Baby Shower 2nd Grade Style

Libby, September, Mrs. Dastrup, Emily

So September's teacher is (I guess I should say was) pregnant, and the cute little room mom threw her a baby shower that they did during class and invited all the parents to come if they could. I just love her teacher and I think it's a great feat to be pregnant as a teacher, so there was no way I was going to miss it. It was a blast! They played some games that would have been kind of dorky if it was a shower for adults, but because it involved the kids it was so much fun. They did the one where you measure out a piece of string and cut it to the size you think is the pregnant persons "girth" (that word makes me giggle!). The kids were awfully flattering. Some of them had pieces of string that would probably barely make it around their waist! And yet after telling September that her piece was barely bigger than me, she ended up taking like 3rd place. That made me feel a little self-conscious. ;) Then they did the diaper changing race to see who could do it the fastest. You could tell who had little brothers and sisters and who didn't. September took like 3rd in that one too. I wasn't surprised with that one....we call her the "second mother". Anyway, it was a lot of fun. Her teacher ended up having her baby about 4 days later, which was about 2 weeks ago, so September has had a substitute and will have a substitute til the end of school. She's kind of sad because she really loved her teacher, but she might come in for the last day of school.

September and her friends, Libby and Emily, with their "girth strings".

Mrs. Dastrup measuring September's string.

Mrs. Dastrup and the string winner, Bridger. Yes, he is as short as he looks. September is really small and he's about 6 inches shorter than her! I'm sure Kya is taller than him! He is a little spit-fire though.

September changing her fake baby's diaper.

Site under construction! :)

Clearly I am not meant to design blogs! I have so much to catch up on and would like to do it, but any time I've tried to do it in the past few days I've only managed to screw up my blog. If you've checked on it any time in the past couple days you may have noticed. ;) I'm trying to change the template, but somehow I only ruin things. At one point I pretty much erased the whole thing...oops! I was able to get it back and I'll have to leave it as is for a while until my computer decides to listen to me! I consider myself a pretty smart person when it comes to computers....but somehow things are not working! So wish me luck that in the next couple days (or so) I can get things fixed the way I would like to.

The Great American Road Trip

I have a few things I need to get on and post about, but I've been wanting to post about this for a few days and since it's kind of time-sensitive, I thought I'd hurry and do it before it's too late. I'll post other stuff later.

So my brother, Joey, is taking part in "The Great American Road Trip" right now. Him and a couple of his friends are traveling to all 48 lower states and they plan to do it all in about 5 days. They're trying to break the best publicly known record which is 5 days 7 hours 15 minutes....I think, don't quote me! They don't allow records anymore in the Guinness Book because of concerns about speeding. So they won't make it in the book, but they'll have bragging rights! They left Sunday morning in Vermont (after taking a couple days to drive THERE of course) and will be finishing the trip at 4 corners on Friday morning if things go as planned.

I think they're a little nuts....but I have to say that I'm a bit jealous. It sounds kind of fun! I think they're living a dream for a lot of people. In fact, they have a camera attached to the dash that takes a picture once every minute. So at the end of the trip they'll have a little movie of all of the views from their trip. Way cool! I can't wait to see it. They've been getting all sorts of attention from media across the country, and here locally in Salt Lake. They have set up a blog that they're updating daily with their iPhones, so if you want to check it out, go to: www.greatamericanroadtrip.us. A lot of the comments that have been left are from people all over the country that have seen them as they have been driving!

Anyway, good luck, Joey! DRIVE SAFE! I love you!!!

We had to SCRAPE the car this morning!

I just HAD to come and post about this, but first, I have to start this story from last night. I went to the store last night and as I was leaving the store....it started to SNOW! When I got home, I was parking the car (I drove Matthew's car because it was in the driveway behind the Pilot because the city is doing some work on our sidewalks - they had to jackhammer an area out and repour the cement because it had sunk). It's on the side of the driveway that leads to where Matthew parks in the garage, so it makes it almost impossible to park his car in the garage, so he's just been parking in the driveway for the past couple days. Well, Matthew came out to help me get the groceries and I asked him if he wanted me to try to maneuver it into the garage...after all it was snowing and he might have to scrape it in the morning if I didn't. It was just a JOKE! We get up this morning and sure enough, everything, including Matthew's car, is covered in snow. Not a whole lot...but it's May 1st for heavens sake! Anything that is sticking at this time of year is ridiculous! Earth to the weather....you can STOP snowing...it's May now!! I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and she said, "Global warming, my foot." (Well, maybe it wasn't foot, I don't remember exactly what word she said, but anyway it was funny.) And today was case in point!

O.k. I had to post this picture for three reasons: 1) To show the lovely orange things in our yard. 2) To show how blue the sky looks...why is it SNOWING? O.k. I guess there are quite a few clouds, but still. And 3) Look at my neighbor's yard?! Why is the snow sticking to virtually every other yard on the block EXCEPT theirs. I would think that it's because they did something special to their lawn, which would probably mean that it looks amazing, but no, their lawn looks as crappy as ours. (Sorry Meredith...but we know how crappy our lawns are, right? Especially compared to the Larson's! Ugh! ;) But for the record, the snow was sticking to their "perfect" lawn, too. Weird! I seriously sat out front for a while this morning trying to figure it out, but I just couldn't. Meredith, if you're reading this, any thoughts? Seriously, I'm stumped!)

O.k. I have to tell another funny story that happened this morning and it kind of has to do with the snow thing, so whatever. So Logan was helping me make a smoothie for breakfast and he was sitting on a stool to be up high enough by me. Well, because he was on the stool, he was able to see outside into the backyard. He started pointing at all of the snow and getting all excited....then he turned and looked over to the side and saw the shed in the backyard and said, "Look, it's Daddy's house!" He's actually said it before, but it was still just as funny! Yes folks, I make my husband live in the shed in the backyard. He's only allowed to come in to eat and use the bathroom. ;)

Here's Matthew's "house". ;)

HANDS, FEET & MOUTHS

Would that be the correct way of making it plural??? That’s right, folks, we are now dealing with THREE children who have it! September is the only one who doesn’t have it yet, and I’m sure it’s only time before she does. I’m keeping her home from school today too, just in case. She’s devastated! Not only because she loves school, but also because they’re doing testing this week and her teacher is doing a contest between the “early birds” and “lator gators” of who can have the most people present for testing. So Ember thinks she’s letting her class down. She’s been crying all night and was only a little relieved when I told her that I’d email her teacher and let her know what’s going on. She also left her homework for the week at school today…of all days. Once again, tears! Bless her cute little school-lovin heart!! Kya on the other hand is fine with missing school. She just said, "Yay, it's like another Spring Break!"

So if anyone needs to find me in the next week…I’ll be at home! Aughhhhh!!!! I’m sure you won’t want to find me though. Please, just stay away!!

Goodbye cast - good riddance!!!

So we got Logan’s cast removed yesterday. Hopefully it was his FINAL cast for the rest of his life! He did NOT want anything to do with the cast saw this time. He hasn’t minded it much in the past, it was only the scissors he was scared of. But this time it took me and a male doctor to hold him down while one of the interns sawed and cut it off. Whew! The good news….even though he tiptoed out of the place, we got home and he started walking flat on his foot and just said, “Look Mom, I can walk flat!” He’s still tiptoeing around when he’s not thinking about it, but flat when we remind him. Now this is more what we expected the last time we took off the cast. So it looks like we’re out of the woods. No physical therapy for him! I am SOOOO happy!!!!!

Note: This post and any following posts are written in"real" time. Because of the way that blogs are published....ya know, showing the most recent post first....you may not know what I'm talking about. If you don't, go read the "disclaimer" a few posts down.

Here's Logan contemplating which color cast he should get next. I think he was a little disappointed when I told him we were DONE getting casts!! He just said, "Oh, man!"....one of his favorite things to say when he doesn't get his way.

He was not liking it very much.


I love how both of them have their heads cocked to the side. Who trained these kids??

Kya's 6th Birthday

As I mentioned earlier, it was Kya’s birthday last Thursday. She turned 6! When did she get so old?!? I keep telling all of my kids to stop growing up but they won’t listen!

I’ve already posted about how crazy and frustrating her actual birthday turned out, but we also celebrated with family the Sunday before. It was a last minute decision to do so, but it turned out all right all things considered.

Here’s a funny story. We had wanted to get Kya a new bike for her birthday. Not only had she started to outgrow her old one, but it had a flat tire. We figured that she was going to need a new one soon anyway, so instead of fixing the flat on the old one, we’d get her a new one. Well, we didn’t want to buy it too early because we didn’t want to have to store it any longer than needed because of her possibly finding it. But when we decided at the last minute to celebrate her birthday on Sunday, I had to run out on Saturday night and get her bike. I got to the store and as I tried to find the one that Matthew and I had decided on earlier, I couldn’t find it. It looked like it was sold out. So I needed to talk to an employee, but the one there in the area was already helping someone. When he was done, I went over to talk to him and lo and behold…it was my long-lost cousin that I hadn’t seen in like 9 years! I wasn’t positive it was him, so I said, “John?”, and he gave me a weird look. So I thought I’d just made a fool of myself and that it wasn’t really him. So I said, “Is your name John?” He pointed to his name tag and sure enough it said John, so I asked him if he knew who I was and he did. So we chatted for a few minutes and I told him that I was buying the bike for my daughter’s birthday that we were celebrating the next day and I invited him over. He’s only met Matthew maybe once, and has never met my kids. He ended up coming and brought his 2-year old son, who I of course had not met. He was too cute! (His pic is below. He is all boy and just LOVES trucks, trains, you name it. So he went and found one of Logan's biggest trucks and adopted it for the evening.) His wife wasn’t able to come because she’s a teacher and she had school she needed to prepare for the next day. So I still have yet to meet her. Someday….

But anyway, things turned out really fun. We opened gifts and then had an ice-cream sundae bar and cake. Nothing too crazy, but it was fun. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KYA!!!

(Here's Kya in the robe my parents gave her. You can see the matching pj's on the floor. I think she wore this whole get-up around for about 5 days straight if you don't count going to school.)

(Here's Logan "helping" Matthew record the event. I'm pretty sure he was more of a hindrance!)

(Here's Kya blowing out the "pretend" candles on her birthday cake. I went to put the candles on and light them....um, we didn't have any. Oops!! So I made her pretend.)

Logan playing dress-ups....

O.k. so that last post got me thinking about all of the times that Logan plays dress-ups. I think he enjoys dressing up more than my girls do. A few weeks ago Kya went to a friend’s birthday party where the theme was “fairies”. So when Kya came home she was on a huge fairy kick. She was a fairy for Halloween last year so she made me get out her old costume so she could wear it around. Well, Logan really got into the fairy kick with her and decided that he needed to wear the wings…a LOT. In fact, he ended up wearing them to bed one night. The pics I have are of him the next morning. I wish I could’ve gotten some while he was sleeping. It was too precious! He is such a character!!

Here he is as "Super Why"....a cute, little not-very-well-known show that he LOVES!

Pretty as a princess!

Here's the "fairy" pics. If you look close enough, you can see a big bump/bruise on his forehead from pulling Matthew's nightstand on top of him. He sure is a clumsy little fairy!

This one just cracks me up for some reason. I guess he's not technically playing "dress-ups", but it still fit in well enough. He just put on this hat of Ember's one day and was walking around practically bumping into things because he couldn't see where he was going. Maybe the picture doesn't do it as much justice as the memories I have in my head, but I just LOVE this picture.


He's ALWAYS getting into the girls princess pj's. These pics are from about a year ago and the girls have pretty much outgrown them. I guess we can hand them down to Logan. He'd love it!



Strutting his stuff in his high heels. I had the BEST picture of him in the high heels and it got erased along with a bunch of other great pics of Logan. But this one does enough justice I guess.

I don't think he's ever been able to figure out how to wear sunglasses correctly. They always end up upside down.

What a stud!


Here he is for Halloween last year. I was so excited to have him wear this costume I put together because it was so appropriate....well, what do you know, the one day that it's perfectly normal and even encouraged to dress-up, he did NOT want to! This is about the closest we ever came to having him in his costume.

And last, but not least, here he is attempting to get all "made up". I was so mad, but I couldn't stay mad for long before I had to go grab the camera. This pic is from about a year ago too. Look at his young, chubby face!

My FOUR princesses!

Yes, that’s right, I said FOUR! You may think I have just three girls, but that doesn’t mean that Logan can’t dress up like a princess. A couple weeks ago the girls were dressing up in their princess dresses and Logan was very insistent that he wear one too. So what did the girls do? They dressed him up of course…and Peyton, too! When they came up to show me, I just grabbed the camera and thought, “Dad’s gonna love this!” Plus, it’ll make great blackmail someday. (Like we need any more blackmail pictures. This kid’s got plenty.)

The "secret" park

A couple weeks ago my brother, Chuck, and his wife, Ginger, and their kids came down. We hadn’t celebrated my dad’s bday yet, so we decided that since they were going to be down that we should all meet up at a park and have a picnic and celebrate. Well, Chuck and Ginger wanted to come down and check out Ikea for things to furnish the cabins that they’re building to rent out up in Bear Lake, so we decided to meet at a park near there. My Dad ended up finding a nice little “secret” park hidden at a dead end within a neighborhood. It was perfect because there weren’t a whole lot of people. We probably bothered the people there because they are probably people that live in the neighborhood and knew that we weren’t, but oh well, we had fun. Afterwards, we took my niece and nephew home with us so that Chuck & Ginger could go to Ikea without having to worry about the kids. After all, Ikea is quite the adventure! It was crazy having our 8-passenger Pilot loaded with kids. Yikes! Their daughter, Zailey, is just three months younger than Logan, and their son, Zenick, is just two weeks older than Peyton, so it’s fun. Logan and Zailey had a ball together!

Here's the Pilot loaded with kids and carseats! Aughhh!!!

Happy one second, sad/mad the next. Funny kids!

Teeth!!

A couple weeks ago Kya lost her first tooth! It had been wiggly for a few days, and then one morning she and Ember came bursting into the room at 6:45 am…TURNED ON THE LIGHTS…to tell us that Kya had lost her tooth. She had just woken up and felt it in her mouth. She’s lucky she didn’t swallow it. It took a while for the tooth fairy to come because we tried to find a book like Ember has where you write letters to the tooth fairy and it has places where you put all of the details in about each lost tooth and so on and it has a pocket in the front that you put the tooth in, etc...but we couldn’t find one anywhere. (BTW, this was one of the errands that I was out doing on one of the days that Logan decided he couldn’t walk anymore, so I was carrying him with one arm and Peyton in her carseat in the other because places like Barnes & Noble of course does not have carts. Not fun!) But anyway, finally we had her write her own note to the tooth fairy and lo and behold, she came! What a happy day!

We have been saying for weeks now that Peyton is getting teeth. Isn’t that what parents always do once their child hits about 6 months and are ornery for no reason? Why not blame it on teething! Anyway, we thought it would’ve been funny if she would’ve finally gotten her first tooth on the day Kya lost hers, but no. But only about a week later, on Kya’s birthday no less, we did our daily mouth check, and sure enough, she had a tooth! I’m going to miss her toothless grin!!

Give it up for the "THL Ladies"

This past year I have spent my Wednesday mornings volunteering at the Take Home Library (the “THL”) at the girl’s school. It’s great….because I can take my kids. It can be a little frustrating sometimes…because I have my kids! Sometimes I wonder if I’m even any help because I’m constantly distracted by Logan getting into some kind of trouble. He has a little friend there, Davis, who is almost his same age and is an angel child. I hope Logan didn’t corrupt him. This poor kid would just watch Logan getting into mischief and look at either his mom or me with this look of either, “Do you SEE what he’s doing. He’s being naughty. Make him stop!”, or “Do you SEE what he’s doing. It looks like fun. I’d like to join him, but I need to make sure you’re not watching.” They are funny together.

Anyway, our volunteering is over for the year and I’m both relieved and bummed. It’ll be nice having my Wednesday mornings to myself, but I’ll miss being forced to get out and be around adults. I made some great friends this year and in fact, they’re the ones that inspired me to start this blog. I’ll miss you Heather and Deborah! We need to get together and do something. But if not, we always have our blogs to keep up on each others lives, right?

Quietly eating pretzels for the time being....

Logan & Davis didn't like having to go back and forth to get pretzels, so they decided to just hop in the cupboard WITH the pretzels. Good thinkin' boys!

Here's just part of the room, which doesn't show near what a disaster it turns into by the time we're done. You can however, see Logan and Davis peaking out from the pretzel cupboard. :)

Hard at work!

Here's Heather! :)

Here's Deborah!