Christmas 2008

We stayed in Utah for Christmas this year. It was the first year since we have been married that we haven't went to Oregon but we actually really enjoyed being able to have our own Christmas and start some traditions of our own with the kids. Allison didn't really know what was going on but Emmie was very into everything Christmas and Santa Claus related this year.

Here are some pictures of the festivities.

Christmas Cookies















Emmie putting out her note, cookies and milk for Santa















The presents appearing after the kids went to bed















Stocking with their ghetto name tags haha















Emmie opening some presents















Allison a little excited about her ball















More presents















Darren opening his gift from the girls















This is what the girls made for Darren to put on his desk at work















Sorry no sound but I had to post this video of Allison dancing



We have really enjoyed relaxing and hanging out while Darren has had the time off work and are NOT looking forward to him going back in tomorrow. We hope everyone else enjoyed their Christmas break as well!

Can it be... is my computer fixed???

Well not entirely, but at least I can do some things on it again. So with the help of Darren's dad, Darren and a little bit of info from his computer savvy cousin over the phone they were able to start the process of fixing this dumb thing. First they backed up all my pictures and word documents onto an external hard drive but Darren takes that to work so I still don't really have any of my stuff. Then we had to completely wipe EVERYTHING off my computer and start from scratch. When we ran a virus scan it turns out that somehow a Trojan virus killed everything. Can I just say computer hackers suck! Also it turns out that my battery won't hold a charge and my power cord is on the fritz! For the time being Darren's dad was nice enough to let me use one of his batteries and power cords from one of his computers. Wow what a mess huh!?!

After that boring update on the computer here's a quick recap on what we've been up to, and I'm sure I'm leaving stuff out but this is what I can remember.

• We had Thanksgiving with Darren's side of the family here in Utah

• Went to temple square to see the lights
  

• The girls and I went to Oregon for a week

While in Oregon we

• Celebrated my mom's birthday with 2 of my sisters and some nieces and nephews

• Went the the Great Wolf Lodge (a hotel and indoor water park)

• Visited my high school friend Rachel that I haven't seen since Emmie was Allison's age

• Got some Christmas shopping done for Darren while he wasn't around

• Went to see the movie Bolt with Emmie and grandpa while grandma babysat Allie (I thought it was a way cute movie for kids)

Since being home from Oregon we have

• Got our first Christmas tree ever!!!

• Emmie had her Christmas program at school which Santa showed up for

• Got lots of snow to play in

• Finished our Christmas shopping (except for Darren haha he says I'm too hard to buy for because I never say I want anything. Although I have given him tons of ideas he says they aren't girl gifts so he wants different ideas.??? I thought my own external hard drive and a new suitcase were good/practical ideas but I guess not. I still hope I get one of those things though)

• Went to a Christmas party at Darren's aunt's house with a ton of the family. We had some good food, did a ornament exchange between the kids and Santa showed up and sang songs with us and passed out candy. It was a lot of fun!

Here are some pictures of the events

Still no Computer

I know I suck but I still haven't gotten our computer fixed. It will have to wait at least another week though before I can even take it in and then however long to fix it, so bare with me. Here are two pictures of Allison doing what she loves most, CLIMBING! Little booger loves to climb on anything and everything. I didn't take a picture of her on top of the table since I don't want her to think that's cool, even though that's where I take her down from 50 times a day!

Hope these can hold you over for a little longer until I get our computer situation fixed

Pregnancy Update

Since I have the pregnancy blog I don't really post anything pregnancy related on this one but seeing as how I have a few people that aren't on that blog the stats on my pregnancy are, I am now 28 weeks which means I'm in my 3rd trimester. Only 12 more weeks to go! I am gaining weight like crazy but feeling fine. :) I actually don't know if I ever posted the gender on here but the envelope that had the baby's gender in it has been opened and it's another girl! There's not much else to report as it has been a pretty normal pregnancy.

Pictures!!!

We are in between computers right now so I haven't wanted to download anything on this new one as I am wanting to get rid of it and fix our old one but family and friends out there are waiting for pictures of all the things that have happened in the last couple weeks so here we go.

• We hung out and did some fun stuff before Halloween

• Had our friends come down from Ogden to stay the night with us for Halloween and take the kids out trick or treating together

• Emmie had her 4th birthday!!! We had presents and cake at home and then gave her the choice of what she wanted to do and she picked bowling
  

• We have also been doing lots and lots of other fun things but no pictures to update on those so here are the pictures of the things we had our camera for
  

So this was the "busy busy"

So I kind of neglected actually telling anything that was making us busy in the last post but it has just been that kind of busy that you feel like your head is spinning so you don't feel like you have a minute to take a breath.

None of the things happening have been too exciting though, just time consuming. We had our wards Fabulous Friday (we did this instead of a Super Saturday) and since I'm on the enrichment committee I did a lot of running around for the last two weeks making sure we had some of the stuff that we needed. I am soooo not a crafty person so I can honestly say that I have been inside Michael's craft store more times in the last two weeks then I have ever been in my whole life. Everything turned out to be worth it though. I thought it was a fun night and I actually did a craft that didn't turn out too bad! This is a huge accomplishment in my book! As you can see it's not finished all the way yet because I need to cut and hang all the tags but hey it's almost done.

I was also in charge of teaching people how to make gospel quiet books for kids since I had made one for Emmie and Allie a little bit ago. Before you go thinking, "but I thought she said she wasn't crafty" the only thing that made this possible for me to make was the fact that I bought a punch out letter book with scrapbook paper included so all it took was gluing and finding pictures to go in it. Here is what the front of it looks like and what a couple pages look like as well.

Allison also had a bad ear infection that took a lot out of us each day and kept us up a lot at night. Luckily the antibiotic took care of that but now she has three more teeth trying to poke through that is again keeping us all up at night and makes for a little bit more of a sad girl during the day. But despite her feeling under the weather with everything she is still such a funny girl and keeps us laughing a lot. She doesn't talk much and just kind of sits back and observes but she understands everything. I thought she would talk more so I didn't really start signing with her earlier but since she isn't talking I've started signing and she's picking it up great. She signs more, all done, drink, and please like a champ so I need to introduce some new ones. Our camera is sucky so it hasn't been recording sound but here is a video of some of the signs I could get her to do. Her sign for drink is actually the sign for milk but it works and also how she signs more is actually the sign for, shoot I can't remember, but that is what she has taught herself even though we sign it the right way.

At the end of the video she starts to play with her tummy and that has nothing to do with signing that's just her playing with her bellybutton. When she is full her bellybutton pops out and she tries to push it back in. haha

Emmie has been LOVING preschool and is getting to know each of the kids really well. She loves to learn and it's nice that she has a set time two days a week that she can focus on classroom learning. She is learning to write her letters really well and has come home excited about telling us different things that start with each letter of the alphabet. She also loves numbers. At school she is learning to write all the little numbers that she already knows while I am working at home with her counting as high as she can and counting different ways. She counts to 100 all the time but is still so excited each time she makes it and we all make a big deal about it so it makes her that much more happy about it. She also likes to count by 10's and I'm teaching her to count by 5's right now. It's so fun to have a kid who likes learning so much but it also gets tough to keep her attention sometimes because she gets bored easy if she isn't stimulated in some way.

We also went to the zoo and doctors office a couple times for Allison and babysat one of Emmie's friends and I had a doctors appointment. I won't bore you with the details of each day but that's where all our busy days have went.

Busy busy

So I've been feeling a little too busy to get on this thing and post but here are a couple pictures for your viewing pleasure...

Little miss Allison at the park. She thinks she is such a big girl and doesn't want help on the structure, but then tries to go down the slide standing up, which lets me know she does indeed need a lot of help still.

Emmie being a daredevil. What you don't see is at the bottom the two slides separate and do a kind of "S" shape that would send her straight on her face if she did decide to actually attempt to go down the slide this way. Luckily the kid has some guts but doesn't go for the gore.

Even though this is a picture from behind I think it's a cute picture of the girls playing.

Just a random picture of Emmie and I at the park

And since Darren is never home during the day, so hardly ever makes it in a picture, here he is so you remember he's a part of the family too. ;)

Oh Emmie

Emmie had her first field trip last Thursday with her preschool class. It was an autumn trip that we went on a hike and collected fall things. She got all sorts of leaves, flowers and acorns and even a yucky sucked on Mentos candy, yum. haha she thought it was a rock or something, but nope it was a sticky mint. We also had a sack lunch and then the kids played on a play structure. It was fun to get to know some other moms of the kids. It was the morning and afternoon classes so even Emmie got to meet some new kids. I love this picture of her, it totally shows her attitude! She didn't want her picture taken so she wasn't about to give me a smile.

Poor Allison was teething and also came down with a cold on top of that so she was a sad little baby during the trip. She didn't cry or anything, she just sat there in the stroller totally dazed sucking on her bink.

Here's a better picture of Emmie.. Although her shirt is hiked up, her pants are falling down and her panties are hanging out, but she's sure happy about that acorn she found!

Emmie also informed me last night while I was bathing her that she ate monies (this is what we call coins like quarters, nickels, dimes, pennies) I then proceeded to question her. I asked her if she really did, what kind of monies was it, when she did it, why she did it and on and on. It came down to that she did in fact eat money it was a nickel while I was in the shower that morning and she ate it because she didn't want it anymore. Reasonable reasoning for a 3 year old I'm sure but I don't quite understand how eating it really solved her not wanting it anymore seeing as now it is closer to her than it was before. I had to explain that we now needed to wait for her to poo it out and that was so not cool with her. She wants nothing to do with this money that she has ingested. I told her we could have the doctor cut it out and now she is freaking out telling me not to tell the doctor what she did. I still can't believe that she has never eaten anything none food except maybe some paper here and there as a baby but she waits until she is almost 4 to decide to try eating random things. Hopefully it doesn't give her too much pain while her body tries to digest this nickel but I can guarantee she won't be eating anymore money any time soon.

Visit from Grandma

My mom has been here for the last week and we just took her to the airport today. She couldn't have come on a better week for me since I was not functioning at my normal level because I haven't been sleeping lately. I'm sure it wasn't the most fun trip for her since we did a lot of lounging around but it was nice for me to have another pair of hands around. I got her a guest pass at my gym while she was here and she took the kids almost everyday or would take Emmie while I stayed here during Allison's nap and it would give me a little break, it was awesome. One of the days she was here we opted for a pedicure at our gyms spa so we took the girls to the kids play area and they watched them while my mom and I got our feet worked on. Also she babysat for Darren and I to be able to take a belated anniversary weekend trip. We had wanted to get away for the weekend back in August but things fell through so she said she would come this month to watch the kids over the weekend for us. We didn't go far just to a nice hotel in downtown Salt Lake but it was a really nice weekend getaway. I haven't ever left Allison overnight and haven't left Emmie since she was 18 months old so it was weird to leave them but was so nice to have some time away. We were able to sleep when we wanted, we hit up a movie, walked around town, went to a spa on Saturday and Darren got a massage and I got a facial. It was just the little break we needed.

If anyone ever wants to try out an awesome spa in Salt Lake the one we went to is a holistic Japanese spa called the Kura Door. I guarantee you will enjoy it!

Of course being the grandma that my mom is she came bearing gifts. With the whole family reunion going on in August she had forgotten to give Allie her birthday gifts so she brought those and she also brought Emmie some early birthday presents so she would be able to see Emmie enjoying them. Emmie LOVES tools and has wanted some for a long time and my mom found some awesome ones that both the girls can't get enough of.

I wish I would have taken more pictures from the visit or from our outing in Salt Lake for the weekend but what can I say, I'm a slacker. But here's a couple of Allison in the backyard playing while my mom was here. Emmie and Allie LOVE to play out back. Allison has a thing for the garden and likes to sit in it and play with the dirt. If she didn't look so dang cute doing it I might get mad at constantly having to wash her off. I have also found Emmie "planting seeds" in the garden, which is really her planting rocks. I guess we will have a little more work ahead of us next year picking out all of Emmie's "seeds" to be able to till up the ground.