Brenda

Brenda truly is an amazing person, and I am very lucky that she is my wife and best friend.

These pictures remind me of all the good times we have had these last 12+ years and just how beautiful she is.

(P.S. the video has music but you have to un-mute it along the bottom)

Love,

Bryan

Brenda - flash slideshow maker

First Day of School

I know most of you were wondering if I started to home school my kids because you had not seen back to school pictures posted here. Well I am super mom, but I have decided to support our local school system and send my kids there....you know to boost their numbers.

Trevor is starting 4th grade and it blows me away that the oldest kids at the school are only 1 year older than him. He is still in the spectrum program (advanced placement class) and doing great.

Kaylee is starting 3rd grade and loves her new class. She has been starting lots of new books and has been super dedicated to getting her homework done and papers signed as soon as she gets home (a big improvement from last year)

Nathan is starting Kindergarten and is in the PM class. He LOVES it. After trying a few backpacks we finally found a winner with a Mario backpack. Nathan is doing well and he is learning the rules of school quickly.

Ashton and Blake are alas still at home (only 5 more years....not that I'm counting down) They keep me REALLY busy (sometimes they actually nap at the same time and I am amazed at what I can accomplish) Ashton still thinks that he is one of the big kids and tries to do everything himself. Blake has decided that he too would like to be a big kid and has started to crawl (mostly scooting around with his head on the floor and his legs kicking behind him) I will try to get video soon.

I LOVE the fall weather that has started to creep in and hope to catch up on all things bloggy soon.

Successes and Failures

I had quite an interesting day today with several ups and downs. As I prepare for bed I was thinking about them all and thought I would share:

Success: I got Ashton to eat his dinner without yelling at him or force feeding him

Failure: I did not do the dinner dishes....last night or tonight

Success: I completed all of my grocery shopping with all 5 kids and bought a large clock I have had my eyes on for a couple of years.

Failure: I was "that lady" at Wal-mart with my kids, they were screaming and fighting and running up and down the isles, and I was about at the end of my rope, and I am pretty sure it showed.

Success: I got all the kids fed and out the door and made it to Cub Scout pack meeting before the opening prayer.

Failure: Blake was covered in spit-up and stunk (I am pretty sure some of the other kids stunk, but I don't want to embarrass them by putting it on the blog)

Success: I got Ashton to bed without yelling at him (for those not around Ashton a lot, I will let you know that he is trying to make the most out of the term "terrible twos" before he reaches the age of 3.

Failure: It is past bed time and I have still not put away the non perishable groceries.

Success: I wrote a blog post

Failure: No pictures of my new clock and newly painted front room.

There you go, a day of ups and downs. Overall I feel pleased with my day and look forward to the new day I have in front of me tomorrow.

You Know It's Summer When.......

Around here there are some key things that tell us that summer has arrived. I will share just a few.

You know it's summer when you see me making one of these for a cute little girl:

You know it's summer when you have to add sunscreen to your shopping list so that your kids don't end up looking like this:

And finally, you know it's summer when Bryan starts to bring these sweet things home from work:

Gotta love summer!

Summer Fun

First day of Summer Break?

Bring it ON!

My house may be a mess, my laundry might all be dirty, the lawn might need mowed, dinner might need to be started.........

BUT

My kids all have happy smiling faces!

(except for Blake who got his 2 month shots today)

No Cat and No Hat

The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play

So we went to IKEA on that cold cold wet day

I shopped there with Bryan and all our kids too,

and I said "I'll take this one and that one... gimme two!"

So Today....

It's too wet to go out and too cold to play ball

So I'll sit in the house and assemble it all

BEFORE

AFTER

But that is not all OH NO that is not all.....

Lets just say that I am hoping for rain all the week long!

How to Successfully Catch Up a Blog in 10 Easy Steps

Step 1: Choose a day when you will have extra kids, like cousins, at your house. (if it is too easy to write a blog post you might do it more often, and then you would not need a handy dandy post telling you step by step how to catch up on your blog.)

Step 2: Got to bed late the night before the post (see you don't want too much energy in the morning or you might be tempted to do housework, run errands, or other things that have been neglected just as long as your blog)

Step 3: Get kids off to school (not only does this get them out of your hair for the day but it gives them opportunities to do cool things like placing 1st in a regional Destination Imagination competition, or even placing 3rd in a state wide Destination Imagination competition, thus providing great material to blog about.

Step 4: Get a nice nutritious breakfast

Step 5: Try to make baby stop crying and go to sleep by feeding him

Step 6: Try to make baby stop crying and go to sleep by changing his diaper

Step 7: Try to make baby stop crying and go to sleep by holding him on your lap precariously so that you can still use both hands to type.

Step 8: Once baby is asleep carefully take him to bed (watch out your leg might be asleep because of how you were holding him).....(you may find these steps unnecessary, but they do provide ample opportunity to post cute pictures of baby)

Step 9: Think of all the fun things you have done in the last few days months that you have not blogged about (don't get too depressed)

Step 10: Find lots of pictures of said fun activities, write, and publish your post.

Now that wasn't so hard was it?

A GIANT thanks goes out to my sister Charlotte who redesigned my blog for me. You should check her out HERE at http://latermom.blogspot.com

Vacuum Woes

My kids love to look back at past blog posts and remember the good old days. They especially like to see posts where they are mentioned or shown in pictures. I would venture to guess that if I didn't post about them for a while, they would be come sad and depressed. Maybe they would hide in their rooms and refuse to eat. But would they stop working all together? I don't have the answers to these intriguing questions because I am a good mother who blogs about each of her kids.......

HOWEVER

I have not blogged about my vacuum in some time now, and alas.....it has become quite depressed and decided that dirt is not worth sucking up any more. So I decided that maybe a good blog post about a great vacuum would do the trick. (when your desperate, your desperate, what can I say) Here it is. I would like to call it......

If You Give a Brenda a Vacuum

If you give a Brenda a vacuum, she will be super happy and vacuum her whole house.

If she vacuums her whole house and realizes that she got an entire canister full of dirt in one day she will realize that she should be vacuuming more often.

If she realizes that she should be vacuuming more often, she probably will (yes I would, stop thinking such negative things)

If she starts to vacuum more often she will start having to replace filters and belts more.

If she starts having to change filters and belts more, she will get lazy and try to make them last as long as possible before changing them.

If she starts waiting as long as she can before changing them, the vacuum will start to clog more often.

If the vacuum starts to clog more often she will get frustrated and try to convince her husband to buy her a new vacuum.

If she tries to convince her husband to buy a new vacuum, he will try to do a lot of research online and find the best vacuum for the best price, so she will probably just skip asking him and buy one the next time she is at the store.

If she buys one the next time she is at the store (hopefully today!) She will get really excited and vacuum her whole house.

AND.....

If she vacuums her whole house......

She will realize that she got an entire canister of dirt in one day and realize that she needs to start vacuuming more often.

A Whole Heap'n of Stuff

So I know I fell of the blogging planet a while back and accidentally missed a bunch of birthdays and holidays. So I thought I would play a little catch up....

WAIT!!

Don't skip this post just because I am including Thanksgiving through New Years!

I know you are thinking what I would be thinking...TONS of pictures, but really there are not that many. You see, I didn't take many pictures 1st because I suck at taking a lot of great pictures at these things because I am too busy worrying about other little non important things like baking, wrapping, and handling my kids. And 2nd because I thought my camera was broken. I put in 3 sets of "new" batteries and my camera would still not turn on. It was then that I realized that my kids were putting old used batteries back into the battery bucket. So YEA! my camera is not broken, and AH DARN! I didn't get many pictures of the holidays.

We start with Thanksgiving, which was also Trevor's birthday.

When asked what kind of cake Trevor wanted for his birthday, he said he wanted a "Math" cake (what can I say, the kid takes after his nerdy mother) so we made cupcakes that could be arranged into math problems where the answers were always 9.....clever...I know.....like I said he takes after me.

Because it was a holiday also, we let him open a present every few hours instead of all at once. I only got my camera out for the first one, which was a pogo stick.

Did I mention we were at my parents house for Thanksgiving? We were. Here is the one picture I took. (you might notice the absence of my pregnant "little" belly in all these pictures, just know that was completely on purpose)

Now on to Christmas, for which my parents came to my house. Here we are at our Christmas Eve dinner, which was FANTASTIC and will be a tradition now for sure.

After dinner we had a talent show, here is a little peak at the fun we had.

OK that wasn't part of the talent show, that was just a bonus performance. Here is the real thing:

Christmas PJ's (the first year I did not make them, and probably the last, I kind of missed it)

About to break down the paper wall with their cousins and grandparents. (this is where the pictures stop on Christmas Day......I am always way to excited to watch the kids open their presents that I don't take any pictures. Oh well.)

And last but not least.....Nathan's birthday.

Nathan did not want a math cake, but his cake fits his personality just as well with a Yoshi cake (he wanted Bowser, but I said NO)

And that about does it. I didn't take any pictures of New Years at my Brothers house, so you get off free with that one. Now I am caught up and can move forward. Hope everyone had a great holiday season!

Being a Truly Authentic Mom

Alright.....

So a month ago recently a friend of mine tagged me in a really fun post about being a true authentic mom. I was surprised to see that she tagged me as someone she thought was a true authentic mom and here is what she wrote about me:

Brenda D.- Brenda is expecting her fifth child (another boy!) and does such a great job with the four she already has. She is the most laid back, easy-going mom I know. She doesn't get upset or worked up about the little things that don't matter, shrugging or laughing them off. She has raised her kids strong in the gospel and makes sure they are surrounded by good influences.

So in order to maintain our good relationship as friends I thought I had better hurry and reply to this tag so that she doesn't realize that I am just a big slacker. I am supposed to pick 5 things about myself that make me a true authentic mom so here it is.

1. I always notice the little things.

You know like are their nails clipped, are they wearing the same clothes as yesterday, do they have white socks on with their Sunday shoes, is their church dress zipped up in the back, or how often are they changing their under ware.

Unfortunately........

I usually notice them a little to late. I don't notice the nails until AFTER piano lessons where their teacher just looked directly at their hands for 30 minutes. I don't notice that they have been wearing the same clothes until at least the 3rd day in a row. The white socks and zipped up church dress I don't notice until we are walking into the chapel (luckily my friend caught Kaylee right before she walked in and zipped her up for me) and I don't catch the under ware until laundry day when they have a weeks worth of laundry and 1-2 pair of under ware. But at least I notice right? (that was a picture of Ashton, I had told him he couldn't go outside until he was dressed, and this is how he came back)

2. I am willing to take them all with me where ever I need to go.

This might sound like a strange one to you (any of you who have fewer kids than me anyway) But I really get strange looks and comments when I have all my kids around me. I don't think of my family being that big, but just the other day Bryan noticed that most of our friends (at least the ones who sent Christmas cards) only have 2 kids. Which made me look around and I realized that when I am at Walmart (true authentic moms shop there by the way), or any store, or McDonalds (not that a true authentic mom would let their kids eat there), I am almost always the only person there with more than 2 kids. I am lucky that I have pretty good kids and I enjoy taking them with me places. My older ones are starting to get old enough to help out with the younger ones and the younger ones (with the exception of Ashton who screamed all night at pack meeting last night "NO I don't want to be quiet!") are fairly well behaved.

3. I am teaching my kids the value of hard work.

I wish I could say that I was doing this for the benefit of the kids, but truth be told it is SO much easier to clean my house if I can just scoot around on the floor and say "here pick this up" or "go put this away" Otherwise I would have to walk around and pick things up myself, and trust me it is not pretty to watch my pregnant self try to bend over and pick stuff up off the floor.

4. I have mad cooking skills.

Don't get me wrong, some people I know have some mad cooking skills and can whip up an extremely fancy meal in no time that tastes delicious and is healthy for you. My mad cooking skills are more like.....I get mad when I cook. For some reason meal time is a grumpy time for me. My kids run around the house with an unlimited amount of energy which is tolerable until one of them gets hurt and thinks it was intentional, even though the one that hurt them insists that it was an accident, and then the one that hurt them apologises but the one that got hurt doesn't really think they are sorry (and I can't blame them after hearing the way that the other one said they were sorry) and so I tell them to go do their homework or practice the piano but then they both want to sit in the same spot to do their homework and can't believe that the other person wont move and on and on and on. And keep in mind, this is only the pre-dinner theatrics, the real show usually doesn't come until half way through dinner when all the kids think it is

really funny to get Ashton to throw his food across the room. But to my defence, my kids always usually sometimes occasionally get 3 square meals a day.

5. I do actually try my hardest.

I understand that being a mother is the most important thing I can do right now. I pray all the time that I will be a good mom, and that my kids will grow up with an understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ and that our home can be a refuge from the world. I do my best to keep evil out of the door and the spirit inside. I am far from perfect, but I believe that if I am trying to do my best that the Savior will fill in the rest.

As I sat and tried to figure out my goals for the new year I was coming up empty until we were reading as a family in the Book of Mormon in Alma 7: 23-24 which reads:

23 And now I would that ye should be humble and be submissive and gentle; easy to be entreated; full of patience and long-suffering; being temperate in all things; being diligent in keeping the commandments of God at all times; asking for whatsoever things ye stand in need, both spiritual and temporal; always returning thanks unto God for whatsoever things ye do receive.

24 And see that ye have faith, hope, and charity, and then ye will always abound in good works.

I knew that this would be my goal for this year. I think it is harder than keeping a clean house or losing weight or even staying on a good budget. But the rewards are greater than I can fully realize. I am grateful that I have been blessed with 4 wonderful kids and one more on the way and that I have the chance to be a mother.

Thanks for tagging me, it is nice to hear sometimes that people think you are doing a good job. I am supposed to tag 5 people and say why they are true authentic moms so here you go.

My older sister Charlotte: She has 6 kids.....enough said. But if I had to go on, I would mention that she does more traditions with her kids than anyone I know and is willing to give up things that she wants in order to make her kids happy.

My younger sister Kim: She has 2 super cute boys that are growing up to be true gentlemen. She can saves tons of money every year by cutting coupons and working the ads and as far as I know keeps a spotless house, not to mention she is the primary president in her ward.

My youngest sister Tami:(private blog) She is expecting baby number 3 right now and is willing to do what the Lord wants even when it is not easy. She gives up hours of her day to take her daughter to a special preschool for the hearing impaired and always looks like she is having fun playing with her kids.

My SIL Andrea:(private blog) She is truly amazing. Her kids always smell so nice. This blows me away because no matter how hard I try my kids never smell nice. She is also very patient and loving towards her kids and is teaching them to be respectful and sweet.

My Mother: (private blog that hasn't been more neglected than my little blog) How else did I learn any of the few motherly skills that I do have if I didn't have one of the best examples in the world. My mom always gave the most of herself to her kids, and still does. She has always been there when I needed her and has taught me how to trust the Lord no matter the circumstances. Thanks Mom.

Well there you go. That's it.