Snapshots

This is the last posting for today. Make sure you see all three. I was so excited the other day when I took these pictures. It has been almost a year since Rylie has looked into the camera for a picture. She usually avoids the camera. She has been having her teacher come over once a week to work with her. Her teacher works the most on getting her to use eye contact. I don't even care Rylie's hair was not done or she is still in pj's. She actually looked at me! I took the picture on the right the same day.



Of coarse, this is another messy face, highchair picture of Emily. I gave her ravioli for the first time. As you can see, she loved it. It is all gone.

Thanksgiving cookies

So, I had planned to have the kids decorate Halloween cookies and just ran out of time. Thank goodness that the candies I bought also worked for Thanksgiving cookies (candy corn and pumpkins)


This is Rylie's masterpiece. She worked on eating this cookies for several days and only ended up eating most of the candy off the top.


Emily just enjoyed eating the cookies and was happy eating and watching our little family night activity. I have recently learned how to adjust my plans when they just don't work out how I thought. The old me would have just let the kids eat the candy and forgotten about making cookies after Halloween was over.

Road Trip!

A couple of weeks ago we had Stake Conference. It was in St. Cloud, which is about 45 minutes away. Darren and I wanted to attend the adult session on Saturday and also conference on Sunday morning but felt it would not work for our family. We came up with the idea to go and stay at a hotel so we could do both. We surprised the kids and didn't tell them until 2 hours before leaving. They were so excited.

All the kids went upstairs and packed immediately, even though we had to wait for the girls to take their naps. Josh was so excited he carried his suitcase, blankie and teddy around for about an hour before we left.

Rylie in the van with all her pets. She is not asleep. She is just avoiding eye contact as usual.

Jacob and Ali showing how excited they are.

The pool at the hotel was great. It had a kiddie pool and a regular pool right next to each other. I stayed in the kid pool with Emily, Rylie and Josh while Darren was in the big pool with Ali and Jacob. They could have swam all night

Josh really enjoyed himself. He really didn't need the floaties since the water was only 1 foot deep.


Here's a video at the pool. I am not sure what happened because I don't think this was all of it. The kids really enjoyed themselves. We were upgraded to a 2 bedroom suite. The kids had their own room (and t.v). We also had a kitchen and living room. We ate McDonalds in our room which made having the kitchen very handy. Ali said she wanted to live there. I think we might have started something that we won't be able to keep. We will see when conference comes around again.

Halloween decorations

In our house decorations are not just to look at. We use them to our advantage!

Emily thought her little pumpkin was a ball and played with it at least once a day.

Rylie loves this little kid. It talks when someone touches it or makes a noise. Here she is putting her arm around it. I sometimes wondered it she thought this was a real kid. Also Emily was scared of it. We would put this at the bottom of our stairs. She would not go near the stairs. Now what am I going to use?

Pumpkins

For family night on the Monday before Halloween we took the kids to pick out pumpkins. There are many farms in the area that had pumpkins patches with all the fun things to do. But, we didn't have a lot of time because it gets dark so early that we decided to go to the parking lot at the outlet mall by our house where a farmer had a stand. We found it very sad how excited our kids were to go to a parking lot. We definitely do not take them out enough.

Joshua did not like gutting the pumpkin. I ended up doing most of it for him.

Jacob and Alison did enjoy the whole process.

This is Joshua's pumpkin. He designed it and Darren cut it out.

Ali did her pumpkin all by herself.

Jacob spent hours on his pumpkin. He had to stop and take breaks because his hand hurt. It did turn out great though.

Halloween

Here are my little monsters!



Jacob saw this woopie cushion costume and had to have it. He wore it to our ward Halloween party and every boy and man loved it (they never grow up). All the rest of the costumes we already owned. One good thing about moving here is that no one has seen these costumes before so Ali felt it was okay to be a witch again this year.

This costume was made by a friend of mine for Jacob when he was almost one. I think Emily is the only one that has been the right size to wear it. It guess it pays to have a lot of children.


My kids had a great time trick-or-treating. We had great weather and they got tons of candy. They had to of course come home and organize it and do a little trading.



This doesn't even include Rylie's candy. Needless to say, we still have candy. I am going to have to throw some away. I hate candy, but I think I have had some almost everyday because it's here.

Potty Trained!

I haven't blogged for a while. I think this is my 3rd entry today. We potty trained Joshua on October 3rd. He has refused to have anything to do with the bathroom. I told him that when he turned four than he was too old to wear diapers. It was a horrible weekend but after the 3rd day he had it down. After the first week he had the nights down also. It has been wonderful. Now we only have 2 in diapers! Yeah!

Why do we need toys?

Our kids were bored a week ago Sunday and ended up with this fort. I love the creativity that they used and also that ALL of them played so well together, however this fort included every pillow, blanket, sheet, stuffed animal, and chair that we own. When they are done, it always seems like I am the one putting our house back in order.

Our dog!

Emily will eat anything and everything off the floor. She has now learned that if she sits under the table in the morning that most of the time Rylie or Josh will drop some fresh cereal.