February 2015

We have some new houses being built across the street from us and all the big trucks, tractors and construction is very entertaining for me and the kids to watch.

This was the day they were pouring the foundation.  They have basements so after we got Hunter from the bus stop we walked down along the sidewalk and I let them watch what was going for a little while, you can't see the basement being poured from our house, but I'm sure the people building it probably didn't love having an audience haha!  So I only let us stay for a few minutes, but the kids still wanted to watch even if they couldn't see it very well, so they sat in our driveway for quite a while just watching the trucks!

I tried

all day

to get

a picture of this!!!

Haha and I finally got one but it's blurry!  She kept pulling this face, it was too funny not to get a picture of!

Park days for visiting teaching are the best!

Especially with your boyfriend!  This cute little boy is my visiting teaching partners son, he is 4 months younger than Timber, hard to tell since he's as big as her!

I think I would wake up a bit sore if I slept twisted like this!!

Hunter was in her way...

so she climbed over him!

Here is a rare occasion that you can kind of see her top teeth from smiling!  She does not have a toothy smile at all!  To see her top teeth I almost always have to lift her top lip up!

Her first Oreo!  Does every family document this or are we just a bit obsessed with Oreos??

Got to love that chocolaty mess!

Top it off with an attempted drink of water, she's still trying to figure out a sippy cup.

What is it with kids getting under chairs??  All of my kids have done it, and it makes for some cute pictures, but some very grumpy babies when they can't figure out how to get back out of there!

This is one of her favorite places to go hide out at.  I at one point had all this baby food nice and organized by fruits and vegetables and then by kinds (it was all given to us so kind of random ones in there) but this little girl thinks it is so fun to go and throw baby food jars around!  Thank goodness she can't throw hard yet!

She has started to prefer what we are eating over baby food, it seems like she wanted real food way younger than Hunter or Aspen did!

And we bought her a soft tipped sippy cup because both Hunter and Aspen seemed to do better with those kind at first too, and she figured this kind out!  It is hilarious to watch her drink from it!  She will put it in her mouth and then jerk back as far as she can to get a drink!!

She loves the dishwasher!

Which doesn't surprise us that much because both of our others did when they were little too.

But she just seems too tiny to stand there and pull stuff out of it!!  This is one of her favorite places to stand up though!

And here is a much better shot of her Dale teeth!  With the help of Cooper and Brandi as our photographer.

I was making cookies one time that my neighbor was over and she couldn't figure what in the world I was doing to my eggs, I explained that I was getting the weird umbilical cord like white things off and throwing them away.  She didn't have a clue what I was talking about and told me I must be imagining things, so the next time I cracked some eggs I had to send her a picture of them to prove my point!  Hopefully I didn't ruin her though, cuz it is very annoying when I know that those are in something I have a very hard time eating it, I had one time where I bit into one in a cake and I can not stand them ever since!  Yuck!  Ben thinks I'm crazy too but he will let me dissect our eggs so that I will eat the food.  He will not dissect them though, so if he is ever cooking I always over to "help" with the eggs, haha!

My mom always had sugar cookies with our names on the for Valentine's day and I always loved it!  So I have continued on that tradition, but my frosting was too cold and I was struggling, so Ben stepped up!  He was not very happy that I thought I needed to document this....

And I maybe shouldn't have because his turned out way better than mine!!!  He did Hunter and Aspen's, mine look like the kids did them haha!!

This little one liked her cookie, well mostly her frosting.

Going for a ride in dad's truck might require the use of safety glasses.

For entertaining some cute little ones at least!

Aspen got a bloody nose during sharing time, it got all over her dress and all over her chair, and I'm sure on the floor too, but since the carpet is dark we couldn't find where to clean that up at!  We got it to stop bleeding then I went and found Ben and he took her home and changed her dress before class time started.  We are used to bloody noses from Hunter, but this was a first for Aspen, and I don't think she has had hardly any since, apparently one gusher for her was enough to never pick her nose that hard again!  I wish Hunter would learn that lesson!!  I am proud to say that I got all the blood out of her dress!  I did sit there and scrub for quite a while but there isn't even a trace of it left behind!

I made the kids these cute chore charts.  I let them pick out their paint color and their tape for the lines.  Unfortunately I have been to lazy to actually start using them!  I have zero desire to fight with them to get there chores done, is that horrible!!  I do have them clean up their own messes and have them help me do stuff around the house, but they don't have actual set chores.  They keep asking me when we are going to use these, failure as a mom moment right here.

We went up to the Hunting Expo again this year.  Aspen was big enough to shoot a bow this time!

I love the cute daddy daughter bonding moment!

Hunter was throwing a fit while they were in line to shoot the bow and didn't calm down until we were done and away from there, but he did get to shoot a BB gun.

And Timber finally took a snooze!

While craziness was happening around her!  Super dad right here!!

We stayed the first night up there at Ben's grandparents, then stayed the next two nights up at Kira and Jordan's new house.  They were going to watch the kids for us while we went to the temple for our anniversary before heading to the expo, but we stayed up too late and could not get ourselves to wake up early enough.  We went to church with them Sunday morning, then headed back to their house after sacrament.  The kids watched a movie as we packed up our stuff to head home, I loved how their dog Frisco snuggled right in with Hunter!

Look how long this cute little bugs hair is getting!!

And of course another shot of her Dale teeth, they didn't last long after this, her other two teeth came in shortly after.

Hunter handed out fun dips for Valentine's Day and also got several from other kids too.  While Hunter and Aspen were eating theirs we gave a little to Timber to try.

She loved it!!!  I have video of her eating it, it's so cute!  She would suck so hard on her cute little fingers, then dip them in it again!  Her eyes got really big quite often while sucking and her cute little feet would be just kicking away!!

Hunter had red.

Aspen had the blue that changes green.

This is one of the fisher price princess toys the girls got for Christmas, I love watching them playing together!

Miss Aspen got spoiled with a bouquet of flowers from the neighbors again!
This month Hunter started wrestling practice.  Ben has wanted to put him in it the last 2 years but we hadn't heard about til it was too late, so he was pretty excited to have Hunter finally start it this year!
I also got to have lunch with my friend Mallory, first time we had gotten to actually spend time together since Hunter was a baby!  We saw her for a few minutes a few months before this just to drop off some breast milk from a girl in my ward since Mallory had a mastectomy so wasn't able to nurse her baby anymore.
The SFW Banquet was the very last day of February.  Ben has helped for the last couple of years with this.  It gets him a good chunk of his dedicated Hunter hours and he is getting more and more involved in it each year.  He enjoys it and it's been fun for us.  This year we took our kids to it with us, which resulted in me leaving a little early to get them to bed, but it was still pretty good.

January 2015

In January we did a really fun activity for our preschool day.  We learned about the 5 senses, we were working on the letter S.  For smell I got out any lotions or body sprays that I didn't use anymore or hadn't liked and let the kids make a mixture of them in a bowl and smell it with each new addition.  They all smelled pretty gross by the end of that!  For touch I have 2 touch and feel books called That's Not My Puppy and That's Not My Frog.  Those two books have always been some of my kids favorite books!  Especially the page in the puppy one that there is a dog with shaggy ears to touch.  For taste I had a little worksheet that I found online that had sour-lemon, bitter-baking cocoa, salty-pretzel, and sweet-M&M's with a smile or a frown on the side of those that they marked if they liked it or not.  Then for sound I let them each fill 3 Easter eggs, once with pennies, one with rice, and one with corn.  Then I taped the eggs shut and they went to town shaking them to see how they all sounded different.  One of the boys was so excited that I had given him money!!  Haha!  It was pretty cute!  Then for sight I had 8 baby food jars that I had put a drop of food coloring in them, then covered it up with baking soda so they couldn't see the color, then I would have them guess what color it would be before I let each of them take turns putting vinegar in a jar.

It was a pretty fun day!  And it kept them busy having fun the whole time!  Some of our days end with just playing and quite often Timber was napping during school time so it was always nicer when I could keep them busy with school activities so that I didn't have to worry about them waking Timber up while they would run around the house playing.  Plus the smaller confines of my house compared to the other houses just made it not quite as exciting to be left we too much play time!

Timber had a little shelf of hair!  Above the long patch I'm holding out is the bald spot that most babies get from laying right there, and then under it is new hair trying to grow in!

Luckily as long as I keep her hair combed down it mostly hides the crazy bald spots!

Got to love morning hair!!

Timber had her 9 month check up this month.  She was 15.81 lbs which is 5% and 26 in. which is 7%!  She's just a tiny little thing!!

I heard Timber waking up from her nap and went in to find this!  She had never gotten to a sitting position on her own before, so I have no clue how she did it!  She did this a few other times too!

Just getting a little drink.

I love how she was pooching her lip out while sleeping!

And it's official!  She's on the move!  Instead of a true crawl she tucks her left leg under her and used her right leg and hands to kind of pull her along on her bum.  It's pretty funny, but she is getting pretty fast at it!

Trying out her first "S'more."  We had the fudge stripe cookies and some marshmallows so I made the other 2 kids some s'mores, but just gave Timber a cookie and ripped up the marshmallow into little pieces for her.

Can you tell what Aspen was doing while she was eating her s'more?  Look at her right nostril, there's a bit of chocolate up there!  Booger flavored chocolate anyone??

Timber got 2 more teeth!  Instead of being the 2 front teeth, she got the 2 right next to where her front teeth will be coming in first!  I was so nice and pinned her down like this to check them out several times!  I decided that they are Dale teeth: 

See what I mean?

I have been waiting and waiting to get to post these 2 funny stories that happened this month!  So glad I wrote them down so I could remember them!  One day me and the kids were going through the drive through at Taco Bell and Hunter noticed a sign on the window, the one that says no smoking.  He asked what it was and I just said "No Smoking, so you can't smoke close to the building."  Hunter then proceeds to tell me, "I wouldn't smoke here!  I only smoke when we go out camping."  It took me a minute to realize what in the world he was talking about!  And even then I had to make sure I was interpreting correctly, he was thinking of a camp fire!  Haha, so then I explained that that's not the kind of smoking the sign meant.  Of course my curious little ones had to know what it meant then, so I asked if they had ever seen anyone with a white stick type thing hanging out of their mouth that has a little bit of smoke coming from it.  They said no.  I know we live in a small town but I know they have seen people smoking!  I didn't press that though, but I did take this opportunity to have a talk about how smoking is bad for you and you shouldn't do it.  So then of course they asked why they would even need the sign then, because if it's bad for you people shouldn't be doing it anyways.  So then I had to explain how everyone makes there own choices and unfortunately not everyone makes choices that are good for them.  Still to this day anytime we go through Taco Bells drive through and sometimes just drive past Taco Bell, there is some comment about that day and how you shouldn't smoke!

The other funny story happened one night when we were reading the Friend.  As Ben finished the story he went to close the magazine, when Aspen hurriedly put her hand out and yelled, "Wait!"  Looked at the page for a second, then said, "What kind of shoes does she have on?"  Hahaha!  Got to love what that girly takes out of our evening Friend and scripture study!!