Begining the Catch Up

So I have several posts to do, what with Christmas and Birthdays and such, and I wasn't sure where to start so I decided to start at the beginning and do them in chronological order, so here goes:

The week before Christmas my kids had their first piano recital. They had been practicing extra hard (I hear the songs in my sleep now) and I was SO proud of how well they played them. Luckily we are close friends with not only the piano teacher...aka Aunt Andrea, but also her other students, so the recital was a small affair at our friends house.

They had some soft cozy lighting, which made for a more intimate setting, but terrible video, but I knew grandparents would want to hear so here are the dark videos:



They did SUCH a great job! I will be glad to go from Christmas music to regular songs (I think) but will look forward to next year when my kids will once again fill my house with the sounds of Christmas!

A Tag and a Story (aren't you lucky?)

Ok, so I knew this tag was out there and I have been meaning to check the 4th picture in my 4th folder to make sure it was something good, but never got around to it and I was just tagged by my friend Alicia so here you have it. It is nothing spectacular, but does go with a crazy story.

We lived in St Augustine Florida for 2 1/2 years while Bryan attended physical therapy school. It just happened to be the worst two hurricane seasons in recent history. Every late summer and early fall the elders quorums would be called out time and time again to do hurricane clean up. Most of the time it was cutting up fallen trees, or patching roofs, but this picture is of the clean up to hurricane Katrina.

Bryan not only had to do regular clean up, but because of the flooding they had to gut houses. He told me the horror stories of cleaning out houses where you could tell how high the water had come because the mold was that high on the walls. He told me how belongings were scattered not only throughout the house but down the street. He told me how the smell was so overwhelming and the sadness of telling people that their homes were not salvageable.

Even through all this loss, he was able to also tell me how grateful people were when they showed up to help, how awesome it was to see members of the church come from all over and sleep on the church gym floor and surrounding land, bringing their own food and supplies because all stores and restaurants in the area were wiped out. He told tales of service, love and gratitude. We did not get hit by that hurricane, but I will never forget Bryan coming home and wanting to get rid of all our stuff, because he had realized that's all it was, was just stuff. He had seen these people lose all their stuff and it made us both realize that stuff does not matter. What matters is family, friends, and faith.

It reminds me of the scripture found in Matthew 6:19-20 "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. What a valuable lesson to remember during this wonder season.

Here are a few more pictures (sorry they are blurry, for obvious reasons he did not take our good camera with him): This first one is a typical trash pile after cleaning out a house: This one is what all the trees and bushes looked like: And if you look closely at this one you can see some steps that used to lead up to a building, and as you can tell the building is just gone.

Oh yeah and I tag my two brothers, Barlow and Gordon and Brandee G.

Just your average trip to the post office....

My children have been on a 2 hour delay for school every day this week. While in some ways it has been wonderful (you know...more time with my kids, no not that I can sleep in longer, shame on you for even thinking it) But it has caused a few hiccups in my Christmas preparations. The worst hiccup came with shipping my Christmas presents though.

I am pretty paranoid about getting things shipped on time. You would think this would motivate me to get all prepared and shipped in the first week of December, but somehow I seem to cut it close year after year. This year was no different. I had planned to do my post office run on Monday, but because of the two hour delay (and a lot of wasted time playing intellectual games like Cake Mania) I had to postpone my trip until Tuesday.

I had everyone ready to go before I took the kids to school (oohh, everyone clap for me...I can get everyone ready to go by 10:30) and went straight to the post office after the school. When I pulled into the parking lot. As I got out of the car I realized that I had not brought a coat for either one of my boys that I still had with me. Now the dilemma starts

*It is only a few feet to the door of the post office....they will be fine with no coat
BUT-I am wearing a big heavy coat so everyone in the post office will think I am a TERRIBLE mother for wearing a coat myself and not putting one on my babies

*Maybe I should just drive home and get their coats
BUT-I live a whole 10 minutes from the post office....what a waste of time (not like computer games...stop judging me) plus Ashton's coat is in the washing machine.

*Ok, my car is messy enough that there HAS to be SOMETHING in here that will work as a coat
BUT-but NOTHING, this never fails. When my car is messy enough I can usually survive for days.

I realized quickly that there was a baby hoody in the car as well as my heavy black jacket (ok, so I can not blame only my kids for leaving stuff in the car) I put the sweatshirt on Ashton and roll up the sleeves on the black jacket for Nathan and into the post office I go, and of course the line is HUGE.

I patiently wait and surprisingly enough my kids behave great and before I know it I am at the front of the line, then I am at the counter shipping my packages. During the transaction an elderly gentleman comes up to me and hands me a pen. OK I thought, I didn't drop a pen, but thanks. Quick smile to the old man and back to the shipping. A few seconds later a woman comes up to me and hands me a pacifier and a "woman's item" Hmm...now I am wondering where this stuff is falling out of. It was obviously mine. Oh well, that was kind of embarrassing, but back to the shipping. It was not until the third visit from someone in the HUGE line handing me another "woman's item" and a receipt that I take the time to turn around to see Nathan had removed my black jacket and was spinning it around, and thus spreading the contents of the pockets all over the post office floor, giving EVERYONE in line some good entertainment.

Oh well, my shipping was done, my kids were warm enough and the post office even had plates of cookies sitting out for us to eat. All in all I will count it as a successful trip to the post office. Hope everyone I had to ship to appreciates it! Have a VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS!

My Baby gets Baptized

Wow, my first child has reached the age of accountability, and chose to be baptised. We are SO proud of him. He has become a very responsible child that I can count on to help me out when I need him and lead his brothers and sister in good righteous ways. I am very happy that he has chosen to enter the waters of baptism and become a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

We chose to do the baptism in Utah so that all of Trevor's grandparents could attend. He has several family members come including his Great-Grandma and Grandpa Bodily, Uncle Barlow and Aunt Andrea and their family, Uncle Bill, Aunt Bethany and her family, Uncle Danny, Aunt Sarah and of course his Mom and Dad and siblings.

The baptism went great....all three times. That's right, the first time the wording was a little off, but because Bryan and both witnesses had only done baptisms in Spanish and apparently the word for "by" and "of" is the same in Spanish, no one caught the mistake until Bryan and Trevor had gotten out of the font to change. So back they came and tried it again. This time it seem ok, but once again, when they were changing, the witnesses decided to have them try one more time (as they were changing Trevor tried to tell Bryan that he had read it wrong....guess he was right) So back they came, into a half drained font and did the baptism one more time. This time Bryan read the words slowly and deliberately and got it right.

Congratulations Trevor....We LOVE you!

For Example....

In case any of you were not clear on how the pinata thing worked....Andrea and I decided to demonstrate:

Andrea chose to show the traditional style, and I am clearly showing our new found technique

Trevor's Birthday

(yes that is Trevor giving bunny ears to his cake...must be an 8 year old boy thing)

We left to go to Utah on Trevor's birthday. It was only a half day at school because of Thanksgiving break and I knew that Bryan would be working until around six so I decided that Trevor could have a birthday party right after school.

After much deliberation he decided to have a Mario Party Party. Which meant that he wanted to play Mario Party on the Wii with his friends, which meant that he could only invite 3 friends. It was a hard choice to make because he knew his other option was to invite his entire school class plus friends from church and get MEGA amounts of presents, but I was SO relieved that it would just be a few boys coming over to pay Nintendo.

As the boys played upstairs I decided to come down and frost the cake. For those that have never seen the way I make the cake toppers for my kids cakes here is how I do it. The day before the birthday I print off a picture, put wax paper over it, and trace/color the picture with frosting. Then I put that in the freezer over night so that it will peel off the wax paper and go onto the cake. Some years it works great, others, not so great. I pretty much have the process down and can make it work. This year I had done all the steps and the topper was frozen and ready to apply on the cake, but low and behold....when I came down to frost the cake, I see that one of the kids (I later found out it was Trevor) had decided to help my by taking out the topper from the freezer and setting it on the counter. AHHH! This is terrible!! Frosting takes overnight to freeze hard, but only 30 seconds to 1 minute to thaw out completely. I quickly threw it back in the freezer and wondered what I would do. Having no other options, once I finished frosting the cake I took out the topper and scrapped it off with a knife. It actually worked ok, but the picture was a bit smeared. Oh well.We also did a pinata, but seeing as I was the only adult and had no hooks on the ceiling to hang it from I decided to just throw the pinata at the boys and let them beat it up. This actually went over really well...go figure...8 year old boys like to karate chop stuff. They each took turns kicking, or "chopping" the pinata until all the candy came out. Overall it went great and Trevor had an awesome 8th birthday.

(yes that is Trevor giving bunny ears to his friend..and his friend giving them back....must be an 8 year old boy thing)

Tidbits Durring Breakfast

Well...I AM HOME!!

We pulled in last night around 9:30. We had a great trip and everything (including Trevor's Baptism) went great and I will post more about all that later. For now I am eating breakfast then starting on the job of cleaning out the car, doing all the laundry, cleaning the house....hopefully all before the kids get home from school so that we can put up our Christmas Tree tonight. So I thought I would just share a few tidbits while I sat here eating breakfast.

Most of the trip from our place to Utah is spent in Idaho, which....lets face it, it is not the most "scenic" drive. So usually when I am going through this part of the trip I can have some personal time to meditate. Well....this time when we were going through Idaho, it was not only dark, but foggy, so you could not see any thing! This left me way to much time to think....hmmm...what could I blog about when I get home....lets see....I could blog about:

~~The fact that my kids refuse to unbutton their pants to put them on, they will just squirm, lay down, jump, or wiggle, but will NOT unbutton the pants (staying in one small room and making all 3 of them get dressed at the same time in that same room really opened my eyes to this one)

~~The fact that Bryan thinks that road trips are a lot like Mario Kart (when we were driving at 3-4 in the morning, this was HILARIOUS to me, I thought of several similarities, but then when I thought of them during regular daylight hours it was not that funny at all)

~~The fact that I CAN NOT eat a jaw breaker without biting it. I tried it about 7 times on the drive down and couldn't do it, I just had this CRAZY desire to bite the thing...don't get to close to me I guess, you never know when that desire will hit!

~~The fact that I can rent some redbox movies in Utah, let the kids watch them the entire way home, and return them at a rexbox here....that is just AWESOME!! And the BEST part?......there is NO charge for the AWESOMENESS!

~~The fact that I will have to vacuum for 2 hours to get my car clean when I get home....No, no one wants another vacuum post :)

~~The fact that not matter how much fun you have or how many wonderful memories you make, there is nothing quite like coming home!