Have You Seen This Yet?

Coolest DVD cover ever. I have turned it around and around and around and it always says "The Princess Bride" whoever figured that out is a super genius.

I got one for Christmas :)

Christmas

It all started with the Nativity.

Tessa was excited to be Mary but she was a bit nervous about Oscar being Joseph. This year they had a script and got to read things, Jeff, Leah and Tessa all had a speaking part. It was lovely.

Here are the kids in our room waiting for Dad and Mom to get their act together enough to go out and open presents. The time was 5:20 am, they sweetly waited until 5:00 exactly to come in and wake us up and demand a start to the festivities. Peter wasn't sure what he was excited about but he knew he was excited.

The pajama pants this year were cow. Every year my tireless sister Lindsey makes us pajama pants, everyone gets a pair and she is amazingly accurate on size and length considering our varied sizes and lengths. It makes family picture taking on Christmas morning much more festive and interesting. I love this years fabric!

Buggie's bag was noticeably emptier than the other bags but only because her big gift was a tiny ipod, pre-loaded with her song list. We've had to shout to get her attention since then.

That's the face I was hoping to see. Let's just say he is looking forward to New Years.

Kay Kay was happy with her haul.

GG & GG Bateman sent gifts for the kids which they loved. See how they are each holding a pen to write on their little notebooks with? Well, when Peter opened his, out came a black sharpie! Thanks Grandma and Grandpa Bateman! Arnon thinks you sent it because you wanted my blog entries to have a little more sparkle and jazz and you thought a two year old with a black sharpie was just the trick!
Jeffey had this look on his face all day. He was very pleased.

Tessa had a happy day, she loved her presents. We all got new sleeping bags and now we're ready for some camping! Jeffey is going to get to go on his first 11 year old scout overnight campout next week, it will be a snow campout and he will get home New Year's Eve which also happens to be his 11 year old birthday. He is pretty much in heaven right now.

Peter Mac loved Christmas. He got lots of Cars stuff and a big wheel and a yellow dump truck and a pack of gum which he promptly chewed.

I thought this was a cool picture with the movement and twinner in the background softly weeping. Cory helpfully dressed them exactly the same. I was cuddling with the sticky faced one on the couch and felt a little dumb asking his name so I didn't, I just noted the smudge on his nose and a few hours later I learned it was Ben that was so sweet and cuddly. Love you Benja!

We took these Christmas Eve when they put their bags out. So they are kind of out of order, but I like them.




Petey's bag was just finished about a week ago. But we don't need to dwell.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Before Christmas

Christmas Eve Ryan had a Speed Camp over at FK (Phoenix College) for the Shields boys, our kids and a couple other kids too. This was his third session with the kids and he is having fun teaching them to run faster and better.

The kids had fun and did well.
.It was the first one I'd been to and it was very fun to watch my sweetie teach. He is very talented. And cute.

Peter ran a lap around the track. He loved trying to keep up with the big kids and doing what they were doing.

These two were super speedy :)

Before we went to the track we visited GiGi, she gave us Christmas presents and batted a balloon around with the kids.

She is so much fun.

We love her a lot.

A lot a lot.

For Christmas I made ornaments for our kids and I decided that since I was starting in August that I'd make them for all nieces and nephews, brothers and sisters, parents, kid's teachers, visiting teaching people, and various and sundry others. I ended up making 42, if you didn't get one it doesn't mean I don't love you, I just ran out of aida cloth.

Here's some pictures of some that I made.

Jake and Cory's family. We call him Benja, I think it will be cute when he gets older, plus Benjamin wasn't going to even try to fit.

Lindsey and David's family.

Amanda and Oliver's, Amanda is a long name to stitch with that big old fat "m", so she is Nunu. The picture is blurry because I took it while we were riding in the van, who knows why.

This is a riding in the van picture too but it wasn't blurry, who knows why. These are for Whitny's family.

My visiting teaching girls. They liked 'em.

I may be too lazy to turn it the right side up. But these are for the kid's teachers. They liked theirs too.

Our missionaries got some too. My parents like theirs. We'll talk to Justin today and see if he got his package yet. All of our missionaries are due to finish up their missions at the end of February and we are excited to see them again!

So that is that. I took tons of pictures last night and today of our Christmas festivities. I'll get around to posting them soon.

Love you all, Merry Christmas!!

You Knew This Would Happen

Other titles I considered for this entry were:

Tobias Funke Would Be Proud
or
How Did I Not See This Coming?

This morning Alana stayed home from school sick so I got her all settled on the couch with Cuddles and PBS. Pretty soon there was squawking because Peter kept jumping on her. He likes to jump on her and he always has. She doesn't really care for it. So Peter went outside with Cuddles to run and frolic and play. I commenced vacuuming the house, doing laundry, dishes, etc. It was a very nice peaceful morning. Alana only vomited once and cleanly into her barf bucket, thank you very much. And I was getting a lot done. I decided to go to the store to grab a few things so I went outside to get Peter and bring him with me when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a blue painted boy and a tiny blue dog.

Words cannot express.

He had managed to open the paint can that I had hammered shut and had about 1/2 inch of paint left in the bottom of it. He had painted himself, the porch, the dog, and her water bowl (in his defense, I'm pretty sure he was trying to clean himself off with her water). I am grateful that he kept his little blue paws off the house itself and the affected area was fairly confined. However, that isn't what crossed my mind in those first few moments of discovery. The grocery store plan was delayed while I scrubbed the porch. I thought briefly of taking a picture of it but paint dries people and time was of the essence. So I scrubbed and ordered Peter to stay on the grass and not touch anything. The cheeky little bugger kept asking me to wash his hands. After I got the porch sort of cleaned off, it looks terrible by the way. I washed the little blue devil. He didn't appreciate it as much as he should have. Next I tackled Cuddles, she was in worse shape than Pete and I had to chop off some of her hair on her ears and I'm pretty sure the hair on the back of her neck has been dyed blue, oh well.

The whole thing is, of course, my fault. I should have known it was too quiet around here. When will I ever learn?

. . . A Special Day

We are in the process of painting the exterior trim of the house which is seriously the most fun job ever. Not.

But the kiddies were getting antsy about having nothing to do on a Saturday while Ryan, Jessica, Mitch and I painted so I gave Jeff the camera and told them to take lots of pictures.






I forgot to tell you, Alana lost her first tooth last week. She was pretty excited and pleased with herself.

This happens a lot around here. Good old Tessa.

You are getting off easy, there were 116 pictures on the camera by the time we cleaned and put away our paint brushes. Sorry there's none of Peter, he was there but all the pictures of him were weird and blurry and he had a shamefully dirty face, his mother should have been paying attention to him. . .

Zoo It

I got to go on a field trip yesterday with Jefferson's 5th grade class to the Phoenix Zoo. These were the kids in my group. I have to say just as a brief side note, fifth grade boys are weird and one of them, we'll call him Glasses, to protect the innocent, said the strangest things. I spent most of the day just marveling at his oddness. I think at the end of this post I will quote one of the more interesting things I heard him say.

I was happy to see the meerkats, they are so cute and they hadn't been in their enclosure the last few times I was at the zoo.

The big cats were all just beautiful, we got to see the tiger, lions, the jaguar and lots of other smaller varieties. The jaguar was my favorite, she was lovely.

Giraffes.
Groundhogs, seriously cute eating their little carrots.

A huge Golden Eagle.

The wolves were pacing around, I'd never seen them that active before. I guess the cool weather perked them up a bit.

The monkeys were very spunky, the zoo people brought out these rug squares with jelly smeared on them and the monkeys were very excited about it. I thought this "jelly" looked like barf. The monkey seemed to enjoy it though.

Jeffer enjoyed "milking" this fake cow.

The boys had to have their picture taken with this dragon. The real komodo dragon was warming under the lights in his little house, he was pretty big and cool looking.

Okay, so what that kid said, "Did you know scientists don't even have a good explanation for why the earth flooded when they killed Jesus' son?" I honestly didn't know what to say in response. Where does one start? I had literally met him 2 minutes before he said that to me and I was a bit baffled. After spending the day with him I realized that that was pretty much par for him. So my response to such a question was a non-committal, "Huh."

Just because they were weird doesn't mean we didn't have a good time. We did have a really good time, we covered almost the entire zoo which is pretty impressive and the boys were fun to hang out with.