Julia's Home from Argentina!

May 2008 - Julia was set to arrive in the Ft. Myers airport at 11 am on Wednesday, May 28th. We were so excited to have her home. We had told everyone in the ward so that they could be at the airport to greet her if the wanted to. On the Monday before, my parents got a call from Julia. She said that she was going to be arriving in the Miami airport at 5am and wanted to know if we could pick her up there so that she didn't have to wait 5 hours before flying to Ft. Myers. They called me and we all talked about it. We decided that we had no way of knowing who in the ward was planning on coming to the airport in Ft. Myers to greet her so we should just keep things the way they were. Aaron had patients scheduled in the morning so he couldn't go to Miami and my mom was scheduled to work in the morning also. So we hung up with Julia being really disappointed.

As soon as we got off the phone and I started thinking about it, I realized that we had made a huge mistake. She is our family and we hadn't seen her for a year and a half - how could we not go get her? All day on Tuesday we worked out plans to go down and get her in Miami. We weren't sure how we were going to find her since they don't let you enter the gates without a ticket, but were determined to make it happen. At 3 am my mom, dad, Jonathan, Val, Lexy and I headed down to Miami. We got there right at 5:oo to discover that her plane had been delayed an hour. We went into the building that said "Customs" and hoped that somehow we could find her. When we started asking around we realized that she would have to go through customs before she could go to her connecting flight. So we sat and waited and waited and waited until finally we saw her. She was too busy trying to figure out which way she was suppose to go so we just stood behind the big glass wall waving and smiling until she looked at us.

It was great to be there to surprise her. On our way home we stopped and had breakfast at Denny's and made it back about an hour before we had to go to the Ft. Myers airport for her second "Welcome Home".

"Lost" Tooth - Literally

May 26th - Today the girls (Lexy, myself, my mom and Aunt Val) and Nathan went to the water park that is in Naples. It was a really nice day. The boys had all gone fishing so we decided to go have some fun of our own. Nathan was really cold and didn't enjoy himself that much. Lexy had a blast until a little mishap. She and aunt Val had gone down the big slides a couple of times and then had decided to go down the lazy river (or crazy river as Lexy calls it). Some how at one point Lexy hit her face against the inner tube and knocked her front tooth out. When they came back over to us she was crying because her tooth was at the bottom of the "crazy" river. She was afraid that since she had really lost her tooth that the tooth fairy would not come. We assured her that the tooth fairy knows and we could even leave her a note explaining what happened. She decided that would be okay.

Later when we got home and had baths and showers I was in my bathroom drying my hair when Nathan walked in saying, "I found Lessy's (Lexy's) tooth". I thought that may he found something small and white that he had mistaken for her tooth. When he put it in my hand though, I discovered that he was telling the truth. I couldn't believe that he had the tooth that we thought was at the bottom of the lazy river. The only explanation is that it went down Lexy's bathing suit and traveled home with us. Thank goodness for little toddlers who notice everything on the floor! This will be a memorable story for a long time.

May 17th 2008- Today was Lexy's ballet recital. All of the girls looked so beautiful. Gran (my dad's mother) came with us to watch the show. We really enjoyed it. Afterwards Lexy, Gran and I went out for a special dinner .

A few cute lines

I have a lot more to post before I am caught up, but Nathan said a couple of things that were so adorable, I just had to post them.

The other night as we were getting ready to have dinner Nathan said, "I want a juice box". I replied with, "I'm not sure that we have any, but I will check." Then he said, "Heavenly Father said I can have a juice box". Well, who can argue with that?

Then Monday morning I wake up to Nathan standing next to our bed. He says mommy I have to go pee pee. (He just recently decided that he wanted to be potty trained and did it in a day, by the way). I didn't want to push my luck by making him wait so I got up (still not really awake) and took him to the bathroom. As I got up my head started pounding so when he said that he was hungry I told him that I was going to have to lay down for a little longer because I had a "head-ache". I invited him to get his blanky and come lay down with me, so he did. Within minutes Lexy was standing by the bed. Nathan started talking to her about random things and then he said, "Mommy......mommy has........mommy has a 'egg-head' ". I started laughing so hard! He was trying to say head-egg(ache), but got it switched around. He has become very sensitive lately and when we all started laughing he burst into tears. I felt so bad I immediately scooped him up and tried to explain that we were only laughing becuase what he said was really cute. It took him a while, but he finally calmed down. I just love the stage that he is in now. It is so fun!

Nathan's Third Birthday

May 2008 - The week of Nathan's third birthday was a complete whirlwind. We had my mom's birthday, his birthday, Lexy's ballet recital, and a Father and Son Camp Out. With everything else going on we decided to have a small party with two of Nathan's best buds - Jeremy and Cody. We went to Pump-It-Up and played for an hour or so. Nathan had helped me make some cupcakes so we took those to share. The boys all had a blast!

Jeremey took a little while to get comfortable going through the obstacle courses by himself,
but once he decided he liked it, there was no stopping him.


Cody coming out of the obstacle course.









Nathan about to go down a slide.

My life is "mostly" back to normal

I know that I disappeared again from the "World of Blogs" but this time it was due to a true lack of time and severe stress. :0) I know that all you "supermom's" who keep up with your blogs on a regular basis wonder what could possibly have kept me from blogging? It was a surprise 60th birthday party for my mom. I started planning it a week or two after my last post and the actual party was not until May 31st. I know that it sounds like I had plenty of time for some extra curricular activities (like blogging) but since I am a perfectionist and wanted to make this extra special I took on a few extra projects.


First, I hand-made all of the invitations with a picture of my mom in her 20's. Let me clarify that....Jonathan (my brother) created the invitations on the computer, then I printed them out and cut them and backed them with paper. Next I had wanted to get video of friends telling mom what they loved about her. I was really stressed about how I was going to get all the videos in time to put something together. I am not a video person like the Curry's or the Watkin's and the whole idea of the video made my heart beat faster. So a kind friend suggested that I do something more on my level like scrapbooking..... I took her advice and then requested letters from every friend that I knew my mom has ever had. I picked out a scrapbook and a color scheme and started making scrapbook pages. I think that I ended up with about 25 letters. This is what ate almost every waking minute of my life through the entire month of May. I worked on it during nap time's and every night until at least 11:00. (It was all worth it, mom!)


Jonathan and I also wanted to use pictures from throughout my mom's lifetime to make a picture video. He wanted to work on that, but since he is in North Carolina that meant that I had to collect all the pictures. That in itself was a huge project. Any time that we went down to my mom's for Sunday dinner I would try to get her to take a walk with the kids and the dog by herself, stick Aaron on "window watch" and I would run back to search through the pictures and "steal" as many of them as I could. Usually the walks would last all of about 10 minutes. Needless to say, I think that it took me 3-4 trips to actually confiscate all of the pictures that I wanted. By the time I actually got them all it was too late to send them to Jonathan. He and Val were coming at the end of May so they created the video after they got here.


In the middle of all this was my mom's actual birthday, Nathan's birthday, Lexy's ballet recital and many rehearsals, Jonathan and Val arrived, Julia came home from her mission and we had friends come into town. Oh yeah......and to top it all off I was called as the new Relief Society president. I still have to chuckle at that one and think half to myself and half to heaven "are you serious?" - seeing as how I have spent the last 15 years in Primary with about 4 months as a teacher in R.S., and a couple more as the enrichment leader (while teaching primary).


Anyway, these are all of my excuses for not blogging since the beginning of April. I hope that I can get back to blogging on a more regular basis now. Thanks for all of your understanding. :0)

P.S. I will post pictures of the party - which was a huge success, by the way - after I get all of the other posts done that need to come first.

Girl's Night Out

May 16th - Tonight was the Father and Son Camp out. Aaron and Nathan went for the firs time together. We decided that we should take full advantage of this opportunity and have a "girl's night". So Lexy and I spent the evening with my good friend Kristen and her daughter Bryn (and baby Abby). First we went out to eat at California Pizza Kitchen, then we took the girls to a Spa around the corner and they had pedicures. After that we went back to our house where the girls made picture frames to put their pictures in and we made s'mores. It was a great night. We had so much fun.