July 2014

The funny thing about this blog post is that I started it before we moved to Utah (6 months ago), and then somehow never got around to finishing it.  I guess moving made it so I didn’t have any blogging energy left?  I better start catching up before I can’t remember what any of the pictures are about. 

We started off last July by driving down to Houston for a Mariners game (we went to a lot of Mariners games last year – pretty much any time they played the Rangers in Dallas or the Astros in Houston we were there).

We made sure to get there with plenty of time to talk to the players before the game.  It was fun to see King Felix again (one of our favorite Mariners), since we had just talked to him a few weeks earlier down in San Diego (we had timed our California trip just right so we were there while the Mariners were playing the Padres).  Here he is chatting with Cindy and Henry:

And here he is signing Cindy’s purse – ha!  She had brought it along to the game with a few toys to play with, and I guess she noticed everyone else handing him things to sign, so she whipped out her purse and asked him to sign it.  A few of the kids also got their gloves signed.                                                                        

Then the purse signing became kind of a thing.  James Jones signing Cindy’s purse:

And Kyle Seager signing Cindy’s purse:

Getting more signatures:

Lizza noticed someone was trying to get a ball signed by one of the players but wasn’t having any luck; she somehow got their ball and got it up to the player and got them to sign it and then gave it back to the guy.  He later bought her some cotton candy to say thanks – lucky girl.  She was nice enough to share. 

Rachel learning how to mark the scorecard – an important skill not many people have anymore. 

If you were to ask me what the secret is to keeping young children entertained for six hours at a baseball stadium after driving 3 hours in the car to get there, I would say 2 things:

1.  Kindles (for puzzles, memory games, and Angry Birds).  2. One tub of popcorn with unlimited refills. 

Also, let them get up and dance once in awhile when “Deep in the heart of Texas” is playing:

As soon as the game was over Oliver disappeared over by the dugout.  When we met up with him later he had this ball signed by Robinson Cano.  Happy boy.                                

Five kids posing by the giant baseballs outside the stadium.  Tristan wasn’t with us for some reason – I think maybe he was on a scout campout?  

Back at home – new coffee tables for the family room!  We haven’t had a coffee table for over 10 years.  When we first got married we bought a glass one, but after it broke a few years later we decided not to replace it because we had always been moving it out of the way to play or wrestle or tackle or sword fight or do somersaults, etc.  We realized we valued the open carpet space over a table for that stage with our kids.  Anyway, now that they are older and getting too big to be so wild in the family room I thought we were probably ready for tables.  You can tell by Cindy’s face that she was extra pleased to have such a perfect place to play with her magnet dolls.                                            

And Rachel and Lizza were extra pleased with the boxes that the tables came in.  They built a little house out of them. With a window, even!  And I just noticed that Lizza is still wearing her Mariners shirt and jean shorts from the game the night before, which means she slept in them and was on day 2.  Way to cut down on laundry!

Next up was a late birthday party for Lizza; we hadn’t had time to do one before our California trip.  I am the worst at birthday parties.  Luckily 4 of my kids have birthdays in the summer and we have a fantastic neighborhood pool.  We invite some friends to come swimming and I make a treat to take to the pool, and then we call it a birthday party.  Rachel took this one up a notch by planning a craft – she taught everyone how to make duct tape flower pens.  A craft+swimming+brownies = happy girls. 

Also, I should have included “taking several hundred pictures of funny jumps into the pool” in the equation for birthday party success:                       

4th of July pancake breakfast at the church.  Oliver is in his scout shirt because he participated in the flag ceremony. 

This one makes me happy because I don’t have very many pictures of me with all my kids, but it also makes me sad because those boots don’t fit Cindy anymore.  She wore those pretty much every week to church for about 2 years (she started wearing them when they were way too big).  And Lizza wore them before her, and Rachel wore them before her.  And the best thing of all is that they were my little brother David’s boots that he had when he was a little kid before I even got married (he’s on his mission now).  They had started out just black on the bottom with a colorful cowboy type scene on the top parts, but he (unless one of my other brothers did it for him) colored them in with a black sharpie so they would be all black so he could pretend he was the cowboy Jake from Silverado (he went through a stage where he wore only black shirts and black jeans and these black boots and made us all call him Jake).  Anyway, somehow they ended up in my kids’ dress-up bucket, and then I started having Rachel wear them for real (because, hey, Texas!).  Over the years the black marker started to fade away and the blues and browns from the cowboy picture started showing through, which only made them cooler.  So I’m sure you can understand my sadness.  I wanted her to wear them forever.                 

The boxes from the coffee tables got repurposed once again, this time as an army base built with the sole purpose of getting itself destroyed by fireworks. 

My dad was with us for the 4th of July because he had flown into town to be at Lizza’s baptism the next day.  Here he is with Cindy, ready to start the firework fun. 

Sparklers!                                                               

The kids with the finished army base, which is about to be set on fire:

Henry, trying to blow out the flames.  Or it’s possible he’s trying to make them bigger? Either one. 

Oliver doing something with the flames, Rachel and Lizza starting to get concerned:

Random explosion occurring.  Lizza’s getting out of there (wise decision).  Now Rachel’s really getting concerned. 

Box on fire.  Rachel with hands on head!               

Time for the hose:

And the after shot:

Plus a video of all the excitement:

The next day was Elizabeth’s baptism.  Such a happy day for her.  Here she is wearing the baptism dress that my mom made me for my baptism (Rachel wore it, too).                                 

This girl was born with a special light:                                      

The whole family, squinting into the sun.  I am rarely successful at getting good family pictures out of events like this. 

Special lunch after the baptism at our favorite Texas restaurant (Jack Allen’s Kitchen)

Getting some pool time in with my dad before he had to go back home to Utah:

More fun at the pool.  We really, really loved our neighborhood pool in Texas. 

Also in July, Lasik touch-up for Daniel’s eyes:

Lizza finished the 7th Harry Potter book.  She wanted a picture with the whole stack of Harry Potters: 

Cindy got in a lot of reading, too, although many of her reading sessions ended like this – she is fast asleep in this picture, still holding onto her Fancy Nancy book.  She decided she was too old for naps, but not too old to fall asleep while reading a big pile of books on my bed.  That was fine with me – I don’t have to call them naps. 

Rachel and Lizza working on their wall stretches again, this time with Rubik’s cubes instead of books.  Such good multi-taskers!                        

Enjoying a warm summer Texas rainstorm:

And then, around the middle of July, disaster!  Seriously, things got crazy.  There was a rainstorm in the middle of the night, which has nothing to do with the story except for that it made it so we couldn’t hear it when our water heater, which was upstairs in our attic, rusted out and started flooding our whole house.  We were in bed sleeping, but kind of half-awake thinking, “wow, this is a loud rainstorm!  Why does it sound like it’s raining inside our walls?”  Finally around 3 a.m. Daniel got up to investigate (we wondered if maybe we had a leaky window?).  He checked the windows and they were dry, but as he turned to go back into our room he heard a huge gush of water rush down out of our fireplace, and then water started coming from the ceiling everywhere, and then he noticed the carpet was starting to get soaking wet.  He called out to me, and I ran out and just stared in shock.  Water was everywhere – pouring out every light fixture, coming out the fan, running along the ceiling and popping out making holes, pouring down over the kitchen table, etc.  I started grabbing pots and pans, but quickly realized those weren’t going to be big enough, so I ran around finding buckets and garbage cans.  The floor was also getting more and more wet, because the water was coming down inside the walls and soaking into the carpets. 

We were really freaking out at first, running around yelling, “what do we do? what do we do?” I think at one point I asked if I should call my mom, but of course that didn’t make sense; I just felt like I didn’t want to be one of the adults in charge of the situation.  When Daniel realized it was coming from our water heaters he ran up to try to shut off the water, but that wasn’t stopping it, so then he ran outside (in his garments, in the rainstorm) and just shut off the water to the whole house.  Then we kind of just looked around in disbelief, thinking, oh, my goodness, we just ruined our house.  It didn’t help that we had just that month decided we were going to move to Utah, and so were planning on getting the house all ready to sell.

I drove to Wal-Mart at 4 in the morning to rent a rug doctor, and then while Daniel starting trying to vacuum up some of the water I got on the phone with our insurance company.  They sent some people to start drying out the house later that morning, which I thought would maybe take a few hours.  It turned out to be a 5-day process, and we weren’t allowed to stay at the house during that time, so we left that afternoon to stay in a hotel while all of the drying equipment was there. 

The kids were a little in shock about what happened to our house, but pretty excited to stay in a hotel. 

Enjoying their hotel breakfast the next morning:

Waffles with sprinkles.  So fancy!                                 

Swimming at the hotel.  The flooding had happened on a Friday, and we were able to move back home the next Tuesday.  Then it was just a matter of waiting to get things worked out with insurance and figure out when we could start all of the repair work (we ended up waiting for a month before the work got started, and then we came back to this same hotel for 2 weeks.  It really turned into a crazy summer). 

Also in July, football practice started for Oliver and Henry (no Tristan this year, because he played on his school team).  This was Henry’s first year, and he went straight into tackle football instead of starting with flag because there weren’t enough kids playing flag to form a team.  He was pretty excited about it. 

He was also excited about this little creation he made out of paper.  He called it the “slash waterpark slash pool slash playground.”  (He was going through a big “slash” phase – everything was this/this/this.  It was a pretty cute stage) 

He will tell you about it himself:

Back at the pool.  I love how much kids can progress in one summer just from going to the pool a lot.  At the beginning of the summer Cynthia had forgotten everything she learned the year before, and was terrified of the deep end.  After just a few months she was fearless.                                           

July 30th, Rachel and Henry’s birthday.  Her 10th, his 6th. 

Books from Grandma and Grandpa:                             

A pet fish:                                                                              

Some new Legos:                                                                                        

And some pepperoni pizza pancakes for breakfast, thanks to Tristan.  He had learned how to make them at scout camp and kindly offered to make them as a special birthday breakfast.  Pretty fancy. 

Then their traditional hotdogs and cheetohs at the pool for lunch:

Some swimming:                                                                  

And then gymnastics (this was the last day of the summer session at the rec center for these two):

And some birthday pies for dessert (they decided they didn’t want cakes this year). 

I just love these two, and it’s so fun that they get to be birthday friends.  I love looking back at them sharing their special day over the years. 

Here’s Rachel on her 4th birthday, with her dinosaur-volcano birthday cake and saying goodbye before I left for the hospital.  I had started having contractions while making her cake that afternoon (it was a surprise to me – I was scheduled to be induced 2 days later, and so hadn’t been expecting to go into labor on my own).  Luckily we had time to have her birthday dinner and cake and ice-cream and get all the kids ready for bed before we had to leave.

Here they are one year later, turning one and five:

Rachel turning 6, Henry turning 2:

Rachel turning 7, Henry turning 3:

Rachel turning 8, Henry turning 4 (he requested the same dinosaur volcano cake that Rachel had when she turned 4, but this one was easier to make because I wasn’t in labor while making it):

Rachel turning 9, Henry turning 5:

And finally, a 10-year old and 6-year old.  Time has gone by so fast. 

And here are Henry and Cynthia, closing out the month of July by falling asleep on the floor.  It was kind of an exhausting month.                                                                              

June 2014

Here’s some of what we did during the rest of June when we weren’t in California:

Blanket fort in the playroom.  This has become a “first week of summer” tradition.  The fort would get broken down and rebuilt multiple times per day.  Summer break + sleeping on the floor = so much excitement.                  

Also exciting – Lizza getting to open some birthday presents a week early.  Since we were going to be in California on her actual birthday, we did a little celebration the week before.  Henry and Cindy were especially happy to gift her some homemade creations.                     

Here is Henry explaining his present.  It involves a polar bear walking along that finds itself suddenly in the Arctic, an evil sea serpent, and a friendly whale.

Summer time at our house generally involves a lot of homemade arts and crafts and projects (I have nothing to do with this).  Here is Henry in a Captain America suit that Oliver and Rachel built entirely out of paper.      

It was one of many paper suits to be constructed over the summer.

One of Cynthia’s hobbies was organizing things all in a line and then having me take a picture of her on the floor next to it.  She was very proud of this one – all of the bears with their outfits just right. 

Summer checklists are my favorite thing about June.  Normally they include daily chores, a few weekly jobs, and study time, but this year the girls wanted to include 15 minutes of stretching every day on their charts.  They discovered they could multi-task and read while they were doing their wall stretches.  What could be better?                    

A friendly art lesson:

Then our California Trip:

After California.  Saying goodbye to our trusty old Dodge Caravan.  Here is a story of the cars we have owned since we got married:  first, a little blue Honda Civic.  Five years (and 3 kids) later, we bought this van.  I was never one to have hard feelings toward mini-vans, and I loved it – so much room!  No more slamming doors shut on 3 carseats in the back of the Civic!  It was very exciting. 

Then a year later we moved to Texas and left our Civic behind, becoming a one-car family again, which was surprisingly doable at the time (it wouldn’t be now).  We stayed that way until right before Cynthia was born, in the fall of 2010, when we bought an 8-passenger Honda Odyssey (so we’d all be able to fit in the same car).  So then we had two mini-vans!  It was weird, but the Dodge was all paid off and still working fine, so we kept both.  We called them “the old van” and “the new van” (we are boring car namers).  Finally after 3 1/2 years, we decided it was a little silly for Daniel to still be driving a mini-van to work, so he bought himself a Honda Civic, and we sold this one.  I don’t really miss it (new van is better). 

Smiling boys after a successful no-cavities dentist trip:

Adventures at the flooded creek near our home:

Snake! (not alive)

Soft-shelled turtle (very alive):

Henry being excited:

I am happy for my kids that they have had little areas of nature and animals so close to go exploring in.  On this particular day, Oliver went out adventuring, and then came running back to tell the rest of us we needed to come see the “amazing waterfall” that had been caused by all the recent rain. 

Everybody investigating:                                            

Henry racing after Oliver’s sandal, which was floating down the stream.  He gallantly dove in and rescued it. 

Henry doing dishes.  He went through a fun stage where this was his favorite job.  It involved the sink being on for long periods of time, and water getting everywhere, but I have never seen someone so cheerful and excited about doing dishes.  You can’t see it very well in the picture, but he is wearing a toy pirate compass on a belt around his waist.  I’m not entirely sure how it worked, but every once in awhile he would open up the compass and study it with a serious look on his face and then he said it told him which dish to wash next.  So you can see why the sink was on for so long. 

Dentist trip, round two (this time for Rachel, Lizza, and Henry).  Who minds sitting around in the waiting room when you have a good book to read? (there’s a tiny chance my kids inherited this from me – I have to admit that I actually look forward to a waiting room when I am in the middle of a good book). 

Doughnuts with friends after spending Saturday morning cleaning the church:

The boys working on teaching and learning first aid techniques to pass off some scout requirements.  Rachel very enthusiastically and realistically playing the part of the victim.  That girl knows how to turn on the creepy. 

Elizabeth pretending to be Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and Cynthia pretending to believe her.  This was a fun game they would play sometimes when they wanted to get the playroom all cleaned up.  Rachel and Lizza would tell Henry and Cindy that they all needed to work together super fast to get the playroom nice and tidy before Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (a character from a book they like) came to do an inspection.  Then Lizza would sneak downstairs, dress up in crazy things, and ring the doorbell.  She even did a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle voice and everything.  Way more effort than just cleaning up, but I guess more fun, too. 

That’s it for June.