Birthday Cakes!!

At Hunter's party Ben's brother asked who made Hunter's cake, which kind of surprised me that he would ask considering his other 2 birthday cakes. Then I remembered he had been on his mission for both of those, so I jumped on here to show him what his other ones looked like. I hadn't ever posted either of them! I was shocked and I thought both of them were so much fun that I had to share so here are pics of all of his cakes:

Birthday cake number 1, and really my first attempt at ever even making a cake that wasn't shaped like a 13 x 9 pan!

As I was finding these pics I just thought it was so cute to see how he changed over a year so you get to see a pic of him with his cakes! He was SO cute! And still is!


Number 2. Can you tell who this is?


How about now? To this day if he sees a picture of this he still gets really excited!

Just one year ago he was trying to blow the candles out by waving his hand at them! Look between his face and hand, you can see the streaks from him waving his hand while I was taking the pic! This year he blew them out like a champ!

And here is this years! I had a really fun time with it, and right when his cousins walked in the door he immediately took them to the fridge to show it to them! It made me pretty happy to see him so excited about it. It took quite a bit longer than I thought it would so I ended up not ever getting ready for the day as you might have notice from my last post :)

I don't know if you noticed but all of these cakes had the frosting with the colored chip things in it. It's my favorite frosting and the only kind that Ben will eat, but I tell you what, it is a pain to try and get the stuff through cake decorating tips!! The red frosting for the track was the kind you get in a tube but everything else is that frosting, I think next year I might just go with vanilla cuz it's been really hard to deal with that frosting every year! They do always taste good though!

Hunter's Party

We did Hunter's part on Monday, we just had family come, but he loves all of his cousins and really they are all his best friends so it was perfect! I made his cake Monday morning and he was so cute he kept coming in and out of the kitchen trying to steal a bite here and there, he was SO excited for it! Here are a few pics of his fun day:

Someday we really will get a bigger table so everybody doesn't have to sit on our floor. It will have to happen soonish too because one of the chairs broke (it has been fixed several times and nothing is really holding) so we are down to 3 chairs, and our 2 stools for the island. Not much seating for our families!

At least the living room seats a few more! For the first several presents he opened he just kept wanting to actually open and play with them. We had to keep convincing him to put it down to open the next, but after the first couple he got into and was so excited to open all of them.

And there were a ton! He got spoiled!

It's so fun to watch all the kids get excited when he is opening their present!

He loved his cake, and was very specific about what part of it he wanted!

After cake and ice cream he got a little help from everybody to put his new toys in action! After everyone left he couldn't decide what he wanted to play with. He would play with one for a couple min then switch to the next, and was not very happy with us when we told him it was time for bed!

I think he would have stayed up playing all night if we would have let him! And first thing he did the next morning was head into the living room to play with everything again!

I finally figured out how to put a video on! Actually I tried the exact same thing as always and for some reason it worked this time!

Hunter's 3!!

I can not believe he is 3!! It has gone by so fast! The night before his birthday I blew up a ton of balloons and wrapped his presents I had those all ready for him in the living room, Then I also hung steamers from his doorway. He was so cute in the morning he came in my room and said "look mom! It's my bur-bay, you made those for me??" He was so cute, he thought the streamers were so cool! And I LOVE how he says birthday, Ben kept trying to teach him how to say it right and I kept telling him to be quiet cuz I think it so cute!

We had him open his presents from us right after his nap so he is a little groggy.

Since I didn't wrap the presents til the night before he got Christmas wrapping paper, I could have sworn I had birthday paper but it was nowhere to be found!

He absolutely loves this movie! He wants to watch it all the time! And it's even cooler since he has a lot of the trucks that are in the movie!

Second one getting a little more awake.

This is a playdoh backpack with a bunch of playdoh cutters and playdoh in it. He plays with it all the time!

And his new tool set so he can be like dad! He goes out in the garage and plays (loses) Ben's tools all the time. So he was pretty excited to have his own!

All ready with his tool belt and hard hat!

His Birthday is Labor Day weekend which is Peach Days in Hurricane so we headed over there for dinner and let him ride some of the rides. He is the blur to the right, this was the only picture I got that you could even kind of tell it was him. I think he had a pretty good day, even though he didn't get his cake (which is what he was most excited about) since we were waiting to do that on Monday when all the family could come. I did make him rice krispies so he at least had a birthday treat of some kind.

We had also gone to Peach Days the day before his birthday and got him a cotton candy on the way home. I think you can tell he LOVED it!!!!

The Fair...Finally!

So I finally found the cable to Ben's camera... it was still in the box. I bought him the camera on black friday last year. Ya that is a very long time to not know where the cable was just because he hadn't ever taken it out of the box! I guess we mostly just used my camera though, there weren't a ton of pictures on. So for the next several days hopefully there will be several posts to get me back up to date!!

The fair was the same weekend that we took our family pictures, like the beginning of August. We had a blast at it! Ben's parents take us to the family night every year and let all the Grandkids ride the rides. Here are some pics:

This was the first ride they went on. Hunter and Logan are in red in orange, the furthest back cart. We learned a lesson from this ride....
Don't start with the bigger rides!! Poor Hunter was crying by the end of it. I felt so bad for him and all the parents around me were staring and saying how sad he was!

Here the 3 boys were in line for the next ride. Hunter decided not to go on it though.

Then we got him on a car ride that wasn't as wild as the dragon roller coaster. The lesson we learned from this ride....

Put him on the calmer rides first! He didn't ever want to stop going on rides after that one! A couple times he even ran right under the people collecting tickets without them noticing, and we had to explain that he had done that and give them a ticket for the kid that was already ready for the ride to start!

See no problem! This one went up and down and he loved it! He was even asking to go back on the dragon ride again!

I just think he is so HANDSOME! The poor guy gets so red though! I think this was more towards the beginning of riding the rides and the heat was already hitting him!

We had a couple extra tickets so Ben and his parents took the kiddos and let me and Joslyn have some fun too! It was a blast and so nice for us to not have to be moms for a little bit! We love being moms but these breaks every now and then are awesome! Thanks for the break!

Here we are coming back down, we both had our hair in our faces the whole time... oh and one of our legs up in the air! Turns out we both do the on rides!

Well all in all it was a great time at the fair!!

"Life" or "Wife"

The kids went to bed at 9, Ben at 11, so why am I still up??? Working. Story of my life. I love that I get to be at home with the kids all day but it really does suck to have to take up my nights (which should be my "me" time) to do work. I do enjoy my work but some nights would just much rather spend it doing something else, like read my book or watch a movie (that's not a kid movie and without interruptions.) Tonight was one of those nights that I just struggled to get the ambitions to work, but I finally got on at 10 and started to work...

Don't give up on me yet there is a funny story not just crazy ramblings.

So like I said Ben went to bed at 11. Well about 11:40 I heard some creaking that sounded awfully like a door opening, I knew it wasn't Hunter's since his room is right next to ours, so of course I started imagining the wort. My bedroom door was open and you can see most of the hallway from my computer desk, so I was just waiting for something to jump at me, then I calmed down and brought my attention back to work. A few minutes later I hear it again. Let's just pause to say I'm a chicken. Especially when Ben is home and can protect me, so why do I need to be brave? So what do I do, I woke him up and had him check it out.

He had left the door to the garage open when he had been in there just a mere 40 min before, so it had been creaking as the wind blew outside.

So he solved my problem and collapsed on the bed. Did I mention that he has to get up at like 5? Well at about 12:15 the biggest spider I have ever seen (besides at a pet store) starts climbing up my wall!!!! For those of you who don't know I am scared to death of spiders, I can't even hardly look at them in a book, let alone touch the picture. Well I stared at if for a minute trying to decide if I should trap it under a cup (to save for Ben to take care of in the morning) and ended up deciding it was too big to fit under a cup without chopping some legs off, and he was on the wall anyways so too complicated. So... yet again, I woke Ben up. It took some convincing to get him out of bed this time. He tried to convince me he would kill it in the morning, right like I'm stupid. I let him know that it would eat me before morning! So as he stood up he mumbled something that sounded like "I hate my life" or was it "wife," I really can't be sure. But he did come to the rescue! He hit it with a magazine and flushed it. He had to hit it like 10-15 times since it was so big! It really took that many, I was watching... he never missed. That there tells you how justified I was in waking him up, it was like the anaconda of house spiders! Well I could only get my attention back to work for a few more minutes, then decided I better turn the lights off so he could get some real sleep and I can't see my papers for work without the light! So now he just has to sleep with the sound of typing :)

I really think it was "life" not "wife" hmmm I'm not sure which is better?????

(Oh and FYI I will get some updates on here soon, I lost my camera and we can't find the cord to Ben's to load the pics to the computer, weird that they are the same brand of camera's and my cord doesn't fit his. We have had a ton happen recently but I just don't fell ok with doing the posts without the pics to go with, so soon there should be some real posts!)

Family Pictures!!

We got family pictures done on Saturday and I love them! I was very nervous about them, I hadn't even thought of pics until Ben started talking about going Hunting and realized I had to get them NOW if I wanted pics without Ben's mountain man beard! Luckily Tami was way nice and got them done for us! Friday night I went and got our clothes, then we got home and I cut Ben and Hunter's hair! That's why I was so nervous, I didn't have any planning time, but Tami did an awesome job! Thank you!! My favorites are this first one and the collage that she made us (the last one.)

4 months and going strong!

This might come as a shock... up until last night when I turned my computer on to do some work I hadn't turned it on for almost a week!! That is usually one of the first things I do in the mornings! It did mean that I didn't get any work done but it was kind of nice. I know it's kind of crazy but it was refreshing to not even look at my computer for several days. Now I'm back though and ready to post!

Aspen had her 4 month check up on the last week. She was 24 inches long which is in the 40% and she was 13 lbs 7 oz which is in the 46% so far pretty average... Her head was in the 94%!!! The poor girl got her moms big ol' noggin! Ben has a tiny head he has to get youth hats! And they've never measured Hunter's so I don't know about his.

As you can see above she is getting pretty close to sitting up! She will sit there for a few seconds then tip over, in the pic I'm holding her one arm and that's all she needs to keep her steady! She still doesn't roll over hardly ever, she occasionally will but it's like she does it on accident, her expression never changes. The doctors did say she seemed really ahead for her age though, as far as pulling herself up when they hold her hands and she can already hold stuff really good (she has been doing that for several weeks.) And he was shocked when he walked in the room and she was standing on my lap (holding my hands of course) I hadn't thought anything of it cuz she has been doing that for a long time and she does it ALL the time. She loves to stand up and see whats going on around her!

This is Hunter and his cousin walking down to the park on the 24th for breakfast after the parade. I thought it was so cute that they were holding hands I had to take a pic before they let go! They held hands the whole way to the park... even after Ben and his brothers told them to stop cuz they are boys! What nerds!!

My sister had her baby boy on the 24th. His name is Tucker Joseph and he is so cute! I love all his hair!!!! I'm so excited that we have kids close in age again, it has been so fun watching Hunter and her daughter grow up together!

Hunter loves to lay by Aspen and talk to her and bring her toys to play with. I even get to hear him sing her songs occasionally :) he very rarely ever wants to hold her though. Which I'm pretty grateful for since when he is done he is done and just drops her, he was about to let her go in this pic. I have learned to never let him hold her anywhere but the middle of the bed!

Aspen has found her toes and she loves them! Just about anytime she's left laying down she will have her toes! Also just check out those rolls she has on her thighs! The picture just doesn't do them justice.

I was talking to Hunter and looked down to see that she had somehow taken her binki out and put it back in upside down and managed to keep it in that way! She's so funny!

I always put her binki's on her head rest in the car seat so we know where they are... I guess the ride was too bumpy or something cuz it fell down and looks like her bow is hooked to the binki holder :) It's really not thought, she has a headband on it's just covered up!

I just LOVE this picture! She stayed staring at Ben's pop for like a solid 5 minutes!