Pics of the kids in their Easter clothes

Enjoy the pics!


This is the best one of the kids. Logan would NOT cooperate, but this one actually turned out kind of funny!

Logan still would not cooperate, so we gave him Pey's little pink brush to help keep him happy. It doesn't ruin the picture as much as the mouthfuls of Quaker granola bites that we used last year! :)

Matthew did a much better job of distracting Logan than I did! He made him laugh, so he was actually smiling in all of the pics with me in them....unlike the ones with Matthew. The one above is literally the only one that he was not acting crazy in.

Easter baskets

We had a really fun Easter. Our church is at 9 am, so we told the kids that we had arranged things with the Easter Bunny for him to bring stuff for their Easter baskets AFTER church. Hooray for connections! ;)

When we got home from church the kids were really antsy. We told them we had to eat lunch first. And THEN, we of course had to take pictures of the kids in their Easter clothes. I think I heard, "When are we done?", about 50 times! Thank goodness we had taken Logan's pictures earlier. Not only was he in a better mood, but it saved some time. (He pooped during church and leaked all over his pants, so we had to take him home to change his pants. He ended up going through three pairs of pants that day! But we quickly took pics of him while we were home.)

The kids enjoyed the things in their Easter baskets. Logan even got excited about the "big boy underwear" in his! September got excited about the ream of copy paper that the Easter bunny had brought her. After going through tons of our copy paper, we had decided that she needed to start using her own money to buy her own. So she was excited to replenish her supply without spending a dime of her own money. Oh the little things that make this girl happy! It was Peyton's first Easter and although she didn't have a clue what was going on, she did enjoy the crinkly teething book she got. The thing that made all three of the older ones very happy was the candy. These kids are all sugarholics. Logan went right to town and started eating his and we didn't notice that he'd gotten blue all over himself until it was too late!

Coloring Easter eggs

On Saturday we of course also had to do the traditional coloring of the Easter eggs. September had already decorated one a couple days earlier for her "egg roll" at school. While making it, she cracked it and had to do a second one. It then cracked once she got to school, before she got a chance to use it in the egg roll. Then, as we were decorating the ones on Saturday, she cracked the first one she did. This girl is not cut out to work with eggs! With eggs costing about $100/dozen these days, we couldn't afford to do a whole lot, so it just meant that we didn't have a whole lot to color. But they all managed to have a lot of fun. The kids love this tradition.

Playing at the park

Something I really wanted to do for my "pretend birthday" was to have a picnic and play tennis at the park here by our house. Well, we ate such a huge breakfast that we weren't very hungry by lunch time AND Matthew was going to be taking me to Tucano's (yum, and VERY filling) for dinner...so the whole picnic thing fell apart. So we ate some snacks before we left. Then, we got to the park and there were already other people there playing tennis. We ran back home and got some basketballs to play with while we were waiting. We stuck around for about an hour waiting for them to leave, but they never did. In the meantime though, the girls had fun playing on the playground. We brought Logan's little quad car for him to ride on because we thought it was the only thing that would keep him entertained since he couldn't really play on the playground, but he didn't let his cast slow him down. After spending a few minutes riding his car around, he was right there with the girls sliding down all the slides! We never got to play tennis, but we still had fun. Matthew and I even took the girls scooters out for a spin!

Visit from Hoey and Nick

My cute "little" brothers, Hoey (aka Joey) and Nick, came and spent the night last Friday. They didn't get here til it was much past the kids bedtimes, but the three older ones wanted to stay up and wait for them so we let them. They got to play with them for a few minutes before they had to go to bed, and then they stayed up with me and Matt and played Rockband until 1:30 am! It was so much fun!!

We dragged ourselves out of bed on Saturday and enjoyed a big "birthday breakfast" of Stuffed French Toast and the works....my favorite! (My bday was on Sunday and since it's hard to celebrate a bday on a Sunday, not to mention a Sunday that is ALSO Easter....we decided to celebrate on Saturday.) The kids then had fun chatting with Joey and Nick through iChat from one room to the next. Joey has a Macbook and we have a Mac Desktop and the girls love chatting with their uncles through the iChat, apparently even when they're within the same house. They also helped the girls make a fort in their bedroom. They had a lot of fun! The kids didn't want them to go. We don't get to see them very often, so it was a fun visit!

Debuting the cast

Logan got his hard cast put on yesterday. He was cracking us up in the room while we were waiting for the dr. He was "reading" the pamphlets about "How To Take Care of Your Cast" and was very interested. He was just being such a character, and then as soon as the dr. came in he just went into one of his ornery, bashful moods. Before long he was back to his usual silly self - the dr. thought he was too cute! It took him a while to decide which color he wanted...."white, no, blue, no, green, no, yellow, no"......he finally decided on a dark blue. He was very intrigued by the process of putting the cast on.


The dr. said the bones look like they're already healing, and she said it doesn't look like the tendons healing properly will be a problem. In fact, he may only have to be in a cast for three weeks! So anyway, we got the cast put on and were good to go. We'll probably go back on Monday to get a new cast put on. They usually put a new one on within the first week after the swelling goes down even more, but the whole Sports Medicine team leaves for a conference on Monday night, so we need to go back on Monday or we'll have to wait a whole week longer.

He has been in a MUCH better mood today. I think having an actual cast on has really helped. Or maybe it's the fact that he's finally been getting some form of medicine in the past couple days. He was not taking the liquid pain reliever so we went and got some chewable tablets and told him they were "candy". He took the first one with no problem, was a little leary on the next few because he could tell they weren't really "candy", but he's been taking them well ever since and it has made all the difference in the world! So it's back to life as usual....well, almost.

My poor boy!

O.k. here's some pics of my poor little guy. He breaks my heart! Looking at his sad, little face is the only thing that keeps me from going insane while he's screaming his guts out 80% of the day. He's also getting very annoyed with his splint and has taken it off about 6 times today. Good thing the hard one is going on tomorrow! I was able to get some video footage of his unique way of coming down the stairs. He was not in a good mood and got mad when he saw me get the camera, but then amazingly "performed". He's gotten pretty fast at coming down, but in the video he doesn't go very fast and only got part of the way down before it start hurting too much.

Today is the day of the wearing of the green...

O.k. it's not actually TODAY...I'm a couple days late. I've been so busy dealing with a SCREAMING child that I haven't been as diligent with my blog as I wanted to be. Let's face it, I'm NEVER going to be able to be as diligent as I'd like to be. But I'll try to do it as often as life will allow.


We had a pretty fun St. Patrick's Day! I tried to find fun activities for the kids to do to keep Logan distracted so he wasn't thinking about his throbbing foot. We ended up making green pancakes for lunch (we didn't have time for breakfast), mint chocolate chip pudding for a snack, and the favorite...."oobleck". It's from a Dr. Seuss book....and basically it's just a mixture of corn starch and water....and in this case, some green food coloring. We used to make this stuff all the time when I was a kid. If you've never done it before, you have got to try it! When you squeeze it together it turns hard, but if you let it just sit, it pretty much turns to a liquid. I'll post some pics of the kids playing with it. It really did help keep Logan's mind off of the pain. YAY! HAPPY ST. PATRICK'S DAY TO US!!!

There is one other thing worth mentioning about SPD. For the past three years, September has made a "leprechaun trap"....only this year she called it a "home" because she felt mean calling it a trap. It is so funny! I LOVE that she's still so sweet and naive. On Sunday night as we were getting the girls in bed, September said, "It is so freaky that leprechauns are real!" I had to try really hard not to laugh! I asked her if it made her nervous to know that the leprechauns were sneaking into her room to sleep in the home she made for them, and she said no, that it was just funny to realize it. She had written them a note (explaining that the socks she put in the bed she made were meant to be used as "sleeping bags") and had requested that they write her back. Then, on Monday morning during breakfast she asked me if Santa Claus and the tooth fairy were real. I am determined not to "lie" to her so I just asked her what she thought. She said, "Well, I KNOW that leprechauns are real, and leprechauns are pretty much just like elves, so that means elves are real, and if elves are real then Santa Claus is obviously real!" I tell ya, she's got it all figured out. But then she asked, "So what about the tooth fairy....is it really you?" I just told her that it's whatever she believes. Personally, I think she's got that one figured out and the only reason she continues to "believe" is because she thinks that if she tells us she knows, that we won't be the tooth fairy anymore and give her money for her teeth. Pretty smart kid! ;)

Well, needless to say, after showing so much faith in the reality of leprechauns, we couldn't disappoint. So I drove around to 4 different places on Monday before I could find some "gold"...ya know, the gold covered chocolate coins. I eventually found some at Partyland where I also found some little shamrock shaped good luck stones. They were too cute I had to buy them. Then I had to craft a note from "Lenny and Lucky". We snuck in after the girls fell asleep and left the "loot". (We of course got some for Kya too even though she didn't have as much involvement.) The girls were so excited when they saw it in the morning. But then September had to go and notice that the stones were actually only THREE LEAF clovers instead of four-leaf ones like Lenny and Lucky had said in the letter. I give up, I guess I don't make a very good leprechaun!

Sleepover!!

I've been wanting to start a blog forever and finally with the inspiration of some recent friends I've made (thanks Heather and Deborah!), I've finally started one. I have plenty blog-worthy moments in my life, so why not?! There's hardly a dull moment in the Cluff household and yesterday was no exception.
My niece and nephew spent the night on Friday. The kids all stayed up pretty late acting crazy and goofy and the craziness continued on Saturday morning when they woke up. They all slept in the toy room and in order to make room for them, we had to move the Chubby Chair out into the hall. In the morning they decided to push it to the bottom of the stairs and jump off the stairs into it. Matthew and I told them that someone was going to get hurt and we were just hoping that it would be one of our kids. Oops, did we really have to say that? To make a long story short.....Logan ended up getting pushed down the stairs and hurt his foot. After an hour of screaming we ended up taking him to the InstaCare, and sure enough it was broken! He has two broken bones which we were told should heal just fine, but we were referred over to a Sports Medicine specialist because they're worried about his tendons healing properly. We'll go see the specialist sometime next week and have his hard cast put on, but in the meantime he has a splint on it. The poor thing rolls and crawls to get around and it breaks my heart! He was so uncomfortable that he couldn't sleep last night and bless Matthew's heart, he took him downstairs so that at least I could get some sleep. He was up with him until 5:30! Logan really wanted to watch TV and Matthew thought it would help him fall asleep, so they did. There's not a whole lot to watch in the middle of the night, but they did get to watch about 7 episodes of Full House! Lucky!!
Then, to top it all off, Logan woke up this morning (from his whole 1 1/2 hours of sleep!) with diarrhea! Matthew stayed home with him (and Peyton) while the girls and I went to Stake Conference. I definitely got the better end of that deal! When we got home Logan's diarrhea had only gotten worse. At first I was just thankful that he wasn't throwing up as well....but again I spoke too soon. He threw up! BUT, somehow we miraculously made it to the toilet! So far he's only thrown up the once, but the diarrhea has continued. So today has been a really "fun" day to say the least. But here's what I am thankful for:

1. The fact that I didn't have to clean up the throw up...we just got to "flush" it away!
2. A wonderful husband that has been so patient and cute throughout this whole ordeal. (He's even cooking dinner as I speak....er, I mean type.)
3. I have a break from worrying about Logan getting into the fridge.
4. INSURANCE!

As soon as we get the cast on, I'll be sure to post some pics. What's a blog without pics, right?