Valentines

We had a nice and busy Valentine's Day. Peter and I made Daddy a candy bouquet with m&m's, reeces, baby ruths, butterfingers, twizzlers, etc. Of course I didn't take a picture and neither did Ryan but you get the gist. We surprised him at work and I think he liked it. The vase came home empty so I guess we did well! Then Pete and I went and collected a friend of his and took her to storytime at the library with us. We love going to storytime. Then we hurried his friend home and had a little time before heading to the school for the second grade program that Alana was in. Yesterday was Arizona's 100th birthday as a state (number 48, baby!). It was an adorable program and she did a great job. Her class played, "Are you smarter than a 2nd grader?", it was darling. That's our girl at the desk on the right side.




They are birthday candles in this picture, isn't that so cute?



Then we jammed home and Pete played with his buddies Axle and Maddox, the kids came home from school, Jeff went to mow lawns at Grampa L's house, Leah and Alana went to gymnastics, while Tessa and I made dinner for our guests and fancy dinner party we had last night. We had both sets of our parents, Ryan's aunt and uncle down from Canada (who cleaned the kitchen after and washed all the dishes and were a fabulous crew, I will have to have them over more often), Jess and Mitch, and Linz and her babies came too. It was a fun night. None of the food was heart shaped like I wanted to make but it tasted really good so it was okay. We had meatloaf, mashed potatoes, broccoli and cauliflower, rolls, fruit kabobs, and red velvet cupcakes. I tried to put the marbles in the baking tins with them to make the cupcakes heart shaped and it worked sort of on a few of them, most of them just looked like someone had bitten them, as Peter sweetly pointed out. Our guests were wonderful and we had a great time.

It was a busy day and I keep wondering what I would have cut out to make myself a bit less harried but I can't imagine what I would have left out so I guess I'm just going to have to go with it and be happy with non-heart shaped meatloaf patties and malformed cupcakes.

Helpers

So yesterday my visiting teaching companion, Phyllis, and I went to the park and had lunch with a girl we visit and we were talking and I told her about what I've been up to and she said, "Well, I'll just send Tom over. Tom is great at roofing and he will have it done for you super quick!" I told her that we were old hands at roofing and it was seriously under control and she didn't need to send Tom (her hubby). BTW, they are great grandparents. Well, sure enough, I got home and started roofing with David, who came by to help for a couple of hours because he is awesome. Well, pretty soon here comes Tom and Phyllis. Tom is all dressed for roofing, he brought his knee pads and everything and he revolutionized our process. He did a fancy stair step technique that I'd seen done on other roofs but didn't understand. Well, he whipped those shingles out and nailed them down faster than you could say, Boo. He laid every shingle but the bottom 15 rows or so, all we had to do was put them in front of him. It was awesome.

He is coming over this morning to help me finish it. He should be here in a few minutes. Just thought I'd let ya'll know that if you do your visiting teaching you will be blessed almost immediately :)

Isn't it so pretty?

Stiff and Sore

So Saturday we ended up finished laying all the underlay over the garage and we barely started the top layer.

The driveway had a huge pile of old roof on it that I loaded up and took to the dump yesterday, three trips. Those roofing materials are heavy and dirty. But I am so glad they are gone. Here's before and after.

Then last evening Mitch and Jess came over to help us lay the top layer peel and stick stuff. I am so glad that is done, now I can shingle the main roof.


David is going to come over today and help me lay shingles. Hopefully we get a lot done. I am so much looking forward to never seeing that ugly pock marked and hail damaged roof again!

What We do for Entertainment

Isn't it hideous? That is our roof. Yes, Peter is up there, he loves it on the roof. I try not to show him how scared I am every time he climbs the ladder and worse, climbs down the ladder.

So these are the before pictures. Shortly after I took them we tore off all the grey stuff. We had a leak there where the plywood shows and replaced that with new, also we put up those new blue boards you can see in the first picture.

Here it is stripped. I guess I should have captured the huge pile of debris in the driveway but it just makes me tired to look at. Tomorrow I get to load it into the little truck and drive to the dump a couple of times. It will be real fun. Actually, I kind of like going to the dump with shingles, it makes me feel like I've accomplished something.

I will take pics every time I go up so ya'll can watch the progress, it will look much better soon. I am just so grateful that we can finally afford to do the roof, that we can do it ourselves and that the weather is so very nice for roofing!

Birthday Bug

Our sweet Leah Bug is now 11.

I can't figure out how that happened. See, she still sticks her tongue out all the time like she did 10 years ago, but she is quite a bit bigger and has a lot more hair on her head than she did even 8 years ago.

She asked for pizza and wings for her party so we had all aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and second cousins who were willing and able to come over last night and had a big shindig.

She loved it. The pizza turned out great and I managed to keep up with demand even though I only have one oven. The wings were great, we had the fryer outside so it wouldn't smoke up the house. And there were lots of fun and happy people over.

Leah was especially happy to have her Sheilds cousins come, she and Oscar are good buddies.

Whit did a photo shoot of some of her more adorable nieces. Jujo is absolutely darling and I'm super excited for Linz to go back to work next week so I can play with her a little bit :). She totally looks like my Grandma Hawker in a couple of her pictures. Cutest Baby since mine were that small.

Seriously.

David's birthday is today! He is such a nice brother. I love him a lot. We partied for him as well last night.

Leah and Ox. Those two are fun together. And there's the cake. Leah got to color on it with the food dye markers and decorate it herself. She loved that part. Saw it on Pinterest.

I made it all from scratch only because I'm cheap and lazy. Cheap because I didn't want to buy rolled fondant when I can make it so "easily". It is actually easy to make, and pretty fun - messy though. And lazy because when I saw I needed white cake mix to tint the rainbow colors and that I didn't have any white cake mixes, and I didn't feel like going to the store right at that moment so I just made the cake batter from scratch too instead of hauling my cookies to the store. Everyone said it looked good and tasted good too! It did. I rocked that cake hard.

Happy Birthday David and Leah, you two are tops in my book.

Thank you for the photos Whit - You are so kind to share your talent with me!

Christmas and So Forth

December started out with a bang at the wedding of my Sweet Little Mandy Sister to her handsome squeeze, Doug. It was a lovely ceremony and I would post pictures here but Whitny hasn't sent them to me yet even though I asked like ten minutes ago and her kids are all at school now. Lazy. I will post them soon. They are adorable. See Doug and Amanda in the photo below? Of course you do.


We had a great Christmas! Full of family, food and fun. On Christmas Eve we had our parents and all our brothers and sisters at our house for a big party! We were only missing my two new nephews, Luke and Alex. I was in charge of the pajama pants this year since Linz played the baby card, so everyone got highwater pj's, I just like calves and that's all there is to say about that. The point is that all the important bits were covered up and everyone got a pair.

Jujo especially loved hers. (also, I stole these pictures from Whit's FB, you take good pics Whitty)

It was nice that all 45 people fit in the house, some leaked out and gathered around the firepit outside too. It was wonderful having them all here. I like them a lot. Arnon dressed up the kids and they put on the Nativity, there was food and wrapping paper and children everywhere.

We liked having Squiddy here and it is okay that he is still a single gentleman, that just means we don't have to share him.

The obligatory Christmas bag pictures.


Christmas morning the kids were up at 5am, after a little help from Ryan and some moaning from me. My bed was warm. But we got up and opened the kids stockings. They were all set out in the pit on a different cushion and Jeff in his morning fog of sleepiness started opening Peter's stocking. Pete didn't appreciate it very much and it took Jeff a second or ten to realize he was fighting over the wrong stocking. It was funny.

After the kids played with their stocking goodies for a little while we gathered up their church clothes and accessories and headed off to Grandma and Grandpa Livingstone's house for gift opening there at seven before church since Chris and Heather were to be heading to Tucson that morning and Jake and Cory were going to go to Mesa and we didn't want to miss them. Gift opening over there was really fun and wild and crazy. Loud and good. It makes me happy. Everyone was pleased with their haul and it was fun to watch people open things. Justin gave Arnon a gift that was in a box labeled, "Automatic Pet Petter" it had pictures of the contraption and descriptions about how it would pet your pet for you, for people who love their pets but don't so much want to touch them. Arnon was kind of sad to open the box and find it wasn't an actual pet petter but just some new clothes. Justin put her gift in a "gag" box. She thought that would be the perfect gift! I kind of want one too.

Cory got us all calendars again and it was "boys" year so they were all manly themed. I think ours was especially awesome, it is a toilets of the world calendar. So thru out the year we can enjoy looking at different interesting toilets. It is hanging in our kitchen and I am only mildly disturbed by it so far, it will be a fun year :)

We went to church at our ward and it was really lovely. We only had sacrament meeting and there was lots of music and the talks were very nice. I wish we had church every Christmas morning, it just made the whole day special.

After church we came home and the kids got to open their bags. They were all happy with what they got and played for a couple of hours while Ryan and I napped. Then we went over and had dinner at Livingstone's, it was yummy, I did the turkey again and everyone was happy with it, I hope I get to always do the turkey because it is so easy and everyone loves it - minimum effort; maximum impact!

Buggy loved getting to play with the babies, there was Jujo and Kinley there to cuddle. I'll admit, I cuddled a baby or two myself.

Our fun week continued with another big wedding. Chris and Heather got married! So the kids and I made ourselves pretty, we got facials. (that's what the above picture is, I'm not trying to scare you... okay, maybe I am)

The ladies and I got mani-pedis so we could be sparkly and fancy at the wedding.



The girls sang a song during the ceremony and they did very well. Uncle Kent helped them practice quite a bit that week before the wedding and they were confident. They ran thru it twice before the ceremony with the string quartet and the quartet loved them! They thought they were the cat's pajamas. Look at the violinist on the right, he was smiling at them the whole time. All the wedding guests gave them lots of compliments and they were pretty glow-y about the whole thing.

There was a big reception with dancing after and we stayed overnight at the resort, the kids stayed up late partying and woke up early to swim before we had to head home for our New Years Eve party that very night featuring Jefferson's 12th birthday!!



He was excited to have tons of family there, the video does not show exactly how loud that birthday song was actually sung, it was really really loud. And the very next day he got to receive the Aaronic Priesthood and be ordained to the office of a Deacon by his Deacon's Quorum Adviser aka, Ryan. Don't worry, the Assistant to the Deacon's Quorum Adviser is very responsible, it is Uncle Mitchell :) The Bishop's office was stuffed to the rafters with family, both of his Grandfathers, his Great-Grampa Bateman, and lots of uncles and family members got to stand in the circle at his ordination. It was lovely. He was grinning all day long. He passed the Sacrament for the first time yesterday and he did great. They had him sitting next to the tallest young man they could find so it was pretty obvious that he was a brand new deacon. He was very serious and all business while he passed the sacrament. I don't know how he got so big, just yesterday he was so small and sweet to cuddle with. Now he is all big and gangly and he has odors...

The rest of last week was filled with hanging out with the family members that were still here, we went hiking a couple of times. Showing off our lovely weather to our Canadian family, mainly trying to convince them to live down here and that rattlesnakes aren't that common. The only wildlife we saw were three fat jackrabbits hippity hopping around.

It was a bit of a marathon to get thru, two weeks jam packed with fun - but we loved it. We came away convinced we have a wonderful family and that we need to go to Canada in July and spend about two weeks there :)

Stay tuned for our new adventures involving ripping part of our roof off and replacing old and rotten wood, re-shingling the roof, and repainting the house using our own muscles and brains, and also my ever-loving parents who come get me out of tight spots. Love you Mom and Dad!

Strange

We found this little gem on the camera. I have no idea when it was taken and what possessed this child to video tape this but I am glad she did because it shows how very strange she is. I'm pretty sure dogs aren't supposed to eat dum dums.

What I wanted to show you was a video of the girls singing at Ryan's brother's wedding last weekend but I can't find that vid on the computer at this moment so that will have to be uploaded another day. Until then, enjoy this.

Also, our Christmas and New Years were fantastic! I am still trying to gather the nerve and time to document it all on here. When the kids go back to school next week and the last family members have jetted off - I will regale you with stories.