My Collection

Okay, so the planets are aligned or something today because today I have cared for, fed and nurtured to some extent a total of nine children (true, five of them are mine). Not that interesting you say? Well, here's the cool part: They range in age from 1-9 and there is one of each for each age!! Yes, I am crazy for noticing that in the first place and blogging about it in the second place, but I think it is cool. So the 9,8,7,5, and 1 year old kids are mine and I had to get outside help for the rest. The 6 year old is on loan from my dear sister, he was dropped off at like 5:30am, yikes, but he's been at school all day so he barely counts. The 3 and 4 year old were here from like 8:30 'till 1 and they were very nice. And the 2 year old I had imported from Utah, her parents are on a cruise in the Bahamas (cry me a river) and I snatched her from Grandma for a couple of hours. Now if there was only a 10 year old out there for me to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for. . .

Also, I had a funny conversation with the 4 year old. I was making cupcakes for the 8 year old's party later this afternoon for Activity Day Girls and the 4 year old wanted in on that sweet action but I nipped it in the bud and she was all miffed and I told her that only 8 year olds can go so sorry kid. And she said, "But I invited her to my birthday party. Why can't I go to hers?" I had to explain a lot of times that not all cupcakes are for birthday parties. It took a lot of explaining.

You know, now that I think about it and read it here in black and white. It's not actually that funny or cool but you've got to account for the fact that I am very easily amused. . .

Christmas in October

For Christmas this year my wonderful parents hooked us up with a hotel room at the Arizona Grand, a hotel here in town that has a waterpark! My three sisters and their families came too, plus Ryan's dad, Terry and Ryan's sister, Jessica and her hubby Mitch came too. It was really fun. There were 16 kids there under the age of 12 and nobody got lost for too long. . .

My sister Whitny took most of these pictures with her fancy new camera. She had lots of fun with it and took some nice snaps.

Of the 16 grandkids there are 5 girls and 11 boys so it got a bit wild at times. Ryan was tossing boys on the two beds that were in our room for a while and I ran to get the camera to catch some video of the craziness but right as I was searching my bag for it Tyler got tossed a bit too enthusiastically and bashed his head on the wall a little. He was fine but it effectively ended the boy toss and I missed out on getting some fun video. Shucks.

Zeke's birthday was Saturday and he was cute running around in his little banana hammock speedo all day.
He hardly ever lets me kiss him because he is a tough guy.

Relaxing in the lazy river. There are three water slides there and I went down one of the steep ones twice and I screamed a lot and got wedgies. The kids were in heaven and had a fantastic time. We all did. Thank you Mom and Daddy! We love you lots!

The Fall

We slept with the windows open last night and it was a wee bit chilly! Yeah! I sure love this little blue planet we live on. It is pretty amazing how life is supported here on such a delicate balance, as if some genius architect or Intelligent Designer planned it all out for us. Nifty.

I'm going to bake pumpkin squares today.

Sooo Funny

My little sister Amanda just bought her first house and she spent today tearing all the lovely wood paneling and faux bricks off one of the walls. So she filled the back of the truck with all the junk and went to the dump. Meanwhile, at our house, Jeff has been begging all day to go to Oliver's new house and help but he had to do his chores first so by the time he finished Amanda had left for the dump already and he was mad that he couldn't go over but I explained that he can't go over because Amanda and Oliver went to the dump. Anyways, (Ryan is totally going to say this is way too long) Amanda and Oliver just came back and Jeff immediately asked. "Did you guys get some furniture for your new house?" To which Amanda said, "No." And then Jeffey said, "You mean you didn't find ANYTHING at the dump?"

He is for sure our child, we don't ever pay retail.

Rant

Ryan and I had a discussion on the phone earlier today and it kind of irked me. He, with the best of intentions and with love behind it, sort of implied that I'm a lazy bum because my exercise regime has taken a serious nose dive in the past couple of weeks. While I did "exercise" today it was short and, I'll admit, I wasn't completely "into" it, but, hey, I did it.

Well, I thought a lot about it since then while I've been cleaning and I ranted a lot to myself and here is one of the reasons I've fallen behind:

That's right folks, it is a shoebox full of junk. Why did I so carefully put all this junk in this shoebox? Because I am going to teach my kids a lesson today (not like the lessons in Arrested Development though, although if anyone knows a one armed man let me know, I may have a job for him.) I am going to show them this shoebox full of junk and tell them that this is why their mother is easily winded and can't do pushups and if they want me to live a long and healthy life they will quit shoving candy wrappers and trash into the couch because it makes me have to spend a half hour mucking all the garbage out from under and around the couch and it makes me bitter. My children (actually, just Leah) think they are sneaky thieves when actually they are just plain old thieves. I know what they are up to! Argh.

Back to the point, if I have one. I truly love having the opportunity to stay at home and be a homemaker for our family. I enjoy making sure everyone has clean clothes to wear and good food to eat and a tidy home to live in. But a line is going to be drawn. I'm going to explain about what is reasonable and what is currently going on around here and how those two things need to become friends with each other.

Wish me luck.

Mermaid

I've got one mermaid costume mostly done, the other two need more work. But here is Alana the mermaid, there will be more stuff added but this is the basic dealy. Whew.

Progress Report

I'm sure you all were dying to know how my projects are going but whether you were or not I'm going to tell you. Here's a picture of the tails! Aren't they pretty? I had to take them all apart and put them back together since the last time you saw them but in everything I do I like to take 6 or 7 steps back and one tiny step forward. But today I got to take a bigger step forward by quilting them. I quilted. I'm a quilter. With much help, hand holding and needle breaking my dear mother-in-law, Arnon, helped me to quilt these bad boys. They turned out really pretty and now I'm going to take a closer look at the quilts she made for each of our children and appreciate them even more because I'm here to say, that stuff is tricky! Thank you so much Arnon, you are a lifesaver!

Where would we be without our dear mothers? Nowhere! These darling tops were sewn by my mom, Valerie, and I am ever so grateful that I didn't have to get involved because she pretty much made up the pattern and they turned out so cute. The girls love them and I think they are adorable too. You rock Mom!

So now I just have to do the tail skirt things and maybe someday we'll see a finished product. Whew!

Here's my beautiful washcloth that I finished at knitting class last night. It is a stunningly ugly bit of knitting, but I will treasure it. Next week I'm attempting yet another wash cloth. Wish me luck! Knitting class is fun.

And, here are our chickens. The brown ones are the ones that we hatched from eggs, there are five of them and they are pretty cute and nice. They should start laying in a couple of months, we can't tell yet if any of them are roosters, none of them seem particularly noisy so maybe we lucked out and only have hens. . . But then, do I really need NINE chickens?