Christmas Vacation Thoughts

I know that I posted a bunch of pictures from our vacation with very little prose.  That was mostly just to get something out there, in case I went on another 6 month hiatus from blogging.  Life can get pretty hectic, and my forecast for the next few months is 'busy'.  I just wanted to take the time this morning and write down what a wonderful break we've had.

The best part about the break was having all of my family together so that my kids could have some cousin playtime.  It took some time to remember everyone; I overheard Noah ask, "Are you the one that I was playing with before?" But after that, there was no separating the cousins. Noah and Jack were constantly together, out on the tree, running around the yard, playing legos, etc.  Harrison had fun getting integrated with the older Anderson kids.  I was also really excited when he started to want to play baseball.  Adam and his boys do a lot more sports than me and mine.  That's been something I wish that I did more, but just haven't found the time.  We actually don't even own a baseball mitt.  Adam, Adam and Mark were often out in the front yard playing catch or pickle.  Noah and Jack really liked to join in pickle, although I 'm not sure Noah knew what was going on.  I think he just liked the running.  Harrison would come running from the house and ask to be part of the fun.  He did really well playing catch.  I think this spring we'll have to start in our back yard (we now have one!).

I also really was glad for the kids see a variety of fun Christmas traditions.  For the last several years, since Harrison was an infant, we've done Christmas at our house; just us.  Holiday travel is difficult, and we were poor students a lot of that time.  I love Christmas with us, don't get me wrong.  It's calm and relaxing.  But with several groups of relatives this year we got to see lots of different ways to do Christmas.  At my parent's house with the Andersons, we had a rocus Nativity re-enactment.  It was a lot of fun. They include Samuel the Lamanite on the wall as part of the nativity, which I thought was fun.  Then there was the classic donkey ride to the full inns.  I got to play a sheep, helping to mark my corner of the living room as the stable.  Sara brought their costumes from Arizona, and had enough for all my kids.  A neighbor of my parent's came over to offer a hay-ride.  So they got to be out in the Texas night singing carols with a full moon.  Then at my Aunt Betsy's house in SLC, they got to be part of a musical retelling of Luke 2.  The Fetzer and Nagel cousins all came with their violins/cellos.  John Nagel would read a verse out of Luke and then they would play a Christmas song.  I figured that since I didn't have a violin to play, I would sing as my talent.  Clark, John, Sara Nagel and her kids soon joined in.  This was a really beautiful way to relive the Nativity.

This Christmas also featured a lot of family building.  My sister-in-law Sarah had her first baby on Christmas Eve.  My sister Sara is expecting. My brother David got married. My brother Dan got engaged.  I was struck by how much fun families can be; the more the merrier. We're all at some point on the path, but I really love being with a big family.  When people ask me why I have three kids, these times are one of many, many reminders.  My mom and dad did a heroic job raising six kids, and it's wonderful to be part of that.

At the Temple

Here's some family photos of us at the Houston Temple.  We did not get any pictures of the bride and groom,  but I assume that they have some for themselves.  It was a nice sealing, and a beautiful day.

Family for Christmas

This Christmas, my brother David got married in Houston.  For the occasion, all of the siblings got together at my parent's house and had a great vacation.  Since we are spread throughout the US, we don't often have a chance to all get together under one roof, and we barely fit under one roof.

It was fun to be together.  We don't really need a lot of activities to have fun, just being a family together.  I am grateful just to be family (mormon message on the topic). So here are some semi-random shots of us together.

Here's my mom with her three granddaughters.

Dan and Jack making lemonade

Paynes and Andersons playing legos on the upstairs balcony.  My parent's house has two big buckets of legos, and that makes a home for my boys.

David found that he could easily entertain kids with videos of kittens

 Mark and Naomi

 One of the things that my mom likes to do is tell stories.  So she gathers all the grandkids on her bed and invents some winners.  I heard my boys retelling parts of the stories throughout the trip.  It's great for me, because it's like a hour of peace and relaxation, time I can spend reconnecting with my siblings without constantly checking on my kids.

 Mark was very excited to play backgammon.  I think that he played nearly everyone in the house.  Maybe he will grow up like Dan, and be a total backgammon pro.

Monopoly, star wars style.

The Old Oak Tree

In the front yard of my parent's house in Texas, there are a few fantastically beautiful oak trees.  They are perhaps 100 years old and 30-40 feet tall.  Like a picturesque children's book, one of them has a solid branch that bends down and touches the ground.  It is a perfect climbing tree.  It is a constant source of fun for our visits to grandma and grandpa.

This Christmas we were there at the same time as the Anderson's and the kids camped out around the old oak tree. Here's a shot of Noah and Jack playing up on one of the branches.

Olivia playing (posing) in the leaves.

A better shot of the branch that comes down. 

Halloween

Time to catch up the old blog. Our Halloween was pretty CRAZY! We closed on our house on the 29th (just barely - I had no idea how stressful closing could be!) and we had to be checked out of our temporary housing by the morning of Oct. 31st (a Sunday, AND Halloween AND the children's primary program at church!), and our belongings weren't arriving until Monday morning. So, Saturday, when we really "celebrated" Halloween with a truck-or-treat at the church, was crazy day filled with trips from our apartment to the new house, moving what little we had with us. It consisted mainly of suitcases of clothes, but we had picked up a few item, and the movers had delivered some items early, so it did take most of the day.
A dear friend in the ward outfitted us with sleeping bags, pillows, mattresses, comforters etc., so we could camp out Sunday night. But there was no pumpkin carving this year - or at least not that I can remember. The move is a bit of a blur now, but I'm looking forward to years where our life wont be quite so stressful and crazy.

I ordered the kids costumes this year - being without a sewing machine or any of my normal crafting stuff, I decided to keep it simple. I had seen an adorable ewok costume that I thought would be perfect for Olivia, and went with a Star Wars theme, since the boys are so into that right now. Sizing was a bit of a challenge - Olivia's costume that was suppose to be size 2-4, barely fit her, and Harrison's Luke Skywalker (size 7) was ginormous. The Darth Vader costume was perfect - a WalMart find, and I splurged and got the voice box to go with it, so he could make darth vader breathing sounds.

Here's some photos of the kids getting ready to go to the party at the church.

 

I must have lost my camera for a while as we were moving in and getting settled - I don't have any pictures! 

Blog Catch-up (LONG post)

I've been neglecting the blog lately.  So I decided to do a really long catch-up post, so I can try and start to keep up with what has actually been going on.  This post may someday be broken down into multiple posts, to someday go into a book, but for now this is what I have the time an patience for. 

So, first off, for anyone that I don't keep up with on facebook, we moved.  Not the blog this time.  And not just up the road a few miles.  Across the country, again.  We now live in Washington State.  Kinda crazy.  I like to joke that we took the long way up the west coast, made a quick 2 year stop off in DC.

We are loving our new location.  The weather has been very pleasant (although it's rained quite a bit, which is very unusual for the area, so I'm told.)  Harrison is loving school.  Noah started a preschool taught by a girl in our ward, and it's been the perfect thing for him. Both schools are less than a 5 minute walk from our temporary housing. I am loving the slower pace of life here, and the fact that I haven't been anywhere that is crowded yet.  I went to Costco and Walmart on the first Saturday we were here, and was amazed to find them less busy than I ever saw our Walmart or Costco in MD.  Such a nice change.  Another change I've had to get used to is that everyone goes the speed limit here.   I think it's a good thing, I've just had to train myself not to speed.  But since everything is within a 5 minute drive, I really don't mind.  I have yet to drive on the freeway, except to drop off the rental car at the airport.  I used to drive on the freeway several times a day: to get Noah to preschool, or go grocery shopping. I've noticed that I have a lot more free-time because I'm spending a lot less time in the car.  But most of my "free-time" has been spent on finding a home, and now working with the lender on getting everything ready for closing.  Oh, yeah, did I mentioned we are BUYING a home? 

We are so excited.  We should be moving in by the end of the month, just in time for our temporary housing to run out.

So now back to the catch up.  I'll just be catching up from where the photos started on our camera when I unloaded them on the computer here.  I know there's other stuff that I haven't blogged about yet, but those pictures on on my computer that is now sitting somewhere in storage.

One of our last weekends in Maryland, we picked up some Fried Chicken from the Dutch Market in Germantown.  We were told it was the best around, and it did not dissapoint.  We decided to take it up to black hill park and have a picnic there.  On our way up, we realized it was Monarch Fiesta day again.  We of course stopped off to particiapte in a bunch of the festivities.   We had a blast.

 

Harrison got to release one of the butterflies they were tagging.  This is him waving good-bye to the little guy.

Compare with last year: 

When we decided we would be moving for sure, and let the kids know, Harrison requested that we go to the top of the Washington Monument one last time.  We had gone before, but we all were excited to go again.We got tickets for labor day, and it was a great day to spend downtown. 

it was a gorgeous blue sky day, and we got really great views of the city.

After we came down, we met up with our friends, the Gathrights.  It was so great to get together with them one last time.  I only wished I had taken more pictures.  

We attempted to go see the White House, but shortly after we arrived, they cleared the area.  We hung around for a bit, and were able to see Marine One land and take off again.  

September is kind of a blur.  We were really hoping to get moved before school started, but with the way things worked out it was impossible.  So a few days before school started, we scheduled our move for the middle of September.  We had about 3 weeks to prepare.  Thankfully Sam's job really took care of us.  They arranged everything from the movers and packing to shipping our car, getting our flights, and setting up temporary housing for when we arrived. Since we were anxious to get moved, we decided to do our house hunting after we arrived.  I didn't take many pictures of the move, but here's what I've got:

The kids were pretty good about keeping themselves entertained while I tried to get the house ready to be packed and shipped.  My mom came for a quick visit on a business trip, and gave Olivia some fun stickers.  Needless to say, Olivia loves stickers.

The boys of course kept themselves entertained with Legos: 

The also rediscovered some new technology: The Television Set.  We've been without since we came to Maryland, but our Hotels and temporary housing came fully equipped.

They are still getting used to the fact that I don't control what comes on when, and we can't pause it.  Kind of makes me laugh.

The kids were really so good during the move.  They were pretty excited about it this time around.  The boys LOVED staying in the hotel our last night in DC.  We had a suite, so they had their own room, own TV and own bathroom. Harrison said, "This is the best hotel EVER!" 

The flight was pretty good.  We had 3 legs - DC to Detroit, Detroit to SLC and SLC to Pasco. We had a 3 hour layover in Detroit, which got shortened to 2 by a delay in DC.  Not a big deal. But then as we were leaving Detroit we got held back to get some luggage on the flight.  Not sure why they held up the flight for that, but we sat on the tarmac for 30 or so minutes.  We had a 45 mintue layover in SLC, so we missed our flight.  And it was the 2nd to last flight of the day.  At this point it was 8 PM in SLC, which was 10 PM our time.  Our kids were kind of loosing it.  They offered to put us on standby for the 9:30 flight, which would get in at 1 AM our time (DC time), but made no guarantee we would be able to get on, but we had confirmed seats for the next day.   So with kids screaming and going crazy, we decided to stay the night.  But, good old Delta, claimed that the delay was due to weather.  And denied us a hotel stay.  I am so glad we were in Utah - my parents were able to come pick us up at the airport, and we stayed the night at their house.  Without any luggage.  Note to self: always pack a change of clothes in your carry on!  I usually do this, but since our flights were being paid for, and we didn't have to pay to check anything, we checked EVERYTHING, except for what we would NEED to have on the flights.  Knowing that we had 2 connections to make, we didn't want to have anything extra.  But we all could have used a change of clothes!  But we made our flight early the next morning, and made it here only about 13 hours late.  

That day I went and registered Harrison for school.  Here's a picture of him the next Monday when he started: 

And going into class on the first day:

He made immediate friends with a little girl who remembered him from church, Abigail.  He seems to be loving school, and enjoying life in general.

Temporary housing has it's good points and bad points.  One of the good points: housekeeping.  It's not that big of a deal - they come once every 2 weeks, but it is nice to have someone else helping out with toilet scrubbing and vacuuming.  And it also helps me to make sure the house is nice and clean so they can do the detail work for me.  One of the bad points: it's furnished, but minimally. So there's no good place for the boys to build with Legos.  So this is what much of our apartment looks like much of the time: 

Okay, I think that's all I can blog for now.  I'll have to do the boys birthdays later.  But I'll leave you with a couple views off our balcony.

Duck race

Can I tell you how much we love being in a small town?!  I miss being in a place that has a 'town' feel; the town does things.  It's casual, fun and not crowded.  This past Saturday, the local Rotary club had an event called the Duck Race.  They get donations in the form of buying a rubber ducky to enter into the race. They sold 33,000 of them, enough to fill a big construction dumpster.  Then these get dumped into the river.  First to cross a finish line wins a new camry.

It was a cool autumn day, and the kids loved the race, as well as the rest of the activities.  They had pumpkin painting, some treat bags, a few community group booths and two bounce houses. It was also adjacent to a very fun playground that we went to after the winning duck won.

more books

I promise that we will post on the whole "moving to the other side of the country" and birthdays. But these are short and easy posts.

Right after I posted about books, I checked one out of the library for Harrison called Talent Thief


I read the first few chapters to get the boys warmed up on the story, and then Harrison took the book and would not allow me to read any more until he had finished.  "Dad you're a slow reader, and I'm very fast.  Please just let me finish, and then you can read some more to Noah."  It's a great spy book for kids.

Also, I remembered a great board book that my brother John gave us, Ten Minutes Till Bedtime

Noah's Birthday

I was so worried I had lost Noah's birthday - I couldn't find pictures of it anywhere!  But I just found them uploaded to my online account.  Whew!  We had a calm family birthday at home (he took some Star Wars cookies and favors to preschool with him in the morning.) I made his favorite meal - tacos. Since we were in temporary housing, and I didn't have any of my normal cake baking/decorating equipment, I just made a sheet cake, frosted it and covered it with more Star Wars cookies. The kids loved it.  

He got light sabers for one of his gifts, and the boys really enjoyed batting balloons around the apartment with them.

Fun books

A while ago, I posted on a great children's book, You can do Anything Daddy. I also noticed that my friends Nate and Emily posted on how this was a family favorite. So I figured that I would post some recent favorites. If I were to name the things that my children read most, it might actually be the Lego Star Wars instructions. But these are actual books.

Dinosaur Roar (amazon) by Paul and Henrietta Strickland. This is one of Olivia's favorites, and is a great board book.

Not a box (amazon) by Antoinette Portis. On a business trip to florida, I was looking for a present to bring back to the kids, and desperately trying not to get something like an overpriced sea shell. I wandered into a small bookstore and found this gem. It's about the imagination of childhood.

Psst (amazon) by Adam Rex. Hooray for a random library find!

Lego Start Wars Illustrated Dictionary (amazon). This was a gift from friends.  It may look like an more of a lego plug, but our boys love reading this (and comparing this to their sets).  It has lead to our acquisition of additional lego sets.

Narnia series by C.S. Lewis. Harrison read these this summer, and enjoyed them.  I'm not sure how he kept the stories straight, because he read them concurrently.  He would read 40-50 pages of one and then loose it, so he would start a different one.  But, I asked some fairly detailed questions, and he knew the story.  He is prehaps not sure what order the books are.