Living Room... Before and After

So I took this picture for you, Mom... so you could see how I had the new furniture placed in our tiny living room...
...and this is what it looks like after Brian got the paint on the walls... I LOVE IT!! it looks a little minty green in the pictures, but its more of a jade green, like is in the throw pillows and the stuffed chair, and the couches are way darker than they look... Now I just need to get the stuff up on the walls and it will look fabulous!!

Jaxson's Spot

I got a really cute video of Jax the other day while he was getting ready to watch TV... it shows off his personality and he actually talks quite a bit...

Jadens New Bike

Another jump back in time, although this WAS only a month ago! Look at all that green grass, and the kids are in SHORTS... and just the last couple days we have been inundated with COLD and SNOW!! what happened?!?!?

Anyway, this was the first day Jaden got his new bike Sept 27th)... he still had his training wheels on, and was just getting the hang of it, and doing very well!!

Day 2 of riding, and he had convinced Brian to take off his training wheels. OK, so he mentioned it and Bri jumped right on it, there wasn't much convincing involved!! YAY for Daddy... if it was up to this Mom, the kids would be babies forever!!

Snowy Day Video...

The video of the boys playing out in the snow... sorry for the bits where Jax is screaming,

but the stuff after that is cute, so I went ahead and put it in... Enjoy!

First Snow of the Season...

So it's not too often that I check weatherchannel.com and see that we have 100% chance of precipitation!! But we sure did today, and they weren't kidding!! In just a couple hours we got a big load of snow dropped on us!! It was so much fun to take the boys out to play in it! Jax rarely ever wears shoes, so snow boots were a little cumbersome for him. He just stood there for the most part and whined and then looked at his big boots. Jaden on the other hand was in heaven... diving and jumping and making snow angels all over the place! Eventually with Jaden holding his hand, Jax got into the spirit of things and joined in the fun of walking out into the snow... I think this must be his first time out in the cold white stuff, and I don't think he was really sure what to make of it! It was great fun, and we all came in freezing cold and pretty wet, but we settled in with big cups of hot chocolate and snuggled up under blankets to warm up.

Jaden and Jaxson walking through

the fluffy white cold...

A fun snowy day for two best buddies to play in!

Jaden eating a snowball...

look at the size of the snowflakes!!

WE LOVE WINTER!!!!!

The New House

OK, so I get a lot of requests to see

the new house, so here you are:

The front and the back...

We are loving our new neighborhood... there are kids everywhere (mostly boys) and everyone is so nice and friendly... it only took us all a few days to make a bunch of friends and fit right in... There is an awesome deck out the back sliding door for summer BBQ's, but we still want to get some fun stuff for the back yard... a swing set and an in-ground trampoline would be awesome!! As it is, the kids never go back there, as there is not much to do!! Maybe next summer...

July 4th 2009

So I am hopping between new stuff and old pictures and videos that I am coming across that I haven't blogged about yet, so bear with me while I get caught up!!

This past Independence Day we were very excited to have Mom and Robynn and Kennedie come up to help us celebrate... You would know how momentous this actually was if you knew how much my sister Robynn dislikes coming to Utah, but we managed to get her up here in summer!! We had a great time together celebrating and playing and eating yummy food!! Between them all they got me to agree to go out and watch the Hot Air Balloons launch. I have lived in Utah for almost 15 years and I have never been (I think the 6 AM start time has something to do with that!!) but we went and it was amazing!! We got to watch all those massive balloons get inflated and launch and fly through the air... it was great!

Then we walked over to see the Parade... it was a lot of fun, despite Mikayla being in a very bad mood and crying the whole time... Jaden kept running out to the street to pick up candy, which of course is the best part of ANY parade!! We saw Princesses, and Pirate Ships, and the BYU athletes with Cosmo, and the LDS Missionaries, and lots of marching bands and horses and all the good stuff you would expect to see in a parade. Pres. Lincoln even drove up in a golf cart and gave Jaden a shiny new penny minted in 2009! It was great fun!!!

After that we dragged ourselves back home for a shower and lunch and to start getting ready for the next phase in the festivities... Its never a party until Kell gets out the grill and does his family famous Carne Asada... as usual it was fantastic... Brad and Jan and kids (including their adopted daughter for the summerMorganne Romney) and Melanie and Ken Donahoo all came to join us... along with Mom, Robynn, Kennedie, Kelly and Steph, and Brian and I and our kids... we had a great time eating to our hearts content, then rushing off to watch the Stadium of Fire fireworks from just below the Provo Temple. We were a little disappointed at first in the fireworks display... about half way through they just stopped with no grand finale or anything... it was quiet for so long that a lot of people around us got up and left. We hung around, though and were rewarded with the rest of the show. Apparently there was a glitch and it took a good while to sort it out!! The kids all had a great time though during the wait playing with their light wands, the boys being Jedi Knights with Light Sabers and the girls making necklaces and bracelets. We did have a second of panic when I looked around and couldn't find Jaden ANYWHERE... eventually we found him. He had wandered off to join another group so he could play with their kids!! Like I said, he will play with ANYONE! (more FHE's on stranger danger, I guess!) By the time we fought traffic and got home it was closing in on midnight, so we let the kids hurry and do sparklers in the parking lot and then everyone headed home... it was a great day... AND a very FULL day!!

Change...

So I am not really sure if I can even remember how to do this blogging thing, its been SO LONG!! We had a very crazy summer... house hunting and buying a new house and moving INTO a new house (not to mention morning sickness! YUCK!!). Once I got my camera and video camera unpacked and charged I realized that I had tons of stuff from clear back in July!! so for now, I am in catch up mode to get us back to the present...

And of course, it never stops there, with the normal things... Mikayla has had such a rough transition into our new neighborhood and her new school! I think she just doesn't like change and EVERYTHING changed in the blink of an eye for her... she tells me almost every day that she wants to move back to the condo (after 4 yrs. it had really become home for us!) so I try so hard to explain that there is NOTHING there anymore... no furniture, no food, no family... poor kid, she even had me drive into our old neighborhood so she could see the condo and the playground... Fortunately, she is just starting to perk up a bit. She has made a couple of cute friends from next door, and she has 4 friends at school that she talks about all the time and invite her to eat lunch and sit by them on the bus coming home from school, so I think she may be getting used to the newness. She refuses to ride the bus to school... every day I have to take her in, and hand her off to her teacher. For the first couple weeks, unbeknownst to me, she was getting to school and hiding from her teacher... so her poor teacher was spending the first 15 min. of class looking for Mikayla (she never hid in the same place twice!) so I resolved to take her in... and for the next couple weeks, I would take her to the door of her classroom, kicking and screaming and her teacher would drag her in to class while she punched her backpack and cried (her teacher would always joke and say "Come on Kayla, lets go beat up Tinker Bell" ... I of course was NOT happy with this situation. Of course I had to take Jax with me, and I think her crying and freaking out got to him, so whenever we would get even CLOSE to Kaylas classroom, Jax would start screaming too... So I had Kayla screaming and trying to run down the hall, and Jax screaming wanting to be picked up so we could leave... Can I even describe the looks on the faces of the other second graders in the room??? I doubt that any of them had ever even imagined such a display!! SO... the new game plan for us is...

1. LEAVE JAX IN THE CAR

and

2. I actually go INTO the classroom with Kayla while she puts her backpack in her cubby and goes to sit in her seat. This is of course contingent on her NOT SCREAMING or KICKING ME or any of the other embarrassing things she likes to do. Its been working out great so far... I just stand in the back of the class and wait til she looks comfortable, then I slip out. This also gives me a chance to talk to her teacher every day and get progress reports on how she is doing in general. The last report I got was so reassuring... teacher said that she called on Kayla to come up and read to her, AND SHE DID!!! she got right up, read to her teacher and went back to sit down... Even after a full year at Vineyard last year, she never got that far with her other teacher, so I am hoping that things are starting to inch towards improvement!!

Jaden of course is happy as always to be wherever... and there are SO MANY kids on our street (mostly boys) that he is in heaven most of the time. Occasionally he asks if he can go to Orem and play with his old friends (to which I very adamantly tell him NO! they were a bunch of punks!) but for the most part he is doing great here. We started him in preschool at a private home just a block over from us, and it only took him a couple days to be best friends with everyone there... he is my little social bug (he takes offense when I say social butterfly) he is always at someones house playing, and can hardly stand to be at home, since it is so BORING here!! His friendships range from hanging out with two year olds to being buds with 11 yr olds... he just joins any group that is outside at the moment!! On another good note for Jaden, he has taught himself how to ride a two wheeler. He used to commandeer a bike from one of the neighborhood boys, but he wasn't making any friends that way... so I went out and got him his own. We decided on a big bike so he could grow into it, but turns out he can;t even reach the ground!! So I told him we would leave his training wheels on and get a helmet until next summer when he is taller. After riding on the bike for about two hours, he came in and told Brian that he didn't want his training wheels on, and so Bri took them off!! But don't you know... Jaden did awesome! I swear it is so refreshing to have a little do it yourselfer. After Kayla's histrionics, I get Jaden who wants to ride a bike without training wheels so he just does it!! He's such a good kid!!

Then there's Jax... my sweet little white baby! I swear, I never thought I would have such a white kid... he is just precious! It makes me laugh so hard when I see him and Jaden next to each other... I had them in the tub together last night and Jaden (who has my coloring) looked so much darker with his tanned skin, dark brown hair and big brown eyes... then there is my little Jax who is whiter than you can imagine, with his strawberry blondish hair and blue eyes... it cracks me up how they are so different. But still the best of friends... Jax can't stand it when Jaden does ANYTHING without him. Especially being outside... Jax shouts at me "mom on!" (come on) "Out!" I have to admit that I hate to take him outside, because like I said... he thinks he can do anything that Jaden can do. So he grabs his dump truck (or a stroller) and off he goes into the road to chase after Jaden and the other big kids... I am constantly running after him and pulling him out from in front of a car... luckily this is a great family neighborhood and everyone knows to drive SLOW!! Jax also is a big talker... he is moving on to saying two and three words together now... some of the cuter ones are "shoes off" when he wants his shoes off or has done it himself... or "there it goes" when something is stuck then starts... like a DVD or a zipper. He also knows most of the Thomas the Trains by name, and I think he knows all the Cars characters by name as well... If he wants to play he comes and tells me "track, track" so I will build the Lightning McQueen race track, or "Tuggies, TV" if he wants to watch a DVD. He is a cute kid, he loves to get comfy on the couch with a pillow and a blanket. He calls it his "spot" and will stay there for a whole Thomas DVD... this works out great for me so I can get a shower!! He is starting to really show a lot of personality, too! If Kayla gets mad and is frowning or shouting, he mimics her, and puts on the hugest scowl (I need to have the camera ready!) or if someone does something he doesn't like he starts shouting "HEY! HEY! HEY! NO!" and glares at them... but if you tell him "Ooh, you look like a grumpy baby!" he smiles at you or makes a funny face... he obviously can change moods at the drop of a hat, and I am not quite sure if that's a good thing or not!!

All in all we are having a great year so far and really loving our new house and new neighborhood... we especially are looking forward to the Holidays coming up!! YAY!