-be cousin-in-law Lauren. It was so fun getting to know her on this trip and we're all excited to have her in the family.

The rest of the time we just did whatever we wanted. We had a lot of crafts to choose from. Sharla owns the cutest little quilt shop called Quilted Works so we went there to find something crafty to do.

Andrea, Rachel and I started on the cutest bags while we were down there and I also made an infant car seat cover that I'm way excited about. I'll post about those later once I finish them and take pictures. I love Sharla's craft room. I could basically live in there.

My cousin Tracy taught us how to make these adorable baby onesies. I'm planning on making many more of these with all my fabric scraps. They make cute baby gifts. And on the left of this picture are silk flowers my mom taught us how to make. You can make them into a pin or a hair clip. My Aunt Linda also showed us how to make some really cute magnets but I didn't get a picture of mine.

We spent a fair amount of time hanging out in the hot tub which was not too hot so as to accommodate us pregnant girls. And we had fun playing games and watching movies too.

Can you see the hot tub? It's that circle in the back behind the big pool.

Here we are playing spoons. I was so pleased that even with my huge belly I got a spoon every round. I guess Sharla had a bigger disadvantage though. As you can see she's holding her 2-year-old daughter.

They also had a well-stocked snack bar next to the home theater, which was bad news for me. I definitely consumed too much candy on this trip. Too bad those extra pounds don't go to the baby.

This was a much needed break for me and I'm so glad I could squeeze it in before our baby girl comes in May. Thanks girls!

Bubbly

2010-03-02T12:15:00.004-07:00

She may be taking this bubble "gun" thing too seriously. Look at that face! This girl has got some kind of vengeance on her mind.

I love that every once in a while it's warm enough to send the kids out these days. We're going a little stir crazy. We're all big fans of bubbles around here. It's rare that we actually have bubbles, though, because every time we get a bottle out somebody manages to spill the whole thing. Tanner and Natalie had a fun afternoon a couple weeks ago with their bubbles toys. Sydney was at school or playing at a friend's house or something so it was just the 2 of them.

I don't know what Tanner's looking at here. Probably bubbles! Isn't he a cutie?

They've been playing really well together lately. But, sometimes they have these fights that I think are pretty funny. The other day it went something like this.
Tanner (talking to me): Nanny's a eepah.
Natalie (clearly offended): A eepah? No I not a eepah!
Tanner (no emotion): Eepah.
Natalie: No eepah!
Tanner: Yes.
Natalie (outraged): NO!!
Whatever an eepah is, Natalie does not want to be one. Tanner speaks his own special language most of the time. But he has made an effort to learn the phrases that are most important to him. Most of them involve requesting food.

Potty training

2010-02-24T22:36:00.003-07:00

Oh the joys of potty training. Natalie decided to show some interest back in January when I found her in the bathroom sitting on the toilet with her diaper on the floor. I would love to not have 3 children in diapers in a few months so we're giving potty training a try. She did really well for the first few days but she's lost interest a little bit. Surprisingly, she seems to do best on Sundays at church. She really likes using public restrooms I guess. Or maybe she's just so eager to have an excuse to leave sacrament meeting for a little bit.

I made a potty chart and Natalie gets a sticker every time she goes in the toilet. She was also getting one skittle every time she made an attempt on the potty. That reward ended though once she figured out how to open the skittle jar. I caught her in the bathroom after bedtime treating herself to the rest of the potty treats.

She gets a potty prize every time she fills up a potty chart. Her first prize was this awesome bubble gun. Her second prize was silly putty. This is proof that my brain takes a vacation when I'm pregnant. Who in their right mind gives a 2-year-old silly putty? Tanner is starting to show a little interest in potty training now but no successes yet. I wish I could put them in some special potty training school or something because this is not something I'm good at. But I know eventually it will happen so I'm not stressing yet. I'll starting stressing once we get closer to preschool time. I'm currently reading Stress-Free Potty Training. We'll see if it gives me some good ideas!

Oh so close

2010-01-09T20:57:00.002-07:00

Well I had a resolution in 2009 to read 50 books. I'm not a fast reader at all so this was a lofty goal for me and I managed to get in 43. Mostly I aimed for juvenile fiction though because of the quick read aspect. I have a side bar on this blog to show all the books I read. It would be easier to name the few books that I didn't so much like, but I won't get into to those. I liked almost all of the books I read. Some of the books I really loved were The Hunger Games, The Book Thief, The Millionaire Next Door, and the Fablehaven series. So if you're looking for a good book those are some of my recommendations!

The results are in...

2010-01-09T20:31:00.002-07:00

We had our ultrasound a few days ago. We are pleased to announce that there is just one baby in my tummy! Yay! It also looks like we're having another girl. We're all very excited. I was about 95% sure it was a girl this time so it wasn't very surprising. A boy would have been convenient so Tanner would have a brother and the sharing of the rooms would have worked out nicely. But what we really wanted was a healthy baby and everything looks good in that way. We couldn't be happier and we're trying to think of a good name for her. I really feel I need to meet our children before I'll completely settle on a name, but we do have some favorites.
Our new little girl will be sharing a room with Tanner for a while so I'm trying to think of a good boy and girl way of decorating. Anyone have any good ideas? I've been meaning to do something nice with his room so now would be a good time to get around to that. This will be the first baby I'll have where we won't be moving when I'm a month away from my due date! Another yay! I can actually take my time decorating and all that before she arrives.

Christmastime

2009-12-28T15:45:00.002-07:00

Wow, where did the time go? And why do I have so few pictures of all the stuff we did this month? Oh well, we did a bunch of fun stuff and I can't really remember it all right now because I basically have no short-term memory when I'm pregnant. Really wish I'd taken more pictures for that reason! Oh thing we did do was go see the lights at temple square. We haven't been in years and I just don't think it's the same without the malls right across the street. We used to always go see the lights and then go inside the mall to warm up and get a treat. Now there are not many places to go inside and get warm and no where to get a treat. But it was still lots of fun! Very quick visit though since the kids were freezing. Apparently I didn't bundle them up enough.

Josh and I went to the Kurt Bestor Christmas concert for our anniversary. It was so good! We also went several parties and the kids met with a couple of Santas. I think that confused Sydney a bit. She must have noticed they didn't look or sound quite the same. She asked me if they were the real Santa Claus's. So I told her no they're not really Santa, but they are happy, jolly and gave you a present just to be nice so that's really what Santa is all about anyways. We think she might become a non-believer pretty early. That would be fine with us. We're not really big on the Santa thing and try not to focus on it much anyways.
So Christmas Eve finally rolled around. Do everyone else's kids go a little crazy the few days before Christmas? Ours sure do! The anticipation of Christmas was making for some emotional children. I didn't really think about it being caused by Christmas until it was over and everyone has been much happier ever since.

The kids and I got new jammies for Christmas.

It's hard to pick a favorite gift but we did recently have a lot of fun with the fire pit that Josh's brother and sis-in-law gave us. I've been wanting one for years because I always like going up in the mountains and roasting stuff over a fire. Now we can just do it in our backyard!

Hope all of you had a wonderful Christmas too! We had so much to be grateful for this year. We can only hope that 2010 will be just as good!

Photo shoot

2009-12-28T15:25:00.003-07:00

Here's what I did today! I took these pictures, edited them, printed them and got them in frames. Yes, I am feeling very accomplished. It's about time I updated some of the baby pictures around the house. I'm no professional so please don't look too closely. They are good enough to be framed in my opinion. And since my kids cry pretty much every time we go to a photo studio, throwing a sheet over the back of the couch works much better for us!

Natalie's a sheep

2009-12-06T13:46:00.002-07:00

This is a how Tanner talks now. "Na-any's a sheep" means Natalie's asleep. It's one of Tanner's favorite phrases since he's usually the first one up every morning. Tanner also likes to call things "two one", we haven't figured out what it means. He'll say this things like "Daddy's a two one", "It's a two one", and whine about "two one." He talks about "two one" when he's happy, sad, annoyed. Who knows! He still jabbers on in his own special language and will tell me whole stories that way, but he's also starting to throw in a few more English words. So we're happy about that!

Our staycation

2009-12-06T13:14:00.004-07:00

Shame on me, I've been a bad blogger lately! It could have something to do with my laptop dying and going through the process of adjusting to my new laptop. Thanks Josh! Glad you understand how important a computer is to me. Anyways, no photoshop on this computer yet so the pictures are not edited. About a month ago we decided to do a little "staycation" (a vacation where we stay home for those not familiar with the term). We did go down to St. George for the first few days so we were away from home for a bit enjoying the nice warm weather.

Here are the kids doing some exploring in Snow Canyon.

Playing in the sand dunes.

The kids are getting to a good stage where we can actually take them to a restaurant without completely embarrassing ourselves. So nice! When we got home we made a list of some things we've wanted to do or see but never get around to it. We decided to get a 6-month membership to the Discovery Gateway museum. The kids love it there and I'm excited to take them this winter when we get a little stir-crazy.

My favorite thing about the museum is that they have all these toys to play with and yet my house stays nice and clean.

The next day we went downtown to the church history museum. Sydney actually has requested to go back to this one more than the discovery gateway. She really loved the "I am a Child of God" exhibit. There were a lot of fun things for kids to do and there was a station that looked like a hospital nursery with lots of little baby dolls and you could hold them, rock them, pretend to feed them, etc. I was happy Natalie really enjoyed the babies too. I hope she likes having a real baby around in May! I'm a little concerned she might get a bit jealous. We'll see.

We walked around temple square and went in one of the visitors centers and also had lunch on the grounds. It was a very pretty day.

On our final day we just went to the zoo to see all the baby animals we've been hearing so much about. My pictures from that are still on my little camera. It was our first visit to the zoo with no stroller. The kids did pretty well! I'm just loving the fact that they can all walk, talk (sort of), and feed themselves. I guess it's time to start potty training soon. Ugh. Anyways, it was a very fun and low-stress vacation that I would definitely recommend.

Halloween

2009-11-04T10:13:00.003-07:00

Last week was so fun! I love Halloween. I got to help in Sydney's kindergarten class with the Halloween party which was fun.

Then we had a party with our neighborhood playgroup. Sadly, I didn't get any pictures there. Tanner was a lucky boy this year and got to use 3 costumes this Halloween. I wasn't done with his Peter Pan costume, so he was Super Tanner and wore one of his super hero capes.
We usually go to my parents' ward for their Halloween carnival. Josh took the kids this year since it was on the same night as our Young Women's mystery dinner, which was also very fun. So I wasn't there for the carnival but it looks like the had a good time and my Dad took lots of great pictures.

Here is our Peter Pan, mermaid, and Tinkerbell. I finally got Tanner's costume done and it turned out really cute I think! It seems that Peter Pan and Robin Hood get mixed up a lot. Just to clarify, Peter Pan has jaggedy edges on his clothes while Robin Hood's shirt has straight edges. Peter Pan has a green hat with a feather, Robin Hood's is yellow. And Peter Pan uses a dagger while Robin Hood has bows and arrows. I saw so many costumes online with Peter Pan using bows and arrows! Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Sydney thought the eating a donut off a string thing was pretty cool and told me all about it when she got home.

We tried to think of a fun place to go during the day on Halloween. There were quite a few places doing fun stuff for kids. We have passes at the aquarium so we decided to go there.

This is us at the entrance to the "haunted rain forest."

They decorated for Halloween by putting skulls and detached hands and feet inside the aquarium tanks.

Halloween night my parents were so nice to come and pass out candy for us to Josh and I could both go trick-or-treating. I love trick-or-treating in our neighborhood that has so many kids. It makes it so much fun to have lots of people out walking around.

Sydney is a seasoned trick-or-treater and was right with her friends running from house to house. Tanner and Natalie caught on that running was the thing to do but it took them a few times to understand that they were collecting candy. Tanner would go up with the group of kids and stand there with them and as soon as some of them started to leave he would turn around and follow them without getting any candy. They figured it out eventually.

And here is Tanner's 3rd Halloween costume. I found it for cheap the week before Halloween and thought it would be a fun addition to all our dress-up clothes. We decided to have him wear it on Halloween since it was a little warmer than Peter Pan. Also, he has a rather large head and I'm pretty sure that hat is not going to fit him next year. Isn't he a handsome little pirate?

Pumpkins and Witches Hats

2009-10-24T20:02:00.002-06:00

Our little pumpkins might just be my favorite thing we grow in the garden. We got 76 this year and they are making my house look so cute for this autumn season. We also have fun giving them away to anyone who comes over.
This year we also visited a pick-your-pumpkin patch. We intend to carve them sometime this week and watch and kids get grossed out with having to pull out all the pumpkin innards. Hee hee. Actually Josh might be doing a lot of that job. I can't imagine that smell is not going to make nauseous right now.

Natalie has to take her stuffed puppy everywhere. It's like my 4th kid. Whenever we got anywhere it's apparently my responsibility to remember to bring puppy and his blankie.

This afternoon I did a guilt-induced craft/treat with the kids. I don't feel like I spend much quality time with the kids lately doing things just for fun. By the time I get done everything I need to get done I just don't have a lot of energy for extra things. There are other moms that do seem to have the energy, so I just want to pretend they don't exist right now. Anyways, I found this cute idea on one of my favorite blogs, for making these witch's hats. Go here if you want to check out the recipe. This is not a low-fat snack, but they are yummy!

Here are Sydney and Natalie doing some frosting. Tanner didn't join us because he took a late nap instead. It's not really his thing anyways. We let him eat one when he got up. Eating treats is Tanner's thing.

Natalie made a short attempt at frosting a cookie. Then she tasted the melted chocolate and said "Hey! It's yummy mama!" like she was surprised. After that hardly any of her frosting made it onto the cookie.

Resolutions

2009-10-19T09:27:00.002-06:00

Lately I've started my yearly ritual of preparing for New Year's resolutions in October. Yes. I know New Years is two months away. I like to practice before I get there so my goals are more habits that I've set. Okay...my calendar is wrong and I'm off my rocker.

That being said, I listened to a talk by Jeffrey R. Holland that points out these three points about doing what is right and doing it now:

1. See the value.
2. Set it as a priority.
3. Scheduling won't be required because the need will dictate.

I thought this was so profound. I'm a list making guy. I made a list of the seven things I'm working on being consistent with daily and monthly. I created a spreadsheet to track how I've been doing. Just seeing the list helps me remember to do them. Seeing my consistency gives me more desire to make sure they're not just tasks, but see their value more and more. I've found that when these items have value, everything else falls into place.

Here's my list:
1. Morning Prayer.
2. Physical Exercise.
3. Personal Scripture Study.
4. Family Scripture Study.
5. Evening Prayer.
6. Monthly Temple Attendance.
7. Monthly Home Teaching.

What's your list?

Hero Week Day 7: Lisa

2009-10-11T18:58:00.001-06:00

As Hero Week comes to the end for 2009, it gets harder to choose who will make it this year and those who will have to wait for next year. So many people have made a big influence in my life. I'm grateful for an outlet to publicly thank others and remind them how incredible they are. There have been several this week that have touched my life so frequently and with such power that it's hard to single out specific individuals. However, this week must end with a redo of a past hero.

As several of the choices in my life have led me to be unsure of myself, one of the few constants in my life is Lisa. Not only has she brought me from a time where I was even more unsure of myself, she has quietly yet forcefully made all the difference. Lately I've noticed several attributes of Lisa and wanted to point them out as my way of saying thank you. Hopefully this doesn't come across as Celine Dion-ish. :)

You have to know the answer to give it

I used to love the phrase "fake it 'til you make it". It made me feel more confident that I could work my way through life trying to be the best I could until that was who I was. What I've learned since, is that in trying to fake so much, you need to take a break to see how your heroes accomplish the task, then emulate it. Pretending to be something your not intending to become it doesn't work. Working hard to emulate others in the correct things they do allows for frequent course correction to actually "make it".

This is Lisa. As most of you know, she's pregnant. She's still in her first trimester and extremely tired. She takes care of three children, runs the house, laundry, food. She's in the Young Women's presidency. She has lofty goals for painting the off-white ceilings and trim. She takes care of the garden and constant is talking about improvements to the yard. She wants the kids to enjoying gymnastics or some other sport. Teaching Sydney to play the piano. A husband that tries hard but fails a lot. And throughout all this, she is the most happy person I know.

Lisa is so much the better half, it brings such joy to my life. She has all the answers and in her humble, patient way, frequently helps me in learning how to become more.

Consistency

Lisa doesn't know how to stop. She's a freight train with things to get done and she's moving fast. One of my two main goals this year has been consistency. Lisa has tried to help by making every effort to support me in all that I do. She dislikes those who nag and doesn't do it. She does, in kind ways, remind me of things I want to accomplish. She has blessed me with an understanding I'm still learning to adapt to: do your best, make small changes, and be happy with who you are.

I am incredible at starting new goals, ways to improve, but dropping the ball on past items. Lisa is the model for consistency (and looks like a model too). I'm so grateful for someone who will share her secrets to success.

Loving

If there were anything I was concerned about losing when moving from my parents' house and getting married, it was my mom's frequently shown love for me, and my dad's hard work ethic. I know you marry someone just like your mom or your dad, but I did better: I got both in one. Lisa shows her love slightly differently, but with all the same intensity my mom did. The children all know their mom loves her because she spends a lot of quality time. She thinks about them all the time. She blesses their lives in more ways than they can see. This applies to her love for me as well.

Bean - you're amazing. I'm so grateful for all you are. You are my hero. Thanks for being patient with me and keep pushing me to meet my goals. Love you!

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Hero Week Day 6: Natalie

2009-10-10T23:39:00.002-06:00

As much as I love the twins, I didn't want to call them out as heroes so quickly. I love them a lot and they are incredible kids, but I want my gratitude to go to those who have taught me the most, or made a big impact in my life. That being said, now I know why they're my heroes.

I think there are several sides to me. One is intended to be humble, considerate and kind. I see several of those people on my Hero Week list. One is passionate, driven, who gets things done out of duty and honor. There are definitely those on the list. The third side is the need to be funny, silly, and spontaneous (Lisa's word for this part of me would be "weird" or "immature", in a kind way). It's this side I see how Natalie affects me so.

Natalie is a spunky little thing. Always wants the spotlight. Always knows how to get what she wants using many different weapons in her arsenal. I thought we had a bit in common just because (for another 7 months) we're both the youngest in our family. When Grandma Moore is around, it's looking like a tender lamb, who is ignored and malnourished. Grandma will then pick her up, and hold her for hours on end. When we're at the dinner table, it's playing with her food or making funny faces to make us laugh as well as keep attention on her. When we're watching a movie or just hanging out, she laughs at all the opportune times, despite not being old enough to get the joke (just that everyone else is laughing).

The thing she really does well at is being a great friend. Sure, she and Tanner have had their "it's mine" fests, where I swear they're two seagulls from Finding Nemo. Sure, Mrs. Grumpy Gills comes out on occasion. But when it's just the two of us, she makes the best friend. Lisa and Tanner went to the grocery store tonight, so Syd, Nano, and I played for awhile. When they got bored of playing cars, Sydney started pretending she couldn't see Natalie. Natalie got this big grin on her face, pushed Sydney a little, and Sydney flailed onto the love sac. This repeated over and over as they both came up with new ideas on how to make it even more funny.

Natalie has this way with everyone. She adapts to different people to see what they find funny, what makes them happy, and just makes it happen. It's fun to see how she makes Lisa happy versus Tanner. She knows my buttons to push (both good and bad). I love when she doesn't need to be reminded to say "please" and "thank you". She pauses after saying these kind words, looking at me for the express purpose to say "I did this to please you".

Sometimes I get so focused on trying to do what's right, I lose the friendship qualities. Doing what is right is important. Not losing your friends in the process, not judging, and not coming off like Mr. perfect (while we all know it's just the opposite) etc. is equally as important. I really love Nano because she knows what she wants, she's really good at it, and it frequently includes helping others. Her best friend is Puppy. Her little stuffed animal takes baths when she does, takes naps, washes hands when dirty, etc. She cries when he goes in the wash.

Natalie is my hero because she loves me and finds ways to make me happy, as great friends do. I love you sweetie!

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Hero Week Day 5: Rich Moore

2009-10-09T22:38:00.002-06:00

Rich has always been a part of my life. I never would have grown to love computers or software development if it hadn't been for Rich. Classic games of ping pong and Warcraft II (IPX/SPX baby) bring back a lot of memories. He gave me my first computer. It was because they knew his work ethic that I got my first software job. But the thing I've always appreciated most was how much time Rich and I have spent. Of all my siblings, I'm sure we've spent the most time almost surpassing the rest. The thing I've learned the most from Rich is that despite pain and other heartache, you come through the kindness and caring beyond belief.

Anytime I'm struggling or needing someone to just listen, Rich has been there. Frequently he'll instant message me just to see how things are going. From Halo parties to just hanging out, Rich has always looked out for me. It's fun to see a good friend become a dad. Rich loves his kids beyond anything else.

Just this past week, we got together for lunch. Not only is his focus on what's new with me, he had personal experience that could help me with situations at work. We're quite similar in what we like, but he's far surpassed me on humility, kindness, and a guy that just wants what's best for his family.

Here's to hoping this friendshop just gets even better over time. Thanks for your example Rich!

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Hero Week Day 4: Harvey and Mary Brown

2009-10-08T22:08:00.002-06:00

For years growing up I had an extra set of grandparents next door. Harvey and Mary Brown were the best things growing up. I could spend all day over at their house. Playing games, eating sugar cereals not found at my house, etc. Later in life going over with Rich to play Rook. The losers put the scorecard on their fridge to give them added reason to play again soon. I miss so much having two people so easy to talk to. I frequently tell Lisa when we die, I can't wait to introduce her to them.

As a common theme this week, I didn't realize how much they gave until later in life. I never thought that they had other plans, places to be, etc. It was all about me. I love how they were always finding new ways to make me happy, like it was their only goal in life. It's like the grandparents that tell all their grandchildren (individually, of course) that they are the favorite.

I wish I had the chance to tell them how much they meant to me before they passed away. Some of my most vivid memories were at their place when I was young. The Easter egg hunts, playing cards, helping wash dishes and thinking it was fun because it was at their house, learning to ride without training wheels.

Giving with the only expectation of joy and friendship. I miss you so much.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Hero Week Day 3: Rob & Liz

2009-10-07T22:55:00.002-06:00

Day 3 is all about Rob and Liz (my brother and sister in law).

When they were married, Liz's dad gave Rob a dollar. He said Rob would need it as Liz is extremely generous. Rob and Liz are frequently doing great acts of kindness that go unnoticed except those they're blessing. I remember multiple times growing up I was invited to play basketball with Rob and his friends when I'm sure it wouldn't have been any of his friends' first choice. You never know what great examples you have around you because they're just humble and consistent. The thing that amazes me most about Rob and Liz is simple: doing what's right looks easy. I've never heard Rob or Liz complain. It just doesn't fit who they are. They always look like they have something to laugh about or just a smile implying they have it great, even on occasions when they don't.

I remember when Rob was knocked out cold playing soccer. After coming to (in the hospital) he motioned for a pencil and paper, as he couldn't speak. He wanted to know what happened, and make sure everyone knew he'd be just fine.

Rob always seemed to know what I'd do (wrong) before I did it. I remember his advice I didn't take before I left on my mission. I remember playing basketball with some guys that were getting out of control. He took me aside and said I should go home. I told him I could take care of myself. It got out of control. If I did all this for someone else (with great care) and they treated me like that, it'd take a long time for me to get over, if I ever did. Rob still calls to check in, see how things are going.

Hero week is about people that have the attributes I crave. I'm so grateful for great people and that I'm blessed to have them in my life.

Love you Rob and Liz!

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Hero Week Day 2: Tanner

2009-10-06T15:43:00.004-06:00

It all started with the smile. Tanner is the cutest, sweetest, gentlest little boy I'll ever meet. Sure he has his days, but here's why Tanner takes the cake (oh he'd eat it if it were literal...):

Caring:

Tanner brings such happiness to our family. Yesterday I was stopping to think what about him makes him so special. Frequently with daredevil sisters, his most common phrase is "ssss ok?", wanting to make sure whoever is hurt is ok. Despite the need of the twins to say "mine" lately, he is often found looking for puppy (Natalie's lovey) so he can give a peace offering to his sister. Anytime we go to the park, etc. he's always coming over every fifteen minutes or so to give me a hug, then runs back to play.

Quick to forgive:

Tanner always shows me how important it is to forgive and forget. No matter what wrong has been done (stolen toy, pushed over, etc.) as soon as the wrong is righted, he's back to happy ol' Tanner. I don't know how he does it.

Unforgettable laugh:
Tanner has this laugh that you just want to tickle him to death to hear, because you can't stop smiling or laughing yourself. Yesterday we were playing steamrollers and he get so excited to spend one on one time that he just bursts with energy and laughter. I wonder if he realizes how infectious his mood is. A few minutes with Tanner can right any wrong. Any time I ask who loves Mama, he's first to thrust his hand in the air and yell "meeeeeeeeeee!"

Instead of getting older, I hope someday to be younger so I can act like Tanner. Caring, easy going, loving, and fun.

Love you buddy! Thanks for your example.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Hero Week Day 1: Paul Evans

2009-10-05T13:37:00.003-06:00

It's that time of year again. A great time to say thanks to the heroes in my life. I'd hate to have one entry to say thank you and never say thanks publicly again. Here is a look back at the past two years:

2008 Heroes:
Chris Okelberry, Thomas S. Monson, Eric and Andrea Ruben, Joseph Smith, Sydney Moore, Colin Lewis and Nick Galieti, Jeffrey R. Holland

2007 Heroes:
Frank and Jenny Moore, Paul and Mo Ruben, Henry B. Eyring, Justin McMurray,
Dan Aird, Jeff Eschler, Peter Tew, Wayne and Eileen Moore, Lisa Moore

As Hero Week came rolling around, this hero came readily to mind: Paul Evans. For those of you who don't live in the Park Pointe Ward, Paul is in the Elders quorum presidency. He frequently teaches, shares his experience, and makes comments that make me reach for pen and paper.

It makes me wonder how we are so blessed to have such good examples around. Paul is a humble man who allows you to see his strengths as well as his weaknesses, if he feels it will help. His lessons are quite frank yet he's careful not to offend. We had a lesson about anger management. He told a story of when we has angry with his swamp cooler (haven't we all been?). He said he was letting some frustration out, but couldn't hear his son saying "don't be scary, daddy". Who can take offense when he's explain how he had to learn the lesson just that very week?

I have really been focusing a lot on putting your energy in the right place and giving it your all. Passion drives Paul Evans. This is why he's my hero this week. Keep it up, buddy.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

General Conference and Hero Week approaching

2009-09-25T11:51:00.003-06:00

As General Conference approaches, my Outlook reminder dings "Reminder: Hero Week approaches". For those of you who weren't reading the blog last year, this will be year three where, each year (the week following October General Conference), I post seven blog entries about those who have made a lasting change in my life over the past year.

I love October. General Conference always makes me remember what's important in life and a renewal of energy to try a little harder and put give a little more. It's helpful to have so much spiritual guidance in one weekend to help me realize who is most important to me, how far I've come, and say thanks to those who have helped so much this year.

Stay tuned...

Twins

2009-09-25T09:58:00.004-06:00

I've found myself making a few comments lately that might suggest that I wish I had had my children one at a time instead of getting my set of twins. In anticipation of our next baby I keep saying things like "it better just be one in there" and stuff like that. So just to set the record straight I am SO happy we were blessed with our twins, Tanner and Natalie. Yes, two babies are more challenging than one baby and the same goes for two 2-year-olds and so on. But it's so worth it and I wouldn't have it any other way even if I could. I like to remind myself that there are people out there with sets of 3, 4, 5, or 6 kids, which would be WAY harder. I'm writing this now while my kids are playing all cute together. Later on today they will probably fight over toys, throw their lunch all over the floor, and refuse to take their naps. And then, I might be feeling a little less grateful for them. The majority of the time they are just plain good kids though. For the most part, they have learned how to share and take turns because they had to do that from day one. They make up funny games to play together. As soon as one gets hurt the other one is usually right there checking to see if they're okay. Sometimes Tanner will jabber on in his own little made-up language and Natalie will listen and nod in agreement like she totally understands him. And whenever Josh asks "who loves mama?" I always get a chorus of "ME!" with hands in the air. So I'm going to try to do better about complaining less and remembering that I would way rather have these kids, with all the messes, and timeouts, and crying that comes with them, than not have them at all.

Kindergarten

2009-09-17T10:27:00.003-06:00

Yay for Kindergarten! Sydney had her first day a few weeks ago. She has really enjoyed it so far. She was excited all summer and all of the sudden had this emotional meltdown the night before school was going to start. I kept asking her if she was nervous about school but she insisted that she was NOT nervous about school, she was just mad because her ice cream melted onto her hand. Right. When I took her to school the next day she was also nervous and didn't want me to leave, but then later she just said she was annoyed because of "all those parents standing around taking pictures of us." She's all adjusted now! It didn't take long.
At this same time she was invited to start a Jr. Tops class in gymnastics. It involved taking her twice a week for an hour and a half. I was a little worried that 3 hours of gymnastics every week was a bit much for a 5-year-old but we did it anyways. It seemed she wasn't going to get better in her regular class. There were too many girls and some of them were as old as 9 or 10 so the class had too big of range to work well. Her new class had girls all her age and size and was great, but apparently it was stressing her out. She stopped trying to get better and kept telling the teacher "I can't do it" when they did cartwheels. I started having to convince her to go every time so we finally decided it was time to take a break. Maybe in a couple years she'll want to get back into it. It was probably just too much with kindergarten and 3 times as much gymnastics all at once. I think it's been a relief for all of us actually.

Alaska

2009-09-17T09:54:00.003-06:00

Over a month ago all the boys of my extended family from the Muir side went to Alaska for a guys retreat. I obviously was not on this trip but Josh isn't getting around to blogging about it so I'm going to post some of their cool pictures. I wish I had a good group picture of all the boys. There were quite a lot of them but they all split up a lot so there is no shot of the big group. Thanks Jer for funding this trip! Josh had a blast!

Here is some of my family getting ready to board one of Jeremy's planes. Pretty awesome way to travel! Apparently Josh even got to sit in the cockpit for part of the flight.

Here is Nick, Eric, and Josh ready to a little fly fishing.

It's a keeper! Well actually, no. All they did was catch and release in the river. Poor fishies. They were saving their keepers for the deep sea fishing day.

If you look closely in this picture you can see how this river is filled with fish. The guys said they could walk out in the river and be kicking them out of the way.

Here are the real keepers! They didn't catch as much as they were hoping out in the deep sea but it was still a good haul. We have quite a bit of halibut and it turns out I really like halibut!

Isn't this picture awesome? They nicknamed this old house "the shrieking shack." On top of it are two bald eagles just hanging out.

Ketchikan, Alaska looks so beautiful! Even though we usually opt for sunny beaches on our vacations, I would love to go visit there myself someday.

Backyard camp-out

2009-09-07T22:21:00.002-06:00

It's been some time since we've been camping. Tanner and Natalie haven't yet had the pleasure of the experience. All summer we meant to do a practice run in the backyard so we could see if the kids could handle real camping. We meant to do this before our neighborhood camp-out but never did. We figured it was better late than never, so on the same night our neighbors went and camped in nature we made an attempt in the backyard.

Let it be known I do know how to rough-it and sleep on the ground, under the stars and all that. I have done it without complaint in the past. But I'll choose comfort if I have the choice. Our 8-person tent sleeps the five us quite comfortably and allows a mattress for each of us. So we had the girls wing...

The boys wing...

And the master suite, which Natalie kept confusing as her wing...

Since we had no chocolate, marshmallows or campfire with which to roast them, I made up another special treat.

Don't they look delicious? They were. Way better than smores!
It turned it was a good idea for us to have a practice run. Tanner was kicked out of the tent at around 10 pm for being such a loud, noisy boy and refusing to stay in his wing of the tent. I went to sleep inside the house with him. And by 3 am Josh brought the girls back in the house too. I think they got cold. Oh well! We'll try again next summer.

Ruben Family Reunion

2009-08-23T10:40:00.005-06:00

A few weeks ago we had the Ruben Family Reunion up at Bear Lake. I haven't been to Bear Lake in 7 years and I really wonder why we haven't made it up there in so long. The kids loved it, it's close to home, you have the beach, hiking, raspberries, so many of my favorite things. We will definitely have to head up again next summer I think. Since the reunion included something like 45 people my Grandma rented out a lodge for us to all stay at with 14 bedrooms and 9 bathrooms. We were very comfortable and had a great time all 4 days. Some of the things we did were the Minnetonka caves, ATV-ing, beach time, Pickleville Playhouse, Bear Lake Pizza, raspberry shakes, ping-pong tournaments (apparently Josh is unbeatable), and the Ruben talent show. I even learned the names of all my cousins while I was there! Here are a bunch of pictures.

We are blessed with such smiley, happy children.

The Minnetonka caves were fun and fairly good workout with all those stairs. The guide actually turned off the lights and let us go through part of the cave in total darkness which was cool.

I love the ATVs, but I'm a little slow. Poor Josh had to keep stopping and waiting for me to catch up. We caught a very pretty view of the lake from up high.

We ordered an "Old Ephraim" size pizza at the Bear Lake Pizza Co. It's 28" and fed all of us with a slice or two to spare.

We ended the trip with the famous Bear Lake raspberry shakes and, of course, a meltdown. Sydney didn't want a raspberry shake. She wanted a plain vanilla cone. We we rolled our eyes and had Tanner trade with her. And everyone was happy again.

Timpanogos

2009-08-03T21:09:00.006-06:00

Well I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself blogging about this event only two days after it happened. It seems like I don't get around to blogging about anything for at least a month later these days! Last Saturday we hiked Mt. Timpanogos. We'd been planning on this hike all summer with some friends. I had done the hike when I was a teenager but, wow, it was easier back then. And when I did it then it had been cloudy and cold and in the end we were hiking in a cloud so we couldn't see any of the amazing view. This time we had beautiful weather and the view was incredible and definitely worth the trek.

We were able to see the peak at about the halfway point of the hike. I didn't know that was the peak and I didn't think it was humanly possible to get up there. But we did!

Here is the view we got of Utah Lake from the summit. The summit is about a mile from the peak, but the view is almost the same.

Here is our group. Sharidee, Sara, Josh, me, Mike, and Jeff. Mike and Jeff were super fast and set a nice brisk pace for us the whole way up. They had a soccer game to get back to that afternoon. Apparently, hiking 18 miles is not enough exercise in one day for these guys. They went ahead of us once we got to the summit so they could hurry and get to the top and run down the mountain to get home. Crazy boys.

We made it to the top! I love this picture because Sara and Sharidee look like they're going to fall off the mountain. I have to admit there were times I was thinking we really should have increased our life insurance before doing this hike. I'm not a big fan of heights. By the way, Sara is 16 weeks pregnant and did this hike. She's amazing.

There are two ways to get down from Timpanogos. The way you went up or by sliding down the glacier. We chose not to slide down the glacier because nobody else seemed to be going that way. Sara really wanted to do it but got outvoted. Sorry! We did still slide down this hill of snow though and it was super fun. This was the only picture we got that worked out. Josh enjoyed listening to us scream the whole way down.

8 hours later we made it back to the car. I had read that it was about 12.5 miles roundtrip. When we got to the bottom the ranger told us it was an 18 mile hike. We were so excited! In my book 18 miles is a pretty big accomplishment.

Lagoon

2009-07-28T22:01:00.003-06:00

We went to Lagoon the other day for our stake Lagoon day. Originally I'd planned to skip it until a friend of mine told me it's actually quite fun to just get in for free with an entrance pass and do the couple of free rides you get with coupons. So we did that! The pictures turned out pretty awful because I wasn't going to haul around my good camera when we had so much other stuff. My parents also joined us for the evening.

Tanner was hilarious on the Merry-go-Round. He clung to the pole like he was scared for his life. Sydney actually cried because she thought it was scary. Natalie looked around like she was bored out of her mind. I'm very glad we didn't actually pay for ride passes.

Ahh, the train. The only ride that is less thrilling than the Merry-go-Round. Nobody cried or even looked scared. The train ride goes around the pond and you get to see the animals they have in the park. I've always felt kind of bad for the animals in the zoo. The ones at Lagoon have it far worse I think.

My favorite part of Lagoon has to be Pioneer Village where there is suddenly way fewer people and a nice calm atmosphere. And its the perfect place to get ice cream.

Natalie was nice and clean and ate her ice cream in a timely manner.

Tanner savored his ice cream. I guess he was trying to make it last all night. Seriously, it took him at least a half hour. It was melting all over the place. He had ice cream all over his face, shirt, arms, hands, legs, and feet. He provided some good entertainment for us.

Pandora Directive

2009-07-13T23:01:00.003-06:00

Back in the good ol' days of Access Software where my brother Rich and I worked, they produced some amazing adventure games. The Tex Murphy series included the Pandora Directive, released in 1997. Anyway, for those still reading, there was an easter egg in the game which several guys from work (including Rich) put their faces in the game in a secret room, with some audio clips. I thought Wende (Rich's wife) would appreciate a flashback of a young (I think 23 year old) Rich (that's him up top).

I've been playing this off and on for the past year, and have loved playing through it again. Nothing like DosBox and not having to swap cds.

Happy 4th of July

2009-07-06T21:43:00.003-06:00

We had fun with sparklers after Tanner and Natalie went to bed. I bought these sparklers about 4 years ago and just now decided to break them out.

That's Josh's signature. He had to draw very fast. If I knew how to use my camera better I could probably have figured out how to give him more time but it turned out pretty good!

Happy Birthday Sydney

2009-07-06T21:25:00.002-06:00

I'm about 2 weeks late posting about Sydney's birthday but better late than never. We decided to do a hawaiian theme "beach" party. This is because a couple months earlier they learned about Hawaii at preschool. Sydney was apparently under the impression that they would be GOING to Hawaii that day. She cried the whole way home and insisted that her teacher had told her they were going to Hawaii and I was totally wrong. I had to call her teacher and have her explain that they were only pretending about Hawaii. So we thought it would be a good idea to bring a little of Hawaii to our home on her birthday. It turned out really fun despite the fact that it poured outside all day and we could not do the "beach" part of the party. I had to think up some extra games to entertain the kids at the last minute. Sydney is super excited about being 5 now especially because it means kindergarten in a few months. Where did the time go?? We also went to the Mayan for dinner that night. Tanner granted Sydney a special birthday miracle by falling asleep on the way there and sleeping for almost the entire meal. It's way easier to eat out with only one 2-year-old to entertain instead of two! It was a very fun day.

He speaks!

2009-06-30T22:04:00.003-06:00

Tanner has his own special language and he is becoming quite fluent in it. He has picked up a few English words as well so I'm not too worried yet that we have a speech problem. He's behind in his speech, but at least we're making some progress. I love when he tells me stories in his language, complete with hand gestures and dramatic facial expressions. Also he does know one important word for when the camera comes out. Cheese!

Back in our beautiful mountains

2009-06-16T19:27:00.003-06:00

Yay summer is here! Which means we go hiking. Our hiking may a bit more limited this year. Tanner and Natalie have put on a bit of weight. It's all muscle! But it's heavy muscle. On Saturday, before Sydney's gymnastics meet, we decided to take a stroll up to Donut Falls. This is the easiest hike on our list of family hikes, but it's a good workout when you're lugging around a kid on your back. So we'll be sticking with fairly easy hikes this summer I think.

Josh is such a gentleman and always takes the heavy little guy. Isn't he a cutie?

I stocked up on Lunchables a couple weeks when they were on sale. We're all set for a few hiking lunches.

The biggest difference between this year and last is that the twins are walking! So they gave us a break on the way down.

Gymnastics

2009-06-16T18:50:00.002-06:00

Sydney had her first gymnastics meet a couple weeks ago. It was actually called a mini meet. Sadly, I wasn't there. It was right during nap time for Tanner and Natalie and taking 2 ornery 2-year-olds to a gymnastics meet where they would just want to go play on all of the equipment sounded like a bad idea. So, since I usually take Sydney to her class every week, Josh went to the mini meet so he could get a chance to watch her skills. She's getting so good I think! She just recently advanced from the Tots class to Level 1 which she's very excited about. It's so fun to see the progress she's made. She likes to come home and show Tanner and Natalie what she can do and then they do somersaults to show her what they can do.

Natalie's dark side

2009-06-15T10:50:00.002-06:00

Short history: Natalie and Sydney have bunkbeds (thanks Nick and Kim!) and Tanner has a crib and regular bed in his room. Natalie takes naps and sleeps in her bunkbed. Tanner takes his nap in the crib (so he doesn't get out) and sleeps in his bed at night. This worked for a little while....

Now Natalie and Tanner have learned how to climb up to Sydney's top bunk. Natalie won't leave the ceiling fan alone (it doesn't get turned on anymore), and won't leave Sydney alone at night, wanting to sleep on the top bunk. Tanner won't sleep in his bed preferring the crib (not sure why). So we put Natalie in Tanner's bed the last few nights.

So last night, Tanner is crying in his crib, and I go in to see what's up. Natalie gives me this little smirk like 'I can't wait to see your face'. She had emptied Tanner's drawer of clothes INTO THE CRIB. Not just that. Her shoes, books, diapers, stuffed animals, etc. You name it, she's trying to fill up the crib with anything she can reach. Tanner was gripping the end of his grib like the stuff was boiling lava. I couldn't stop laughing, taking things out and attempting to tell Nanners that it wasn't cool and she shouldn't do it. She smirks again, starts laughing, and I just bust out laughing. I still can't stop when I tried to tell Lisa what happened, or even now while I'm typing.

While we were away...

2009-06-07T14:01:00.005-06:00

So while we're on the cruise, hoping for the best (i.e. the kids won't start any upheaval, etc), everything went well. It sounds like the kids were as spoiled as we were. We sure love our parents!

Paul and Mo (Lisa's parents) sent us pictures like this:

My parents sent this video:

Cruising the Bahamas

2009-06-06T15:33:00.007-06:00

A couple weeks ago Josh and I enjoyed another fabulous getaway to some white sandy beaches. This time we visited the Bahamas. Josh found a great deal for a 4-night cruise on the Majesty of the Seas. Doesn't it look majestic? It was a much needed trip away and it's so true that absence makes the heart grow stronger. I missed the kids a lot more on this trip but I absolutely loved spending lots of care-free time with my hubby. :)
So our cruise departed out of Miami. I'd never been there before but we didn't see much of it besides the airport.

Here we are about to sail off. Bye-bye Miami!

Here's our towel elephant our stateroom attendant made us. The staterooms were especially small on this ship but we didn't care. You basically just sleep in there anyways. And I sleep really well on ships. I think it's the subtle rocking all night that makes me sleep like a baby and wake up really rested.

A lot of people don't like the assigned seating that Royal Caribbean does but I actually really like it. It gives us a chance to make friends, which was especially fun this time because we kept running into them on our excursions.

This is Luke and Sonia who live in Florida.

This is Calvin and Kristen. We couldn't remember Kristen's name on the first night so we suggested we call her Hobbes. I told her about his the next day and she liked the nickname. So it stuck and we called her Hobbes most of the time on the trip.

Even though you can eat for free pretty much all day and night on the ship we decided to try out Johnny Rockets once just for kicks. Calvin and Hobbes said it was worth the $5 cover charge and I have to agree. It really was quite delicious. It was also a fun little diner styled in red leather and chrome like in the 50's and the employees would come out and dance for us every once in a while.

Day 2 of our cruise was Nassau. We decided to do a beach break on Blackbeard's Cay. It was beautiful! We just swam around in the crystal clear waters and laid out on the beach chairs. The white sand just makes the water look so amazing.

It turned out Calvin and Hobbes were also going to Blackbeard's to swim with the stingrays. We saw a couple of "wild" stingrays while we were out swimming too but Josh and I were too late to get in on the actual stingray excursion.

After relaxing on the beach we wandered around Nassau for a bit and did a little shopping.

Here we are at dinner that evening.

Coco Cay was our second stop on the cruise. This is Royal Caribbean's private Island. I think it was our favorite stop. We didn't book any excursions but we did rent floating beach mats and floated around the ocean. This was actually not good because the sun was very intense but it felt so good floating in the cool water that we didn't notice the heat too much. That resulted in a sunburn. We also found Calvin and Hobbes again and they showed us the ways of geocaching. We'd never done this before and it was pretty fun! Like a little treasure hunt. We're planning to take this up as a new family hobby. I'm so glad we joined them on the nature trail which took us to the other side of the island because it was nearly deserted there. We found a stunning beach with hardly anyone on it. You could walk out for probably a hundred yards into the ocean and still be waist deep. It was awesome.

Our final stop was in Key West. Due to our sunburns and the lack of beaches in Key West we decided to stay out of the sun a little bit that day.

We spent the first little while wandering around the town looking at all the beautiful houses and historic buildings.

The very first thing we did was call home and make sure the kids were behaving well for their grandparents.

We visited Ripley's Believe It or Not museum. And once again we ran into Calvin and Hobbes. I think they were stalking us. :) Ripley's was weird but there was air conditioning. I am not used to humidity so I was extremely happy to go somewhere cool and indoors for a bit. We did a little shopping afterwards and I had some killer Key Lime pie. I also got some Key Lime juice. I don't know if this is better than the regular lime juice I buy in the grocery store. I haven't actually made a key lime pie out of it yet.

Here is us sitting in the shade of a bush.

And back to the ship. Overall this was a wonderful trip and I highly recommend this cruise. Especially if you can get a good deal on flights to Miami. Thanks again to my parents and Josh's parents for watching the kids for us! And kudos to any of you who actually read this entire post. That was long!

My new hobby

2009-05-20T22:20:00.005-06:00

For those of you who know Brooke or follow her blog then you know I'm totally copying her. But I'm so excited about the money I'm saving on groceries lately! My good friend, Andrea, invited me to a GrocerySmarts class a few weeks ago and it was awesome. I've seriously been telling everyone I know about it ever since. I've been bulking up our food storage over the last couple weeks and saving tons of money doing it. Today I made a trip to Albertsons and look what I got.

That's 3 Marie Calendar frozen dinners, 3 bottles of salad dressing, 2 bottles of mustard, 2 packages of hot dogs, and 1 can of shaving cream. My grand total? $3.33. The regular price total would have been $37.55. That's a savings of 91%. I'm kind of addicted to this now. Honestly, I get this little high when I watch the cashier scan my coupons and the total of my groceries just keeps dropping. It's so much fun!
Anyways, my sister Rachel and I asked Brooke to teach another GrocerySmarts class for us on Saturday, May 30th at 1:00 at my parent's home in Murray. Anyone who would like to come learn how to save some money is welcome! The class is free. Just comment me with your email and I'll get you the address.

My babies are 2!

2009-05-18T21:34:00.003-06:00

It's official. Our babies are no longer babies. They are officially toddlers. Their birthday landed on a Sunday this year so we decided to do most of the celebrating on Saturday in order to have more playtime with the presents. Here are some pictures of the fun weekend. My parents came over to play on Saturday for a bit and Josh's parents came over on Sunday. I didn't get any pictures with Josh's parents since my camera battery died. I got video but I'm not technical enough to figure out how to put that on here. The video is cute though. They got a jump-o-lene and have been using it well.

The kids are enjoying their pizza on the new picnic table.

Natalie is feeling oh so pretty in the pink tu-tu that Grandma Ruben gave her. She's worn it every day since.

I'm glad the kids got to unwrap something. I was too lazy to wrap their presents this year since they were in fairly large boxes and they don't really care that much at this age anyways. Tanner is playing with some cool lego-like toys. They're fun. I made this awesome back scratcher out of them.

Now for a little about my cuties. Tanner first. Tanner is such a character and I'm so glad to have a little boy in the mix around here. I think he's actually a lot like me. He doesn't mind doing his own thing on his own and he gets very focused on whatever he's working on. He lately really likes puzzles and lego building and every once in a while he'll stop what he's doing to come over and give me a quick hug or just make sure I'm still around. He's very independent and has learned how to get what he needs. What he needs is usually food so he's learned how to open the doors that have those child-proof handles on them and get into the pantry. Everything in the lower two shelves in there and anything on the counter is no longer safe. He's a very good sharer. If he has an extra binky or snack he will usually give it to one of his sisters. However, if his snack runs out he will also try to share somebody elses with himself. It's very fun to watch how he thinks.

Natalie is kind of our "class clown" in the family. She loves to make us all laugh. She also loves to copy everything her older sister does, right down to the facial expressions. I told Sydney to get dressed today and she gave me a pouty face and folded her arms subbornly. Natalie walked over and stood right next to her, made the same pouty face and folder her arms. She is also very girly. She loves to dress herself in jewelry and hates and carry around purses all day. AND she likes getting her hair done and will sit very still for me. Yay! She also loves to dance to anything - church hymns, the vacuum, the blender. I held her one night while she was sick and watched American Idol and even then her little back would start twitching as she tried to dance to the music. All in all I am so grateful to have these little people in our family! Even though twins can be very challenging sometimes I wouldn't have it any other way. I can't imagine what it would be like to have one of them without the other.

Tulip Festival '09

2009-05-03T21:47:00.004-06:00

Yay for tulips! My favorite flower. The tulips I planted in the backyard are not doing so well. Everyone else's are in full bloom but mine are looking a little dry and wilted. So once again we headed to Thanksgiving Point so I could get my tulip fix. Traditionally we go on my birthday but this year we had bigger plans for that day so we went on the following Monday. While talking to my friend, Sara at the gym I mentioned I wanted to go that night and she said they were going too. Family night with the Weavers! That's always fun. The kids had a blast as usual. What kid doesn't love running through a field surrounded in flowers?

I took way less pictures this year it seemed. It could have something to do with the fact that the twins are walking, no running now. I already have plenty of pictures of my kids running away from me so I didn't need anymore of those.

Tanner is getting a little more mischevious these days. You can see when his mind working on a new escape plan.

Everyone squit into the sun and smile! Here is Tanner Weaver, my Tanner, Natalie, Sydney, and Jackson.

So this picture is just in case Sydney and Jackson fall in love and get married someday! Hee hee.

The kids had a blast at the fountain which, for some reason, was not turned on. Natalie was barely tall enough to reach and look like she was going to dive in at any second. Tanner actually was going to dive in, but it was more on purpose in his case.

A wicked birthday

2009-05-03T20:26:00.004-06:00

So my birthday was 2 weeks ago and I'm barely getting around to blogging. It was such a great birthday that I had to wait until I had adequate time to rave about it on here. Back in December our friend Okie found out that previous season ticket holders at the Capitol Theatre could get tickets to Wicked a couple days early. So being the super friends that they are they asked if we would like to join them! Yay! Because basically I have wanted to see this broadway for the last 4 years. I have all the music memorized, the piano book, a magnet on my fridge, and have even seen an illegally recorded tape of it. Yeah I'm basically obsessed. But I had never seen the real thing. It was the best birthday ever!! Tickets ended up being extremely hard to come by. They apparently sold out within minutes the day they were available. Anyways, I love every single minute of it. The talent was amazing and in my opinion every bit as good as the original cast on the CD. Elphaba could really belt out those notes in "Defying Gravity" and Glinda's song "Popular" was one of my favorites. I couldn't believe how she could bounce around the stage in heels all hyper and sing at the same time. Yeah basically I just sat there and grinned all goofy-like for almost the whole production. It was also extra fun because we got to go with Okie and Lynette who basically make me laugh till I'm crying almost every time we see them. Thanks for the fun night guys!

Josh and I during the intermission when I bought my awesome Wicked t-shirt.

Okie and Lynette are very savvy to the plays at Capitol Theatre and were smart enough to buy a poster during the intermission and then wait outside the backstage exit at the end of the show to get an autograph from all the cast. Why didn't I think of that?? Why didn't Okie tell me to think of that? Oh well! Next time I will be so smart. So above is "Glinda" signing with her pink pen.

Here's me, "Elphaba", and Lynette. Elphaba looks pretty different when she's not green.

Fun at the Farm

2009-04-15T14:29:00.004-06:00

Monday evening we decided the weather was too beautiful not to visit Wheeler Farm. This is one of our favorite hang-outs. We brought bread for the ducks but they must have had too many visitors that day because they weren't interested. The lighting was just perfect for some picture taking. There were photographers doing family portraits and engagements. The kids were all smily and happy. I kinda wish I'd planned for a photo shoot and dressed the kids in more coordinating outfits, but oh well. I had fun playing with the pictures in photoshop.