January and February 2016

A lot of January was spent getting settled in our new house and finding a spot for everything.  Luckily, one of the best things about the new house is that is has a spot for everything.  Including this little extra room in an upstairs loft that was just perfect for games and puzzles – now when Henry wants to start a 1,000 piece puzzle right before dinner it’s no problem.

We also organized a wall in the garage just for fishing gear:

And an extra bedroom downstairs just for Legos – dreams coming true right here. 

Finishing the paint in the garage wasn’t quite as fun as organizing Legos, but it was just as satisfying when it was done:

January was also for playing in the snow.  So much snow!

Daniel took the kids on an adventure/exploring walk out behind our house.  They found this owl and this fort.

And here’s a picture I sent Daniel when he was out of town and I couldn’t get our van up the driveway into the garage:

At least it is pretty to look at.  This is the view from my bedroom window. 

More January things:

Nerf weapon target practice:

Tristan in the kitchen.  He loves cooking and finding new recipes online. Here is is making two of his specialties, crepes and fried rice:

Winter fly-fishing – so pretty, but really hard to tie the flies with frozen hands:

Three little monkeys in Rachel’s bed.  They always start out in their own room, but generally end up in with her before the night is over.  She is a good sport, always. 

Six dentist appointments.  Nothing like having a nice long wait in the waiting room with a good book:

Foosball with cousins:

Here’s a fun January video of Cynthia playing one of her favorite “Let’s Pretend” games.  This version worked like this: whatever age you are, you get to pick that number of things from a store (whatever you want, mom!) and keep them for free.  She was five, so she lists the five things she would pick:

1) Treats (skittles, specifically)

2) A Littlest Pet Shop toy

3) A Strider bike (I pointed out to her that she already had a bike, and she looked at me like I was stupid and explained that in the game you don’t have anything when you start.  It makes her list even funnier to think that these are the five things she’d pick if she was starting completely from scratch)

4)  A tool (we had just been to a hardware store and she had seen the cutest little mini hammers and I guess decided that would be among her top five things.  In fact, now that I think about it, I’m realizing that’s what gave her the idea for her little game – she really wanted that hammer).

5) A whole bag of every kind of fruit except not durian (I love that she made sure to not include durian in her special bag of every kind of fruit.  Durian is a super nasty smelly fruit that grows in Malaysia.  She’s never even tried  it, but she’s heard Daniel talk about it from his mission days, and she for sure knows she never wants it.  Even in pretend games.)

Other things I love about this video:

-how she is wearing a fancy formal gown with rain boots.  She was going through a “wear a dress every single day phase”.

-the look of happiness on her face at the end when she imagines being able to help me pick out my 35 free things

February

Then it was February.

Here we are at the Provo City Center Temple Open House.  The only thing that makes me sad about these pictures is remembering that Cynthia was sooo excited to go to the temple, and she really wanted to wear all white to pretend she was a bride, and when she got ready to go she had put on a white cardigan over her dress, and I can’t remember if it was too small or dirty or what, but for some reason I made her go change, and she didn’t have another white one, so she put on this green one, but was really devastated about not being in all white.  When I see her posing in her fancy white dress, I wish I would have just let her wear what she wanted, like I usually do. 

The rest of February she clearly did wear whatever she wanted.  Here she is in a Seahawks t-shirt paired with a fancy skirt and green star pants.  She was a really big fan of loading up her stroller with all the babies and pets in the house.  Now that she is in first grade and gone a lot of the day, it’s fun to look back on these pictures and remember how great it was to hang out with her while the older kids were all at school.  Every single day was an adventure, but in an easy way – she was really good at entertaining herself.  She’d just load up all her stuff and come hang out in whatever room I was in. 

I have a video clip of her on this day.  I was asking her about all the many children in her stroller (there are five – you can’t see them, but four are stuffed into the back).  She told me that she was an 8-year old child but her mom went to another country and left her in charge of all the little children.  Their names were Sarah, Summer & Spring (twins), Ella, and Tiny (I guess after naming four girls she was too exhausted to come up with anything decent for the fifth).

Just a busy mom waiting on a bench at the junior high with her slippers and her baby in a pack:

On this day she told me she was about to go to a rainforest in Brazil to do some exploring.  She was 8 years old (again), and taking care of her mother’s children (again – where the heck is her mother, I wonder?)  This time she was taking a few bunnies with her, and she told me the girl bunnies have wings and they can fly.  They help her find other animals to collect while she’s exploring (so I guess they’re like tracker bunnies?).  Love her exploring outfit.

When she wasn’t exploring in rainforests or looking after all her mother’s children, she would bring buckets of toys to wherever I was and work on setups. 

Different day, same dress.  It was a favorite of hers. 

She also did a lot of reading.  Here she is all tucked in on the couch with a couple of pillows to keep her warm.

When she was done doing all those things, she would go wait outside for the kids to get home from school.  She loved to watch the clock all day long, and she always would tell me when it was time for snack or lunch, and she knew exactly when the bus was going to drop the kids off. 

Other February things:

More wintery fly-fishing on the Provo River:

Banana splits:

Deer in the front yard.  There are so many deer that live around our house and we love it.  I guess if I had a garden I wouldn’t, but for now we always think it’s fun to see them.

Rachel with the castle she made for her Valentines box:

Henry doing puzzles:

Henry and Rachel climbing a tree in the backyard:

Lizza working on making cute little things out of rubber bands:

And then defending her room from trespassers:

I love the signs that she and Rachel made.  They weren’t messing around. 

Me and Daniel up at Sundance on our 16th wedding anniversary:

Riding bikes:

Playing Bocce ball:

And hiking up to the top of the hill behind our house.  We really love where we live. 

Last February thing: Henry doing his best to start another band.  He’s always trying to start bands. 

December 2015

The first few weeks of December were our last weeks spent in our rental house. It was a busy time while we got ready to move.

Rachel got glasses:


Elizabeth sold stuff.  We found out that while we had been gone in India, she had made almost $100 by making and selling bowties and hair accessories around the neighborhood.  I think she gave Cindy quarters to roam the streets on her strider bike and tell people to come buy stuff.  Not clear why this required a snowsuit. 


Tristan and Henry played Risk:

Cynthia did puzzles and then posed next to them for pictures.  When she was really little she saw Henry do this once (he was measuring how big he was compared to the puzzle he had done), and now she thinks that’s just what you do when you finish a puzzle. 


Rachel experimented with recipes from The Friend. My kids love looking at the recipes in The Friend each month; every single recipe seems so exciting in an “oh my gosh, we could totally make this!” kind of way.  


Then Henry made a spotlight poster for school.  This is what a spotlight poster looks like when you find out about it the night before it’s due, with no time to go to the store and print out pictures or for any fanciness at all.  We put one picture of him in the middle, and then drew stars with fun Henry facts, which I made him color in. Easiest poster ever. 

Fun Henry facts from December 2015:
Favorite toy: Legos
Favorite hobby: reading
Favorite food: pizza, ice-cream, sweet-potato pudding (this is true – he really did love sweet-potato pudding)
Favorite color: red
Favorite sports teams: BYU, Seahawks
Things he loves: hiking and exploring, swimming, animals and bugs, his family


Then Cynthia felt like maybe she should make a spotlight poster.  I didn’t even have a photo for her middle star, so she drew it all herself.

Fun facts about Cynthia in December 2015:
Favorite toy: dolls
Favorite food: fruit, dessert (still true today.  The follow-up to every single “I wish I had a wand” conversation is the “I wish the whole world was made of treats/candy/dessert, except it was healthy” conversation)
Favorite color: purple, yellow, red, orange, dark orange, green, blue, pink (so nice for dark orange to get its own separate spot)
Favorite friend: brothers and sisters
Favorite thing to do: watch movies
Loves to: go on trips and go exploring, swim, sing


And here she is in that same velvet unicorn dress, helping my mom decorate the Christmas tree at her house.  So this was either the same day as the spotlight poster, or any other day in December, because this dress was pretty much on an every single day rotation


Then we officially closed on the new house (back in October we had found out we had to leave our rental house, and we had ended up selling our lot and buying this house that was already built).  It was still in Alpine, only about 5 minutes away from where we had been renting, which was great because our kids didn’t have to change schools.  It had been built not quite two years before and was in great shape, but there were a few changes we wanted to make before moving in, like the blue paint in the dining room and kitchen.  My mom came out to help me paint over the blue to match the rest of the house.  It was nice to have a few weeks of overlap when we were still living in our rental, but we had closed on the house and could start moving stuff over and getting things done in stages.



This involved getting up into some super tight claustrophobic spots, since there was blue all the way up above the cupboards.  My mom is the best sport in the world.


After:


And here is another picture from a few months later when we switched out the chandelier for a new one, and added globe pendant lights over the island:

Here is my mom again, helping me paint all of the shelves and walls in the garage.  This was a humongous task, but I knew if I didn’t get it done before we moved in, it would probably never happen. 


Sooo many shelves. Which is always a good thing, except when you’re painting them.  I was tempted to skip painting all the underneath sides of the shelves, but my mom did the mom thing where she said no, that would not be okay.  And she was right (of course).


Other mid-move things:

Daniel spent a whole day with some of the kids chopping up all the old wood from our lot (we had paid to have a bunch of the dead trees cut down).  He chopped it all up and brought it over to the house for us to use as firewood. 


Sitting on the floor eating lunch after working hard chopping wood:

Tristan and Oliver asleep on the floor after working hard helping us put up the tv:


Cynthia lying on the floor after working hard making the biggest set-up ever.  Except I don’t think she was tired – pretty sure she thought you were supposed to pose on the floor next to set-ups just like puzzles.  While the older kids were at school I would take her with me over to the house to get stuff done, and this is how she spent her time. 


Along with playing outside in the snow, which hit at exactly the wrong time for trying to move in.

There was a huge blizzard the night we brought all our big furniture over.  We didn’t get a moving truck; instead we borrowed a pick-up truck and trailer, and Daniel and I moved it all over with Tristan and Oliver in several snowy trips. 


December 17th was the night we first slept over at the new house.  It looks like dinner was hot chocolate and marshmallows served with some sort of bread? Maybe a cracker? Eaten on the floor, of course.  Such an adventure. 


I remember we were working fast to get everything all put away and organized, etc., and at some point pretty late in the evening I noticed Cindy and Henry had given up on any sort of parenting happening, and they had covered their heads with blankets and put themselves to bed on the couch.  I decided to just let them stay there. 


Then the very next day Daniel and the 3 boys (along with some of their uncles and cousins) drove down to watch BYU play in the Vegas Bowl.



They had a fun trip even though BYU lost. I think the thing I heard the most about when they got home was this fancy breakfast.  Pretty sure there is bacon stacked between every level of that pancake tower:

While they were gone, we were doing other stuff back in Utah:

Moving last-minute carloads of random things over to the new house.  At this point, there was no rhyme or reason to the chaos.  It was just all the weird stuff lying around at the end of a move, like spotty bananas and the posters that were stuck behind the washing machine. Weird stuff that I didn’t even want to move over, but somehow it filled a whole car.


We also played in the snow:


And started setting up some Christmas stuff.  When we first moved from Texas to our rental house at the end of 2014 it was only a few days before Christmas, and I swore never again, and then it turned out exactly one year later we did it again!

We got the stockings hung and decorated the Christmas tree, with the disaster of a BYU/Utah game on in the background (Utah might have scored five touchdowns in the first quarter).  


The next day we got all our books up on the shelves and finished putting everything away.  I remember being really excited to show Daniel and the boys all the progress we had made while they were gone – when they left there were still boxes everywhere, and when they got back, we were ready for Christmas! (kind of)

Also that weekend, my parents took Rachel and Lizza to see the new Star Wars movie, which they thought was the best thing ever. 


Cindy was invited, too, but she had been feeling sick that morning and I decided to keep her home.  She was understandably devastated about this, but it turned out to be a good thing since she started throwing up as soon as they pulled out of the driveway.  When she was all done, she looked up at me and said, “I changed my mind.  I don’t want to go.” Good thinking, Cindy.


Then the boys got back from Vegas and it was Tristan’s 15th birthday. 

Crepes (that he probably made himself) with fruit and whipped cream for breakfast:

Lots of playing in the snow:


Our new house backs right up to a forest area, which was perfect for snowy exploring.

My kids love snow, because snow forts:

My feelings about snow are that is really pretty to look at when I am nice and cozy inside looking out at it.  It helps if I am sitting by the fireplace sipping hot chocolate.  Then I love snow. 

But not this part:


And especially not this part:

Tristan picked spicy chicken tacos for his birthday dinner, and mint chocolate ice-cream with no cake for his birthday cake (he’s never been a big cake fan).  I know that is only one candle, not fifteen, but I am proud of myself for even being able to find a candle at all after just moving.  Plus sticking 15 candles in a bowl of ice-cream would have been tricky. 


Happy birthday to Tristan!  We sure love him.  It’s weird for me to see this picture now – it was taken almost two years ago, and most of the kids don’t look that different now, but Tristan sure does.  He’ll be 17 in less than two months – yikes. 


That night for some special birthday fun we set up one of the Christmas presents early – a ping pong table! It was very exciting.  Thanks for the creepy thumbs up pose, Oliver.


Then it was the day before Christmas.  We had a big family lunch at our house with those of my family who live in Utah, along with my grandparents. 


That afternoon we set up another early Christmas present.  It’s just so fun opening Christmas presents early; we can't help ourselves.  


Then it was time for the annual Christmas Eve party at Daniel’s dad’s house.  Dinner, new pajamas, and presents. 


And here is Christmas morning. 


Christmas afternoon we tried to leave to go visit Daniel’s mom and spend Christmas evening at her house, but first Daniel had to shovel us out of our driveway.  So much snow!


Presents from Grandma Nini:


Rachel spent most of her time on Aunt Audra’s hoverboard, and Cynthia spent most of her time out in the garage with the pets.

Dinner with cousins:

Sick again, the day after Christmas.  Poor girl. 


Last December thing – Daniel and I took a quick trip to Aspen, Colorado to see our current favorite band, The National.  They were doing a small concert at the Belly Up bar in Aspen, and we are so glad we went.  We’ve been to a lot of concerts, both before and after this one, and I think this one might be my favorite. The bar was pretty small, so not a lot of people were there, and it was just a really cozy and unique concert. 

Before they opened the doors we walked around a little and tried not to freeze. 


When we got in we were able to walk right up to the front and stand next to the stage. 


We were standing right here by the setlist on the floor of the stage, which was kind of fun, because we always knew what song they were going to play next.

These guys are really amazing musicians.


Here is a little bit of “About Today”, the song that plays at the end of the movie Warrior.  The first time we heard The National was when we watched that movie years ago, and we knew we loved the song, but didn’t find out more about the band until later.

 

That's it for December.