New Family Pictures

Since Princess Kate went ahead and revealed her official portrait last week, I thought it only fair that we do the same. We desperately needed them and my talented sister in law Robyn was, I'm sure, chomping at the bit to shoot them for us. I had a great idea that we take them at a sushi restaurant, it more accurately reflects our personality as a family I think.
There were a lot of favorites, here is a sample.

Kudos to Robyn for figuring out how to do this while crammed into a booth with low lighting, and also for eating sushi, she was very brave. If you would like to see more of her work go here.

Opposition Therapy

On of our great troubles with Anna is that she's always "bored". No matter how many times we tell her that is not our problem she continues to expect us to fill all her waking hours with our attention. As I was lamenting about this in my journal a few nights ago I received a bit of inspiration: "opposition in all things". Anna can't be contented with playing all the time because that's all she ever does! Other than preschool 3 mornings a week, her life has no structure. So I decided to get strict about her chores again. Before she can watch shows or play with friends she has to do a few very simple chores. The best part about this is that when she complains that she "hates doing chores" I can smile and assure her that it will make playing more fun. And the more she hates something the more she will love playing when it's over. It's revolutionizing my attitude which makes it easier to enforce.

Additionally there was a quote in Downton Abby this week that I have since typed up, printed and hung up in the kitchen: (it's best if you imagine Maggie Smith saying it) "Anna dear, you are a girl with a brain and reasonable ability. Stop whining and find something to do!"

Breaking it in

Here is a late Christmas present for Calvin. I finished it late last night and after all that work was having serious doubts about letting a known spit upper use it, but I made it for him and I can tell he likes the bright colors. At least I can cross it off my projects list.

My degree in Eliza Communications

So here's a good example of Eliza communicating. The girls were eating breakfast as I took Calvin into my room to give him breakfast and read a little of my book. Then Eliza came in wanting to play. I asked her if she finished her breakfast, of course she had not. So I asked her to go back in and finish - this is where it gets tricky. She made her slurp for drink sound and pointed at the ground. I wasn't really paying attention to her and what she said didn't make sense, so she repeated it again, "slurp, point to ground" then again "slurp, ground" and again until I started guessing. "your drink is on the floor?" no. "you want your drink on the floor?" no. "you spilled your drink" uh huuhhh she answered as if that fact was obvious 5 minutes ago. Awesome. So not only did I decipher her language, but I got to clean milk up off the floor.

5 months and some sillies

 Calvin is 5 months old now and still a charmer. I don't know what else to say about him, we love him to death.

Here is Eliza's cheesy smile face. She asked me again and again to take her picture, so I have about 20 pictures of her like this. They make me laugh every time. She's hilarious.

Anna may be the most photogenic child ever. Mostly I love the photobomb that Calvin is doing in the background.

 Here's another picture of silly Eliza. She's a ham.

New

So this is the new thing at our house. We spent New Years anticipating and setting up a 10 gallon aquarium on the kitchen counter. And when I say "we" I do not include myself. It was mostly Ben and Anna. This was not my idea, in fact in pretty sure we agreed never to get pets when we got married. Nevertheless, there they are. Anna bought two basic goldfish with her own money and named them Phineas and Isabella. Ben got one big calico named Buford and a small fan-tail goldfish for Eliza named "Nemo" (of course). They have been all the rage for the last two days. Frankly I'm surprised they are still alive.


Update: Isabella was found dead the next morning and Phineas followed her that evening. They were replaced by bigger, stronger fish. A black one named Nightmare Moon and a big Goldfish named Rarity.

Rebirth

Check out what Husben got me for Christmas!

He also included some large iron-on numbers, so the question I put to you is, what number should I put on the back? The original was #2, so consider that.

Manicures

The girls allowed me to cut their nails this morning after I promised to paint them. Eventually it came to me, and the girls painted my nails. They each did one hand. Anna did pretty good, Eliza... I don't think she skipped any colors.

Record Keeping

(This is not supposed to be of interest to the general public, this is more of a record keeping entry.)

We sat down tonight with the girls and tried to list all the words in Eliza's profoundly limited vocabulary. She's over 2 years old now and we struggled and split hairs and were able to only list around 50 words/animal sounds. (Luckily she supplements with lots of grunting and pointing.) And here they are:

Mommy

Mom

Mama = grandma

Bampa = grandpa

Dada

Nana = Anna

Baby

Yeah

Hi

No

Hehe = horse

Hahhah = monkey

Meow = cat

Duck

Woof

Ball

Pop = popsicle or lollypop

Ffffff (exhale) = Iron Man or any Avenger

Thffff (inhale) = drink

Blue

Yellow

Bubble

Purple

Boo

Me

Ain = again

Nemo 

Home

Yum

Yummy

Ta-da

Beep

Weee = anything fun, like slides, swings

Ick

Nope

Oh

Up

Dow = go

Bow = goodbye

Holp = help

Hello

Owie

Bee = any insect; also, all letters

Em = Aunt Emily

Bobo = Uncle Jethro

Hey

Moo

Uh-uh

Uh-huh

Ma = kiss

Mmhmm

Boop = boot

4 Months of Fun

Calvin is already 4 months old, he's a joyous perfect boy. He's great at sleeping, smiling, and spitting up all over everything. He is also starting to grab at things.

He loves sitting up and sucking on his fingers (As a child, I sucked my index finger rather than my thumb, that's why it's important). And his sisters love him.

Here is a sneak preview of what Calvin is getting for Christmas. I found a tutorial with pattern on instructables.com and finally got it done last week. He already loves his Hobbes.

 Eventually Anna got antsy during the photo shoot and wanted to take some pictures, here's just one of the many that she got.

Stats: 13.2 lbs. 8.4%
23.75 inches 4.06%

Burial

I thought this was a pretty good idea so I want to share how I handled the body of Oriole Shirt. Since I couldn't bring myself to give him away, throw him away or burn him away, and I thought it would be weird to hang him on a wall in the house, I used small thumbtacks and stuck him up in a place of honor in the closet. Every shirt should be so lucky.

Farewell old friend

Here is the eulogy for my favorite shirt. Oriole shirt. He is too sheer to be repurposed in any way and I will miss him terribly but it is finally time to say goodbye.
I got him in high school from my brother who had bought him for a dollar from a thrift store in Helper, UT. He then painstakingly picked off all the sequins leaving behind the glitter glue.
Oriole shirt has never let me down. He fit me so well, that's why he stayed around so long.
I took him to Jackson and cleaned the grease traps in him, hoping the stains wouldn't show up on the black.
When Ben and I started dating, Ben picked me up for breakfast and I was wearing Oriole Shirt and Ben, of course was wearing a Red Sox shirt. An old guy at the diner even commented on it.
Then there was the rec league softball game we went to watch and Camertle didn't have a shirt with numbers on the back so I took off Oriole Shirt (I had a long sleeve shirt on underneath) and gave it to her so she could play as #2.
Good times.
I wore him through pregnancies, through summer and winter, he has always been there in the drawer waiting for me.
So this is all the memorial I could come up with for Oriole Shirt. May we cherish his memory. If you have any good memories to share you may take this time to share them on the comments.

Felt tree

I recognize that I am not the craftiest person reading this blog, but I wanted to tell you all how cheap easy this was to make. I have had my eye on these felt trees for kids to mess with for a few seasons, and I was unsure if it would be worth it.
WELL.
The hardest part was definitely getting up the will and courage to take my kids to the craft store. Honestly, I know how hard it can be, Eliza refused to sit in the cart or even keep up with me and Anna screamed at me for not buying her bubble gum all the way home.
But anyway, I bought 1/2 yard of green felt, and 8 colors of felt for ornaments. This project was about $5. Seriously. I cut the tree out, it is actually 3 sections, and thumbtacked it to the wall. Then we cut out 3 shapes per color, we have balls, turnips and bells. Then I cut little strips and polka dots and zig zags to decorate the ornaments if desired. I didn't get out the glue gun or anything. Setting it all up and cutting it out took 1 hour.
Such an easy project if you've been eyeing them like I have been.
I was thinking of using it as an advent, we have 24 ornaments, so they can put one up each day, if I can keep them from playing with all of them all the time.
I am very happy with it.

Baby blessing

Last night we blessed Calvin at our house. It was a small affair with just his grandpa, dad, 2 uncles and the Bishop in the circle. It was very nice. Ben's mom and sister were in town so we wanted to share the experience with them.
Unfortunately, Eliza had caught pie night stomach flu so I was busy attending to her instead of taking pictures or talking to anyone, so let's just pretend I took these pictures yesterday and also pretend he's not wearing a BYU onesie covered by a blanket. K?

Ice skating!

So Anna earned a family activity by doing her chores. She decided she wanted to try ice skating, I found that Provo peaks arena has a time set aside for kids under 12 and their parents at 10:00 on Thursdays!

Aunt Beetle came along because Ben was out of town and she helped the girls skate. I loved that it wasn't crowded and that it only cost $5.

 Also they had little walkers for the kids, Anna did really well and never fell but she said it was harder than she thought it would be.

Eliza even let Beetle push her around the ice. It was a great activity, I can't wait to do it again!

How to...

How to get assistance while shopping at Home Depot:

1- wear a baseball cap
2- wear a dirty sweatshirt and/or carharts
3- have facial hair

How not to get assistance while shopping at Home Depot:

1- have three kids with you, including a baby in a sling
2- try to push the cart with two kids in it with one hand while you support the one in the sling
3- look completely lost in the lumber section.

Raking leaves

Here are the obligatory pictures of raking leaves. Eliza just learned how to smile on demand, she's got a big cheesy, toothy grin that I can't resist.

3 months

Little Calvin is getting so big. Seriously, the biggest baby yet. Ok, that's not saying much.
I took some pictures with him today with the big camera but he wasn't really smiling. Then I got my iPod out and he had a better outlook. So these are those pictures.
He's quite a looker.

You can't go home again

This is a favorite picture of mine. I want to put it up so I will always have it (until the Internet explodes). This was my yard growing up, my playground, work-ground and imagination laboratory. We played and slept on the trampoline, we kicked field goals through the cherry trees, we hooked a zip line up to the big tree and tried not to die (ah, Toni?! Ah Toni!?) as it connected to the second cherry tree. I played catch with my dad and football with brothers and cousins. We irrigated in the sunshine and in the moonlight. We tried (more than once) to turn the gazebo into a swimming pool.

I wish I had a picture of the massive driveway behind the photographer. That is where we played basketball, jumped rope with cousins using giant 50 foot jump ropes. Where we rode bikes and fixed cars.
It was great place to grow up. This picture reminds me how good we had it.

Recipes that, inexplicably, work

I found myself with 2 surplus pomegranates today which yielded almost 2 cups of pomegranate seeds. What's more, the seeds were a little too tart for me, so I set about looking for some baked good I could incorporate them into. I found a chocolate chip pomegranate muffin recipe that looked easy enough so I got started.
I decided to double the recipe so I wouldn't have any seeds left over. My first substitution, instead of 4 cups of flour I decided to do 2 cups oatmeal, 2 cups flour.
Next I remembered that we were completely out of milk- animal and vegetable. But I had some dry milk powder, so that was resolved easily.
After that I realized somewhat panicked that we had no chocolate chips! A travesty, I know, but I stopped buying them the 5th time I found Anna in my closet with a bucket of chocolate chips. So, after searching the cupboards I did find...Halloween candy! So I worked out a deal with the girls, and they let me take all the M&M's and sixlets - which wasnt much.
At this point I decided to just go for it and shoot for an excellent Recipe That Doesn't Work. So I did the ole' half oil, half applesauce trick. And instead of two muffin pans, like I thought I had, I found one regular muffin pan and one pan with 24 mini muffins. I guess we downsized during the move.
At this point the batter looked surprisingly good, considering what I had done to it.
I tried a few as they finished baking and they were not terrible, then I had one that was lucky enough to catch some of the chocolate, and it was Delicious! So next time, more M&M's and we'll be all set!
Thus concludes an unsuccessful unsuccessful baking attempt. Thank you for your time.